The Gardener
By Rudyard Kipling
Every one in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all her world, and
by none more honourably than by her only brother's unfortunate child. The village
knew, too, that George Turrell had tried his family severely since early youth, and
were not surprised to be told that, after many fresh starts given and thrown away he,
an Inspector of Indian Police, had entangled himself with the daughter of a retired
non-commissioned officer, and had died of a fall from a horse a few weeks before his
child was born.
Mercifully, George's father and mother were both dead, and though Helen, thirtyfive
and independent, might well have washed her hands of the whole disgraceful affair,
she most nobly took charge, though she was, at the time, under threat of lung trouble
which had driven her to the south of France. She arranged for the passage of the child
and a nurse from Bombay, met them at Marseilles, nursed the baby through an attack
of infantile dysentery due the carelessness of the nurse, whom she had had to dismiss,
and at last, thin and worn but triumphant, brought the boy late in the autumn, wholly
restored, to her Hampshire home.
All these details were public property, for Helen was as open as the day, and held
that scandals are only increased by hushing then up. She admitted that George had
always been rather a black sheep, but things might have been much worse if the
mother had insisted on her right to keep the boy. Luckily, it seemed that people of
that class would do almost anything for money, and, as George had always turned to
her in his scrapes, she felt herself justified - her friends agreed with her - in cutting
the whole non-commissioned officer connection, and giving the child every
advantage. A christening, by the Rector, under the name of Michael, was the first
step. So far as she knew herself, she was not, she said, a child-lover, but, for all her
faults, she had been very fond of George, and she pointed out that little Michael had
his father's mouth to a line; which made something to build upon.
As a matter of fact, it was the Turrell forehead, broad, low, and well-shaped, with the
widely spaces eyes beneath it, that Michael had most faithfully reproduced. His
mouth was somewhat better cut than the family type. But Helen, who would concede
nothing good to his mother's side, vowed he was a Turrell all over, and, there being
no one to contradict, the likeness was established.
In a few years Michael took his place, as accepted as Helen had always been fearless, philosophical, and fairly good-looking. At six, he wished to know why he
could not call her 'Mummy', as other boys called their mothers. She explained that
she was only his auntie, and that aunties were not quite the same as mummies, but
that, if it gave him pleasure, he might call her 'Mummy' at bedtime, for a pet-name
between themselves.
Michael kept his secret most loyally, but Helen, as usual, explained the fact to her
friends; which when Michael heard, he raged.
"Why did you tell? Why did you tell?" came at the end of the storm.
"Because it's always best to tell the truth", Helen answered, her arm round him as he
shook in his cot.
"All right, but when the troof's ugly I don't think it's nice."
"Don't you, dear?"
"No, I don't and" - she felt the small body stiffen - "now you've told, I won't call you
'Mummy' any more - not even at bedtimes."
"But isn't that rather unkind?" said Helen softly.
"I don't care! I don't care! You have hurted me in my insides and I'll hurt you back. I'll
hurt you as long as I live!"
"Don't, oh, don't talk like that, dear! You don't know what - "
"I will! And when I'm dead I'll hurt you worse!"
"Thank goodness, I shall be dead long before you, darling."
"Huh! Emma says, 'Never know your luck'." (Michael had been talking to Helen's
elderly, flat-faces maid.) "Lots of little boys die quite soon. So'll I. Then you'll see!"
Helen caught her breath and moved towards the door, but the wail of 'Mummy!
Mummy!' drew her back again, and the two wept together.
At ten years old, after two terms at a prep. school, something or somebody gave him
the idea that his civil status was not quite regular. He attacked Helen on the subject,
breaking down her stammered defences with the family directness.
"Don't believe a word of it", he said, cheerily, at the end. "People wouldn't have
talked like they did if my people had been married. But don't you bother, Auntie. I've
found out all about my sort in English Hist'ry and the Shakespeare bits. There was
William the Conqueror to begin with, and - oh, heaps more, and they all got on firstrate. 'Twon't make any difference to you, by being that - will it?"
"As if anything could - " she began.
"All right. We won't talk about it any more if it makes you cry". He never mentioned
the thing again of his own will, but when, two years later, he skilfully managed to
have measles in the holidays, as his temperature went up tot the appointed one
hundred and four he muttered of nothing else, till Helen's voice, piercing at last his
delirium, reached him with assurance that nothing on earth or beyond could make any
difference between them.
The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer
holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as
jewels Helen treasured them. In due time Michael developed his own interests, which
ran their courses and gave way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and
increasing throughout. She repaid it with all that she had of affection or could
command of counsel and money; and since Michael was no fool, the War took him
just before what was like to have been a most promising career.
He was to have gone up to Oxford, with a scholarship, in October. At the end of
August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who
threw themselves into the Line; but the captain of his O.T.C., where he had been
sergeant for nearly a year, headed him off and steered him directly to a commission in
a battalion so new that half of it still wore the old Army red, and the other half was
breeding meningitis through living overcrowdedly in damp tents. Helen had been
shocked at the idea of direct enlistment.
"But it's in the family", Michael laughed.
"You don't mean to tell me that you believed that story all this time?" said Helen.
(Emma, her maid, had been dead now several years.) "I gave you my word of honour
- and I give it again - that - that it's all right. It is indeed."
"Oh, that doesn't worry me. It never did", he replied valiantly. "What I meant was, I
should have got into the show earlier if I'd enlisted - like my grandfather."
"Don't talk like that! Are you afraid of its ending so soon, then?"
"No such luck. You know what K. says."
"Yes. But my banker told me last Monday it couldn't possibly last beyond Christmas for financial reasons."
"I hope he's right, but our Colonel - and he's a Regular - say it's going to be a long
job."
Michael's battalion was fortunate in that, by some chance which meant several
'leaves', it was used for coast-defence among shallow trenches on the Norfolk coast;
thence sent north to watch the mouth of a Scotch estuary, and, lastly, held for weeks
on a baseless rumour of distant service. But, the very day that Michael was to have
met Helen for four whole hours at a railway-junction up the line, it was hurled out, to
help make good the wastage of Loos, and he had only just time to send her a wire of
farewell.
In France luck again helped the battalion. It was put down near the Salient, where it
led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme was being manufactured; and
enjoyed the peace of the Armentières and Laventie sectors when that battle began.
Finding that it had sound views on protecting its own flanks and could dig, a prudent
Commander stole it out of its own Division, under pretence of helping to lay
telegraphs, and used it round Ypres at large.
A month later, and just after Michael had written Helen that there was noting special
doing and therefore no need to worry, a shell-splinter dropping out of a wet dawn
killed him at once. The next shell uprooted and laid down over the body what had
been the foundation of a barn wall, so neatly that none but an expert would have
guessed that anything unpleasant had happened.
By this time the village was old in experience of war, and, English fashion, had
evolved a ritual to meet it. When the postmistress handed her seven-year-old daughter
the official telegram to take to Miss Turrell, she observed to the Rector's gardener:
"It's Miss Helen's turn now". He replied, thinking of his own son: "Well, he's lasted
longer than some". The child herself came to the front-door weeping aloud, because
Master Michael had often given her sweets. Helen, presently, found herself pulling
down the house-blinds one after one with great care, and saying earnestly to each:
"Missing always means dead." Then she took her place in the dreary procession that
was impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions. The Rector,
of course, preached hope end prophesied word, very soon, from a prison camp.
Several friends, too, told her perfectly truthful tales, but always about other women,
to whom, after months and months of silence, their missing had been miraculously
restored. Other people urged her to communicate with infallible Secretaries of
organizations who could communicate with benevolent neutrals, who could extract
accurate information from the most secretive of Hun commandants. Helen did and
wrote and signed everything that was suggested or put before her.
Once, on one of Michael's leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where
she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. It struck
her at the time that the wretched thing was never left alone for a single second; and
"I'm being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin", she told herself, as she
prepared her documents.
In due course, when all the organizations had deeply or sincerely regretted their
inability to trace, etc, something gave way within her and all sensations - save of
thankfulness for the release - came to an end in blessed passivity. Michael had died
and her world had stood still and she had been one with the full shock of that arrest.
Now she was standing still and the world was going forward, but it did not concern
her - in no way or relation did it touch her. She knew this by the ease with which she
could slip Michael's name into talk and incline her head to the proper angle, at the
proper murmur of sympathy.
In the blessed realization of that relief, the Armistice with all its bells broke over her
and passed unheeded. At the end of another year she had overcome her physical
loathing of the living and returned young, so that she could take them by the hand and
almost sincerely wish them well. She had no interest in any aftermath, national or
personal, of the war, but, moving at an immense distance, she sat on various relief
committees and held strong views - she heard herself delivering them - about the site
of the proposed village War Memorial.
Then there came to her, as next of kin, an official intimation, backed by a page of a
letter to her in indelible pencil, a silver identity-disc and a watch, to the effect that the
body of Lieutenant Michael Turrell had been found, identified, and re-interred in
Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery - the letter of the row and the grave's number in
that row duly given.
So Helen found herself moved on to another process of the manufacture - to a world
full of exultant or broken relatives, now strong in the certainty that there was an altar
upon earth where they might lay their love. These soon told her, and by means of
time-tables made clear, how easy it was and how little it interfered with life's affairs
to go and see one's grave.
"So different", as the Rector's wife said, "if he'd been killed in Mesopotamia, or even
Gallipoli."
The agony of being waked up to some sort of second life drove Helen across the
Channel, where, in a new world of abbreviated titles, she learnt that Hagenzeele Third
could be comfortably reached by an afternoon train which fitted in with the morning
boat, and that there was a comfortable little hotel not three kilometres from
Hagenzeele itself, where one could spend quite a comfortable night and see one's
grave next morning. All this she had from a Central Authority who lived in a board
and tar-paper shed on the skirts of a razed city of whirling lime-dust and blown
papers.
"By the way", said he, "you know your grave, of course?"
"Yes, thank you", said Helen, and showed its row and number typed on Michael's
own little typewriter. The officer would have checked it, out of one of his many
books; but a large Lancashire woman thrust between them and bade him tell her
where she might find her son, who had been corporal in the A.S.C. His proper name,
she sobbed, was Anderson, but, coming of respectable folk, he had of course enlisted
under the name of Smith; and had been killed at Dickiebush, in early 'Fifteen. She
had not his number nor did she know which of his two Christian names she might
have used with his alias; but her Cook's tourist ticket expired at the end of Easter
week, and if by then she could not find her child she should go mad. Whereupon she
fell forward on Helen's breast; but the officer's wife came out quickly from a little
bedroom behind the office, and the three of them lifted the woman on to the cot.
"They are often like this", said the officer's wife, loosening the tight bonnet-strings.
"Yesterday she said he'd been killed at Hooge. Are you sure you know your grave? It
makes such a difference."
"Yes, thank you", said Helen, and hurried out before the woman on the bed should
begin to lament again.
Tea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false front,
carried her still further into the nightmare. She paid her bill beside a stolid, plainfeatured Englishwoman, who, hearing her inquire about the train to Hagenzeele,
volunteered to come with her.
"I'm going to Hagenzeele myself", she explained. "Not to Hagenzeele Third; mine is
Sugar Factory, but they call it La Rosière now. It's just south of Hagenzeele Three.
Have you got your room at the hotel there?"
"Oh yes, thank you, I've wired."
"That's better. Sometimes the place is quite full, and at others there's hardly a soul.
But they've put bathrooms into the old Lion d'Or - that's the hotel on the west side of
Sugar Factory - and it draws off a lot of people, luckily."
"It's all new to me. This is the first time I've been over."
"Indeed! This is my ninth time since the Armistice. Not on my own account. I haven't
lost anyone, thank God - but, like everyone else, I've lot of friends at home who have.
Coming over as often as I do, I find it helps them to have someone just look at the place and tell them about it afterwards. And one can take photos for them, too. I get
quite a list of commissions to execute." She laughed nervously and tapped her slung
Kodak. "There are two or three to see at Sugar Factory this time, and plenty of others
in the cemeteries all about. My system is to save them up, and arrange them, you
know. And when I've got enough commissions for one area to make it worth while, I
pop over and execute them. It does comfort people."
"I suppose so", Helen answered, shivering as they entered the little train.
"Of course it does. (Isn't lucky we've got windows-seats?) It must do or they wouldn't
ask one to do it, would they? I've a list of quite twelve or fifteen commissions here" she tapped the Kodak again - "I must sort them out tonight. Oh, I forgot to ask you.
What's yours?"
"My nephew", said Helen. "But I was very fond of him".
"Ah, yes! I sometimes wonder whether they know after death? What do you think?"
"Oh, I don't - I haven't dared to think much about that sort of thing", said Helen,
almost lifting her hands to keep her off.
"Perhaps that's better", the woman answered. "The sense of loss must be enough, I
expect. Well I won't worry you any more."
Helen was grateful, but when they reached the hotel Mrs Scarsworth (they had
exchanged names) insisted on dining at the same table with her, and after the meal, in
the little, hideous salon full of low-voiced relatives, took Helen through her
'commissions' with biographies of the dead, where she happened to know them, and
sketches of their next of kin. Helen endured till nearly half-past nine, ere she fled to
her room.
Almost at one there was a knock at her door and Mrs Scarsworth entered; her hands,
holding the dreadful list, clasped before her.
"Yes - yes - I know", she began. "You're sick of me, but I want to tell you something.
You - you aren't married, are you? Then perhaps you won't... But it doesn't matter.
I've got to tell someone. I can't go on any longer like this."
"But please -" Mrs Scarsworth had backed against the shut door, and her mouth
worked dryly.
"In a minute", she said. "You - you know about these graves of mine I was telling you
about downstairs, just now? They really are commissions. At least several of them
are." Here eye wandered round the room. "What extraordinary wall-papers they have
in Belgium, don't you think? ... Yes. I swear they are commissions. But there's one,
d'you see, and - and he was more to me than anything else in the world. Do you
understand?"
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
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 I'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!"
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 woodenfaced 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.
A Catastrophe
H.G. Wells
THE LITTLE SHOP was not paying. The realisation came insensibly. Winslow was
not the man for definite addition and subtraction and sudden discovery. He became
aware of the truth in his mind gradually, as though it had always been there. A lot of
facts had converged and led him there. There was that line of cretonnes—four halfpieces—untouched, save for half a yard sold to cover a stool. There were those
shirtings at 4¾d.—Bandersnatch, in the Broadway, was selling them at 2¾d.—under
cost, in fact. (Surely Bandersnatch might let a man live!) Those servants’ caps, a
selling line, needed replenishing, and that brought back the memory of Winslow’s
sole wholesale dealers, Helter, Skelter, & Grab. Why! How about their account?
Winslow stood with a big green box on the counter before him when he thought of it.
His pale grey eyes grew a little rounder; his pale, straggling moustache twitched. He
had been drifting along, day after day. He went round to the ramshackle cash-desk in
the corner—it was Winslow’s weakness to sell his goods over the counter, give his
customers a duplicate bill, and then dodge into the desk to receive the money, as
though he doubted his own honesty. His lank forefinger, with the prominent joints,
ran down the bright little calendar (“Clack’s Cottons last for All Time”). “One—two
—three; three weeks an’ a day!” said Winslow, staring. “March! Only three weeks
and a day. It can’t be.”
“Tea dear,” said Mrs. Winslow, opening the door with the glass window and the white
blind that communicated with the parlour.
“One minute,” said Winslow, and began unlocking the desk.
An irritable old gentleman, very hot and red about the face, and in a heavy fur-lined
coat, came in noisily. Mrs. Winslow vanished.
“Ugh!” said the old gentleman. “Pocket-handkerchief.”
“Yes, sir,” said Winslow. “About what price—”
“Ugh!” said the old gentleman. “Poggit-handkerchief, quig!”
Winslow began to feel flustered. He produced two boxes.
“These sir—” began Winslow.
“Sheed tin!” said the old gentleman, clutching the stiffness of the linen. “Wad to blow
my nose—not haggit about.”
“A cotton one, p’raps, sir?” said Winslow.
“How much?” said the old gentleman over the handkerchief.
“Sevenpence, sir. There’s nothing more I can show you? No ties, braces—?”
“Damn!” said the old gentleman, fumbling in his ticket-pocket, and finally producing
half a crown. Winslow looked round for his metallic duplicate-book which he kept in
various fixtures, according to circumstances, and then he caught the old gentleman’s
eye. He went straight to the desk at once and got the change, with an entire disregard
of routine of the shop.
Winslow was always more or less excited by a customer. But the open desk reminded
him of his trouble. It did not come back to him all at once. He heard a finger-nail
softly tapping on the glass, and looking up saw Minnie’s eyes over the blind. It
seemed like retreat opening. He shut and locked the desk, and went into the back
room to tea.
But he was preoccupied. Three weeks and a day! He took unusually large bites of his
bread and butter, and stared hard at the little pot of jam. He answered Minnie’s
conversational advances distractedly. The shadow of Helter, Skelter, & Grab lay upon
the tea-table. He was struggling with this new idea of failure, the tangible realisation
that was taking shape and substance, condensing, as it were, out of the misty
uneasiness of many days. At present it was simply one concrete fact; there were
thirty-nine pounds left in the bank, and that day three weeks Messrs. Helter, Skelter,
& Grab, those enterprising outfitters of young men, would demand their eighty
pounds.
After tea there was a customer or so—small purchases: some muslin and buckram,
dress-protectors, tape, and a pair of Lisle hose. Then, knowing that Black Care was
lurking in the dusky corners of the shop, he lit the three lamps early and set to,
refolding his cotton prints, the most vigorous and least meditative proceeding of
which he could think. He could see Minnie’s shadow in the other room as she moved
about the table. She was busy turning an old dress. He had a walk after supper,
looked in at the Y.M.C.A., but found no one to talk to, and finally went to bed.
Minnie was already there. And there too, waiting for him, nudging him gently, until
about midnight he was hopelessly awake, sat Black Care.
He had, had one or two nights lately in that company, but this was much worse. First
came Messrs. Helter, Skelter, & Grab, and their demand for eighty pounds—an
enormous sum when your original capital was only a hundred and seventy. They
camped, as it were, before him, sat down and beleaguered him. He clutched feebly at
the circumambient darkness for expedients. Suppose he had a sale, sold things for
almost anything? He tried to imagine a sale miraculously successful in some
unexpected manner, and mildly profitable, in spite of reductions below cost. Then
Bandersnatch Limited, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107 Broadway, joined the siege, a
long caterpillar of frontage, a battery of shop fronts, wherein things were sold at a
farthing above cost. How could he fight such an establishment? Besides, what had he
to sell? He began to review his resources. What taking line was there to bait the sale?
Then straightway came those pieces of cretonne, yellow and black, with a bluishgreen flower; those discredited skirtings, prints without buoyancy, skirmishing
haberdashery, some despairful four-button gloves by an inferior maker—a hopeless
crew. And that was his force against Bandersnatch, Helter, Skelter, & Grab, and the
pitiless world behind them. Whatever had made him think a mortal would buy such
things? Why had he bought this and neglected that? He suddenly realised the
intensity of his hatred for Helter, Skelter, & Grab’s salesman. Then he drove towards
an agony of self-reproach. He had spent too much on that cash-desk. What real need
was there of a desk? He saw his vanity of that desk in a lurid glow of self-discovery.
And the lamps? Five pounds! Then suddenly, with what was almost physical pain, he
remembered the rent.
He groaned and turned over. And there, dim in the darkness, was the hummock of
Mrs. Winslow’s shoulder. That set him off in another direction. He became acutely
sensible of Minnie’s want of feeling. Here he was, worried to death about business,
and she sleeping like a little child. He regretted having married, with that infinite
bitterness that only comes to the human heart in the small hours of the morning. That
hummock of white seemed absolutely without helpfulness, a burden, a responsibility.
What fools men were to marry! Minnie’s inert repose irritated his so much that he
was almost provoked to wake her up and tell her that they were “Ruined.” She would
have to go back to her uncle; her uncle had always been against him: and as for his
own future, Winslow was exceedingly uncertain. A shop assistant who has once set
up for himself finds the utmost difficulty in getting into a situation again. He began to
figure himself “crib-hunting” once more, going from this wholesale house to that,
writing innumerable letters. How he hated writing letters! “Sir—, Referring to your
advertisement in the Christian World.” He beheld an infinite vista of discomfort and
disappointment, ending—in a gulf.
He dressed, yawning, and went down to open the shop. He felt tired before the day
began. As he carried the shutters in, he kept asking himself what good he was doing.
The end was inevitable, whether he bothered or not. The clear daylight smote into the
place, and showed how old and rough and splintered was the floor, how shabby the
second-hand counter, how hopeless the whole enterprise. He had been dreaming these
past six months of a bright shop, of a happy couple, of a modest but comely profit
flowing in. He had suddenly awakened from his dream. The braid that bound his
decent black coat-it was a trifle loose-caught against the catch of the shop door, and
was torn away. This suddenly turned his wretchedness to wrath. He stood quivering
for a moment, then with a spiteful clutch, tore the braid looser, and went in to Minnie.
“Here,” he said, with infinite reproach; “look here! You might look after a chap a bit.”
“I didn’t see it torn,” said Minnie.
“You never do,” said Winslow, with gross injustice, “until things are too late.”
Minnie looked suddenly at his face. “I’ll sew it now, Sid, if you like.”
“Let’s have breakfast first,” said Winslow, “and do things at their proper time.”
He was preoccupied at breakfast, and Minnie watched him anxiously. His only
remark was to declare his egg a bad one. It wasn’t; it was flavoury—, being one of
those at fifteen a shilling—, but quite nice. He pushed it away from him, and then,
having eaten a slice of bread and butter, admitted himself in the wrong by resuming
the egg.
“Sid,” said Minnie, as he stood up to go into the shop again, “you’re not well.”
“I’m well enough.” He looked at her as though he hated her.
“Then there’s something else the matter. You aren’t angry with me, Sid, are you,
about that braid? Do tell me what’s the matter. You were just like this at tea yesterday,
and at supper-time. It wasn’t the braid then.”
“And I’m likely to be.”
She looked interrogation. “Oh, what is the matter?” she said.
It was too good a chance to miss, and he brought the evil news out with dramatic
force. “Matter?” he said. “I done my best, and here we are. That’s the matter! If I
can’t pay Helter, Skelter, & Grab eighty pounds, this day three weeks—” Pause. “We
shall be sold up! Sold up! That’s the matter, Min! SOLD UP!”
“Oh, Sid!” began Minnie.
He slammed the door. For the moment he felt relieved of at least half his misery. He
began dusting boxes that did not require dusting, and then reblocked a cretonne
already faultlessly blocked. He was in a state of grim wretchedness; a martyr under
the harrow of fate. At anyrate, it should not be said he failed for want of industry. And
how he had planned and contrived and worked! All to this end! He felt horrible
doubts. Providence and Bandersnatch—surely they were incompatible! Perhaps he
was being “tried”? That sent him off upon a new tack, a very comforting one. The
martyr pose, the gold-in-the-furnace attitude, lasted all the morning.
At dinner—“potato pie—” he looked up suddenly, and saw Minnie’s face regarding
him. Pale she looked, and a little red about the eyes. Something caught him suddenly
with a queer effect upon his throat. All his thoughts seemed to wheel round into quite
a new direction.
He pushed back his plate and stared at her blankly. Then he got up, went round the
table to her—she staring at him. He dropped on his knees beside her without a word.
“Oh, Minnie!” he said, and suddenly she knew it was peace, and put her arms about
him, as he began to sob and weep.
He cried like a little boy, slobbering on her shoulder that he was a knave to have
married her and brought her to this, that he hadn’t the wits to be trusted with a penny,
that it was all his fault; that he “had hoped so—” ending in a howl. And she, crying
gently herself, patting his shoulders, said “Ssh!” softly to his noisy weeping, and so
soothed the outbreak. Then suddenly the crazy bell upon the shop door began, and
Winslow had to jump to his feet, and be a man again.
After that scene they “talked it over” at tea, at supper, in bed, at every possible
interval in between, solemnly—quite inconclusively—with set faces and eyes for the
most part staring in front of them—and yet with a certain mutual comfort. “What to
do I don’t know,” was Winslow’s main proposition. Minnie tried to take a cheerful
view of service—with a probable baby. But she found she needed all her courage.
And her uncle would help her again, perhaps just at the critical time. It didn’t do for
folks to be too proud. Besides, “something might happen,” a favourite formula with
her.
