The Wish House and Other Stories (43 page)

He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the silence of a great city asleep – the silence that underlay the even voice of the breakers along the sea-front – a thick, tingling quiet of warm life stilled down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the glittering shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr Cashell was adjusting some wire that crackled from time to time
with the tense, knuckle-stretching sound of the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door shut and opened swiftly, I could hear his uncle coughing abed.

‘Here,’ I said, when the drink was properly warmed, ‘take some of this, Mr Shaynor.’

He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand for the glass. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the top.

‘It looks,’ he said, suddenly, ‘it looks – those bubbles – like a string of pearls winking at you – rather like the pearls round that young lady’s neck.’ He turned again to the advertisement where the female in the dove-coloured corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned her teeth.

‘Not bad, is it?’ I said.

‘Eh?’

He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His figure lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on chest, hands dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.

‘I’m afraid I’ve rather cooked Shaynor’s goose,’ I said, bearing the fresh drink to young Mr Cashell. ‘Perhaps it was the chloric-ether.’

‘Oh, he’s all right.’ The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly. ‘Consumptives go off in those sort of dozes very often. It’s exhaustion…I don’t wonder. I daresay the liquor will do him good. It’s grand stuff.’ He finished his share appreciatively. ‘Well, as I was saying – before he interrupted – about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is nickel-filings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of space from the station that despatches ’em, and all these little particles are attracted together – cohere, we call it – for just so long as the current passes through them. Now, it’s important to remember that the current is an induced current. There are a good many kinds of induction —‘

‘Yes, but what
is
induction?’

‘That’s rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short of it is that when a current of electricity passes through a wire there’s a lot of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire parallel to, and within what we call its magnetic field – why, then the second wire will also become charged with electricity.’

‘On its own account?’

‘On its own account.’

‘Then let’s see if I’ve got it correctly. Miles off, at Poole, or wherever it is —‘

‘It will be anywhere in ten years.’

‘You’ve got a charged wire —‘

‘Charged with Hertzian waves which vibrate, say, two hundred and thirty million times a second.’ Mr Cashell snaked his forefinger rapidly through the air.

‘All right – a charged wire at Poole, giving out these waves into space. Then this wire of yours sticking out into space – on the roof of the house – in some mysterious way gets charged with those waves from Poole —‘

Or anywhere – it only happens to be Poole tonight.’

‘And those waves set the coherer at work, just like an ordinary telegraph-office ticker?’

‘No! That’s where so many people make the mistake. The Hertzian waves wouldn’t be strong enough to work a great heavy Morse instrument like ours. They can only just make that dust cohere, and while it coheres (a little while for a dot and a longer while for a dash) the current from this battery – the home battery’ – he laid his hand on the thing – ‘can get through to the Morse printing-machine to record the dot or dash. Let me make it clearer. Do you know anything about steam?’

‘Very little. But go on.’

‘Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and start a steamer’s engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main steam, doesn’t it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The Hertzian wave is the child’s hand that turns it.’

‘I see. That’s marvellous.’

‘Marvellous, isn’t it? And, remember, we’re only at the beginning. There’s nothing we shan’t be able to do in ten years. I want to live – my God, how I want to live, and see it develop!’ He looked through the door at Shaynor breathing lightly in his chair. ‘Poor beast! And he wants to keep company with Fanny Brand.’

‘Fanny
who?’
I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in my brain – something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word ‘arterial.’

‘Fanny Brand – the girl you kept shop for.’ He laughed. ‘That’s all I know about her, and for the life of me I can’t see what Shaynor sees in her, or she in him.’

‘Can’t
you see what he sees in her?’ I insisted.

‘Oh, yes, if
that’s
what you mean. She’s a great, big, fat lump of a
girl, and so on. I suppose that’s why he’s so crazy after her. She isn’t his sort. Well, it doesn’t matter. My uncle says he’s bound to die before the year’s out. Your drink’s given him a good sleep, at any rate.’ Young Mr Cashell could not catch Mr Shaynor’s face, which was half turned to the advertisement.

I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted another pastille. Mr Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through and over me with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.

‘Poole’s late,’ said young Mr Cashell, when I stepped back. ‘I’ll just send them a call.’

He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks again.

‘Grand, isn’t it?
That’s
the Power – our unknown Power – kicking and fighting to be let loose,’ said young Mr Cashell. ‘There she goes – kick – kick – kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work a sending-machine, waves going into space you know. T.R. is our call. Poole ought to answer with L.L.L.’

We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear
‘kiss – kiss – kiss’
of the halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-pole.

‘Poole is not ready. I’ll stay here and call you when he is.’

I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with a careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without cessation. I stepped nearer to listen.

‘And threw – and threw – and threw,’ he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.

I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words-delivered roundly and clearly. These:

The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his place, rubbing his hands.

It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr Shaynor ever read Keats, or could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as
a vile chromo recalls some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink, and solitude were evidently turning Mr Shaynor into a poet. He sat down again and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.

I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches;

He raised his head sharply, and frowned towards the blank shutters of the poulterer’s shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear line came:

The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where the Blaudett’s Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went on:

‘Hsh!’ said Mr Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the presence of spirits. ‘There’s something coming through from somewhere; but it isn’t Poole.’ I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might have been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh whisper: ‘Mr Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave me alone till I tell you.’

‘But I thought you’d come to see this wonderful thing – Sir,’ indignantly at the end.

‘Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet.’

I watched – I waited. Under the blue-veined hand – the dry hand of the consumptive – came away clear, without erasure:

he shivered as he wrote –

Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.

For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-mastering fear. Then I smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr Shaynor’s clothing, and heard, as though it had been the rending of trumpets, the rattle of his breathing. I was still in my place of observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot at the butts, half-bent, hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of the black, red, and yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering encouragement, evidently to my other self, sounding sentences, such as men pronounce in dreams.

‘If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn’t – like causes
must
beget like effects. There is no escape from this law.
You
ought to be grateful that you know “St Agnes’ Eve” without the book; because, given the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the enigma, and approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny Brawne; allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon the handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop just now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here almost perfectly duplicated – the result is logical and inevitable. As inevitable as induction.’

Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering in some minute and inadequate corner – at an immense distance.

Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr Shaynor. As dreamers accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness, and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: ‘If he has read Keats it’s the chloric-ether. If he hasn’t, it’s the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave of tuberculosis,
plus
Fanny Brand and the professional status which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats.’

Mr Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote, muttering;

The little smoke of a candle that goes out.

‘No,’ he muttered. ‘Little smoke – little smoke – little smoke. What else?’ He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last of the Blaudett’s Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. ‘Ah!’ Then with relief:

Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and rewrote ‘gold – cold – mould’ many times. Again he sought inspiration from the advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had overheard;

As I remembered the original it is ‘fair’ – a trite word – instead of ‘young’, and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the attempt to reproduce ‘Its little smoke in pallid moonlight died’ was a failure.

Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose – the naked soul’s confession of its physical yearning for its beloved-unclean as we count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material, so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem. Shame I had none in overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the pastille.

‘That’s it,’ I murmured. ‘That’s how it’s blocked out. Go on! Ink it in, man. Ink it in!’

Mr Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein ‘loveliness’ was made to rhyme with a desire to look upon ‘her empty dress’. He picked up a fold of the gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff. Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.

In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket, rose, passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the labels aloud. Returning, he took from his desk Christy’s
New Commercial Plants
and the old Culpeper that I had given him, opened and laid them side by side with a clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face, read first in
one and then in the other, and paused with pen behind his ear.