The Wish House and Other Stories (71 page)

Helen nodded.

‘More than anyone else. And, of course, he oughtn’t to have been. He ought to have been nothing to me. But he
was.
He
is.
That’s why I do the commissions, you see. That’s all.’

‘But why do you tell me?’ Helen asked desperately.

‘Because I’m
so
tired of lying. Tired of lying – always lying – year in and year out. When I don’t tell lies I’ve got to act ’em and I’ve got to think ’em, always.
You
don’t know what that means. He was everything to me that he oughtn’t to have been – the one real thing-the only thing that ever happened to me in all my life; and I’ve had to pretend he wasn’t. I’ve had to watch every word I said, and think out what lie I’d tell next, for years and years!’

‘How many years?’ Helen asked.

‘Six years and four months before, and two and three-quarters after. I’ve gone to him eight times, since. Tomorrow’ll make the ninth, and – and I can’t – I
can’t
go to him again with nobody in the world knowing. I want to be honest with someone before I go. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter about
me.
I was never truthful, even as a girl. But it isn’t worthy of
him.
So – so I – I had to tell you. I can’t keep it up any longer. Oh, I can’t!’

She lifted her joined hands almost to the level of her mouth, and brought them down sharply, still joined, to full arms’ length below her waist. Helen reached forward, caught them, bowed her head over them, and murmured: ‘Oh, my dear! My dear!’ Mrs Scarsworth stepped back, her face all mottled.

‘My God!’ said she. ‘Is
that
how you take it?’

Helen could not speak, and the woman went out; but it was a long while before Helen was able to sleep.

Next morning Mrs Scarsworth left early on her round of commissions, and Helen walked alone to Hagenzeele Third. The place was still in the making, and stood some five or six feet above the metalled road, which it flanked for hundreds of yards. Culverts
across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her. She went forward, moved to the left and the right hopelessly, wondering by what guidance she should ever come to her own. A great distance away there was a line of whiteness. It proved to be a block of some two or three hundred graves whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted out, and whose new-sown grass showed green. Here she could see clear-cut letters at the ends of the rows, and, referring to her slip, realized that it was not here she must look.

A man knelt behind a line of headstones – evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘Lieutenant Michael Turrell – my nephew,’ said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.

The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.

‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’

When Helen left the cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.

I
N
the days beyond compare and before the Judgments, a genius called Graydon foresaw that the advance of education and the standard of living would submerge all mind-marks in one mudrush of standardized reading-matter, and so created the Fictional Supply Syndicate to meet the demand.

Since a few days’ work for him brought them more money than a week’s elsewhere, he drew many young men – some now imminent – into his employ. He bade them keep their eyes on the
Sixpenny Dream Book
, the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue (this for backgrounds and furniture as they changed), and
The Hearthstone Friend
, a weekly publication which specialized unrivalledly in the domestic emotions. Yet, even so, youth would not be denied, and some of the collaborated love-talk in ‘Passion Hath Peril’, and ‘Ena’s Lost Lovers’, and the account of the murder of the earl in ‘The Wickwire Tragedies’ – to name but a few masterpieces now never mentioned for fear of blackmail – was as good as anything to which their authors signed their real names in more distinguished years.

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon’s ark was James Andrew Manallace – a darkish, slow northerner of the type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. Given written or verbal outlines of a plot, he was useless; but, with a half-dozen pictures round which to write his tale, he could astonish.

And he adored that woman who afterwards became the mother of Vidal Benzaquen,
^*
and who suffered and died because she loved one unworthy. There was, also, among the company a mannered, bellied person called Alured Castorley, who talked and wrote about ‘Bohemia’, but was always afraid of being ‘compromised’ by the weekly suppers at Neminaka’s Café in Hestern Square, where the Syndicate work was apportioned, and where everyone looked out for himself. He, too, for a time, had loved Vidal’s mother, in his own way.

Now, one Saturday at Neminaka’s, Graydon, who had given Manallace a sheaf of prints – torn from an extinct children’s book called
Philippa’s Queen
– on which to improvise, asked for results. Manallace went down into his ulster-pocket, hesitated a moment, and said the stuff had turned into poetry on his hands.

‘Bosh!’

‘That’s what it isn’t,’ the boy retorted. ‘It’s rather good.’

‘Then it’s no use to us.’ Graydon laughed. ‘Have you brought back the cuts?’

Manallace handed them over. There was a castle in the series; a knight or so in armour; an old lady in a horned head-dress; a young ditto; a very obvious Hebrew; a clerk, with pen and inkhorn, checking wine-barrels on a wharf; and a Crusader. On the back of one of the prints was a note, ‘If he doesn’t want to go, why can’t he be captured and held to ransom?’ Graydon asked what it all meant.

‘I don’t know yet. A comic opera, perhaps,’ said Manallace.

Graydon, who seldom wasted time, passed the cuts on to someone else, and advanced Manallace a couple of sovereigns to carry on with, as usual; at which Castorley was angry and would have said something unpleasant but was suppressed. Half-way through supper, Castorley told the company that a relative had died and left him an independence; and that he now withdrew from ‘hackwork’ to follow ‘Literature’. Generally, the Syndicate rejoiced in a comrade’s good fortune, but Castorley had gifts of waking dislike. So the news was received with a vote of thanks, and he went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother, who refused him. He did not come back. Manallace, who had arrived a little exalted, got so drunk before midnight that a man had to stay and see him home. But liquor never touched him above the belt, and when he had slept awhile, he recited to the gas-chandelier the poetry he had made out of the pictures; said that, on second thoughts, he would convert it into comic opera; deplored the Upas-tree influence of Gilbert and Sullivan: sang somewhat to illustrate his point; and – after words, by the way, with a negress in yellow satin – was steered to his rooms.