One hopeful line was to anticipate a sudden afflux of customers. “Perhaps,” said
Minnie, “you might get together fifty. They know you well enough to trust you a bit.”
They debated that point. Once the possibility of Helter, Skelter, & Grab giving credit
was admitted, it was pleasant to begin sweating the acceptable minimum. For some
half-hour over tea the second day after Winslow’s discoveries they were quite
cheerful again, laughing even at their terrific fears. Even twenty pounds to go on with
might be considered enough. Then in some mysterious way the pleasant prospect of
Messrs. Helter, Skelter, & Grab tempering the wind to the shorn retailer vanished—
vanished absolutely, and Winslow found himself again in the pit of despair.
He began looking about at the furniture, and wondering idly what it would fetch. The
chiffonier was good, anyhow, and there were Minnie’s old plates that her mother used
to have. Then he began to think of desperate expedients for putting off the evil day.
He had heard somewhere of Bills of Sale—there was to his ears something
comfortingly substantial in the phrase. Then, why not “Go to the Money-Lenders”?
One cheering thing happened on Thursday afternoon a little girl came in with a
pattern of “print,” and he was able to match it. He had not been able to match
anything out of his meagre stock before. He went in and told Minnie. The incident is
mentioned lest the reader should imagine it was uniform despair with him.
The next morning, and the next, after the discovery, Winslow opened shop late. When
one has been awake most of the night, and has no hope, what is the good of getting
up punctually? But as he went into the dark shop on Friday he saw something lying
on the floor, something lit by the bright light that came under the ill-fitting door—a
black oblong. He stooped and picked up an envelope with a deep mourning edge. It
was addressed to his wife. Clearly a death in her family—perhaps her uncle. He knew
the man too well to have expectations. And they would have to get mourning and go
to the funeral. The brutal cruelty of people dying! He saw it all in a flash—he always
visualised his thoughts. Black trousers to get, black crape, black gloves—none in
stock—the railway fares, the shop closed for the day.
“I’m afraid there’s bad news, Minnie,” he said.
She was kneeling before the fireplace, blowing the fire. She had her housemaid’s
gloves on and the old country sun-bonnet she wore of a morning, to keep the dust out
of her hair. She turned, saw the envelope, gave a gasp, and pressed two bloodless lips
together.
“I’m afraid it’s uncle,” she said, holding the letter and staring with eyes wide open
into Winslow’s face. “It’s a strange hand!”
“The postmark’s Hull,” said Winslow.
“The postmark’s Hull.”
Minnie opened the letter slowly, drew it out, hesitated, turned it over, saw the
signature. “It’s Mr. Speight!”
“What does he say?” said Winslow.
Minnie began to read. “Oh!” she screamed. She dropped the letter, collapsed into a
crouching heap, her hands covering her eyes. Winslow snatched at it. “A most terrible
accident has occurred,” he read; “Melchior’s chimney fell down yesterday evening
right on the top of your uncle’s house, and every living soul was killed—your uncle,
your cousin Mary, Will and Ned, and the girl—every one of them, and smashed—you
would hardly know them. I’m writing to you to break the news before you see it in
the papers—” The letter fluttered from Winslow’s fingers. He put out his hand against
the mantel to steady himself.
All of them dead! Then he saw, as in a vision, a row of seven cottages, each let at
seven shillings a week, a timber yard, two villas, and the ruins—still marketable—of
the avuncular residence. He tried to feel a sense of loss and could not. They were sure
to have been left to Minnie’s aunt. All dead! 7 x 7 x 52 ÷ 20 began insensibly to work
itself out in his mind, but discipline was ever weak in his mental arithmetic; figures
kept moving from one line to another, like children playing at Widdy, Widdy Way.
Was it two hundred pounds about—or one hundred pounds? Presently he picked up
the letter again, and finished reading it. “You being the next of kin,” said Mr. Speight.
“How awful!” said Minnie in horror-struck whisper, and looking up at last. Winslow
stared back at her, shaking his head solemnly. There were a thousand things running
through his mind, but none that, even to his dull sense, seemed appropriate as a
remark. “It was the Lord’s will,” he said at last.
“It seems so very, very terrible,” said Minnie; “auntie, dear auntie—Ted—poor, dear
uncle—”
“It was the Lord’s will, Minnie,” said Winslow, with infinite feeling. A long silence.
“Yes,” said Minnie, very slowly, staring thoughtfully at the crackling black paper in
the grate. The fire had gone out. “Yes, perhaps it was the Lord’s will.”
They looked gravely at one another. Each would have been terribly shocked at any
mention of the property by the other. She turned to the dark fireplace and began
tearing up an old newspaper slowly. Whatever our losses may be, the world’s work
still waits for us. Winslow gave a deep sigh and walked in a hushed manner towards
the front door. As he opened it, a flood of sunlight came streaming into the dark
shadows of the closed shop. Bandersnatch, Helter, Skelter, & Grab, had vanished out
of his mind like the mists before the rising sun.
Presently he was carrying in the shutters, and in the briskest way, the fire in the
kitchen was crackling exhilaratingly, with a little saucepan walloping above it, for
Minnie was boiling two eggs—, one for herself this morning, as well as one for him
—, and Minnie herself was audible, laying breakfast with the great éclat. The blow
was a sudden and terrible one—but it behoves us to face such things bravely in this
sad, unaccountable world. It was quite midday before either of them mentioned the
cottages.
The Country of the Blind
by H.G. Wells
(1866-1946)
Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of
Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that mysterious
mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the Country of the Blind. Long
years ago that valley lay so far open to the world that men might come at last through
frightful gorges and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither indeed
men came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of
an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it
was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was boiling at Yaguachi and all
the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the Pacific slopes
there were land-slips and swift thawings and sudden floods, and one whole side of the
old Arauca crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the
Blind for ever from the exploring feet of men. But one of these early settlers had
chanced to be on the hither side of the gorges when the world had so terribly shaken
itself, and he perforce had to forget his wife and his child and all the friends and
possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in the lower world. He
started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in the
mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along the length of the
Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which he had first
been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, when he was a child. The
valley, he said, had in it all that the heart of man could desire--sweet water, pasture,
an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an
excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging forests of pine that held the avalanches
high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock were capped by
cliffs of ice; but the glacier stream came not to them, but flowed away by the farther
slopes, and only now and then huge ice masses fell on the valley side. In this valley it
neither rained nor snowed, but the abundant springs gave a rich green pasture, that
irrigation would spread over all the valley space. The settlers did well indeed there.
Their beasts did well and multiplied, and but one thing marred their happiness. Yet it
was enough to mar it greatly. A strange disease had come upon them and had made all
the children born to them there--and, indeed, several older children also--blind. It was
to seek some charm or antidote against this plague of blindness that he had with
fatigue and danger and difficulty returned down the gorge. In those days, in such
cases, men did not think of germs and infections, but of sins, and it seemed to him
that the reason of this affliction must he in the negligence of these priestless
immigrants to set up a shrine so soon as they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine-a handsome, cheap, effectual shrine--to be erected in the valley; he wanted relics and
such-like potent things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers.
In his wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account; he insisted
there was none in the valley with something of the insistence of an inexpert liar. They
had all clubbed their money and ornaments together, having little need for such
treasure up there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill. I figure this dimeyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim clutched feverishly,
a man all unused to the ways of the lower world, telling this story to some keen-eyed,
attentive priest before the great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to
return with pious and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay
with which he must have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had once come
out. But the rest of his story of mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil
death after several years. Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that had once
made the gorge now bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave, and the legend his poor,
ill-told story set going developed into the legend of a race of blind men somewhere
"over there" one may still hear to-day.
And amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten valley the disease
ran its course. The old became groping, the young saw but dimly, and the children
that were born to them never saw at all. But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed
basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any
beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the
beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had
become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the
sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously,
and when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to
adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of
stone. They were a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly
touched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of
old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot
many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came
from became mythical in colour and uncertain. In all things save sight they were
strong and able, and presently chance sent one who had an original mind and who
could talk and persuade among them, and then afterwards another. These two passed,
leaving their effects, and the little community grew in numbers and in understanding,
and met and settled social and economic problems that arose. Generation followed
generation. Generation followed generation. There came a time when a child was
born who was fifteen generations from that ancestor who went out of the valley with
a bar of silver to seek God's aid, and who never returned. Thereabout it chanced that a
man came into this community from the outer world. And this is the story of that
man.
He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been down to the
sea and had seen the world, a reader of books in an original way, an acute and
enterprising man, and he was taken on by a party of Englishmen who had come out to
Ecuador to climb mountains, to replace one of their three Swiss guides who had
fallen ill. He climbed here and he climbed there, and then came the attempt on
Parascotopetl, the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to the outer world.
The story of that accident has been written a dozen times. Pointer's narrative is the
best. He tells how the little party worked their difficult and almost vertical way up to
the very foot of the last and greatest precipice, and how they built a night shelter
amidst the snow upon a little shelf of rock, and, with a touch of real dramatic power,
how presently they found Nunez had gone from them. They shouted, and there was
no reply; shouted and whistled, and for the rest of that night they slept no more.
As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossible he could
have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknown side of the
mountain; far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way down
it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track went straight to the edge of a frightful
precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and hazy with
distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow, shut-in valley--the lost Country
of the Blind. But they did not know it was the lost Country of the Blind, nor
distinguish it in any way from any other narrow streak of upland valley. Unnerved by
this disaster, they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer was called
away to the war before he could make another attack. To this day Parascotopetl lifts
an unconquered crest, and Pointer's shelter crumbles unvisited amidst the snows.
And the man who fell survived.
At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the midst of a cloud
of snow upon a snow-slope even steeper than the one above. Down this he was
whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a bone broken in his body; and then at
last came to gentler slopes, and at last rolled out and lay still, buried amidst a
softening heap of the white masses that had accompanied and saved him. He came to
himself with a dim fancy that he was ill in bed; then realized his position with a
mountaineer's intelligence and worked himself loose and, after a rest or so, out until
he saw the stars. He rested flat upon his chest for a space, wondering where he was
and what had happened to him. He explored his limbs, and discovered that several of
his buttons were gone and his coat turned over his head. His knife had gone from his
pocket and his hat was lost, though he had tied it under his chin. He recalled that he
had been looking for loose stones to raise his piece of the shelter wall. His ice-axe
had disappeared.
He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by the ghastly
light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken. For a while he lay,
gazing blankly at the vast, pale cliff towering above, rising moment by moment out
of a subsiding tide of darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a
space, and then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter... .
After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the lower edge of the
snow. Below, down what was now a moon-lit and practicable slope, he saw the dark
and broken appearance of rock-strewn turf He struggled to his feet, aching in every
joint and limb, got down painfully from the heaped loose snow about him, went
downward until he was on the turf, and there dropped rather than lay beside a
boulder, drank deep from the flask in his inner pocket, and instantly fell asleep... .
He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.
He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vast precipice that
sloped only a little in the gully down which he and his snow had come. Over against
him another wall of rock reared itself against the sky. The gorge between these
precipices ran east and west and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit to the
westward the mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge. Below him it
seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he found
a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which a desperate man might
venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at last to another desolate alp,
and then after a rock climb of no particular difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He
took his bearings and turned his face up the gorge, for he saw it opened out above
upon green meadows, among which he now glimpsed quite distinctly a cluster of
stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At times his progress was like clambering along the
face of a wall, and after a time the rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge, the
voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But
the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to
talus, and among the rocks he noted--for he was an observant man--an unfamiliar fern
that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond
or so and gnawed its stalk, and found it help ful.
About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the plain and the
sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the shadow of a rock, filled up his
flask with water from a spring and drank it down, and remained for a time, resting
before he went on to the houses.
They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of that valley
became, as he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The greater part of its surface
was lush green meadow, starred with many beautiful flowers, irrigated with
extraordinary care, and bearing evidence of systematic cropping piece by piece. High
up and ringing the valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a circumferential
water channel, from which the little trickles of water that fed the meadow plants
came, and on the higher slopes above this flocks of llamas cropped the scanty
herbage. Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places for the llamas, stood against the
boundary wall here and there. The irrigation streams ran together into a main channel
down the centre of the valley, and this was enclosed on either side by a wall breast
high. This gave a singularly urban quality to this secluded place, a quality that was
greatly enhanced by the fact that a number of paths paved with black and white
stones, and each with a curious little kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an
orderly manner. The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and
higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in a
continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness, here and
there their parti-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window
broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity,
smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes
slate-coloured or dark brown; and it was the sight of this wild plastering first brought
the word "blind" into the thoughts of the explorer. "The good man who did that," he
thought, "must have been as blind as a bat."
He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ran about the
valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus contents into the deeps of the
gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade. He could now see a number of men
and women resting on piled heaps of grass, as if taking a siesta, in the remoter part of
the meadow, and nearer the village a number of recumbent children, and then nearer
at hand three men carrying pails on yokes along a little path that ran from the
encircling wall towards the houses. These latter were clad in garments of llama cloth
and boots and belts of leather, and they wore caps of cloth with back and ear flaps.
They followed one another in single file, walking slowly and yawning as they
walked, like men who have been up all night. There was something so reassuringly
prosperous and respectable in their bearing that after a moment's hesitation Nunez
stood forward as conspicuously as possible upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty
shout that echoed round the valley.
The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were looking about
them. They turned their faces this way and that, and Nunez gesticulated with
freedom. But they did not appear to see him for all his gestures, and after a time,
directing themselves towards the mountains far away to the right, they shouted as if
in answer. Nunez bawled again, and then once more, and as he gestured ineffectually
the word "blind" came up to the top of his thoughts. "The fools must be blind," he
said.
When at last, after much shouting and wrath, Nunez crossed the stream by a little
bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached them, he was sure that they
were blind. He was sure that this was the Country of the Blind of which the legends
told. Conviction had sprung upon him, and a sense of great and rather enviable
adventure. The three stood side by side, not looking at him, but with their ears
directed towards him, judging him by his unfamiliar steps. They stood close together
like men a little afraid, and he could see their eyelids closed and sunken, as though
the very balls beneath had shrunk away. There was an expression near awe on their
faces.
"A man," one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish. "A man it is--a man or a spirit-coming down from the rocks."
But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon life. All the
old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the Blind had come back to his mind,
and through his thoughts ran this old proverb, as if it were a refrain:--
"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used his eyes.
"Where does he come from, brother Pedro?" asked one.
"Down out of the rocks."
"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyond there--where
men can see. From near Bogota--where there are a hundred thousands of people, and
where the city passes out of sight."
"Sight?" muttered Pedro. "Sight?"
"He comes," said the second blind man, "out of the rocks."
The cloth of their coats, Nunez saw was curious fashioned, each with a different sort
of stitching. They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a
hand outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread fingers.
"Come hither," said the third blind man, following his motion and clutching him
neatly.
And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until they had done
so.
"Carefully," he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thought that organ, with
its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went over it again.
"A strange creature, Correa," said the one called Pedro. "Feel the coarseness of his
hair. Like a llama's hair."
"Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigating Nunez's
unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he will grow finer."
Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him firm.
"Carefully," he said again.
"He speaks," said the third man. "Certainly he is a man."
"Ugh!" said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.
"And you have come into the world?" asked Pedro.
"OUT of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above there, half-way to
the sun. Out of the great, big world that goes down, twelve days' journey to the sea."
They scarcely seemed to heed him. "Our fathers have told us men may be made by
the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of things, and moisture, and
rottenness--rottenness."
"Let us lead him to the elders," said Pedro.
"Shout first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid. This is a marvellous occasion."
So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to lead him to the
houses.
He drew his hand away. "I can see," he said.
"See?" said Correa.
"Yes; see," said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro's pail.
"His senses are still imperfect," said the third blind man. "He stumbles, and talks
unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand."
"As you will," said Nunez, and was led along laughing.
It seemed they knew nothing of sight.
Well, all in good time he would teach them.
He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering together in the
middle roadway of the village.
He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated, that first
encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind. The place seemed larger as
he drew near to it, and the smeared plasterings queerer, and a crowd of children and
men and women (the women and girls he was pleased to note had, some of them,
quite sweet faces, for all that their eyes were shut and sunken) came about him,
holding on to him, touching him with soft, sensitive hands, smelling at him, and
listening at every word he spoke. Some of the maidens and children, however, kept
aloof as if afraid, and indeed his voice seemed coarse and rude beside their softer
notes. They mobbed him. His three guides kept close to him with an effect of
proprietorship, and said again and again, "A wild man out of the rocks."
"Bogota," he said. "Bogota. Over the mountain crests."
"A wild man--using wild words," said Pedro. "Did you hear that--"BOGOTA? His
mind has hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings of speech."
A little boy nipped his hand. "Bogota!" he said mockingly.
"Aye! A city to your village. I come from the great world --where men have eyes and
see."
"His name's Bogota," they said.
"He stumbled," said Correa--" stumbled twice as we came hither."
"Bring him in to the elders."
And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as pitch, save
at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed in behind him and shut out all
but the faintest glimmer of day, and before he could arrest himself he had fallen
headlong over the feet of a seated man. His arm, outflung, struck the face of someone
else as he went down; he felt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of anger, and
for a moment he struggled against a number of hands that clutched him. It was a onesided fight. An inkling of the situation came to him and he lay quiet.
"I fell down," be said; I couldn't see in this pitchy darkness."
There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to understand his words.
Then the voice of Correa said: "He is but newly formed. He stumbles as he walks and
mingles words that mean nothing with his speech."
Others also said things about him that he heard or understood imperfectly.
"May I sit up?" he asked, in a pause. "I will not struggle against you again."
They consulted and let him rise.
The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself trying to
explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky and mountains and
such-like marvels, to these elders who sat in darkness in the Country of the Blind.
And they would believe and understand nothing whatever that he told them, a thing
quite outside his expectation. They would not even understand many of his words.
For fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all the seeing
world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed; the story of the
outer world was faded and changed to a child's story; and they had ceased to concern
themselves with anything beyond the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind
men of genius had arisen among them and questioned the shreds of belief and
tradition they had brought with them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all
these things as idle fancies and replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much
of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves
new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips. Slowly Nunez
realised this: that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts
was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been
set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels of his
incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening to their instruction.
And the eldest of the blind men explained to him life and philosophy and religion,
how that the world (meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the
rocks, and then had come first inanimate things without the gift of touch, and llamas
and a few other creatures that had little sense, and then men, and at last angels, whom
one could hear singing and making fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch at
all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.
He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm and the cold,
which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it was good to sleep in the
warm and work during the cold, so that now, but for his advent, the whole town of the
blind would have been asleep. He said Nunez must have been specially created to
learn and serve the wisdom they had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency
and stumbling behaviour he must have courage and do his best to learn, and at that all
the people in the door-way murmured encouragingly. He said the night--for the blind
call their day night--was now far gone, and it behooved everyone to go back to sleep.
He asked Nunez if he knew how to sleep, and Nunez said he did, but that before sleep
he wanted food. They brought him food, llama's milk in a bowl and rough salted
bread, and led him into a lonely place to eat out of their hearing, and afterwards to
slumber until the chill of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again.
But Nunez slumbered not at all.
Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his limbs and turning
the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over and over in his mind.
Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with
indignation.
"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've been
insulting their Heaven-sent King and master... . .
"I see I must bring them to reason.
"Let me think.
"Let me think."
He was still thinking when the sun set.
Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the glow upon the
snow-fields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every side was the most
beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went from that inaccessible glory to the
village and irrigated fields, fast sinking into the twilight, and suddenly a wave of
emotion took him, and he thanked God from the bottom of his heart that the power of
sight had been given him.
He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.
"Yaho there, Bogota! Come hither!"
At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for all what sight
would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.
"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.
He laughed noiselessly and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."
Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped, amazed.
The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you be led
like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"
Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said.
"There is no such word as SEE," said the blind man, after a pause. "Cease this folly
and follow the sound of my feet."
Nunez followed, a little annoyed.
"My time will come," he said.
"You'll learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in the world."
"Has no one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King?'"
"What is blind?" asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.
Four days passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still incognito, as a clumsy
and useless stranger among his subjects.
It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had supposed, and
in the meantime, while he meditated his coup d'etat, he did what he was told and
learnt the manners and customs of the Country of the Blind. He found working and
going about at night a particularly irksome thing, and he decided that that should be
the first thing he would change.
They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of virtue and
happiness as these things can be understood by men. They toiled, but not
oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for their needs; they had days and
seasons of rest; they made much of music and singing, and there was love among
them and little children. It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they
went about their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs;
each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to the others, and
was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities
of path or meadow had long since been cleared away; all their methods and procedure
arose naturally from their special needs. Their senses had become marvellously acute;
they could hear and judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away--could
hear the very beating of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with them,
and touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was as free and
confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was extraordinarily fine; they
could distinguish individual differences as readily as a dog can, and they went about
the tending of llamas, who lived among the rocks above and came to the wall for food
and shelter, with ease and confidence. It was only when at last Nunez sought to assert
himself that he found how easy and confident their movements could be.
He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you here, you
people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in me."
Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and
ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to
see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so
that one could almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to
persuade. He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky
and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became
condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end
of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang
a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and
when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed,
they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and
stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the
smooth roof to things in which they believed--it was an article of faith with them that
the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he
shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, and tried to show
them the practical value of sight. One morning he saw Pedro in the path called
Seventeen and coming towards the central houses, but still too far off for hearing or
scent, and he told them as much. "In a little while," he prophesied, "Pedro will be
here." An old man remarked that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen, and then,
as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and went transversely
into path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards the outer wall. They mocked
Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked Pedro questions to
clear his character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to him.
Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows towards the
wall with one complaisant individual, and to him he promised to describe all that
happened among the houses. He noted certain goings and comings, but the things that
really seemed to signify to these people happened inside of or behind the windowless
houses--the only things they took note of to test him by--and of those he could see or
tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this attempt, and the ridicule they could not
repress, that he resorted to force. He thought of seizing a spade and suddenly smiting
one or two of them to earth, and so in fair combat showing the advantage of eyes. He
went so far with that resolution as to seize his spade, and then he discovered a new
thing about himself, and that was that it was impossible for him to hit a blind man in
cold blood.
He hesitated, and found them all aware that he had snatched up the spade. They stood
all alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears towards him for what he would
do next.
"Put that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of help less horror. He came near
obedience.
Then he had thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him and out of
the village.
He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass behind his
feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways. He felt something of the
buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginning of a fight, but more perplexity. He
began to realise that you cannot even fight happily with creatures who stand upon a
different mental basis to yourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades
and sticks come out of the street of houses and advance in a spreading line along the
several paths towards him. They advanced slowly, speaking frequently to one
another, and ever and again the whole cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.
The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not laugh.
One struck his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling his way along
it.
For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then his vague
disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up, went a pace or so
towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went back a little way. There they all
stood in a crescent, still and listening.
He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Should he charge
them?
The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the Blind the OneEyed Man is King."
Should he charge them?
He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbable because of its
smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little doors and at the approaching
line of seekers. Behind these others were now coming out of the street of houses.
Should he charge them?
"Bogota!" called one. "Bogota! where are you?"
He gripped his spade still tighter and advanced down the meadows towards the place
of habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him. "I'll hit them if they
touch me," he swore; "by Heaven, I will. I'll hit." He called aloud, "Look here, I'm
going to do what I like in this valley! Do you hear? I'm going to do what I like and go
where I like."
They were moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It was like
playing blind man's buff with everyone blindfolded except one. "Get hold of him!"
cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose curve of pursuers. He felt suddenly
he must be active and resolute.
"You don't understand," he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and resolute,
and which broke. "You are blind and I can see. Leave me alone!"
"Bogota! Put down that spade and come off the grass!"
The last order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust of anger. "I'll hurt
you," he said, sobbing with emotion. "By Heaven, I'll hurt you! Leave me alone!"
He began to run--not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the nearest blind
man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and then made a dash to escape
from their closing ranks. He made for where a gap was wide, and the men on either
side, with a quick perception of the approach of his paces, rushed in on one another.
He sprang forward, and then saw he must be caught, and SWISH! the spade had
struck. He felt the soft thud of hand and arm, and the man was down with a yell of
pain, and he was through.
Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and blind men,
whirling spades and stakes, were running with a reasoned swiftness hither and thither.
He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing forward and
swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his spade a yard wide of this
antagonist, and whirled about and fled, fairly yelling as he dodged another.
He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there was no need
to dodge, and, in his anxiety to see on every side of him at once, stumbling. For a
moment he was down and they heard his fall. Far away in the circumferential wall a
little doorway looked like Heaven, and he set off in a wild rush for it. He did not even
look round at his pursuers until it was gained, and he had stumbled across the bridge,
clambered a little way among the rocks, to the surprise and dismay of a young llama,
who went leaping out of sight, and lay down sobbing for breath.
And so his coup d'etat came to an end.
He stayed outside the wall of the valley of the blind for two nights and days without
food or shelter, and meditated upon the Unexpected. During these meditations he
repeated very frequently and always with a profounder note of derision the exploded
proverb: "In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King." He thought chiefly
of ways of fighting and conquering these people, and it grew clear that for him no
practicable way was possible. He had no weapons, and now it would be hard to get
one.
The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could not find it in
himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, if he did that, he might
then dictate terms on the threat of assassinating them all. But--Sooner or later he must
sleep!... .
He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable under pine boughs
while the frost fell at night, and-- with less confidence--to catch a llama by artifice in
order to try to kill it--perhaps by hammering it with a stone--and so finally, perhaps,
to eat some of it. But the llamas had a doubt of him and regarded him with distrustful
brown eyes and spat when he drew near. Fear came on him the second day and fits of
shivering. Finally he crawled down to the wall of the Country of the Blind and tried
to make his terms. He crawled along by the stream, shouting, until two blind men
came out to the gate and talked to him.
"I was mad," he said. "But I was only newly made."
They said that was better.
He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.
Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and they took that
as a favourable sign.
They asked him if he still thought he could SEE."
"No," he said. "That was folly. The word means nothing. Less than nothing!"
They asked him what was overhead.
"About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the world--of rock--and
very, very smooth. So smooth--so beautifully smooth . . "He burst again into
hysterical tears. "Before you ask me any more, give me some food or I shall die!"
He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of toleration.
They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and
inferiority, and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and
heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did
submissively what he was told.
He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his submission.
But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a great misery. And blind
philosophers came and talked to him of the wicked levity of his mind, and reproved
him so impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock that covered their cosmic
casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of
hallucination in not seeing it overhead.
So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people ceased to be
a generalised people and became individualities to him, and familiar to him, while the
world beyond the mountains became more and more remote and unreal. There was
Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro, Yacob's
nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter of Yacob. She
was little esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a clear-cut face and
lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind man's ideal of feminine
beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and presently the most beautiful thing
in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids were not sunken and red after the common
way of the valley, but lay as though they might open again at any moment; and she
had long eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement. And her voice was
weak and did not satisfy the acute hearing of the valley swains. So that she had no
lover.
There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would be resigned
to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.
He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services and presently he
found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day gathering they sat side by side in the
dim starlight, and the music was sweet. His hand came upon hers and he dared to
clasp it. Then very tenderly she returned his pressure. And one day, as they were at
their meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as it chanced
the fire leapt then, and he saw the tenderness of her face.
He sought to speak to her.
He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight spinning. The
light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down at her feet and told her he
loved her, and told her how beautiful she seemed to him. He had a lover's voice, he
spoke with a tender reverence that came near to awe, and she had never before been
touched by adoration. She made him no definite answer, but it was clear his words
pleased her.
After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The valley became
the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains where men lived by day
seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some day pour into her ears. Very
tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of sight.
Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of
the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a
guilty indulgence. She did not believe, she could only half understand, but she was
mysteriously delighted, and it seemed to him that she completely understood.
His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding her of Yacob
and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful and delayed. And it was one of her
elder sisters who first told Yacob that Medina-sarote and Nunez were in love.
There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunez and Medinasarote; not so much because they valued her as because they held him as a being
apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below the permissible level of a man. Her sisters
opposed it bitterly as bringing discredit on them all; and old Yacob, though he had
formed a sort of liking for his clumsy, obedient serf, shook his head and said the thing
could not be. The young men were all angry at the idea of corrupting the race, and
one went so far as to revile and strike Nunez. He struck back. Then for the first time
he found an advantage in seeing, even by twilight, and after that fight was over no
one was disposed to raise a hand against him. But they still found his marriage
impossible.
Old Yacob had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was grieved to have her
weep upon his shoulder.
"You see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do anything right."
"I know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's getting better. And
he's strong, dear father, and kind--stronger and kinder than any other man in the
world. And he loves me--and, father, I love him."
Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and, besides--what made it
more distressing--he liked Nunez for many things. So he went and sat in the
windowless council-chamber with the other elders and watched the trend of the talk,
and said, at the proper time, "He's better than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall
find him as sane as ourselves."
Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He was a great
doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a very philosophical and
inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of his peculiarities appealed to him.
One day when Yacob was present he returned to the topic of Nunez. "I have
examined Nunez," he said, "and the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he
might be cured."
"This is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.
"His brain is affected," said the blind doctor.
The elders murmured assent.
"Now, WHAT affects it?"
"Ah!" said old Yacob.
THIS," said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queer things that are
called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable depression in the face, are
diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a way as to affect his brain. They are greatly
distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a
state of constant irritation and distraction."
"Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?"
"And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him complete,
all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation--namely, to remove
these irritant bodies."
"And then he will be sane?"
"Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
"Thank Heaven for science!" said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunez of
his happy hopes.
But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold and
disappointing.
"One might think," he said, "from the tone you take that you did not care for my
daughter."
It was Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
"YOU do not want me," he said, "to lose my gift of sight?"
She shook her head.
"My world is sight."
Her head drooped lower.
"There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things--the flowers, the lichens
amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a piece of fur, the far sky with its drifting
dawn of clouds, the sunsets and the stars. And there is YOU. For you alone it is good
to have sight, to see your sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your dear, beautiful
hands folded together.... . It is these eyes of mine you won, these eyes that hold me to
you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I must touch you, hear you, and never see you
again. I must come under that roof of rock and stone and darkness, that horrible roof
under which your imaginations stoop... NO; YOU would not have me do that?"
A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing a question.
"I wish," she said, "sometimes--" She paused.
"Yes?" he said, a little apprehensively.
"I wish sometimes--you would not talk like that."
"Like what?"
"I know it's pretty--it's your imagination. I love it, but NOW--"
He felt cold. "NOW?" he said, faintly.
She sat quite still.
"You mean--you think--I should be better, better perhaps--"
He was realising things very swiftly. He felt anger perhaps, anger at the dull course of
fate, but also sympathy for her lack of understanding--a sympathy near akin to pity.
"DEAR," he said, and he could see by her whiteness how tensely her spirit pressed
against the things she could not say. He put his arms about her, he kissed her ear, and
they sat for a time in silence.
"If I were to consent to this?" he said at last, in a voice that was very gentle.
She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," she sobbed, "if
only you would!"
For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his servitude and
inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew nothing of sleep, and all through
the warm, sunlit hours, while the others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or
wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mind to bear on his dilemma. He had given
his answer, he had given his consent, and still he was not sure. And at last work-time
was over, the sun rose in splendour over the golden crests, and his last day of vision
began for him. He had a few minutes with Medina-sarote before she went apart to
sleep.
"To-morrow," he said, "I shall see no more."
"Dear heart!" she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.
"They will hurt you but little," she said; "and you are going through this pain, you are
going through it, dear lover, for ME... . Dear, if a woman's heart and life can do it, I
will repay you. My dearest one, my dearest with the tender voice, I will repay."
He was drenched in pity for himself and her.
He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and looked on her sweet face for
the last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered to that dear sight, "good-bye!"
And then in silence he turned away from her.
She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the rhythm of them
threw her into a passion of weeping.
He walked away.
He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with
white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should come, but as
he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in
golden armour, marching down the steeps... .
It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in the valley, and
his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin.
He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and passed through the wall
of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his eyes were always upon the
sunlit ice and snow.
He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to the things
beyond he was now to resign for ever!
He thought of that great free world that he was parted from, the world that was his
own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance, with
Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery
by night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying
beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come
down through passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He
thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world
beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day by
day, until its banks receded, and the big steamers came splashing by and one had
reached the sea--the limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its thousands of islands,
and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings round and about that
greater world. And there, unpent by mountains, one saw the sky--the sky, not such a
disc as one saw it here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which
the circling stars were floating... .
His eyes began to scrutinise the great curtain of the mountains with a keener inquiry.
For example; if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, then one might
come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sort of shelf and rose
still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And then? That talus might be
managed. Thence perhaps a climb might be found to take him up to the precipice that
came below the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another farther to the east
might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon the amber-lit
snow there, and half-way up to the crest of those beautiful desolations. And suppose
one had good fortune!
He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it with folded
arms. He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote. He turned
again towards the mountain wall down which the day had come to him. Then very
circumspectly he began his climb. When sunset came he was not longer climbing, but
he was far and high. His clothes were torn, his limbs were bloodstained, he was
bruised in many places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on
his face. From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a
mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits
around him were things of light and fire. The mountain summits around him were
things of light andfire, and the little things in the rocks near at hand were drenched
with light and beauty, a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, a flash of small
crystal here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close beside his
face. There were deep, mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple,
and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the
sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite still there, smiling as if he
were content now merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind, in which he
had thought to be King. And the glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and
still he lay there, under the cold, clear stars.
Hubert and Minnie
Aldous Huxley
For Hubert Lapell this first love-affair was extremely important. "Important" was
the word he had used himself when he was writing about it in his diary. It was an
event in his life, a real event for a change. It marked, he felt, a genuine turning-point
in his spiritual development.
"Voltaire," he wrote in his diary - and he wrote it a second time in one of his letters
to Minnie - "Voltaire said that one died twice: once with the death of the whole body
and once before, with the death of one's capacity to love. And in the same way one is
born twice, the second time being on the occasion when one first falls in love. One is
born, then, into a new world - a world of intenser feelings, heightened values, more
penetrating insights." And so on.
In point of actual fact Hubert found this new world a little disappointing. The
intenser feelings proved to be rather mild not by any means up to literary standards.
"I tell thee I am madIn Cressid's love. Thou answer'st; she is fair,
Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her
voice...."
No, it certainly wasn't quite that. In his diary, in his letters to Minnie, he painted, it
is true, a series of brilliant and romantic landscapes of the new world. But they were
composite imaginary landscapes in the manner of Salvator Rosa - richer, wilder, more
picturesquely clear-obscure than the real thing. Hubert would seize with avidity on
the least velleity of an unhappiness, a physical desire, a spiritual yearning, to work it
up in his letters and journals into something substantially romantic. There were times,
generally very late at night, when he succeeded in persuading himself that he was
indeed the wildest, unhappiest, most passionate of lovers. But in the daytime he went
about his business nourishing something like a grievance against love. The thing was
a bit of a fraud; yes, really, he decided, rather a fraud. All the same, he supposed it
was important.
For Minnie, however, love was no fraud at all. Almost from the first moment she
had adored him. A common friend had brought him to one of her Wednesday
evenings. "This is Mr. Lapell; but he's too young to he called anything but Hubert."
That was how he had been introduced. And, laughing, she had taken his hand and
called him Hubert at once. He too had laughed, rather nervously. "My name's
Minnie," she said. But he had been too shy to call her anything at all that evening. His
brown hair was tufty and untidy, like little boy's, and he had shy grey eyes that never
looked at you for more than a glimpse at a time, but turned away almost at once, as
though they were afraid. Quickly he glanced at you, eagerly - then away again; and
his musical voice, with its sudden emphases, its quick modulations from high to low,
seemed always to address itself to a ghost floating low down and a little to one side of
the person to whom he was talking. Above the brows was a forehead beautifully
domed, with a pensive wrinkle running up from between the eyes. In repose his fulllipped mouth pouted a little, as though he were expressing some chronic discontent
with the world. And, of course, thought Minnie, the world wasn't beautiful enough for
his idealism.
"But after all," he had said earnestly that first evening, "one has the world of
thought to live in. That, at any rate, is simple and clear and beautiful. One can always
live apart from the brutal scramble." And from the depths of the arm-chair in which,
fragile, tired, and in these rather "artistic" surroundings almost incongruously elegant,
she was sitting. Helen Glamber laughed her clear little laugh. "I think, on the
contrary," she said (Minnie remembered every incident of that first evening), "I think
one ought to rush about and know thousands of people, and eat and drink
enormously, and make love incessantly, and shout and laugh and knock people over
the head." And having vented these Rabelaisian sentiments, Mrs. Glamber dropped
back with a sigh of fatigue, covering her eyes with a thin white hand; for she had a
splitting headache, and the light hurt her.
"Really!" Minnie protested, laughing. She would have felt rather shocked if any
one else had said that; but Helen Glamber was allowed to say anything.
Hubert reaffirmed his quietism. Elegant, weary, infinitely fragile, Mrs. Glamber lay
back in her arm-chair, listening. Or perhaps, under her covering hand, she was trying
to go to sleep.
She had adored him at first sight. Now that she looked back she could see that it
had been at first sight. Adored him protectively, maternally - for he was only twenty
and very young, in spite of the wrinkle between his brows, and the long words, and
the undergraduate's newly discovered knowledge; only twenty, and she was nearly
twenty-nine. And she had fallen in love with his beauty, top. Ah, passionately. Hubert,
perceiving it later, was surprised and exceedingly flattered. This had never happened
to him before. He enjoyed being worshipped, and since Minnie had fallen so violently
in love with him, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to be in love
with Minnie. True, if she had not started by adoring him, it would never have
occurred to Hubert to fall in love with her. At their first meeting he had found her
certainly very nice, but not particularly exciting.
Afterwards, the manifest expression of her adoration had made him find her more
interesting, and in the end he had fallen in love himself. But perhaps it was not to be
wondered at if he found the process a little disappointing.
But still, he reflected on those secret occasions when he had to admit to himself
that something was wrong with this passion, love without possession could never,
surely, in the nature of things, be quite the genuine article. In his diary he recorded
aptly those two quatrains of John Donne:
"So must pure lovers' souls descend
To affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we thein, that so
Weak men on love revealed may look;
Love's mysterious in souls grow,
But yet the body is his book."
At their next meeting he recited them to Minnie. The conversation which followed,
compounded as it was of philosophy and personal confidences, was exquisite. It
really, Hubert felt, came up to literary standards.
The next morning Minnie rang up her friend Helen Glamber and asked if she might
come to tea that afternoon. She had several things to talk to her about. Mrs. Glamber
sighed as she hung up the receiver. "Minnie's coming to tea," she called, turning
towards the open door. From across the passage her husband's voice came back to
her. "Good Lord!" it said in a tone of far-away horror, of absent-minded resignation;
for John Glamber was deep in his work and there was only a little of him left, so to
speak, above the surface to react to the bad news.
Helen Glamber sighed again, and propping herself more comfortably against her
pillows she reached for her book. She knew that far-away voice and what it meant. It
meant that he wouldn't answer if she went on with the conversation; only say "h'm"
or "m'yes." And if she persisted after that, it meant that he'd say, plaintively, heartbreakingly, "Darling, you must let me get on with my work." And at that moment she
would so much have liked to talk a little. Instead, she went on reading at the point
where she had broken off to answer Minnie's telephone call.
"By this time the flames had enveloped the gynaeceum. Nineteen times did the
heroic Patriarch of Alexandria venture into the blazing fabric, from which he
succeeded in rescuing all but two of its lovely occupants, twenty-seven in number, all
of whom he caused to be transported at once to his own private apartments...."
It was one of those instructive books John liked her to read. History, mystery,
lesson, and law. But at the moment she didn't feel much like history. She felt like
talking. And that was out of the question; absolutely out of it.
She put down her book and began to file her nails and think of poor Minnie. Yes,
poor Minnie. Why was it that one couldn't help saying Good Lord! heart-feltly, when
one heard she was coming to tea? And why did one never have the heart to refuse to
let her come to tea? She was pathetic, but pathetic in such a boring way. There are
some people you like being kind to, people you want to help and befriend. People that
look at you with the eyes of sick monkeys. Your heart breaks when you see them. But
poor Minnie had none of the charms of a sick monkey. She was just a great big
healthy young woman of twenty-eight who ought to have been married and the
mother of children, and who wasn't. She would have made such a good wife, such an
admirably solicitous and careful mother. But it just happened that none of the men
she knew had ever wanted to marry her. And why should they want to? When she
came into a room, the light seemed to grow perceptibly dimmer, the electric tension
slackened off. She brought no life with her; she absorbed what there was, she was
like so much blotting-paper. No wonder nobody wanted to marry her. And yet, of
course, it was the only thing. Particularly as she was always falling in love herself.
The only thing.
"John!" Mrs. Glamber suddenly called. "Is it really true about ferrets?"
"Ferrets?" the voice from across the passage repeated. With a remote irritation. "Is
what true about ferrets?"
"That the females die if they're not mated."
"How on earth should I know?"
"But you generally know everything."
"But, my darling, really..." The voice was plaintive, full of reproach.
Mrs. Glamber clapped her hand over her mouth and only took it off again to blow a
kiss. "All right," she said very quickly. "All right. Really. I'm sorry. I won't do it
again.
Really."
She
blew
another
kiss
towards
the
door.
"But ferrets..." repeated the voice.
Sh - sh, sh — sh."
"Why ferrets?"
"Darling," said Mrs. Glamber almost sternly, "you really must go on with your
work."
Minnie came to tea. She put the case - hypothetically at first, as though it were the
case of a third person; then, gaining courage, she put it personally. It was her own
case. Out of the depths of her untroubled, pagan innocence, Helen Glamber brutally
advised her. "If you want to go to bed with the young man," she said, "go to bed with
him. The thing has no importance in itself. At least not much. It's only important
because it makes possible more secret confidences, because it strengthens affection,
makes the man in a way dependent on you. And then, of course, it's the natural thing.
I'm all for nature except when it comes to painting one's face. They say that ferrets..."
But Minnie noticed that she never finished the sentence. Appalled and fascinated,
shocked and yet convinced, she listened.
"My darling,' said Mrs. Glamber that evening when her husband came home - for
he hadn't been able to face Minnie; he had gone to the Club for tea - "who was it that
invented religion, and sin, and all that? And why?"
John laughed. "It was invented by Adam," he said, "for various little transcendental
reasons which you would probably find it difficult to appreciate. But also for the very
practical purpose of keeping Eve in order."
"Well, if you call complicating people's lives keeping them in order, then I dare say
you're right." Mrs.Glamber shook her head. "I find it all too obscure. At sixteen, yes.
But one really ought to have grown out of that sort of thing by twenty. And at thirty the woman's nearly thirty, you know - well, really..."
In the end, Minnie wrote to Hubert telling him that she had made up her mind.
Hubert was staying in Hertfordshire with his friend Watchett. It was a big house, the
food was good, one was very comfortable; and old Mr. Watchett, moreover, had a
very sound library. In the impenetrable shade of the Wellingtonias Hubert and Ted
Watchett played croquet and discussed the best methods of cultivating the Me. You
could do a good deal, they decided, with art - books, you know, and pictures and
music. "Listen to Stravinsky's Sacre" said Ted Watchett, "and you're for ever excused
from going to Tibet or the Gold Coast or any of those awful places. And then there's
Dostoievsky instead of murder, and D.H. Lawrence as a substitute for sex."
"All the same," said Hubert, "one must have a certain amount of actual nonimaginative experience." He spoke earnestly, abstractedly; but Minnie's letter was in
his pocket. "Gnosce teipsum. You can't really know yourself without coming into
collision with events, can you?"
Next day, Ted's cousin, Phoebe, arrived. She had red hair and a milky skin, and was
more or less on the musical comedy stage. "One foot on and one foot off," she
explained. "The splits." And there and then she did them, the splits, on the drawingroom carpet. "It's quite easy," she said, laughing, and jumped up again with an easy
grace that fairly took one's breath away. Ted didn't like her. "Tiresome girl," he said.
"So silly, too. Consciously silly, silly on purpose, which makes it worse." And, it was
true, she did like boasting about the amount of champagne she could put away
without getting buffy, and the number of times she had exceeded the generous
allowance and been "blind to the world." She liked talking about her admirers in
terms which might make you suppose that they were all her accepted lovers. But then
she had the justification of her vitality and her shining red hair.
"Vitality," Hubert wrote in his diary (he contemplated a distant date, after, or
preferably before, his death, when these confessions and aphorisms would be
published), "vitality can make claims on the world almost as imperiously as can
beauty. Sometimes beauty and vitality meet in one person."
It was Hubert who arranged that they should stay at the mill. One of his friends had
once been there with a reading party, and found the place comfortable, secluded, and
admirably quiet. Quiet, that is to say, with the special quietness peculiar to mills. For
the silence there was not the silence of night on a mountain; it was a silence made of
continuous thunder.
At nine o'clock every morning the mill-wheel began to turn, and its roaring never
stopped, all day. For the first moment the noise was terrifying, was almost
unbearable. Then, after a little, one grew accustomed to it. The thunder became, by
reason of its very unintermittence, a perfect silence, wonderfully rich and profound.
At the back of the mill was a little garden hemmed in on three sides by the house,
the outhouses, and a high brick wall, and open on the fourth towards the water.
Looking over the parapet, Minnie watched it sliding past. It was like a brown snake
with arrowy markings on its back; and it crawled, it glided, it slid along for ever. She
sat there, waiting: her train, from London, had brought her here soon after lunch;
Hubert, coming across country from the Watchetts, would hardly arrive before six.
The whater flowed beneath her eyes like lime, like destiny, smoothly towards some
new and violent event.
The immense noise that in this garden was silence enveloped her. Inured, her mind
moved in it as though in its native clement. From beyond the parapet came the
coolness and the weedy smell of water. But if she turned back towards the garden, she
breathed at once the hot perfume of sunlight beating on flowers and ripening fruit. In
the afternoon sunlight all the world was ripe. The old red house lay there, ripe, like a
dropped plum; the walls were riper than the fruits of the nectarine trees so tenderly
and neatly crucified on their warm bricks. And that richer silence of unremitting
thunder seemed, as it were, the powdery bloom on a day that had come to exquisite
maturity and was hanging, round as a peach and juicy with life and happiness,
waiting in the sunshine for the bile of eager teeth.
At the heart of this fruit-ripe world Minnie waited. The water flowed towards the
wheel; smoothly, smoothly - then it fell, it broke itself to pieces on the turning wheel.
And lime was sliding onwards, quietly towards an event that would shatter all the
smoothness of her life.
"If you really want to go to bed with the young man, go to bed with him." She
could hear Helen's clear, shrill voice saying impossible, brutal things. If any one else
had said them, she would have run out of the room. But in Helen's mouth they
seemed, somehow, so simple, so innocuous, and so true. And yet all that other people
had said or implied - at home, at school, among the people she was used to meeting seemed equally true.
But then, of course, there was love. Hubert had written a Shakespearean sonnet
which began:
"Love hallows all whereon 'tis truly placed,
Turns dross to gold with one touch of his dart,
Makes matter mind, extremest passion chaste,
And builds a temple in the lustful heart."
She thought that very beautiful. And very true. It seemed to throw a bridge
between Helen and the other people. Love, true love, made all the difference. It
justified. Love - how much, how much she loved!
Time passed and the light grew richer as the sun declined out of the height of the
sky. The day grew more and more deliciously ripe, swelling with unheard-of
sweetness. Over its sun-flushed cheeks the thundery silence of the mill-wheel spread
the softest, peachiest of blooms. Minnie sal on the parapet, waiting. Sometimes she
looked down at the sliding water, sometimes she turned her eyes towards the garden.
Time flowed, but she was now no more afraid of that shattering event that thundered
there, in the future. The ripe sweetness of the afternoon seemed to enter into her
spirit, filling it to the brim. There was no more room for doubts, or fearful
anticipations, or regrets. She was happy. Tenderly, with a tenderness she could not
have expressed in words, only with the gentlest of light kisses, with fingers
caressingly drawn through the ruffled hair, she thought of Hubert, her Hubert.
Hubert, Hubert... And suddenly, startlingly, he was standing there at her side.
"Oh," she said, and for a moment she stared at him with round brown eyes, in
which there was nothing but astonishment. Then the expression changed. "Hubert,"
she said softly. Hubert took her hand and dropped it again; looked at her for an
instant, then turned away. Leaning on the parapet, he stared down into the sliding
water; his face was unsmiling. For a long time both were silent. Minnie remained
where she was, sitting quite still, her eyes fixed on the young man's averted face. She
was happy, happy, happy. The long day ripened and ripened, perfection after
perfection.
"Minnie," said the young man suddenly, and with a loud abruptness, as though he
had been a long time deciding himself to speak and had at last succeeded in bringing
out the prepared and pent-up words, "I feel I've behaved very badly towards you. I
never ought to have asked you to come here. It was wrong. I'm sorry."
"But I came because I wanted to," Minnie exclaimed.
Hubert glanced at her, then turned away his eyes and went on addressing a ghost
that floated, it seemed, jus) above the face of the sliding water. "It was too much to
ask. I shouldn't have done it. For a man it's different. But for a woman..."
"But, I tell you, I wanted to."
"It's too much."
"It's nothing," said Minnie, "because I love you." And leaning forward, she ran her
fingers through his hair. Ah, tenderness that no words could express!
"You silly boy," she whispered. "Did you think I didn't love you enough for that?."
Hubert did not look up. The water slid and slid away before his eyes; Minnie's
fingers played in his hair, ran caressingly over the nape of his neck. He felt suddenly
a positive haired for this woman. Idiot! Why couldn't she take a hint? He didn't want
her. And why on earth had he ever imagined that he did? All the way in the train he
had been asking himself that question. Why? Why? And the question had asked itself
still more urgently just now as, standing at the garden door, he had looked out
between the apple tree and watched her, unobserved, through a long minute - watched
her sitting there on the parapet, turning her vague brown eyes now at the water, now
towards the garden, and smiling to herself with an expression that had seemed to him
so dim and vacuous that lie could almost have fancied her an imbecile.
And with Phoebe yesterday he had stood on the crest of the bare chalk down. Like
a sea at their feet stretched the plain, and above the dim horizon towered heroic
clouds. Fingers of the wind lifted the red locks of her hair. She stood as though
poised, ready to leap off into the boisterous air. "How I should like to fly!" she said.
"There's something particularly attractive about airmen, I always think." And she had
gone running down the hill.
But Minnie, with her dull hair, her apple-red checks, and big, slow body, was like a
peasant girl. How had he ever persuaded himself that he wanted her? And what made
it much worse, of course, was that she adored him, embarrassingly, tiresomely, like a
too affectionate spaniel that insists on tumbling about at your feet and licking your
hand just when you want to sit quietly and concentrate on serious things.
Hubert moved away, out of reach of her caressing hand. He lifted towards her for a
moment a pair of eyes that had become, as it were, opaque with a cold anger; then
dropped them again.
"The sacrifice is too great," he said in a voice that sounded to him like somebody
else's voice. He found it very difficult to say this sort of thing convincingly. "I can't
ask it of you, the actor pursued. "I won't."
"But it isn't a sacrifice," Minnie protested. It s a joy, it's happiness. Oh, can't you
understand?"
Hubert did not answer. Motionless, his elbows on the parapet, he stared down into
the water. Minnie looked at him, perplexed only, at first; but all at once she was
seized with a nameless agonizing doubt that grew and grew within her, as the silence
prolonged itself, like some dreadful cancer of the spirit, until it had eaten away all her
happiness, until there was nothing left in her mind hut doubt and apprehension.
"What is it? " she said at last. "Why are yon so strange? What is it, Hubert? What is
it?"
Leaning anxiously forward, she laid her two hands on either side of his averted
face and turned it towards her. Blank and opaque with anger were the eyes. "What is
it'?" she repeated. "Hubert, what is it?"
Hubert disengaged himself. "It's no good," he said in a smothered voice. No good
at all. It was a mistake. I'm sorry. I think I'd better go away. The trap's still at the
door."
And without waiting for her to say anything, without explaining himself any
further, he turned and walked quickly away, almost ran, towards the house. Well,
thank goodness, he said to himself, he was out of that. He hadn't done it very well, or
handsomely, or courageously; but, at any rate, lie was out of it. Poor Minnie! He felt
sorry for her; but after all, what could he do about it? Poor Minnie! Still, it rather
flattered his vanity to think that she would be mourning over him. And in any case, he
reassured his conscience, she couldn't really mind much. But on the other hand, his
vanity reminded him, slic did adore him. Oh, she absolutely worshipped...
The door closed behind him. Minnie was alone again in the garden. Ripe, ripe it
lay there in the late sunshine. Half of it was in shadow now; but the rest of it, in the
coloured evening light, seemed to have come to the final and absolute perfection of
maturity. Bloomy with thundery silence, the choicest fruit of all lime hung there,
deliciously sweet, sweet to the core; hung flushed and beautiful on the brink of
darkness.
Minnie sat there quite still, wondering what had happened. Had he gone, had he
really gone. The door closed behind him with a bang, and almost as though the sound
were a signal prearranged, a man walked out from the mill on to the dam and closed
the sluice. And all at once the wheel was still. Apocalyptically there was silence: the
silence of soundlessness took the place of that other silence that was uninterrupted
sound. Gulfs opened endlessly out around her; she was alone. Across the void of
soundlessness a belated bee trailed its thin buzzing; the sparrows chirped, and from
across the water came the sound of voices and far-away laughter. And as though
woken from a sleep, Minnie looked up and listened, fearfully, turning her head from
side to side.
1924
The miraculous revenge
George Bernard Shaw
I arrived in Dublin on the evening of the fifth of August, and drove to the residence of
my uncle, the Cardinal Archbishop. He is like most of my family, deficient in feeling,
and consequently averse to me personally. He lives in a dingy house, with a side-long
view of the portico of his cathedral from the front windows, and of a monster national
school from the back. My uncle maintains no retinue. The people believe that he is
waited upon by angels. When I knocked at the door, an old woman, his only servant,
opened it, and informed me that her master was then officiating at the cathedral, and
that he had directed her to prepare dinner for me in his absence. An unpleasant smell
of salt fish made me ask her what the dinner consisted of. She assured me that she
had cooked all that could be permitted in his Holiness’s house on Friday. On my
asking her further why on Friday, she replied that Friday was a fast day. I bade her
tell His Holiness that I had hoped to have the pleasure of calling on him shortly, and
drove to the hotel in Sackville-street, where I engaged apartments and dined.
After dinner I resumed my eternal search—I know not for what: it drives me to and
fro like another Cain. I sought in the streets without success. I went to the theatre.
The music was execrable, the scenery poor. I had seen the play a month before in
London with the same beautiful artist in the chief part. Two years had passed since,
seeing her for the first time, I had hoped that she, perhaps, might be the long-sought
mystery. It had proved otherwise. On this night I looked at her and listened to her for
the sake of that bygone hope, and applauded her generously when the curtain fell. But
I went out lonely still. When I had supped at a restaurant, I returned to my hotel, and
tried to read. In vain. The sound of feet in the corridors as the other occupants of the
hotel went to bed distracted my attention from my book. Suddenly it occurred to to
me that I had never quite understood my uncle’s character. He, father to a great flock
of poor and ignorant Irish; an austere and saintly man, to whom livers of hopeless
lives daily appealed for help heavenward; who was reputed never to have sent away a
troubled peasant without relieving him of his burden by sharing it; whose knees were
worn less by the altar steps than by the tears and embraces of the guilty and wretched:
he refused to humor my light extravagances, or to find time to talk with me of books,
flowers, and music. Had I not been mad to expect it? Now that I needed sympathy
myself, I did him justice. I desired to be with a true-hearted man, and mingle my tears
with his.
I looked at my watch. It was nearly an hour past midnight. In the corridor the lights
were out, except one jet at the end. I threw a cloak upon my shoulders, put on a
Spanish hat and left my apartment, listening to the echoes of my measured steps
retreating through the deserted passages. A strange sight arrested me on the landing of
the grand staircase. Through an open door I saw the moonlight shining through the
windows of a saloon in which some entertainment had recently taken place. I looked
at my watch again: it was but one o’clock; and yet the guests had departed. I entered
the room, my boots ringing loudly on the waxed boards. On a chair lay a child’s cloak
and a broken toy. The entertainment had been a children’s party. I stood for a time
looking at the shadow of my cloaked figure on the floor, and at the disordered
decorations, ghostly in the white light. Then I saw there was a grand piano still open
in the middle of the room. My fingers throbbed as I sat down before it and expressed
all I felt in a grand hymn which seemed to thrill the cold stillness of the shadows into
a deep hum of approbation, and to people the radiance of the moon with angels. Soon
there was a stir without too, as if the rapture were spreading abroad. I took up the
chant triumphantly with my voice, and the empty saloon resounded as though to the
thunder of an orchestra.
“Hallo sir!” “Confound you, sir—” “Do you suppose that this—” “What the deuce
—?”
I turned; and silence followed. Six men, partially dressed, with disheveled hair, stood
regarding me angrily. They all carried candles. One of them had a bootjack, which he
held like a truncheon. Another, the foremost, had a pistol. The night porter was
behind trembling.
“Sir,” said the man with the revolver, coarsely, “may I ask whether you are mad, that
you disturb people at this hour with such unearthly noise?”
“Is it possible that you dislike it?” I replied courteously.
“Dislike it!” said he, stamping with rage. “Why—damn everything—do you suppose
we were enjoying it?”
“Take care: he’s mad,” whispered the man with the bootjack.
I began to laugh. Evidently they did think me mad. Unaccustomed to my habits, and
ignorant of the music as they probably were, the mistake, however absurd, was not
unnatural. I rose. They came closer to one another; and the night porter ran away.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “I am sorry for you. Had you lain still and listened, we should
all have been the better and happier. But what you have done, you cannot undo.
Kindly inform the night porter that I am gone to visit my uncle, the Cardinal
Archbishop. Adieu!”
I strode past them, and left them whispering among themselves. Some minutes later I
knocked at the door of the Cardinal’s house. Presently a window opened and the
moonbeams fell on a grey head, with a black cap that seemed ashy pale against the
unfathomable gloom of the shadow beneath the stone sill.
“Who are you?”
“I am Zeno Legge.”
“What do you want at this hour?”
The question wounded me. “My dear uncle,” I exclaimed, “I know you do not intend
it, but you make me feel unwelcome. Come down and let me in, I beg.”
“Go to your hotel,” he said sternly. “I will see you in the morning. Goodnight.” He
disappeared and closed the window.
I felt that if I let this rebuff pass, I should not feel kindly towards my uncle in the
morning, nor indeed at any future time. I therefore plied the knocker with my right
hand, and kept the bell ringing with my left until I heard the door chain rattle within.
The Cardinal’s expression was grave nearly to moroseness as he confronted me on
the threshold.
“Uncle,” I cried, grasping his hand, “do not reproach me. Your door is never shut
against the wretched. Let us sit up all night and talk.”
“You may thank my position and my charity for your admission, Zeno,” he said. “For
the sake of the neighbors, I had rather you played the fool in my study than upon my
doorstep at this hour. Walk upstairs quietly if you please. My housekeeper is a hard-
working woman: the little sleep she allows herself must not be disturbed.”
“You have a noble heart, uncle. I shall creep like a mouse.”
“This is my study,” he said as we entered an ill-furnished den on the second floor.
“The only refreshment I can offer you, if you desire any, is a bunch of raisins. The
doctors have forbidden you to touch stimulants, I believe.”
“By heaven——!” He raised his finger. “Pardon me: I was wrong to swear. But I had
totally forgotten the doctors. At dinner I had a bottle of Grave.”
“Humph! You have no business to be traveling alone. Your mother promised that
Bushy should come over here with you.”
“Pshaw! Bushy is not a man of feeling. Besides, he is a coward. He refused to come
with me because I purchased a revolver.”
“He should have taken the revolver from you, and kept to his post.”
“Why will you persist in treating me like a child, uncle? I am very impressionable, I
grant you; but I have gone around the world alone, and do not need to be dry-nursed
through a tour in Ireland.”
“What do you intend to do during your stay here?”
I had no plans and instead of answering I shrugged my shoulders and looked round
the apartment. There was a upon my uncle’s desk. I looked at its face, as he was wont
to look in the midst of his labor. I saw there eternal peace. The air became luminous
with an infinite net-work of the jeweled rings of Paradise descending in roseate
clouds upon us.
“Uncle,” I said, bursting into the sweetest tears I had ever shed, “my wanderings are
over. I will enter the Church, if you will help me. Let us read together the third part of
Faust; for I understand it at last.”
“Hush, man,” he said, half rising with an expression of alarm. “Control yourself.”
“Do not let tears mislead you. I am calm and strong. Quick, let us have Goethe:
Das Unbeschreibliche, Hier ist gethan; Das Ewig-Weibliche, Zieht uns hinan.”
“Come, come. Dry your eyes and be quiet. I have no library here.”
“But I have—in my portmanteau at the hotel,” I said, rising. “Let me go for it. I will
return in fifteen minutes.”
“The devil is in you, I believe. Cannot——”
I interrupted him with a shout of laughter.
“Cardinal,” I said noisily, “you have become profane; and a profane priest is always
the best of good fellows. Let us have some wine; and I will sing you a German beer
song.”
“Heaven forgive me if I do you wrong,” he said; “but I believe God has laid the
expiation of some sin on your unhappy head. Will you favor me with your attention
for awhile? I have something to say to you, and I have also to get some sleep before
my hour of rising, which is half-past five.”
“My usual hour for retiring—when I retire at all. But proceed. My fault is not
inattention, but over-susceptibility.”
“Well, then, I want you to go to Wicklow. My reasons——”
“No matter what they may be,” said I, rising again. “It is enough that you desire me
to go. I shall start forthwith.”
“Zeno! will you sit down and listen to me?”
I sank upon my chair reluctantly. “Ardor is a crime in your eyes, even when it is
shewn in your service,” I said. “May I turn down the light?”
“Why?”
“To bring on my sombre mood, in which I am able to listen with tireless patience.”
“I will turn it down myself. Will that do?”
I thanked him and composed myself to listen in the shadow. My eyes, I felt, glittered.
I was like Poe’s raven.
“Now for my reasons for sending you to Wicklow. First, for your own sake. If you
stay in town, or in any place where excitement can be obtained by any means, you
will be in Swift’s Hospital in a week. You must live in the country, under the eye of
one upon whom I can depend. And you must have something to do to keep you out of
mischief and away from your music and painting and poetry, which, Sir John Richard
writes to me, are dangerous for you in your present morbid state. Second, because I
can entrust you with a task which, in the hands of a sensible man might bring
discredit on the Church. In short, I want you to investigate a miracle.”
He looked attentively at me. I sat like a statue.
“You understand me?” he said.
“Nevermore,” I replied, hoarsely. “Pardon me,” I added, amused at the trick my
imagination had played me, “I understand you perfectly. Proceed.”
“I hope you do. Well, four miles distant from the town of Wicklow is a village called
Four Mile Water. The resident priest is Father Hickey. You have heard of the miracles
at Knock?”
I winked.
“I did not ask you what you think of them but whether you have heard of them. I see
you have. I need not tell you that even a miracle may do more harm than good to the
Church in this country, unless it can be proved so thoroughly that her powerful and
jealous enemies are silenced by the testimony of followers of their heresy. Therefore,
when I saw in a Wexford newspaper last week a description of a strange
manifestation of the Divine Power which was said to have taken place at Four Mile
Water, I was troubled in my mind about it. So I wrote to Father Hickey, bidding him
give me an account of the matter if it were true, and, if it were not, to denounce from
the altar the author of the report, and contradict it in the paper at once. This is his
reply. He says, well, the first part is about Church matters: I need not trouble you with
it. He goes on to say——”
“One moment. Is this his own hand-writing? It does not look like a man’s.”
“He suffers from rheumatism in the fingers of his right hand; and his niece, who is an
orphan, and lives with him, acts as his amanuensis. Well——”
“Stay. What is her name?”
“Her name? Kate Hickey.”
“How old is she?”
“Tush, man, she is only a little girl. If she were old enough to concern you, I should
not send you into her way. Have you any more questions to ask about her?”
“I fancy her in a white veil at the rite of confirmation, a type of innocence. Enough of
her. What says Reverend Hickey of the apparitions?”
“They are not apparitions. I will read you what he says. Ahem! ‘In reply to your
inquiries concerning the late miraculous event in this parish, I have to inform you that
I can vouch for its truth, and that I can be confirmed not only by the inhabitants of the
place, who are all Catholics, but by every persons acquainted with the former
situation of the graveyard referred to, including the Protestant Archdeacon of
Baltinglas, who spends six weeks annually in the neighborhood. The newspaper
account is incomplete and inaccurate. The following are the facts: About four years
ago, a man named Wolfe Tone Fitzgerald settled in this village as a farrier. His
antecedents did not transpire, and he had no family. He lived by himself; was very
careless of his person; and when in his cups as he often was, regarded the honor
neither of God nor man in his conversation. Indeed if it were not speaking ill of the
dead, one might say that he was a dirty, drunken, blasphemous blackguard. Worse
again, he was, I fear, an atheist; for he never attended Mass, and gave His Holiness
worse language even than he gave the Queen. I should have mentioned that he was a
bitter rebel, and boasted that his grandfather had been out in ’98, and his father with
Smith O’Brien. At last he went by the name of Brimstone Billy, and was held up in
the village as the type of all wickedness.
“‘You are aware that our graveyard, situate on the north side of the water, is famous
throughout the country as the burial-place of the nuns of St. Ursula, the hermit of
Four Mile Water, and many other holy people. No Protestant has ever ventured to
enforce his legal right of interment there, though two have died in the parish within
my own recollection. Three weeks ago, this Fitzgerald died in a fit brought on by
drink; and a great hullabaloo was raised in the village when it became known that he
would be buried in the graveyard. The body had to be watched to prevent its being
stolen and buried at the crossroads. My people were greatly disappointed when they
were told I could do nothing to stop the burial, particularly as I of course refused to
read any service on the occasion. However, I bade them not interfere; and the
interment was effected on the 14th of July, late in the evening, and long after the legal
hour. There was no disturbance. Next morning, the graveyard was found moved to the
south side of the water, with the one newly-filled grave left behind on the north side;
and thus they both remain. The departed saints would not lie with the reprobate. I can
testify to it on the oath of a Christian priest; and if this will not satisfy those outside
the Church, everyone, as I said before, who remembers where the graveyard was two
months ago, can confirm me.
“‘I respectfully suggest that a thorough investigation into the truth of this miracle be
proposed to a committee of Protestant gentlemen. They shall not be asked to accept a
single fact on hearsay from my people. The ordnance maps shew where the graveyard
was; and anyone can see for himself where it is. I need not tell your Eminence what a
rebuke this would be to those enemies of the holy Church that have sought to put a
stain on her by discrediting the late wonderful manifestations at Knock Chapel. If
they come to Four Mile Water, they need cross-examine no one. They will be asked to
believe nothing but their own senses.
“‘Awaiting your Eminence’s counsel to guide me further in the matter,
“‘I am, etc.’
“Well, Zeno,” said my uncle: “what do you think of Father Hickey now?”
“Uncle: do not ask me. Beneath this roof I desire to believe everything. The Reverend
Hickey has appealed strongly to my love of legend. Let us admire the poetry of his
narrative and ignore the balance of probability between a Christian priest telling a lie
on his own oath and a graveyard swimming across a river in the middle of the night
and forgetting to return.”
“Tom Hickey is not telling a lie, you may take my word on that. But he may be
mistaken.”
“Such a mistake amounts to insanity. It is true that I myself, awakening suddenly in
the depth of night have found myself convinced that the position of my bed had been
reversed. But on opening my eyes the illusion ceased. I fear Mr. Hickey is mad. Your
best course is this. Send down to Four Mile Water a perfectly sane investigator; an
acute observer; one whose perceptive faculties, at once healthy and subtle, are
absolutely unclouded by religious prejudice. In a word, send me. I will report to you
the true state of affairs in a few days; and you can then make arrangements for
transferring Hickey from the altar to the asylum.”
“Yes I had intended to send you. You are wonderfully sharp; and you would make a
capital detective if you could only keep your mind to one point. But your chief
qualifications for this business is that you are too crazy to excite the suspicion of
those whom you have to watch. For the affair may be a trick. If so, I hope and believe
that Hickey has no hand in it. Still, it is my duty to take every precaution.”
“Cardinal: may I ask whether traces of insanity have ever appeared in our family?”
“Except in you and in my grandmother, no. She was a Pole; and you resemble her
personally. Why do you ask?”
“Because it has often occurred to me that you are perhaps a little cracked. Excuse my
candor; but a man who has devoted his life to the pursuit of a red hat; who accuses
everyone else beside himself of being mad; and is disposed to listen seriously to a tale
of a peripatetic graveyard, can hardly be quite sane. Depend upon it, uncle, you want
rest and change. The blood of your Polish grandmother is in your veins.”
“I hope I may not be committing a sin in sending a ribald on the church’s affairs,” he
replied, fervently. “However, we must use the instruments put into our hands. Is it
agreed that you go?”
“Had you not delayed me with the story, which I might as well have learned on the
spot, I should have been there already.”
“There is no occasion for impatience, Zeno. I must send to Hickey and find a place
for you. I shall tell him you are going to recover your health, as, in fact, you are. And,
Zeno, in Heaven’s name be discreet. Try to act like a man of sense. Do not dispute
with Hickey on matters of religion. Since you are my nephew, you had better not
disgrace me.”
“I shall become an ardent Catholic, and do you infinite credit, uncle.”
“I wish you would, although you would hardly be an acquisition to the Church. And
now I must turn you out. It is nearly three o’clock; and I need some sleep. Do you
know your way back to your hotel?”
“I need not stir. I can sleep in this chair. Go to bed, and never mind me.”
“I shall not close my eyes until you are safely out of the house. Come, rouse yourself
and say good-night.”
The following is a copy of my first report to the Cardinal:—
“Four Mile Water, County Wicklow, 10th August.
“My Dear Uncle,
“The miracle is genuine. I have affected perfect credulity in order to throw the
Hickeys and countryfolk off their guard with me. I have listened to their method of
convincing the sceptical strangers. I have examined the ordnance maps, and crossexamined the neighboring Protestant gentlefolk. I have spent a day upon the ground
on each side of the water, and have visited it at midnight. I have considered the
upheaval theories, subsidence theories, volcanic theories, and tidal wave theories
which the provincial savants have suggested. They are all untenable. There is only
one scoffer in the district, an Orangeman; and he admits the removal of the cemetery,
but says it was dug up and transplanted in the night by a body of men under the
command of Father Tom. This is also out of the question. The interment of Brimstone
Billy was the first which had taken place for four years; and his is the only grave
which bears the trace of recent digging. It is alone on the north bank; and the
inhabitants shun it after night fall. As each passer-by during the day throws a stone
upon it, it will soon be marked by a large cairn. The graveyard, with a ruined stone
chapel still standing in its midst, is on the south side. You may send down a
committee to investigate the matter as soon as you please. There can be no doubt as
to the miracle having actually taken place, as recorded by Hickey. As for me, I have
grown so accustomed to it that if the county Wicklow were to waltz off with me to
Middlesex, I should be quite impatient of any expression of surprise from my friends
in London.
“Is not the above a businesslike statement? Away, then, with this stale miracle. If you
would see for yourself a miracle which can never pall, a vision of youth and health to
be crowned with garlands for ever, come down and see Kate Hickey, whom you
suppose to be a little girl. Illusion, my lord cardinal, illusion! She is seventeen, with a
bloom and a brogue that would lay your asceticism in ashes at a flash. To her I am an
object of wonder, a strange man bred in wicked cities. She is courted by six feet of
farming material, chopped off a spare length of coarse humanity by the Almighty, and
flung into Wicklow to plough the fields. His name is Phil Langan; and he hates me. I
have to consort with him for the sake of Father Tom, whom I entertain vastly by
stories of your wild oats sown at Salamanca. I exhausted my authentic anecdotes the
first day; and now I invent gallant escapades with Spanish donnas, in which you
figure as a youth of unstable morals. This delights Father Tom infinitely. I feel that I
have done you a service by thus casting on the cold sacerdotal abstraction which
formerly represented you in Kate’s imagination a ray of vivifying passion.
“What a country this is! A Hesperidean garden: such skies! Adieu, uncle.
“Zeno Legge.”