In the course of a few years, Graydon’s foresight and genius were rewarded. The public began to read and reason upon higher planes, and the Syndicate grew rich. Later still, people demanded of their printed matter what they expected in their clothing and furniture. So, precisely as the three-guinea handbag is followed in three weeks by its thirteen and sevenpence ha’penny, indistinguishable sister, they enjoyed perfect synthetic substitutes for Plot, Sentiment, and
Emotion. Graydon died before the cinema-caption school came in, but he left his widow twenty-seven thousand pounds.

Manallace made a reputation, and, more important, money for Vidal’s mother when her husband ran away and the first symptoms of her paralysis showed. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As he once said when urged to ‘write a real book’: ‘I’ve got my label, and I’m not going to chew it off. If you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em.’ His output apart, he was genuinely a man of letters. He rented a small cottage in the country and economized on everything, except the care and charges of Vidal’s mother.

Castorley flew higher. When his legacy freed him from ‘hackwork’, he became first a critic – in which calling he loyally scalped all his old associates as they came up – and then looked for some speciality. Having found it (Chaucer was the prey), he consolidated his position before he occupied it, by his careful speech, his cultivated bearing, and the whispered words of his friends whom he, too, had saved the trouble of thinking. It followed that, when he published his first serious articles on Chaucer, all the world which is interested in Chaucer said: ‘This is an authority.’ But he was no impostor. He learned and knew his poet and his age; and in a month-long dogfight in an austere literary weekly, met and mangled a recognized Chaucer expert of the day. He also, ‘for old sake’s sake’, as he wrote to a friend, went out of his way to review one of Manallace’s books with an intimacy of unclean deduction (this was before the days of Freud) which long stood as a record. Some member of the extinct Syndicate took occasion to ask him if he would – for old sake’s sake – help Vidal’s mother to a new treatment. He answered that he had ‘known the lady very slightly and the calls on his purse were so heavy that’, etc. The writer showed the letter to Manallace, who said he was glad Castorley hadn’t interfered. Vidal’s mother was then wholly paralysed. Only her eyes could move, and those always looked for the husband who had left her. She died thus in Manallace’s arms in April of the first year of the war.

During the war he and Castorley worked as some sort of departmental dishwashers in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisais. Here Manallace came to know Castorley again. Castorley, having a sweet tooth, cadged lumps of sugar for his tea from a typist, and when she took to giving them to a younger man, arranged that she should be reported for smoking in unauthorized
apartments. Manallace possessed himself of every detail of the affair, as compensation for the review of his book. Then there came a night when, waiting for a big air-raid, the two men had talked humanly, and Manallace spoke of Vidal’s mother. Castorley said something in reply, and from that hour – as was learned several years later-Manallace’s real life-work and interests began.

The war over, Castorley set about to make himself Supreme Pontiff on Chaucer by methods not far removed from the employment of poison gas. The English Pope was silent, through private griefs, and influenza had carried off the learned Hun who claimed continental allegiance. Thus Castorley crowed unchallenged from Upsala to Seville, while Manallace went back to his cottage with the photo of Vidal’s mother over the mantelpiece. She seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interests in trifles. His private diversions were experiments of uncertain outcome, which, he said, rested him after a day’s gadzooking and vitalstapping. I found him, for instance, one weekend, in his toolshed-scullery, boiling a brew of slimy barks which were, if mixed with oak-galls, vitriol and wine, to become an ink-powder. We boiled it till the Monday, and it turned into an adhesive stronger than birdlime, and entangled us both.

At other times, he would carry me off, once in a few weeks, to sit at Castorley’s feet, and hear him talk about Chaucer. Castorley’s voice, bad enough in youth, when it could be shouted down, had, with culture and tact, grown almost insupportable. His mannerisms, too, had multiplied and set. He minced and mouthed, postured and chewed his words throughout those terrible evenings; and poisoned not only Chaucer, but every shred of English literature which he used to embellish him. He was shameless, too, as regarded self-advertisement and ‘recognition’ – weaving elaborate intrigues; forming petty friendships and confederacies, to be dissolved next week in favour of more promising alliances; fawning, snubbing, lecturing, organizing and lying as unrestingly as a politician, in chase of the knighthood due not to him (he always called on his Maker to forbid such a thought) but as tribute to Chaucer. Yet, sometimes, he could break from his obsession and prove how a man’s work will try to save the soul of him. He would tell us charmingly of copyists of the fifteenth century in England and the Low Countries, who had multiplied the Chaucer MSS., of which there remained – he gave us the exact number – and how each scribe could by him (and, he implied, by him alone) be distinguished from every other by some peculiarity of letter-formation, spacing or like
trick of pen-work; and how he could fix the dates of their work within five years. Sometimes he would give us an hour of really interesting stuff and then return to his overdue ‘recognition’. The changes sickened me, but Manallace defended him, as a master in his own line who had revealed Chaucer to at least one grateful soul.