Behold me, at Four Mile Water, in love. I had been in love frequently; but not oftener
than once a year had I encountered a woman who affected me so seriously as Kate
Hickey. She was so shrewd, and yet so flippant! When I spoke of art she yawned.
When I deplored the sordidness of the world she laughed, and called me “poor
fellow!” When I told her what a treasure of beauty and freshness she had she
ridiculed me. When I reproached her with her brutality she became angry, and
sneered at me for being what she called a fine gentleman. One sunny afternoon we
were standing at the gate of her uncle’s house, she looking down the dusty road for
the detestable Langan, I watching the spotless azure sky, when she said:
“How soon are you going back to London?”
“I am not going back to London. Miss Hickey. I am not yet tired of Four Mile Water.”
“I am sure that Four Mile Water ought to be proud of your approbation.”
“You disapprove of my liking it, then? Or is it that you grudge me the happiness I
have found here? I think Irish ladies grudge a man a moment’s peace.”
“I wonder you have ever prevailed on yourself to associate with Irish ladies, since
they are so far beneath you.”
“Did I say they were beneath me, Miss Hickey? I feel that I have made a deep
impression on you.”
“Indeed! Yes, you’re quite right. I assure you I can’t sleep at night for thinking of
you, Mr. Legge. It’s the best a Christian can do, seeing you think so mightly little of
yourself.”
“You are triply wrong, Miss Hickey: wrong to be sarcastic with me, wrong to
discourage the candor with which you think of me sometimes, and wrong to
discourage the candor with which I always avow that I think constantly of myself.”
“Then you had better not speak to me, since I have no manners.”
“Again! Did I say you had no manners? The warmest expressions of regard from my
mouth seem to reach your ears transformed into insults. Were I to repeat the Litany of
the Blessed Virgin, you would retort as though I had been reproaching you. This is
because you hate me. You never misunderstand Langan, whom you love.”
“I don’t know what London manners are, Mr. Legge; but in Ireland gentlemen are
expected to mind their own business. How dare you say I love Mr. Langan?”
“Then you do not love him?”
“It is nothing to you whether I love him or not.”
“Nothing to me that you hate me and love another?”
“I didn’t say I hated you. You’re not so very clever yourself at understanding what
people say, though you make such a fuss because they don’t understand you.” Here,
as she glanced down the road she suddenly looked glad.
“Aha!” I said.
“What do you mean by ‘Aha!’”
“No matter. I will now show you what a man’s sympathy is. As you perceived just
then, Langan—who is too tall for his age, by-the-by—is coming to pay you a visit.
Well, instead of staying with you, as a jealous woman would, I will withdraw.”
“I don’t care whether you go or stay, I’m sure. I wonder what you would give to be as
fine a man as Mr. Langan?”
“All I possess: I swear it! But solely because you admire tall men more than broad
views. Mr. Langan may be defined geometrically as length without breadth; altitude
without position; a line on the landscape, not a point in it.”
“How very clever you are!”
“You don’t understand me, I see. Here comes your lover, stepping over the wall like a
camel. And here go I out through the gate like a Christian. Good afternoon, Mr.
Langan. I am going because Miss Hickey has something to say to you about me
which she would rather not say in my presence. You will excuse me?”
“Oh, I’ll excuse you,” he said boorishly. I smiled, and went out. Before I was out of
hearing, Kate whispered vehemently to him, “I hate that fellow.”
I smiled again; but I had scarcely done so when my spirits fell. I walked hastily away
with a coarse threatening sound in my ears like that of the clarionets whose sustained
low notes darken the woodland in “Der Frieschutz.” I found myself presently at the
graveyard. It was a barren place, enclosed by a mud wall with a gate to admit
funerals, and numerous gaps to admit peasantry, who made short cuts across it as they
went to and fro between Four Mile Water and the market town. The graves were
mounds overgrown with grass: there was no keeper; nor were there flowers, railings,
or any other conventionalities that make an English graveyard repulsive. A great
thornbush, near what was called the grave of the holy sisters, was covered with scraps
of cloth and flannel, attached by peasant women who had prayed before it. There
were three kneeling there as I enterd; for the reputation of the place had been revived
of late by the miracle; and a ferry had been established close by, to conduct visitors
over the route taken by the graveyard. From where I stood I could see on the opposite
bank the heap of stones, perceptibly increased since my last visit, marking the
deserted grave of Brimstone Billy. I strained my eyes broodingly at it for some
minutes, and then descended the river bank and entered the boat.
“Good evenin t’your honor,” said the ferryman, and set to work to draw the boat over
hand by a rope stretched across the water.
“Good evening. Is your business beginning to fall off yet?”
“Faith, it never was as good as it might a been. The people that comes from the south
side can see Billy’s grave—Lord have mercy on him!—across the wather; and they
think bad of payin a penny to put a stone over him. It’s them that lives towrst Dublin
that makes the journey. Your honor is the third I’ve brought from the south to north
this blessed day.”
“When do most people come? In the afternoon, I suppose?”
“All hours, sur, except afther dusk. There isn’t a sowl in the counthry ud come within
sight of the grave wanst the sun goes down.”
“And you! do you stay here all night by yourself?”
“The holy heavens forbid! Is it me stay here all night? No, your honor: I tether the
boat at siven o’hlyock, and lave Brimstone Billy—God forgimme!—to take care of it
t’ll mornin.”
“It will be stolen some night, I’m afraid.”
“Arra, who’d dar come next or near it, let alone stale it? Faith, I’d think twice before
lookin at it meself in the dark. God bless your honor, an gran’che long life.”
I had given him sixpence. I went on to the reprobate’s grave and stood at the foot of
it, looking at the sky, gorgeous with the descent of the sun. To my English eyes,
accustomed to giant trees, broad lawns, and stately mansions, the landscape was wild
and inhospitable. The ferryman was already tugging at the rope on his way back (I
had told him that I did not intend to return that way), and presently I saw him make
the painter fast to the south bank; put on his coat; and trudge homeward. I turned to
the grave at my feet. Those who had interred Brimstone Billy, working hastily at an
unlawful hour and in fear of molestation by the people, had hardly dug a grave. They
had scooped out earth enough to hide their burden, and no more. A stray goat had
kicked away the corner of the mound and exposed the coffin. It occurred to me, as I
took some of the stones from the cairn, and heaped them to repair the breach, that had
the miracle been the work of a body of men, they would have moved the one grave
instead of the many. Even from a supernatural point of view, it seemed strange that
the sinner should have banished the elect, when, by their superior numbers, they
might so much more easily have banished him.
It was almost dark when I left the spot. After a walk of half a mile I recrossed the
water by a bridge and returned to the farm house in which I lodged. Here, finding that
I had enough of solitude, I only stayed to take a cup of tea. Then I went to Father
Hickey’s cottage.
Kate was alone when I entered. She looked up quickly as I opened the door, and
turned away disappointed when she recognized me.
“Be generous for once,” I said. “I have walked about aimlessly for hours in order to
avoid spoiling the beautiful afternoon for you by my presence. When the sun was up I
withdrew my shadow from your path. Now that darkness has fallen, shed some light
on mine. May I stay half an hour?”
“You may stay as long as you like, of course. My uncle will soon be home. He is
clever enough to talk to you.”
“What! More sarcasm! Come, Miss Hickey, help me to spend a pleasant evening. It
will only cost you a smile. I am somewhat cast down. Four Mile Water is a paradise;
but without you it would be lonely.”
“It must be very lonely for you. I wonder why you came here.”
“Because I heard that the women here were all Zerlinas, like you, and the men
Masettos, like Mr. Phil—where are you going to?”
“Let me pass, Mr. Legge, I had intended never speaking to you again after the way
you went on about Mr. Langan today; and I wouldn’t either, only my uncle made me
promise not to take any notice of you, because you were—no matter; but I won’t
listen to you any more on the subject.”
“Don’t go. I swear never to mention his name again. I beg your pardon for what I
said: you shall have no further cause for complaint. Will you forgive me?”
She sat down evidently disappointed by my submission. I took a chair, and placed
myself near her. She tapped the floor impatiently with her foot. I saw that there was
not a movement that I could make, not a look, not a tone of voice, which did not
irritate her.
“You were remarking,” I said, “that your uncle desired you take no notice of me
because——”
She closed her lips and did not answer.
“I fear that I have offended you again by my curiosity. But indeed, I had no idea that
he had forbidden you to tell me the reason.”
“He did not forbid me. Since you are so determined to find out——”
“No; excuse me. I do not wish to know, I am sorry I asked.”
“Indeed! Perhaps you would be sorrier if you were told I only made a secret of it out
of consideration for you.”
“Then your uncle has spoken ill of me behind my back. If that be so there is no such
thing as a true man in Ireland, I would not have believed it on the word of any woman
alive save yourself.”
“I never said my uncle was a backbiter. Just to shew you what he thinks of you, I will
tell you, whether you want to know or not, that he bid me not mind you because you
were only a poor mad creature, sent down here by your family to be out of harm’s
way.”
“Oh, Miss Hickey!”
“There now! you have got it out of me; and I wish I had bit my tongue out first. I
sometimes think—that I mayn’t sin!—that you have a bad angel in you.”
“I am glad you told me this,” I said gently. “Do not reproach yourself for having done
so, I beg. Your uncle has been misled by what he has heard of my family, who are all
more or less insane. Far from being mad, I am actually the only rational man named
Legge in the three kingdoms. I will prove this to you, and at the same time keep your
indiscretion in countenance, by telling you something I ought not to tell you. It is this.
I am not here as an invalid or a chance tourist. I am here to investigate the miracle.
The Cardinal, a shrewd and somewhat erratic man, selected mine from all the long
heads at his disposal to come down here, and find out the truth of Father Hickey’s
story. Would he have entrusted such a task to a madman, think you?”
“The truth of—who dared to doubt my uncle’s word? And so you are a spy, a dirty
informer.”
I started. The adjective she had used, though probably the commonest expression of
contempt in Ireland, is revolting to an Englishman.
“Miss Hickey,” I said: “there is in me, as you have said, a bad angel. Do not shock
my good angel—who is a person of taste—quite away from my heart, lest the other
be left undisputed monarch of it. Hark! The chapel bell is ringing the angelus. Can
you, with that sound softening the darkness of the village night, cherish a feeling of
spite against one who admires you?”
“You come between me and my prayers” she said hysterically, and began to sob. She
had scarcely done so when I heard voices without. Then Langan and the priest
entered.
“Oh, Phil,” she cried, running to him, “take me away from him: I cant bear——” I
turned towards him, and shewed him my dog-tooth in a false smile. He felled me at
one stroke, as he might have felled a poplar-tree.
“Murdher!” exclaimed the priest. “What are you doin, Phil?”
“He’s an informer,” sobbed Kate. “He came down here to spy on you, uncle, and to
try and show that the blessed miracle was a makeshift. I knew it long before he told
me, by his insulting ways. He wanted to make love to me.”
I rose with difficulty from beneath the table where I had lain motionless for a
moment.
“Sir,” I said, “I am somewhat dazed by the recent action of Mr. Langan, whom I beg,
the next time he converts himself into a fulling-mill, to do so at the expense of a man
more nearly his equal in strength than I. What your niece has told you is partly true. I
am indeed the Cardinal’s spy; and I have already reported to him that the miracle is a
genuine one. A committee of gentlemen will wait on you tomorrow to verify it, at my
suggestion. I have thought that the proof might be regarded by them as more
complete if you were taken by surprise. Miss Hickey: that I admire all that is
admirable in you is but to say that I have a sense of the beautiful. To say that I love
you would be mere profanity. Mr. Langan: I have in my pocket a loaded pistol which
I carry from a silly English prejudice against your countrymen. Had I been the
Hercules of the ploughtail, and you in my place, I should have been a dead man now.
Do not redden: you are safe as far as I am concerned.”
“Let me tell you before you leave my house for good,” said Father Hickey, who
seemed to have become unreasonably angry, “that you should never have crossed my
threshold if I had known you were a spy: no, not if your uncle were his Holiness the
Pope himself.”
Here a frightful thing happened to me. I felt giddy, and put my hand on my head.
Three warm drops trickled over it. I instantly became murderous. My mouth filled
with blood; my eyes were blinded with it. My hand went involuntarily to the pistol. It
is my habit to obey my impulses instantaneously. Fortunately the impulse to kill
vanished before a sudden perception of how I might miraculously humble the mad
vanity in which these foolish people had turned upon me. The blood receded from my
ears; and I again heard and saw distinctly.
“And let me tell you,” Langan was saying, “that if you think yourself handier with
cold lead than you are with your fists, I’ll exchange shots with you, and welcome,
whenever you please. Father Tom’s credit is the same to me as my own; and if you
say a word against it, you lie.”
“His credit is in my hands,” I said, “I am the Cardinal’s witness. Do you defy me?”
“There is the door,” said the priest, holding it open before me. “Until you can undo
the visible work of God’s hand your testimony can do no harm to me.”
“Father Hickey,” I replied, “before the sun rises again upon Four Mile Water, I will
undo the visible work of God’s hand, and bring the pointing finger of the scoffer upon
your altar.”
I bowed to Kate, and walked out. It was so dark that I could not at first see the garden
gate. Before I found it, I heard through the window Father Hickey’s voice, saying, “I
wouldn’t for ten pounds that this had happened, Phil. He’s as mad as a march hare.
The Cardinal told me so.”
I returned to my lodging, and took a cold bath to cleanse the blood from my neck and
shoulder. The effect of the blow I had received was so severe, that even after the bath
and a light meal I felt giddy and languid. There was an alarum-clock on the mantle
piece: I wound it; set the alarum for half-past twelve; muffled it so that it should not
disturb the people in the adjoining room; and went to bed, where I slept soundly for
an hour and a quarter. Then the alarum roused me, and I sprang up before I was
thoroughly awake. Had I hesitated, the desire to relapse into perfect sleep would have
overpowered me. Although the muscles of my neck were painfully stiff, and my
hands unsteady from my nervous disturbance, produced by the interruption of my
first slumber, I dressed myself resolutely, and, after taking a draught of cold water,
stole out of the house. It was exceedingly dark; and I had some difficulty in finding
the cow-house, whence I borrowed a spade, and a truck with wheels, ordinarily used
for moving sacks of potatoes. These I carried in my hands until I was beyond earshot
of the house, when I put the spade on the truck, and wheeled it along the road to the
cemetery. When I approached the water, knowing that no one would dare come
thereabout at such an hour I made greater haste, no longer concerning myself about
the rattling of the wheels. Looking across to the opposite bank, I could see a
phosophorescent glow, marking the lonely grave of Brimstone Billy. This helped me
to find the ferry station, where, after wandering a little and stumbling often, I found
the boat, and embarked with my implements. Guided by the rope, I crossed the water
without difficulty; landed; made fast the boat; dragged the truck up the bank; and sat
down to rest on the cairn at the grave. For nearly a quarter of an hour I sat watching
the patches of jack-o-lantern fire, and collecting my strength for the work before me.
Then the distant bell of the chapel clock tolled one. I arose; took the spade; and in
about ten minutes uncovered the coffin, which smelt horribly. Keeping to windward
of it, and using the spade as a lever, I contrived with great labor to place it on the
truck. I wheeled it without accident to the landing place, where, by placing the shafts
of the truck upon the stern of the boat and lifting the foot by main strength, I
succeeded in embarking my load after twenty minutes’ toil, during which I got
covered with clay and perspiration, and several times all but upset the boat. At the
southern bank I had less difficulty in getting the coffin ashore, dragging it up to the
graveyard.
It was now past two o’clock, and the dawn had begun; so that I had no further trouble
for want of light. I wheeled the coffin to a patch of loamy soil which I had noticed in
the afternoon near the grave of the holy sisters. I had warmed to my work; my neck
no longer pained me; and I began to dig vigorously, soon making a shallow trench,
deep enough to hide the coffin with the addition of a mound. The chill pearl-coloured
morning had by this time quite dissipated the darkness. I could see, and was myself
visible, for miles around. This alarmed, and made me impatient to finish my task.
Nevertheless, I was forced to rest for a moment before placing the coffin in the
trench. I wiped my brow and wrists, and again looked about me. The tomb of the holy
women, a massive slab supported on four stone spheres, was grey and wet with dew.
Near it was the thornbush covered with rags, the newest of which were growing
gaudy in the radiance which was stretching up from the coast on the east. It was time
to finish my work. I seized the truck; laid it alongside the grave; and gradually pried
the coffin off with the spade until it rolled over into the trench with a hollow sound
like a drunken remonstrance from the sleeper within. I shovelled the earth round and
over it, working as fast as possible. In less than a quarter of an hour it was buried. Ten
minutes more sufficed to make the mound symmetrical, and to clear the adjacent
ward. Then I flung down the spade; threw up my arms; and vented a sigh of relief and
triumph. But I recoiled as I saw that I was standing on a barren common, covered
with furze. No product of man’s handiwork was near me except my truck and spade
and the grave of Brimstone Billy, now as lonely as before. I turned towards the water.
On the opposite bank was the cemetery, with the tomb of the holy women, the
thornbush with its rags stirring in the morning breeze, and the broken mud wall. The
ruined chapel was there, too, not a stone shaken from its crumbling walls, not a sign
to shew that it and its precinct were less rooted in their place than the eternal hills
around.
I looked down at the grave with a pang of compassion for the unfortunate Wolf Tone
Fitzgerald, with whom the blessed would not rest. I was even astonished, though I
had worked expressly to this end. But the birds were astir, and the cocks crowing. My
landlord was an early riser. I put the spade on the truck again, and hastened back to
the farm, where I replaced them in the cow-house. Then I stole into the house, and
took a clean pair of boots, an overcoat, and a silk hat. These with a change of linen,
were sufficient to make my appearance respectable. I went out again, bathed in Four
Mile Water, took a last look at the cemetery, and walked to Wicklow, whence I
traveled by the first train to Dublin.
Some months later, at Cairo, I received a packet of Irish newspapers, and a leading
article, cut from The Times, on the subject of the miracle. Father Hickey had suffered
the meed of his inhospitable conduct. The committee, arriving at Four Mile Water the
day after I left, had found the graveyard exactly where it formerly stood. Father
Hickey, taken by surprise, had attempted to defend himself by a confused statement,
which led the committee to declare finally that the miracle was a gross imposture.
The Times, commenting on this after adducing a number of examples of priestly
craft, remarked, “We are glad to learn that the Rev. Mr. Hickey has been permanently
relieved of his duties as the parish priest of Four Mile Water by his ecclesiastical
superior. It is less gratifying to have to record that it has been found possible to obtain
two hundred signatures to a memorial embodying the absurd defence offered to the
committee, and expressing unabated confidence in the integrity of Mr. Hickey.”
London, 1885.
The Serenade
George Bernard Shaw
I celebrated my fortieth birthday by one of the 'amateur theatrical performances for
which my house at Beckenham is famous. The piece, written, as usual, by myself,
was a fairy play in three acts; and the plot turned upon the possession of a magic
horn by the hero, a young Persian prince. My works are so well known that it is
unnecessary to describe the action minutely. I need only remind the reader that an
important feature in the second act is the interruption of a festival by the sound of the
horn, blown by the Prince in the heart of a loadstone mountain in which he has been
entombed by a malignant fairy. I had engaged a hornist from the band of my regiment
to blow the horn: and it was arranged that he should place himself, not upon the
stage, but downstairs in the hall, so that the required effect of extreme distance should
be produced.
The entertainment began pleasantly. Some natural disappointment was felt when it
became known that I was not to act; but my guests excused me with perfect good
humor when I pleaded my double duty as host and stage manager. The best seat in the
auditorium was occupied by the beautiful Linda Fitznightingale. The next chair,
which I had intended for myself, had been taken (rather coolly) by Porcharlester of
the 12th, a young man of amiable disposition, and of some musical talent, which
enables him to make the most of a somewhat effeminate baritone voice which he is
weak enough to put forward as a tenor.
As Linda's taste for music approached fanaticism, Porcharlester's single
accomplishment gave him, in her eyes, an advantage over men of more solid parts
and mature age. I resolved to interrupt their conversation as soon as I was at leisure.
It was some time before this occurred; for I make it a rule to see for myself that
everything needed at the performances in my house is at hand in its proper place. At
last Miss Waterloo, who enacted the heroine, complained that my anxiety made her
nervous, and begged me to go to the front and rest myself. I complied willingly, and
hastened to the side of Linda. As I approached, Porcharlester rose, saying, "I am
going to take a peep behind: that is, if non-performers may be admitted."
"Oh, certainly," I said, glad to be rid of him. "But pray do not meddle with anything.
The slightest hitch —
"All right," he said, interrupting me. "I know how fidgety you are. I will keep my
hands in my pockets all the time."
"You should not allow him to be disrespectful to you, Colonel Green," said Linda,
when he was gone. "And I feel sure he will do no end of mischief behind the scenes."
"Boys will be boys," I replied. "Poreharlcster's manner is just the same to General
Johnston, who is quite an old man. How are your musical studies progressing?"
"I am full of Schubert just now. Oh, Colonel Green, do you know Schubert's
serenade?"
"Ah! a charming thing. It is something like this, I think. Diddledi-dum, deediddledidum, deedum, deediddledy- day."
"Yes, it is a little like that. Does Mr. Porcharlester sing it?"
"He tries to sing it. But he only appears to advantage when he sings trivial music. In
nothing that demands serious sentiment, depth of feeling, matured sympathy, as it
were —"
"Yes, yes. I know you think Mr. Porcharlester flippant. Do you like the serenade?"
Mm! well, the fact is — Do you like it?"
"I love it. I dream of it. I have lived on it for the last three days."
"I must confess that it has always struck me as being a singularly beautiful piece of
music. I hope to have the pleasure of hearing justice done to it by your voice when
our little play is over."
"I sing it! Oh, I dare not. All! here is Mr. Porcharlester. I will make him promise to
sing it for us."
"Green," said Porcharlester with ill-bred jocosity: "I don’t wish to disturb you
groundlessly; but the fellow who is to play the magic horn hasn’t turned up."
"Good Heavens!" I exclaimed. "I ordered him for half-past seven sharp. If he fails,
the play will be spoiled."
I excused myself briefly lo Linda, and hurried lo the hall. The horn was there, on the
table. Porcharlester had resorted to an infamous trick to get rid of me I was about to
return and demand an explanation, when it occurred to me that, after all, the
bandsman might have left his instrument there at the morning rehearsal, and had
perhaps not come. But a servant whom I called told me that the man had arrived with
military punctuality at half-past seven, and had, according to my orders, been shewn
into the supper room joining the hall, and left there with a glass of wine and a
sandwich. Porcharlester, then, had deceived me. As the servant returned to his duties,
leaving me alone and angry in the hall, my attention was curiously arrested by the
gleaming brass curves of the instrument on the table. Amid the inanimate objects
around me the horn seemed silent and motionless in a way apart, as though, pregnant
with dreadful sound, it were consciously biding its time for utterance. I stole to the
table, and cautiously touched one of the valves with my forefinger. After a moment I
ventured to press it down. It clicked. At a sound in the supper room I started back
guiltily. Then the prompter's bell tinkled. It was the signal for the hornist to prepare
for his cue. I awaited the appearance of the bandsman with some shame, hoping that
he would not discover that I had been childishly meddling with his instrument. But he
did not come. My anxiety increased: I hurried into the supper room. There, at the
head of the table, sat the soldier, fast asleep. Before him were five decanters empty. I
seized his shoulder and shook him violently. He grunted; made a drunken blow at me;
and relapsed into insensibility.
Swearing, in my anger, to have him shot for this mutiny, I rushed back lo the hall.
The bell rang again. This second bell was for the horn to sound. The stage was
waiting. In that extremity I saw but one way to save the piece from failure. I snatched
up the instrument; put the smaller end into my mouth; and puffed vigorously through
it. Waste of breath! not a sound responded. I became faint with my exertions; and the
polished brass slipped through my clammy hands. The bell again urgently broke the
ruinous silence. Then I grasped the horn like a vice; inflated my lungs; jammed the
mouthpiece against my lips and set my teeth until it nearly cut me; and spat fiercely
into it. The result was a titanic blast. My ears received a deafening shock; the lamp
glasses whirred; the hats of my visitors rained from their pegs; and I pressed my
bursting temples between my palms as the soldier reeled out, pale as though the last
trumpet had roused him, and confronted the throng of amazed guests who appeared
on the stairs.
****************
For the next three months I studied the art of horn-blowing under the direction of an
adept. He worried me by his lower middle class manners and his wearisome trick of
repeating that the 'orn, as he called it, resembled the human voice more than any
other instrument; but he was competent and conscientious; and I was persevering, in
spite of some remonstrances from the neighbors. At last I ventured to ask him
whether he considered me sufficiently advanced to play a solo in private for a friend.
"Well, Colonel," he said, "I tell you the truth, you havnt a horn lip for it: at least, not
yet. Then, you see, you blow so tremendous. If youll believe me, sir, it dont need all
the muscle you put into it: it spoils the tone. What was you thinking of playing for
your friend?"
"Something that you must teach me. Schubert's serenade."
He stared at me, and shook his head. "It aint written for the hinstrument, sir," he said.
"Youll never play it."
"The first time I play it through without a mistake, I will give you five guineas,
besides our regular terms."
This overcame his doubts. I found the execution of the serenade, even after diligent
practice, uncertain and very difficult. But I succeeded at last.
"If I was you, Colonel," said my instructor, as he pocketed the five guineas, "I'd keep
that tune to myself, and play summat simpler for my friends. You can play it well
enough here after half an hour's exercise; but when I'm not at your elbow, youll find it
wont come so steady."
I made light of this hint, the prudence of which I now fully recognize. But at that time
I was bent on a long cherished project of serenading Linda. Her house, near the
northern end of Park Lane, was favorably situated for the purpose; and I had already
bribed a servant to admit me to the small pleasure ground that lay between the house
and the roadway. Late in June, I learned that site intended to repose for an evening
from the fatigues of society. This was my opportunity. At nine o'clock I placed my
horn in a travelling bag, and drove to the Marble Arch, where I alighted and walked
to my destination. I was arrested by the voice of Porcharlester calling, "Hallo,
Colonel!" As I did not wish to be questioned, I thought it best to forestall him by
asking whither he was bound.
"I am going to see Linda," he replied. "She contrived to let me know last night that
she would be alone all this evening. I don't mind telling you these things, Colonel:
you are a man of honor, and you know how good she is. I adore her. If I could only be
certain that it is myself, and not merely my voice that she likes, I should be the
happiest man in England."
"I am quite sure that it cannot be your voice," I said. "Thank you," he exclaimed,
grasping my hand: "it's very kind of you to say so; but I hardly dare flatter myself that
you are right. It almost chokes me to look at her. Do you know I have never had the
pluck to sing that serenade of Schubert's since she told me it was a favorite of hers?"
"Why? Does she not like your singing of it?"
"I tell you I have never ventured to sing it before her, though she is always at me for
it. I am half jealous of that confounded tune. But I would do anything to please her;
and I am going to surprise her with it tomorrow at Mrs. Locksly Hall's. I have been
taking lessons and working like a dog to be able to sing it in really first-rate style. If
you meet her, mind you don't breathe a word of this. It is to be a surprise."
"I have no doubt you will startle her," I said, exulting at the thought that he would be
a day too late. I knew that it would lake a finer voice than his to bear comparison with
the melancholy sweetness, the sombre menace, the self-contained power with which
the instrument I carried would respond to a skilful performer. We parted; and I saw
him enter the house of Linda. A few minutes later, I was in the garden, looking up at
them from my place in the shadow as they sat near the open window. Their
conversation did not reach me: I thought he would never go. The night was a little
cold; and the ground was damp. Ten o'clock struck — a quarter past — half past — I
almost resolved to go home. Had not the tedium been relieved by some pieces which
she played on the pianoforte, I could not have held out. At last they rose; and I was
now able to distinguish their words.
"Yes," she said, "it is time for you to go." How heartily I agreed with her! "But you
might have sung the serenade for me. I have played three times for you."
"I have a frightful cold," he said. "I really cannot. Good-night."
"What nonsense! You have not the least symptom of a cold. No matter: I will never
ask you again. Good night, Mr. Porcharlester."
"Do not be savage with me," he said. "You shall hear me sing it sooner than you
think, perhaps."
"Ah! you say that very significantly. Sooner than I think! If you are preparing a
surprise for me, I will forgive you. I shall see you at Mrs. Locksly Hall's tomorrow, I
hope."
He assented, and hurried away, fearful, I suppose, lest he should betray his plan.
When he was gone, she came to the window, and looked out at the stars. Gazing at
her, I forgot my impatience: my teeth ceased to chatter. I took the horn from my
travelling bag. She sighed; closed the window; and drew down a white blind. The
sight of her hand alone as she did so would have inspired me to excel all my previous
efforts. She seated herself so that I could see the shadow of her figure in profile. My
hour had come. Park Lane was nearly still: the traffic in Oxford Street was too distant
to be distracting.
I began. At the first note I saw her start and listen. When the completed phrase
revealed to her what air I was playing, she laid down her book. The mouthpiece of
my instrument was like ice; and my lips were stiff and chilly, so that in spite of my
utmost care I was interrupted more than once by those uncouth guggling sounds
which the best hornists cannot always avoid. Nevertheless, considering that I was
cold and very nervous, I succeeded fairly well. Gaining confidence as I went on, I
partly atoned for the imperfection of the beginning by playing the concluding bars
with commanding sonority, and even achieving a tolerable shake on the penultimate
note.
An encouraging cheer from the street as I finished, shewed me that a crowd was
collected there, and that immediate flight was out of the question. I replaced the horn
in my bag, and made ready to go when the mob should disperse. Meanwhile I gazed
at the shadow on the blind. She was writing now. Could she, I think, be writing to
me? She rose; and I the shadow overspread the window so that I could no longer
distinguish her movements. I heard a hell ring. A minute later the door of the house
opened. I retreated behind an aloe tub; but on recognizing the servant whom I had
bribed, I whistled softly to him. He came towards me with a letter in his hand. My
heart beat strongly as I saw it.
"All right, sir," he said. "Miss Linda told me to give you this; but you are not to open
it, if you please, until you get home."
"Then she knew who I was," I said eagerly.
"I suppose so, sir. When I heard her bell, I took care to answer it myself. Then she
says to me, 'Youll find a gentleman somewhere in the pleasure ground. Give him this
note; and beg him lo go home at once. He is not to read it here. "
"Is there any crowd outside?"
"All gone, sir. Thank you, sir. Goodnight, sir."
I ran all the way lo Hamilton Place, where I got into a hansom.
Ten minutes afterwords I was in my study, opening the letter with unsteady hands. It
was not enclosed in an envelope, but folded in three, with a corner turned down. I
opened it and read,
"714, Park Lane, Friday.
"Dear Mr. Porcharlester — "
I stopped. Had she then given him credit for my performance? A more immediately
important question was whether I had any right lo read a letter not addressed to me.
Curiosity and love prevailed over this scruple. The letter continued thus.
"I am sorry that you have seen nothing in my fancy for Schubert's serenade except
matter for ridicule. Perhaps it was an exaggerated fancy; but I would not have
expressed it to you had I not believed you capable of understanding it. If it be any
satisfaction to you to know that you have cured me of it thoroughly, pray believe that
I shall never again hear the serenade without a strange mixture of mirth and pain. I
did not know that a human throat could compass such sounds; and I little thought,
when you promised that I should hear your voice sooner than I expected, that you
contemplated such a performance. I have only one word more: Adieu. I shall not have
the pleasure of meeting you at Mrs. Locksly Hall's tomorrow, as my engagements
will not permit me to go there. For the same reason I fear I must deny myself the
pleasure of receiving you again this season. I am, dear Mr. Porcharlester, yours truly,
L i n d a F i I z n i g h t i n g a l e."
I felt that to forward this letter to Porcharlester would only pain him uselessly. I fell
also that my instructor was right, and that I have not the lip for the French horn. I
have accordingly given it up.
Linda is now my wife. I sometimes ask her why she persists in cutting Porcharlester,
who has pledged me his word as an officer and a gentleman that he is unconscious of
having given her the slightest ground for offence. She always refuses to tell me.
Katherine Mansfield
Taking the veil
It seemed impossible that anyone should be unhappy on such a beautiful morning.
Nobody was, decided Edna, except herself. The windows were flung wide in the
houses. From within I here came the sound of pianos, little hands chased after each
other and ran away from each other, practising scales. The trees fluttered in the sunny
gardens, all bright with spring flowers. Street boys whistled, a little dog barked;
people passed by, walking so lightly, so swiftly, they looked as though they wanted to
break into a run. Now she actually saw in the distance a parasol, peach-coloured, the
first parasol of the year.
Perhaps even Edna did not look quite as unhappy as she felt, it is not easy to look
tragic at eighteen, when you are extremely pretty, with the cheeks and lips and
shining eyes of perfect health. Above all, when you are wearing a French blue frock
and your new spring hat trimmed with cornflowers. True, she carried under her arm a
book bound in horrid black leather. Perhaps the book provided a gloomy note, but
only by accident; it was the ordinary Library binding. For Edna had made going to
the Library an excuse for getting out of the house to think, to realise what had
happened, to decide somehow what was lo be done now.
An awful thing had happened. Quite suddenly, at the theater last night, when she and
Jimmy were sealed side by side in the dress-circle, without a moment's warning —in
fact, she had just finished a chocolate almond and passed the box to him again — she
had fallen in love with an actor. But — fallen —in love....
The feeling was unlike anything she had ever imagined before. It wasn't in the least
pleasant. It was hardly thrilling. Unless you can call the most dreadful sensation of
hopeless misery, despair, agony and wretchedness, thrilling. Combined with the
certainty that if that actor met her on the pavement after, while Jimmy was fetching
their cab, she would follow him to the ends of the earth, at a nod, at a sign, without
giving another thought to Jimmy or her father and mother or her happy home and
countless friends again....
The play had begun fairly cheerfully. That was at the chocolate almond stage. Then
the hero had gone blind. Terrible moment! Edna had cried so much she had to borrow
Jimmy's folded, smooth-feeling handkerchief as well. Not that crying mattered.
Whole rows were in tears. Even the men blew their noses with a loud trumpeting
noise and tried to peer at the programme instead of looking at the stage. Jimmy, most
mercifully dry—eyed—for what would she have done without his handkerchief? —
squeezed her free hand, and whispered "Cheer up, darling girl!" And if was then she
had taken a last chocolate almond to please him and passed the box again. Then there
had been that ghastly scene with the hero alone on the stage in a deserted room at
twilight, with a band playing outside and the sound of cheering coming from the
street. He had tried — ah! how painfully, how pitifully! — to grope his way to the
window. He had succeeded at last. There he stood holding the curtain while one beam
of light, just one beam, shone full on his raised sightless face, and the band faded
away into I he distance....
It was — really, it was absolutely— oh, the most — it was simply — in fact, from
that moment Edna knew that life could never be the same. She drew her hand away
from Jimmy's, leaned back, and shut the chocolate box for ever. This at last was love!
Edna and Jimmy were engaged. She had had her hair up for a year and a half; they
had been publicly engaged for a year. But, they had known they were going to marry
each other ever since they walked in the Botanical Gardens with their nurses, and sat
on the grass with a wine biscuit and a piece of barley-sugar each for their tea. It was
so much an accepted thing that Edna had worn a wonderfully good imitation of an
engagement-ring out of a cracker all the lime she was at school. And up till now they
had been devoted to each other.
But now it was over, it was so completely over that Edna found it difficult to believe
that Jimmy did not realise it too. She smiled wisely, sadly, as she turned into the
gardens of the Convent of the Sacred Heart and mounted the path that led through
them to Hill Street. How much better to know it now than to wait until after they
were married! Now it was possible that Jimmy would get over it. No, it was no use
deceiving herself; lie would never get over it! His life was wrecked, was ruined: that
was inevitable. But he was young.... Time, people always said, Time might make a
little, just a little difference. In forty years when he was an old man, he might be able
to think of her calmly perhaps. But she,— what did the future hold for her?
Edna lad reached the lop of I lie path. There under a new-leafed tree, hung with little
bunches of while flowers, she sat down on a green bench and looked over the
Convent flowerbeds. In the one nearest to her there grew tender stocks, with a border
of blue, shell like pansies with at one corner a clump of creamy freesias, their light
spears of green criss-crossed over the flowers. The Convent pigeons were tumbling
high in the air, and she could hear the voice of Sister Agnes who was giving a singing
lesson Ah me, sounded the deep tones of the nun, and Ah me, they were echoed....
If she did not marry Jimmy, of course she would marry nobody. The man she was in
love with, the famous actor – Edna had far too much common sense not to realise that
would never be. It was very odd. She didn't even want it to be. Her love was too
intense for that. It had to be endured, silently: it had to torment her. It was, she
supposed, simply that kind of love.
"But, Edna!'' cried Jimmy. "Can you never change? Can I never hope again?"
Oh, what sorrow to have to say it, but it must be said. "No, Jimmy, I will never
change."
Edna bowed her head: and a little flower fell on her lap, and the voice of Sister Agnes
cried suddenly Ah no, and the echo came, Ah no...
At that moment the future was revealed. Edna saw it all. She was astonished; it took
her breath away at first. But, after all. what could be more natural? She would go into
a convent... Her father and mother do everything to dissuade her, in vain. As for
Jimmy, his state of mind hardly bears thinking about. Why can't they understand?
How can they add to her suffering like this? The world is cruel, terribly cruel! After a
last scene when she gives away her jewelery and so on to her best friends – she so
calm, they so broken-hearted – into a convent she goes. No, one moment. The very
evening of her going is the actor's last evening at Port Willin. He receives by a
strange messenger a box. It is full of while flowers. But there is no name, no card.
Nothing? Yes, under the roses, wrapped in a white handkerchief, Edna's last
photograph with, written underneath,
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Edna sat very still under the trees: she clasped the black book in her fingers as though
it were her missal. She takes the name of Sister Angela. Snip! Snip! All her lovely
hair is cut off. Will she be allowed to send one curl to Jimmy? It is contrived
somehow. And in a blue gown with a while headband Sister Angela goes from the
convent to the chapel, from the chapel to the convent with something unearthly in her
look, in her sorrowful eyes, and in the gentle smile with which they greet the little
children who run to her. A saint! She hears it whispered as she paces the chill, waxsmelling corridors. A saint! And visitors to the chapel are told of the nun whose voice
is heard above the other voices, of her youth, her beauty, of her tragic, tragic love.
"There is a man in this town whose life is ruined...."
A big bee, a golden furry fellow, crept into a freesia, and the delicate flower leaned
over, swung, shook; and when the bee flew away it fluttered still as though it were
laughing. Happy, careless flower!
Sister Angela looker at it and said, "Now it is winter." One night, lying in her icy cell,
she hears a cry. Some stray animal is out there in the garden, a kitten or a lamb or —
well, whatever little animal might be there. Up rises the sleepless nun. All in white,
shivering but fearless, she goes and brings it in. But next morning, when the bell
rings for matins, she is found tossing in high fever ... in delirium... and she never
recovers. In three days all is over. The service has been said in the chapel, and she is
buried in the corner of the cemetery reserved for I he nuns, where there are plain lilt
lo crosses of wood. Rest in Peace, Sister Angela....
Now it is evening. Two old people leaning on each other come slowly lo the grave
and kneel down sobbing, "Our daughter! Our only daughter!" Now there comes
another. He is all in black; he comes slowly. But when he is there and lifts his black
hat, Edna sees to her horror his hair is snow-white. Jimmy! Too late, loo late! The
tears are running down his fare; he is crying now. Too late, loo late! The wind shakes
the leafless trees in the churchyard. He gives one awful bitter cry.
Edna's black book fell with a thud to the garden path. She jumped up, her heart
beating. My darling! No, It's not loo late. It's all been a mistake, a terrible dream. Oh,
that white hair! How could she have done it." She has not done it. Oh, heavens! Oh,
what happiness! She is free, young, and nobody knows her secret. Everything is still
possible for her and Jimmy. The house they have planned may still be built, the little
solemn boy with his hands behind his back watching them plant the standard roses
may still be born. His baby sister... But when Edna got as far as his baby sister, she
stretched out her arms as though the little love came flying through the air to her, and
gazing at the garden, at the white sprays on the tree, at those darling pigeons blue
against the blue, and the Convent with its narrow windows, she realised that now at
last for the first lime in her life — she had never imagined any feeling like it before
— she knew what it was to be in love, but — in — love!
James Joyce
Eveline
SHE sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned
against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She
was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard
his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the
cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in
which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from
Belfast bought the field and built houses in it — not like their little brown houses but
bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play
together in that field — the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple,
she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up.
Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but
usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming.
Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and
besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and
sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the
Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go
away like the others, to leave her home.
Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had
dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came
from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had
never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found
out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the
broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed
Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he
showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:
“He is in Melbourne now.”
She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh
each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had
those whom she had known all her life about her. O course she had to work hard, both
in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they
found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her
place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had
always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.
“Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?”
“Look lively, Miss Hill, please.”
She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.
But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then
she would be married — she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She
would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over
nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it
was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never
gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl but
latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her
dead mother’s sake. And no she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and
Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down
somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday
nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages —
seven shillings — and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get
any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no
head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the
streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad on Saturday night. In the end he
would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s
dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing,
holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through
the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work
to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to
hr charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work —
a hard life — but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly
undesirable life.
She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, openhearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live
with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her. How well she
remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main
road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate,
his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of
bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the
Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and
she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was
awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and,
when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused.
He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her
to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries.
He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out
to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the
different services. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told her
stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said,
and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had
found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.
“I know these sailor chaps,” he said.
One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover
secretly.
The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew
indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her
favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he
would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had
been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the
fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the
Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the
children laugh.
Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head
against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the
avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air Strange that it should
come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep
the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her
mother’s illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and
outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go
away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom
saying:
“Damned Italians! coming over here!”
As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of
her being — that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She
trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish
insistence:
“Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!”
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would
save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why
should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his
arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her
hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage
over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through
the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying
in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her
cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to
show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the mist. If
she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos
Ayres. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done
for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in
silent fervent prayer.
A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
“Come!”
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he
would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
“Come!”
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas
she sent a cry of anguish.
“Eveline! Evvy!”
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on
but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal.
Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.
A Painful Case
by James Joyce (1916)
MR. JAMES DUFFY LIVED in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as
possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other
suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old somber house
and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the
shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were
free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a
black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coalscuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase
had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed
with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little handmirror hung above the washstand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as
the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were
arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at
one end of the lowest shelf and a copy of the Maynooth Catechism, sewn into the
cloth cover of a notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were
always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael
Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of
papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from
time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile
Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint
fragrance escaped—the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or
of an overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten.
Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A
medieval doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire
tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large
head grew dry black hair and a tawny mustache did not quite cover an unamiable
mouth. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no
harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows,
gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but
often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts
with doubtful side-glasses. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to
compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a
subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to
beggars
and
walked
firmly,
carrying
a
stout
hazel.
He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every
morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and
took his lunch—a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At
four o’clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George’s Street where he
felt himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth and where there was a
certain plain honesty in the bill of fare. His evenings were spent either before his
landlady’s piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart’s
music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only
dissipations
of
his
life.
He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual
life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and
escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties
for old dignity’s sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate
the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob
his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an
adventureless
tale.
One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda. The
house, thinly peopled and silent, gave distressing prophecy of failure. The lady who
sat next him looked round at the deserted house once or twice and then said:
“What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It’s so hard on people to have to
sing
to
empty
benches.”
He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that she seemed so
little awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory.
When he learned that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged her to be a
year or so younger than himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had
remained intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes
were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note but was
confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for
an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this
half-disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket,
molding a bosom of a certain fullness, struck the note of defiance more definitely.
He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort Terrace and
seized the moments when her daughter’s attention was diverted to become intimate.
She alluded once or twice to her husband but her tone was not such as to make the
allusion a warning. Her name was Mrs. Sinico. Her husband’s great-great-grandfather
had come from Leghorn. Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying
between
Dublin
and
Holland;
and
they
had
one
child.
Meeting her a third time by accident he found courage to make an appointment.
She came. This was the first of many meetings; they met always in the evening and
chose the most quiet quarters for their walks together. Mr. Duffy, however, had a
distaste for underhand ways and, finding that they were compelled to meet stealthily,
he forced her to ask him to her house. Captain Sinico encouraged his visits, thinking
that his daughter’s hand was in question. He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from
his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest
in her. As the husband was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr.
Duffy had many opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society. Neither he nor she had
had any such adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little
by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with
ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.
Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life. With
almost maternal solicitude she urged him to let his nature open to the full: she became
his confessor. He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an
Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober
workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into
three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued
his attendances. The workmen’s discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest
they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hardfeatured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the produce of a
leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to
strike
Dublin
for
some
centuries.
She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her,
with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking
consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse
middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to
impresarios?
He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their evenings
alone. Little by little, as their thoughts entangled, they spoke of subjects less remote.
Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic. Many times she allowed the
dark to fall upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room,
their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them. This union
exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalized his mental
life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought
that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the
fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange
impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable
loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these
discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual
excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.
Mr. Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned
him. He did not visit her for a week, then he wrote to her asking her to meet him. As
he did not wish their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined
confessional they met in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. It was cold autumn
weather but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for
nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is
a bond to sorrow. When they came out of the Park they walked in silence towards the
tram; but here she began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her
part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. A few days later he received a parcel
containing
his
books
and
music.
Four years passed. Mr. Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore
witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the
music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche:
Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers
which lay in his desk. One of his sentences, written two months after his last
interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because
there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is
impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. He kept away from concerts lest
he should meet her. His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired. And still
every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening walked home from
the city after having dined moderately in George’s Street and read the evening paper
for
dessert.
One evening as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his
mouth his hand stopped. His eyes fixed themselves on a paragraph in the evening
paper which he had propped against the water-carafe. He replaced the morsel of food
on his plate and read the paragraph attentively. Then he drank a glass of water,
pushed his plate to one side, doubled the paper down before him between his elbows
and read the paragraph over and over again. The cabbage began to deposit a cold
white grease on his plate. The girl came over to him to ask was his dinner not
properly cooked. He said it was very good and ate a few mouthfuls of it with
difficulty.
Then
he
paid
his
bill
and
went
out.
He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick
striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a side-pocket
of his tight reefer overcoat. On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to
Chapelizod he slackened his pace. His stick struck the ground less emphatically and
his breath, issuing irregularly, almost with a sighing sound, condensed in the wintry
air. When he reached his house he went up at once to his bedroom and, taking the
paper from his pocket, read the paragraph again by the failing light of the window. He
read it not aloud, but moving his lips as a priest does when he reads the prayers
Secreto. This was the paragraph:
DEATH
OF
A PAINFUL CASE
A
LADY
AT
SYDNEY
PARADE
Today at the City of Dublin Hospital the Deputy Coroner (in the absence of Mr. Leverett) held
an inquest on the body of Mrs. Emily Sinico, aged forty-three years, who was killed at Sydney
Parade Station yesterday evening. The evidence showed that the deceased lady, while attempting to
cross the line, was knocked down by the engine of the ten o’clock slow train from Kingstown,
thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.
James Lennon, driver of the engine, stated that he had been in the employment of the railway
company for fifteen years. On hearing the guard’s whistle he set the train in motion and a second or
two afterwards brought it to rest in response to loud cries. The train was going slowly.
P. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to start he observed a woman
attempting to cross the lines. He ran towards her and shouted, but, before he could reach her, she
was caught by the buffer of the engine and fell to the ground.
A
juror.
“You
saw
the
lady
fall?”
Witness.
“Yes.”
Police Sergeant Croly deposed that when he arrived he found the deceased lying on the
platform apparently dead. He had the body taken to the waiting-room pending the arrival of the
ambulance.
Constable
57
corroborated.
Dr. Halpin, assistant house surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that the deceased had
two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe contusions of the right shoulder. The right side of
the head had been injured in the fall. The injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a
normal person. Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the
heart’s
action.
Mr. H. B. Patterson Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret at the
accident. The company had always taken every precaution to prevent people crossing the lines
except by the bridges, both by placing notices in every station and by the use of patent spring gates
at level crossings. The deceased had been in the habit of crossing the lines late at night from
platform to platform and, in view of certain other circumstances of the case, he did not think the
railway
officials
were
to
blame.
Captain Sinico, of Leoville, Sydney Parade, husband of the deceased, also gave evidence. He
stated that the deceased was his wife. He was not in Dublin at the time of the accident as he had
arrived only that morning from Rotterdam. They had been married for twenty-two years and had
lived happily until about two years ago when his wife began to be rather intemperate in her habits.
Miss Mary Sinico said that of late her mother had been in the habit of going out at night to buy
spirits. She, witness, had often tried to reason with her mother and had induced her to join a League.
She was not at home until an hour after the accident. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with
the
medical
evidence
and
exonerated
Lennon
from
all
blame.
The Deputy Coroner said it was a most painful case, and expressed great sympathy with
Captain Sinico and his daughter. He urged on the railway company to take strong measures to
prevent the possibility of similar accidents in the future. No blame attached to anyone.
Mr. Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the
cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from
time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The
whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever
spoken to her of what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions
of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a
commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded
herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and
malodorous. His soul’s companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he
had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end!
Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to
habits, one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared. But that she could
have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He
remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he
had ever done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.
As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched
his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He
put on his overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the
threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at
Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.
The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were
five or six workingmen in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in
County Kildare. They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked,
spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with
their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or
hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a
long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter
reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the
lonely
road
outside.
As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two
images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had
ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked
himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of
deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what
seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood
how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His
life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory—if
anyone
remembered
him.
It was after nine o’clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy.
He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He
walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She
seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch
his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from
her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.
When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the
river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold
night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the
Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with
despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from
life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and
happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the
prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No
one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey
gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train
winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through
the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he
heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her
name.
He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his
ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree
and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness
nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear
nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that
he was alone.
Rain
By W. Somerset Maugham
It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight.
Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and, leaning over the rail, searched the heavens for the
Southern Cross. After two years at the front and a wound that had taken longer to
heal than it should, he was glad to settle down quietly at Apia for twelve months at
least, and he felt already better for the journey. Since some of the passengers were
leaving the ship next day at Pago-Pago they had had a little dance that evening and in
his ears hammered still the harsh notes of the mechanical piano. But the deck was
quiet at last. A little way off he saw his wife in a long chair talking with the
Davidsons, and he strolled over to her. When he sat down under the light and took
off his hat you saw that he had very red hair, with a bald patch on the crown, and the
red, freckled skin which accompanies red hair; he was a man of forty, thin, with a
pinched face, precise and rather pedantic; and he spoke with a Scots accent in a very
low, quiet voice.
Between the Macphails and the Davidsons, who were missionaries, there had arisen
the intimacy of shipboard, which is due to propinquity rather than to any community
of taste. Their chief tie was the disapproval they shared of the men who spent their
days and nights in the smoking-room playing poker or bridge and drinking. Mrs.
Macphail was not a little flattered to think that she and her husband were the only
people on board with whom the Davidsons were willing to associate, and even the
doctor, shy but no fool, half unconsciously acknowledged the compliment. It was
only because he was of an argumentative mind that in their cabin at night he
permitted himself to carp.
"Mrs. Davidson was saying she didn`t know how they`d have got through the
journey if it hadn`t been for us," said Mrs. Macphail, as she neatly brushed out her
transformation. "She said we were really the only people on the ship they cared to
know."
"I shouldn`t have thought a missionary was such a big bug that he could afford to put
on frills."
"It`s not frills. I quite understand what she means. It wouldn`t have been very nice
for the Davidsons to have to mix with all that rough lot in the smoking-room."
"The founder of their religion wasn`t so exclusive," said Dr. Macphail with a
chuckle.
"I`ve asked you over and over again not to joke about religion," answered his wife. "I
shouldn`t like to have a nature like yours, Alec. You never look for the best in
people."
He gave her a sidelong glance with his pale, blue eyes, but did not reply. After many
years of married life he had learned that it was more conducive to peace to leave his
wife with the last word. He was undressed before she was, and climbing into the
upper bunk he settled down to read himself to sleep.
When he came on deck next morning they were close to land. He looked at it with
greedy eyes. There was a thin strip of silver beach rising quickly to hills covered to
the top with luxuriant vegetation. The coconut trees, thick and green, came nearly to
the water`s edge, and among them you saw the grass houses of the Samoaris; and
here and there, gleaming white, a little church. Mrs. Davidson came and stood beside
him. She was dressed in black, and wore round her neck a gold chain, from which
dangled a small cross. She was a little woman, with brown, dull hair very elaborately
arranged, and she had prominent blue eyes behind invisible pince-nez. Her face was
long, like a sheep`s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme
alertness; she had the quick movements of a bird. The most remarkable thing about
her was her voice, high, metallic, and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard
monotony, irritating to the nerves like the pitiless clamour of the pneumatic drill.
"This must seem like home to you," said Dr. Macphail, with his thin, difficult smile.
"Ours are low islands, you know, not like these. Coral. These are volcanic. We`ve got
another ten days` journey to reach them."
"In these parts that`s almost like being in the next street at home," said Dr. Macphail
facetiously.
"Well, that`s rather an exaggerated way of putting it, but one does look at distances
differently in the J South Seas. So far you`re right."
Dr. Macphail sighed faintly.
"I`m glad we`re not stationed here," she went on. "They say this is a terribly difficult
place to work in. The steamers` touching makes the people unsettled; and then
there`s the naval station; that`s bad for the natives. In our district we don`t have
difficulties like that to contend with. There are one or two traders, of course, but we
take care to make them behave, and if they don`t we make the place so hot for them
they`re glad to go."
Fixing the glasses on her nose she looked at the green island with a ruthless stare.
"It`s almost a hopeless task for the missionaries here. I can never be sufficiently
thankful to God that we are at least spared that."
Davidson`s district consisted of a group of islands to the North of Samoa; they were
widely separated and he had frequently to go long distances by canoe. At these times
his wife remained at their headquarters and managed the mission. Dr. Macphail felt
his heart sink when he considered the efficiency with which she certainly managed it.
She spoke of the depravity of the natives in a voice which nothing could hush, but
with a vehemently unctuous horror. Her sense of delicacy was singular. Early in their
acquaintance she had said to him:
"You know, their marriage customs when we first settled in the islands were so
shocking that I couldn`t possibly describe them to you. But I`ll tell Mrs. Macphail
and she`ll tell you."
Then he had seen his wife and Mrs. Davidson, their deck-chairs close together, in
earnest conversation for about two hours. As he walked past them backwards and
forwards for the sake of exercise, he had heard Mrs. Davidson`s agitated whisper,
like the distant flow of a mountain torrent, and he saw by his wife`s open mouth and
pale face that she was enjoying an alarming experience. At night in their cabin she
repeated to him with bated breath all she had heard.
"Well, what did I say to you?" cried Mrs. Davidson, exultant, next morning. "Did you
ever hear anything more dreadful? You don`t wonder that I couldn`t tell you myself,
do you? Even though you are a doctor."
Mrs. Davidson scanned his face. She had a dramatic eagerness to see that she had
achieved the desired effect.
"Can you wonder that when we first went there our hearts sank? You`ll hardly
believe me when I tell you it was impossible to find a single good girl in any of the
villages."
She used the word good in a severely technical manner.
"Mr. Davidson and I talked it over, and we made up our minds the first thing to do
was to put down the dancing. The natives were crazy about dancing."
"I was not averse to it myself when I was a young man," said Dr. Macphail.
"I guessed as much when I heard you ask Mrs. Macphail to have a turn with you last
night. I don`t think there`s any real harm if a man dances with his wife, but I was
relieved that she wouldn`t. Under the circumstances I thought it better that we should
keep ourselves to ourselves."
"Under what circumstances? "
Mrs. Davidson gave him a quick look through her pince-nez, but did not answer his
question.
"But among white people it`s not quite the same," she went on, "though I must say I
agree with Mr. Davidson, who says he can`t understand how a husband can stand by
and see his wife in another man`s arms, and as far as I`m concerned I`ve never
danced a step since I married. But the native dancing is quite another matter. It`s not
only immoral in itself, but it distinctly leads to immorality. However, I`m thankful to
God that we stamped it out, and I don`t think I`m wrong in saying that no one has
danced in our district for eight years."
But now they came to the mouth of the harbour and Mrs. Macphail joined them. The
ship turned sharply and steamed slowly in. It was a great landlocked harbour big
enough to hold a fleet of battleships; and all around it rose, high and steep, the green
hills. Near the entrance, getting such breeze as blew from the sea, stood the
governor`s house in a garden. The Stars and Stripes dangled languidly from a
flagstaff. They passed two or three trim bungalows, and a tennis court, and then they
came to the quay with its warehouses. Mrs. Davidson pointed out the schooner,
moored two or three hundred yards from the side, which was to take them to Apia.
There was a crowd of eager, noisy, and good-humoured natives come from all parts
of the island, some from curiosity, others to barter with the travellers on their way to
Sydney; and they brought pineapples and huge bunches of bananas, tapa cloths,
necklaces of shells or sharks` teeth, kava-bowls, and models of war canoes.
American sailors, neat and trim, clean-shaven and frank efface, sauntered among
them, and there was a little group of officials. While their luggage was being landed
the Macphails and Mrs. Davidson watched the crowd. Dr. Macphail looked at the
yaws from which most of the children and the young boys seemed to suffer,
disfiguring sores like torpid ulcers, and his professional eyes glistened when he saw
for the first time in his experience cases of elephantiasis, men going about with a
huge, heavy arm or dragging along a grossly disfigured leg. Men and women wore
the lava-lava.
"It`s a very indecent costume," said Mrs. Davidson. "Mr. Davidson thinks it should
be prohibited by law. How can you expect people to be moral when they wear
nothing but a strip of red cotton round their loins?"
"It`s suitable enough to the climate," said the doctor, wiping the sweat off his head.
Now that they were on land the heat, though it was so early in the morning, was
already oppressive. Closed in by its hills, not a breath of air came in to Pago-Pago.
"In our islands," Mrs. Davidson went on in her high-pitched tones, "we`ve practically
eradicated the lava-lava. A few old men still continue to wear it, but that`s all. The
women have all taken to the Mother Hubbard, and the men wear trousers and
singlets. At the very beginning of our stay Mr. Davidson said in one of his reports:
the inhabitants of these islands will never be thoroughly Christianised till every boy
of more than ten years is made to wear a pair of trousers."
But Mrs. Davidson had given two or three of her birdlike glances at heavy grey
clouds that came floating over the mouth of the harbour. A few drops began to fall.
"We`d better take shelter," she said.
They made their way with all the crowd to a great shed of corrugated iron, and the
rain began to fall in torrents. They stood there for some time and then were joined by
Mr. Davidson. He had been polite enough to the Macphails during the journey, but he
had not his wife`s sociability, and had spent much of his time reading. He was a
silent, rather sullen man, and you felt that his affability was a duty that he imposed
upon himself Christianly; he was by nature reserved and even morose. His
appearance was singular. He was very tall and thin, with long limbs loosely jointed;
hollow cheeks and curiously high cheek-bones; he had so cadaverous an air that it
surprised you to notice how full and sensual were his lips. He wore his hair very
long. His dark eyes, set deep in their sockets, were large and tragic; and his hands
with their big, long fingers, were finely shaped; they gave him a look of great
strength. But the most striking thing about him was the feeling he gave you of
suppressed fire. It was impressive and vaguely troubling. He was not a man with
whom any intimacy was possible.
He brought now unwelcome news. There was an epidemic of measles, a serious and
often fatal disease among the Kanakas, on the island, and a case had developed
among the crew of the schooner which was to take them on their journey. The sick
man had been brought ashore and put in hospital on the quarantine station, but
telegraphic instructions had been sent from Apia to say that the schooner would not
be allowed to enter the harbour till it was certain no other member of the crew was
affected.
"It means we shall have to stay here for ten days at least."
"But I`m urgently needed a Apia," said Dr. Macphail.
"That can`t be helped. If no more cases develop on board, the schooner will be
allowed to sail with white passengers, but all native traffic is prohibited for three
months."
"Is there a hotel here?" asked Mrs. Macphail.
Davidson gave a low chuckle.
"There`s not."
"What shall we do then?"
"I`ve been talking to the governor. There`s a trader along the front who has rooms
that he rents, and my proposition is that as soon as the rain lets up we should go
along there and see what we can do. Don`t expect comfort. You`ve just got to be
thankful if we get a bed to sleep on and a roof over our heads."
But the rain showed no sign of stopping, and at length with umbrellas and
waterproofs they set out. There was no town, but merely a group of official
buildings, a store or two, and at the back, among the coconut trees and plantains, a
few native dwellings. The house they sought was about five minutes` walk from the
wharf. It was a frame house of two storeys, with broad verandahs on both floors and
a roof of corrugated iron. The owner was a half-caste named Horn, with a native wife
surrounded by little brown children, and on the ground-floor he had a store where he
sold canned goods and cottons. The rooms he showed them were almost bare of
furniture. In the Macphails` there was nothing but a poor, worn bed with a ragged
mosquito net, a rickety chair, and a washstand. They looked round with dismay. The
rain poured down without ceasing.
"I`m not going to unpack more than we actually need," said Mrs. Macphail.
Mrs. Davidson came into the room as she was unlocking a portmanteau. She was
very brisk and alert. The cheerless surroundings had no effect on her.
"If you`ll take my advice you`ll get a needle and cotton and start right in to mend the
mosquito net, she said, or you`ll not be able to get a wink of sleep tonight."
"Will they be very bad?" asked Dr. Macphail.
"This is the season for them. When you`re asked to a party at Government House at
Apia you`ll notice that all the ladies are given a pillow-slip to put their - their lower
extremities in."
"I wish the rain would stop for a moment," said Mrs. Macphail. "I could try to make
the place comfortable with more heart if the sun were shining."
"Oh, if you wait for that, you`ll wait a long time. Pago-Pago is about the rainiest
place in the Pacific. You see, the hills, and that bay, they attract the water, and one
expects rain at this time of year anyway."
She looked from Macphail to his wife, standing helplessly in different parts of the
room, like lost souls, and she pursed her lips. She saw that she must take them in
hand. Feckless people like that made her impatient, but her hands itched to put
everything in the order which came so naturally to her.
"Here, you give me a needle and cotton and I`ll mend that net of yours, while you go
on with your unpacking. Dinner`s at one. Dr. Macphail, you`d better go down to the
wharf and see that your heavy luggage has been put in a dry place. You know what
these natives are, they`re quite capable of storing it where the rain will beat in on it
all the time."
The doctor put on his waterproof again and went downstairs. At the door Mr. Horn
was standing in conversation with the quartermaster of the ship they had just arrived
in and a second-class passenger whom Dr. Macphail had seen several times on board.
The quartermaster, a little, shrivelled man, extremely dirty, nodded to him as he
passed.
"This is a bad job about the measles, doc," he said. "I see you`ve fixed yourself up
already."
Dr. Macphail thought he was rather familiar, but he was a timid Man and he did not
take offence easily.
"Yes, we`ve got a room upstairs."
"Miss Thompson was sailing with you to Apia, so I`ve brought her along here."
The quartermaster pointed with his thumb to the woman standing by his side. She
was twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white
dress and a large white hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the
tops of long white boots in glace kid. She gave Macphail an ingratiating smile.
"The feller`s tryin` to soak me a dollar and a half a day for the meanest sized room,"
she said in a hoarse voice.
"I tell you she`s a friend of mine, Jo," said the quartermaster. "She can`t pay more
than a dollar, and you`ve sure got to take her for that."
The trader was fat and smooth and quietly smiling. "Well, if you put it like that, Mr.
Swan, I`ll see what I can do about it. I`ll talk to Mrs. Horn and if we think we can
make a reduction we will."
"Don`t try to pull that stuff with me," said Miss Thompson. "We`ll settle this right
now. You get a dollar a day for the room and not one bean more."
Dr. Macphail smiled. He admired the effrontery with which she bargained. He was
the sort of man who always paid what he was asked. He preferred to be over-charged
than to haggle. The trader sighed.
"Well, to oblige Mr. Swan I`ll take it."
"That`s the goods," said Miss Thompson. "Come right in and have a shot of hooch.
I`ve got some real good rye in that grip if you`ll bring it` along, Mr. Swan. You come
along too, doctor."
"Oh, I don`t think I will, thank you," he answered. "I`m just going down to see that
our luggage is all right."
He stepped out into the rain. It swept in from the opening of the harbour in sheets
and the opposite shore was all blurred. He passed two or three natives clad in nothing
but the lava-lava, with huge umbrellas over them. They walked finely, with leisurely
movements, very upright; and they smiled and greeted him in a strange tongue as
they went by.
It was nearly dinner-time when he got back, and their meal was laid in the trader`s
parlour. It was a room designed not to live in but for purposes of prestige, and it had
a musty, melancholy air. A suite of stamped plush was arranged neatly round the
walls, and from the middle of the ceiling, protected from the flies by yellow tissue
paper, hung a gilt chandelier. Davidson did not come.
"I know he went to call on the governor," said Mrs. Davidson, "and I guess he`s kept
him to dinner."
A little native girl brought them a dish of Hamburger steak, and after a while the
trader came up to see that they had everything they wanted.
"I see we have a fellow lodger, Mr. Horn." said Dr. Macphail.
"She`s taken a room, that`s all," answered the trader. "She`s getting her own board."
He looked at the two ladies with an obsequious air.
"I put her downstairs so she shouldn`t be in the way. She won`t be any trouble to
you."
"Is it someone who was on the boat?" asked Mrs. Macphail.
"Yes, ma`am, she was in the second cabin. She was going to Apia. She has a position
as cashier waiting for her."
"Oh!"
When the trader was gone Macphail said:
"I shouldn`t think she`d find it exactly cheerful having her meals in her room."
"If she was in the second cabin I guess she`d rather," answered Mrs. Davidson. "I
don`t exactly know who it can be."
"I happened to be there when the quartermaster brought her along. Her name`s
Thompson."
"It`s not the woman who was dancing with the quartermaster last night? " asked Mrs.
Davidson.
"That`s who it must be," said Mrs. Macphail. "I wondered at the time what she was.
She looked rather fast to me."
"Not good style at all," said Mrs. Davidson.
They began to talk of other things, and after dinner, tired with their early rise, they
separated and slept. When they awoke, though the sky was still grey and the clouds
hung low, it was not raining, and they went for a walk on the high road which the
Americans had built along the bay.
On their return they found that Davidson had just come in.
We may be here for a fortnight, he said irritably. "I`ve argued it out with the
governor, but he says there is nothing to be done."
"Mr. Davidson`s just longing to get back to his work," said his wife, with an anxious
glance at him.
"We`ve been away for a year," he said, walking up and down the verandah. "The
mission has been in charge of native missionaries and I`m terribly nervous that
they`ve let things slide. They`re good men, I`m not saying a word against them, Godfearing, devout, and truly Christian men - their Christianity would put many socalled Christians at home to the blush - but they`re pitifully lacking in energy, They
can make a stand once, they can make a stand twice, but they can`t make a stand all
the time. If you leave a mission in charge of a native missionary, no matter how trustworhy he seems, in course of time you`ll find he`s let abuses creep in."
Mr. Davidson stood still. With his tall, spare form, and his great eyes flashing out of
his pale face, he was an impressive figure. His sincerity was obvious in the fire of his
gestures and in his deep, ringing voice.
"I expect to have my work cut out for me. I shall act and I shall act promptly. If the
tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast into the flames."
And in the evening after the high tea which was their last meal, while they sat in the
stiff parlour, the ladies working and Dr. Macphail smoking his pipe, the missionary
told them of his work in the islands.
"When we went there they had no sense of sin at all," he said. "They broke the
commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I
think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instil into the natives the sense
of sin."
The Macphails knew already that Davidson had worked in the Solomons for five
years before he met his wife. She had been a missionary in China, and they had
become acquainted in Boston, where they were both spending part of their leave to
attend a missionary congress. On their marriage they had been appointed to the
islands in which they had laboured ever since.
In the course of all the conversations they had had with Mr. Davidson one thing had
shone out clearly and that was the man`s unflinching courage. He was a medical
missionary, and he was liable to be called at any time to one or other of the islands in
the group. Even the whaleboat is not so very safe a conveyance in the stormy pacific
of the wet season, but often he would be sent for in a canoe, and then the danger was
great. In cases of illness or accident he never hesitated. A dozen times he had spent
the whole night baling for his life, and more than once Mrs. Davidson had given him
up for lost.
"I`d beg him not to go sometimes," she said, "or at least to wait till the weather was
more settled, but he`d never listen. He`s obstinate, and when he`s once made up his
mind, nothing can move him."
"How can I ask the natives to put their trust in the Lord if I am afraid to do so
myself?" cried Davidson. "And I`m not, I`m not. They know that if they send for me
in their trouble I`ll come if it`s humanly possible. And do you think the Lord is going
to abandon me when I am on his business? The wind blows at his bidding and the
waves toss and rage at his word."
Dr. Macphail was a timid man. He had never been able to get used to the hurtling of
the shells over the trenches, and when he was operating in an advanced dressing-
station the sweat poured from his brow and dimmed his spectacles in the effort he
made to control his unsteady hand. He shuddered a little as he looked at the
missionary.
"I wish I could say that I`ve never been afraid," he said.
"I wish you could say that you believed in God," retorted the other.
But for some reason, that evening the missionary`s thoughts travelled back to the
early days he and his wife had spent on the islands.
"Sometimes Mrs. Davidson and I would look at one another and the tears would
stream down our cheeks. We worked without ceasing, day and night, and we seemed
to make no progress. I don`t know what I should have done without her then. When I
felt my heart sink, when I was very near despair, she gave me courage and hope."
Mrs. Davidson looked down at her work, and a slight colour rose to her thin cheeks.
Her hands trembled a little. She did not trust herself to speak.
"We had no one to help us. We were alone, thousands of miles from any of our own
people, surrounded by darkness. When I was broken and weary she would put her
work aside and take the Bible and read to me till peace came and settled upon me
like sleep upon the eyelids of a child, and when at last she closed the book she`d say:
`We`ll save them in spite of themselves.` And I felt strong again in the Lord, and I
answered: `Yes, with God`s help I`ll save them. I must save them.`"
He came over to the table and stood in front of it as though it were a lectern.
"You see, they were so naturally depraved that they couldn`t be brought to see their
wickedness. We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions. We
had to make it a sin, not only to commit adultery and to lie and thieve, but to expose
their bodies, and to dance and not to come to church. I made it a sin for a girl to show
her bosom and a sin for a man not to wear trousers."
"How?" asked Dr. Macphail, not without surprise.
"I instituted fines. Obviously the only way to make people realise that an action is
sinful is to punish them if they commit it. I fined them if they didn`t come to church,
and I fined them if they danced. I fined them if they were improperly dressed. I had a
tariff, and every sin had to be paid for either in money or work. And at last I made
them understand."
"But did they never refuse to pay?"
"How could they?" asked the missionary.
"It would be a brave man who tried to stand up against Mr. Davidson," said his wife,
tightening her lips.
Dr. Macphail looked at Davidson with troubled eyes. What he heard shocked him,
but he hesitated to express his disapproval.
"You must remember that in the last resort I could expel them from their church
membership.""
"Did they mind that?"
Davidson smiled a little and gently rubbed his hands.
"They couldn`t sell their copra. When the men fished they got no share of the catch.
It meant something very like starvation. Yes, they minded quite a lot."
"Tell him about Fred Ohlson," said Mrs. Davidson.
The missionary fixed his fiery eyes on Dr. Macphail.
"Fred Ohlson was a Danish trader who had been in the islands a good many years.
He was a pretty rich man as traders go and he wasn`t very pleased when we came.
You see, he`d had things very much his own way. He paid the natives what he liked
for their copra, and he paid in goods and whiskey. He had a native wife, but he was
flagrantly unfaithful to her. He was a drunkard. I gave him a chance to mend his
ways, but he wouldn`t take it. He laughed at me."
Davidson`s voice fell to a deep bass as he said the last words, and he was silent for a
minute or two. The silence was heavy with menace.
"In two years he was a ruined man. He`d lost everything he`d saved in a quarter of a
century. I broke him, and at last he was forced to come to me like a beggar and
beseech me to give him a passage back to Sydney."
"I wish you could have seen him when he came to see Mr. Davidson," said the
missionary`s wife.
"He had been a fine, powerful man, with a lot of fat on him, and he had a great big
voice, but now he was half the size, and he was shaking all over. He`d suddenly
become an old man."
With abstracted gaze Davidson looked out into the night. The rain was falling again.
Suddenly from below came a sound, and Davidson turned and looked questioningly
at his wife. It was the sound of a gramophone, harsh and loud, wheezing out a
syncopated tune.
"What`s that?" he asked.
Mrs. Davidson fixed her pince-nez more firmly on her nose.
"One of the second-class passengers has a room in the house. I guess it comes from
there."
They listened in silence, and presently they heard the sound of dancing. Then the
music stopped, and they heard the popping of corks and voices raised in animated
conversation.
"I daresay she`s giving a farewell party to her friends on board," said Dr. Macphail.
"The ship sails at twelve, doesn`t it?"
Davidson made no remark, but he looked at his watch.
"Are you ready?" he asked his wife.
She got up and folded her work.
"Yes, I guess I am," she answered.
"It`s early to go to bed yet, isn`t it?" said the doctor.
"We have a good deal of reading to do," explained Mrs. Davidson. "Wherever we
are, we read a chapter of the Bible before retiring for the night and we study it with
the commentaries, you know, and discuss it thoroughly. It`s a wonderful training for
the mind."
The two couples bade one another good night. Dr. and Mrs. Macphail were left
alone. For two or three minutes they did not speak.
"I think I`ll go and fetch the cards," the doctor said at last.
Mrs. Macphail looked at him doubtfully. Her conversation with the Davidsons had
left her a little uneasy, but she did not like to say that she thought they had better not
play cards when the Davidsons might come in at any moment. Dr. Macphail brought
them and she watched him, though with a vague sense of guilt, while he laid out his
patience. Below the sound of revelry continued.
It was fine enough next day, and the Macphails, condemned to spend a fortnight of
idleness at Pago-Pago, set about making the best of things. They went down to the
quay and got out of their boxes a number of books. The doctor called on the chief
surgeon of the naval hospital and went round the beds with him. They left cards on
the governor. They passed Miss Thompson on the road. The doctor took off his hat,
and she gave him a "Good morning, doc.," in a loud, cheerful voice. She was dressed
as on the day before, in a white frock, and her shiny white boots with their high
heels, her fat legs bulging over the tops of them, were strange things on that exotic
scene.
"I don`t think she`s very suitably dressed, I must say," said Mrs. Macphail. "She
looks extremely common to me."
When they got back to their house, she was on the verandah playing with one of the
trader`s dark children.
"Say a word to her," Dr. Macphail whispered to his wife. "She`s all alone here, and it
seems rather unkind to ignore her."
Mrs. Macphail was shy, but she was in the habit of doing what her husband bade her.
"I think we`re fellow lodgers here," she said rather foolishly.
"Terrible, ain`t it, bein` cooped up in a one-horse burg like this?" answered Miss
Thompson. "And they tell me I`m lucky to have gotten a room. I don`t see myself
livin` in a native house, and that`s what some have to do. I don`t know why they
don`t have a hotel."
They exchanged a few more words. Miss Thompson, loud-voiced and garrulous, was
evidently quite willing to gossip, but Mrs. Macphail had a poor stock of small talk
and presently she said:
"Well, I think we must go upstairs."
In the evening when they sat down to their high tea Davidson on coming in said:
"I see that woman downstairs has a couple of sailors sitting there. I wonder how
she`s gotten acquainted with them."
"She can`t be very particular," said Mrs. Davidson.
They were all rather tired after the idle, aimless day.
"If there`s going to be a fortnight of this I don`t know what we shall feel like at the
end of it," said Dr. Macphail.
"The only thing to do is to portion out the day to different activities," answered the
missionary. "I shall set aside a certain number of hours to study and a certain number
to exercise, rain or fine - in the wet season you can`t afford to pay any attention to
the rain - and a certain number to recreation."
Dr. Macphail looked at his companion with misgiving. Davidson`s programme
oppressed him. They were eating Hamburger steak again. It seemed the only dish the
cook knew how to make. Then below the grama-phone began. Davidson started
nervously when he heard it, but said nothing. Men`s voices floated up. Miss
Thompson`s guests were joining in a well-known song and presently they heard her
voice too, hoarse and loud. There was a good deal of shouting and laughing. The four
people upstairs, trying to make conversation, listened despite themselves to the clink
of glasses and the scrape of chairs. More people had evidently come. Miss Thompson
was giving a party.
"I wonder how she gets them all in," said Mrs. Macphail, suddenly breaking into a
medical conversation between the missionary and her husband.
It showed whither her thoughts were wandering. The twitch of Davidson`s face
proved that, though he spoke of scientific things, his mind was busy in the same
direction. Suddenly, while the doctor was giving some experience of practice on the
Flanders front, rather prosily, he sprang to his feet with a cry.
"What`s the matter, Alfred?" asked Mrs. Davidson.
"Of course! It never occurred to me. She`s out of Iwelei."
"She can`t be."
"She came on board at Honolulu. It`s obvious. And she`s carrying on her trade here.
Here."
He uttered the last word with a passion of indignation.
"What`s Iwelei?" asked Mrs. Macphail.
He turned his gloomy eyes on her and his voice trembled with horror.
"The plague spot of Honolulu. The Red Light district. It was a blot on our
civilisation."
Iwelei was on the edge of the city. You went down side streets by the harbour, in the
darkness, across a rickety bridge, till you came to a deserted road, all ruts and holes,
and then suddenly you came out into the light. There was parking room for motors
on each side of the road, and there were saloons, tawdry and bright, each one noisy
with its mechanical piano, and there were barbers` shops and tobacconists. There was
a stir in the air and a sense of expectant gaiety. You turned down a narrow alley,
either to the right or to the left, for the road divided Iwelei into two parts, and you
found yourself in the district. There were rows of little bungalows, trim and neatly
painted in green, and the pathway between them was broad and straight. It was laid
out like a garden-city. In its respectable regularity, its order and spruceness, it gave
an impression of sardonic horror; for never can the search for love have been so
systematised and ordered. The pathways were lit by a rare lamp, but they would have
been dark except for the lights that came from the open windows of the bungalows.
Men wandered about, looking at the women who sat at their windows, reading or
sewing, for the most part taking no notice of the passers-by; and like the women they
were of all nationalities. There were Americans, sailors from the ships in port,
enlisted men off the gunboats, sombrely drunk, and soldiers from the regiments,
white and black, quartered on the island; there were Japanese, walking in twos and
threes; Hawaiians, Chinese in long robes, and Filipinos in preposterous hats. They
were silent and as it were oppressed. Desire is sad.
"It was the most crying scandal of the Pacific," exclaimed Davidson vehemently.
"The missionaries had been agitating against it for years, and at last the local press
took it up. The police refused to stir. You know their argument. They say that vice is
inevitable and consequently the best thing is to localise and control it. The truth is,
they were paid. Paid. They were paid by the saloon-keepers, paid by the bullies, paid
by the women themselves. At last they were forced to move."
"I read about it in the papers that came on board in Honolulu," said Dr. Macphail.
"Iwelei, with its sin and shame, ceased to exist on the very day we arrived. The
whole population was brought before the justices. I don`t know why I didn`t
understand at once what that woman was."
"Now you come to speak of it," said Mrs. Macphail, "I remember seeing her come on
board only a few minutes before the boat sailed. I remember thinking at the time she
was cutting it rather fine."
"How dare she come here!" cried Davidson indignantly. "I`m not going to allow it."
He strode towards the door.
"What are you going to do?" asked Macphail.
"What do you expect me to do? I`m going to stop it. I`m not going to have this house
turned into - into..."
He sought for a word that should not offend the ladies` ears. His eyes were flashing
and his pale face was paler still in his emotion.
"It sounds as though there were three or four men down there," said the doctor.
"Don`t you think it`s rather rash to go in just now?"
The missionary gave him a contemptuous look and without a word flung out of the
room.
"You know Mr. Davidson very little if you think the fear of personal danger can stop
him in the performance of his duty," said his wife.
She sat with her hands nervously clasped, a spot of colour on her high cheek bones,
listening to what was about to happen below. They all listened. They heard him
clatter down the wooden stairs and throw open the door. The singing stopped
suddenly, but the gramophone continued to bray out its vulgar tune. They heard
Davidson`s voice and then the noise of something heavy falling. The music stopped.
He had hurled the gramophone on the floor. Then again they heard Davidson`s voice,
they could not make out the words, then Miss Thompson`s, loud and shrill, then a
confused clamour as though several people were shouting together at the top of their
lungs. Mrs. Davidson gave a little gasp, and she clenched her hands more tightly. Dr.
Macphail looked uncertainly from her to his wife. He did not want to go down, but
he wondered if they expected him to. Then there was something that sounded like a
scuffle. The noise now was more distinct. It might be that Davidson was being
thrown out of the room. The door was slammed. There was a moment`s silence and
they heard Davidson come up the stairs again. He went to his room.
"I think I`ll go to him," said Mrs. Davidson.
She got up and went out.
"If you want me, just call," said Mrs. Macphail, and then when the other was gone: "I
hope he isn`t hurt."
"Why couldn`t he mind his own business?" said Dr. Macphail.
They sat in silence for a minute or two and then they both started, for the
gramophone began to play once more, defiantly, and mocking voices shouted
hoarsely the words of an obscene song.
Next day Mrs. Davidson was pale and tired. She complained of headache, and she
looked old and wizened. She told Mrs. Macphail that the missionary had not slept at
all; he had passed the night in a state of frightful agitation and at five had got up and
gone out. A glass of beer had been thrown over him and his clothes were stained and
stinking. But a sombre fire glowed in Mrs. Davidson`s eyes when she spoke of Miss
Thompson.
"She`ll bitterly rue the day when she flouted Mr. Davidson," she said. "Mr. Davidson
has a wonderful heart and no one who is in trouble has ever gone to I him without
being comforted, but he has no mercy for sin, and when his righteous wrath is
excited he`s terrible."
"Why, what will he do?" asked Mrs. Macphail.
"I don`t know, but I wouldn`t stand in that creature`s shoes for anything in the
world."
Mrs. Macphail shuddered. There was something positively alarming in the
triumphant assurance of the little woman`s manner. They were going out together
that morning, and they went down the stairs side by side. Miss Thompson`s door was
open, and they saw her in a bedraggled dressing-gown, cooking something in a
chafing - dish.
"Good morning," she called. "Is Mrs. Davidson better this morning?"
They passed her in silence, with their noses in the air, as if she did not exist. They
flushed, however, when she burst into a shout of derisive laughter. Mrs. Davidson
turned on her suddenly. "Don`t you dare to speak to me," she screamed. "If you insult
me I shall have you turned out of here."
"Say, did I ask M. Davidson to visit with me?"
"Don`t answer her," whispered Mrs. Macphail hurriedly.
They walked on till they were out of earshot.
"She s brazen, brazen," burst from Mrs. Davidson.
Her anger almost suffocated her.
And on their way home they met her strolling towards the quay. She had all her
finery on. Her great white hat with its vulgar, showy flowers was an affront. She
called out cheerily to them as she went by, and a couple of American sailors who
were standing there grinned as the ladies set their faces to an icy stare. They got in
just before the rain began to fall again.
"I guess she`ll get her fine clothes spoilt," said Mrs. Davidson with a bitter sneer.
Davidson did not come in till they were half way through dinner. He was wet
through, but he would not change. He sat, morose and silent, refusing to eat more
than a mouthful, and he stared at the slanting rain. When Mrs. Davidson told him of
their two encounters with Miss Thompson he did not answer. His deepening frown
alone showed that he had heard.
"Don`t you think we ought to make Mr. Horn turn her out of here?" asked Mrs.
Davidson. "We can`t allow her to insult us."
"There doesn`t seem to be any other place for her to go," said Macphail.
"She can live with one of the natives."
"In weather like this a native hut must be a rather uncomfortable place to live in."
"I lived in one for years," said the missionary.
When the little native girl brought in the fried bananas which formed the sweet they
had every day, Davidson turned to her.
"Ask Miss Thompson when it would be convenient for me to see her," he said.
The girl nodded shyly and went out.
"What do you want to see her for, Alfred?" asked his wife.
"It`s my duty to see her. I won`t act till I`ve given her every chance."
"You don`t know what she is. She`ll insult you."
"Let her insult me. Let her spit on me. She has an immortal soul, and I must do all
that is in my power to save it."
Mrs. Davidson`s ears rang still with the harlot`s mocking laughter.
"She`s gone too far."
"Too far for the mercy of God?" His eyes lit up suddenly and his voice grew mellow
and soft.
"Never. The sinner may be deeper in sin than the depth of hell itself, but the love of
the Lord Jesus can reach him still."
The girl came back with the message.
"Miss Thompson`s compliments and as long as Rev. Davidson don`t come in
business hours she`ll be glad to see him any time."
The party received it in stony silence, and Dr. Macphail quickly effaced from his lips
the smile which had come upon them. He knew his wife would be vexed with him if
he found Miss Thompson`s effrontery amusing.
They finished the meal in silence. When it was over the two ladies got up and took
their work, Mrs. Macphail was making another of the innumerable comforters which
she had turned out since the beginning of the war, and the doctor lit his pipe. But
Davidson remained in his chair and with abstracted eyes stared at the table. At last he
got up and without a word went out of the room. They heard him go down and they
heard Miss Thompson`s defiant "Come in" when he knocked at the door. He
remained with her for an hour. And Dr. Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning
to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the
earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the
primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from
heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that
was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you
must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your
bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless.
Macphail turned his head when the missionary came back. The two women looked
up.
"I`ve given her every chance. I have exhorted her to repent. She is an evil woman."
He paused, and Dr. Macphail saw his eyes darken and his pale face grow hard and
stern.
"Now I shall take the whips with which the Lord Jesus drove the usurers and the
money changers out of the Temple of the Most High."
He walked up and down the room. His mouth was close set, and his black brows
were frowning.
"If she fled to the uttermost parts of the earth I should pursue her."
With a sudden movement he turned round and strode out of the room. They heard
him go downstairs again.
"What is he going to do?" asked Mrs. Macphail. If
"I don`t know." Mrs. Davidson took off her pince-nez and wiped them. "When he is
on the Lord`s work I never ask him questions."
She sighed a little.
"What is the matter?"
"He`ll wear himself out. He doesn`t know what it is to spare himself."
Dr. Macphail learnt the first results of the missionary`s activity from the half-caste
trader in whose house they lodged. He stopped the doctor when he passed the store
`and came out to speak to him on the stoop. His fat face was worried.
"The Rev. Davidson has been at me for letting Miss Thompson have a room here," he
said, "but I didn`t know what she was when I rented it to her. When people come and
ask if I can rent them a room all I want to know is if they`ve the money to pay for it.
And she paid me for hers a week in advance."
Dr. Macphail did not want to commit himself. "When all`s said and done it`s your
housed We`re very much obliged to you for taking us in at all."
Horn looked at him doubtfully. He was not certain yet how definitely Macphail stood
on the missionary`s side.
"The missionaries are in with one another," he said, hesitatingly olf they get it in for
a trader he may just as well shut up his store and quit."
"Did he want you to turn her out?"
"No, he said so long as she behaved herself he couldn`t ask me to do that. He said he
wanted to be just to me. I promised she shouldn`t have no more visitors. I`ve just
been and told her.
"How did she take it?"
"She gave me Hell."
The trader squirmed in his old ducks. He had found Miss Thompson a rough
customer.
"Oh, well, I daresay she`ll get out. I don`t suppose she wants to stay here if she can`t
have anyone in."
"There`s nowhere she can go, only a native house, and no native`ll take her now, not
now that the missionaries have got their knife in her."
Dr. Macphail looked at the falling rain.
"Well, I don`t suppose it`s any good waiting for it to clear up."
In the evening when they sat in the parlour Davidson talked to them of his early days
at college. He had had no means and had worked his way through by doing odd jobs
during the vacations. There was silence downstairs. Miss Thompson was sitting in
her little room alone. But suddenly the gramophone began to play. She had set it on
in defiance, to cheat her loneliness, but there was no one to sing, and it had a
melancholy note. It was like a cry for help Davidson took no notice. He was in the
middle of a long anecdote and without change of expression went on. The
gramophone continued. Miss Thompson put on one reel after another. It looked as
though the silence of the night were getting on her nerves. It was breathless and
sultry. When the Macphails went to bed they could not sleep. They lay side by side
with their eyes wide open, listening to the cruel singing of the mosquitoes outside
their curtain.
"What`s that?" whispered Mrs. Macphail at last.
They heard a voice, Davidson`s voice, through the wooden partition. It went on with
a monotonous, earnest insistence. He was praying aloud. He was praying for the soul
of Miss Thompson.
Two or three days went by. Now when they passed Miss Thompson on the road she
did not greet them with ironic cordiality or smile; she passed with her nose in the air,
a sulky look on her painted face, frowning, as though she did not see them. The
trader told Macphail that she had tried to get lodging elsewhere, but had failed. In the
evening she played through the various reels of her gramophone, but the pretence of
mirth was obvious now. The ragtime had a cracked, heart-broken rhythm as though it
were a one-step of despair. When she began to play on Sunday Davidson sent Horn
to beg her to stop at once since it was the Lord`s day. The reel was taken off and the
house was silent except for the steady pattering of the rain on the iron roof.
"I think she`s getting a bit worked up," said the trader next day to Macphail. "She
don`t know what Mr. Davidson`s up to and it makes her scared."
Macphail had caught a glimpse of her that morning and it struck him that her
arrogant expression had changed. There was in her face a hunted look. The half-caste
gave him a sidelong glance.
"I suppose you don`t know what Mr. Davidson is doing about it?" he hazarded.
"No, I don`t."
It was singular that Horn should ask him that question, for he also had the idea that
the misssionary was mysteriously at work. He had an impression that he was
weaving a net around the woman, carefully, systematically, and suddenly, when
everything was ready, would pull the strings tight.
"He told me to tell her," said the trader, "that if at any time she wanted him she only
had to send and he`d come."
"What did she say when you told her that?"
"She didn`t say nothing. I didn`t stop. I just said what he said I was to and then I beat
it. I thought she might be going to start weepin`."
"I have no doubt the loneliness is getting on her nerves," said the doctor. "And the
rain - that`s enough to make anyone jumpy," he continued irritably. "Doesn`t it ever
stop in this confounded place?"
"It goes on pretty steady in the rainy season. We have three hundred inches in the
year. You see, it`s the shape of the bay. It seems to attract the rain from all over the
Pacific."
"Damn the shape of the bay," said the doctor.
He scratched his mosquito bites. He felt very short-tempered. When the rain stopped
and the sun shone, it was like a hothouse, seething, humid, sultry, breathless, and you
had a strange feeling that everything was growing with a savage violence. The
natives, blithe and childlike by reputation, seemed then, with their tattooing an their
dyed hair, to have something sinister in their appearance; and when they pattered
along at your heels with their naked feet you looked back instinctively. You felt they
might at any moment come behind you swiftly and thrust long knife between your
shoulder blades. You could not tell what dark thoughts lurked behind their wide-set
eyes. They had a little the look of ancient Egyptians painted on a temple wall, and
there was about them the terror of what is immeasurably old.
The missionary came and went. He was busy, but the Macphails did not know what
he was doing. Horn told the doctor that he saw the governor every day, and once
Davidson mentioned him.
"He looks as if he had plenty of determination," he said, "but when you come down
to brass tacks he has no backbone."
"I suppose that means he won`t do exactly what you want," suggested the doctor
facetiously.
The missionary did not smile.
"I want him to do what`s right. It shouldn`t be necessary to persuade a man to do
that."
"But there may be differences of opinion about what is right."
"If a man had a gangrenous foot would you have patience with anyone who hesitated
to amputate it?"
"Gangrene is a matter of fact."
"And Evil?"
What Davidson had done soon appeared. The four of them had just finished their
midday meal, and they had not yet separated for the siesta which the heat imposed on
the ladies and on the doctor. Davidson had little patience with the slothful habit. The
door was suddenly flung open and Miss Thompson came in. She looked round the
room and then went up to Davidson.
"You low-down skunk, what have you been saying about me to the governor?"
She was spluttering with rage. There was a moment`s pause. Then the missionary
drew forward a chair.
"Won`t you be seated, Miss Thompson? I`ve been hoping to have another talk with
you."
"You poor low-life bastard."
She burst into a torrent of insult, foul and insolent. Davidson kept his grave eyes on
her.
"I`m indifferent to the abuse you think fit to heap on me, Miss Thompson," he said,
"but I must beg you to remember that ladies are present."
Tears by now were struggling with her anger. Her face was red and swollen as
though she were choking.
"What has happened?" asked Dr. Macphail.
"A feller`s just been in here and he says I gotter beat it on the next boat."
Was there a gleam in the missionary`s eyes? His face remained impassive.
"You could hardly expect the governor to let you stay here under the circumstances."
"You done it," she shrieked. "You can`t kid me. You done it."
"I don`t want to deceive you. I urged the governor to take the only possible step
consistent with his obligations."
"Why couldn`t you leave me be? I wasn`t doin` you no harm."
"You may be sure that if you had I should be the last man to resent it."
"Do you think I want to stay on in this poor imitation of a burg? I don`t look no
busher, do I?"
"In that case I don`t see what cause of complaint you have," he answered.
She gave an inarticulate cry of rage and flung out of the room. There was a short
silence.
"It`s a relief to know that the governor has acted at last," said Davidson finally. "He`s
a weak man and he shilly-shallied. He said she was only here for a fortnight anyway,
and if she went on to Apia that was under British jurisdiction and had nothing to do
with him."
The missionary sprang to his feet and strode across the room.
"It`s terrible the way the men who are in authority seek to evade their responsibility.
They speak as though evil that was out of sight ceased to be evil. The very existence
of that woman is a scandal and it does not help matters to shift it to another of the
islands. In the end I had to speak straight from the shoulder."
Davidson`s brow lowered, and he protruded his firm chin. He looked fierce and
determined.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Our mission is not entirely without influence at Washington. I pointed out to the
governor that it wouldn`t do him any good if there was a complaint about the way he
managed things here."
"When has she got to go?" asked the doctor, after a pause.
"The San Francisco boat is due here from Sydney next Tuesday. She`s to sail on
that."
That was in five days` time. It was next day, when he was coining back from the
hospital where for want of something better to do Macphail spent most of his
mornings, that the half-caste stopped him as he was going upstairs.
"Excuse me, Dr. Macphail, Miss Thompson`s sick. Will you have a look at her."
"Certainly."
Horn led him to her room. She was sitting in a chair idly, neither reading nor sewing,
staring in front of her. She wore her white dress and the large hat with the flowers on
it. Macphail noticed that her skin was yellow and muddy under her powder, and her
eyes were heavy.
"I`m sorry to hear you`re not well," he said.
"Oh, I ain`t sick really. I just said that, because I just had to see you. I`ve got to clear
on a boat that`s going to `Frisco."
She looked at him and he saw that her eyes were suddenly startled. She opened and
clenched her hands spasmodically. The trader stood at the door, listening.
"So I understand," said the doctor.
She gave a little gulp
"I guess it ain`t very convenient for me to go to Frisco just now. T went to see the
governor yesterday afternoon, but I couldn`t get to him. I saw the secretary, and he
told me I`d got to take that boat and that was all there was to it. I just had to see the
governor, so I waited outside his house this morning, and when he come out I spoke
to him. He didn`t want to speak to me, I`ll say, but I wouldn`t let him shake me off,
and at last he said he hadn`t no objection to my staying here till the next boat to
Sydney if the Rev. Davidson will stand for it."
She stopped and looked at Dr. Macphail anxiously.
"I don`t know exactly what I can do," he said.
"Well, I thought maybe you wouldn`t mind asking him. I swear to God I won`t start
anything here if he`ll just only let me stay. I won`t go out of the house if that`ll suit
him. It`s no more`n a fortnight."
"I`ll ask him."
"He won`t stand for it," said Horn. "He`ll have you out on Tuesday, so you may as
well make up your mind to it."
"Tell him I can get work in Sydney, straight stuff, I mean. Tain`t asking very much."
"I`ll do what I can."
"And come and tell me right away, will you? I can`t set down to a thing till I get the
dope one way or the other."
It was not an errand that much pleased the doctor, and, characteristically perhaps, he
went about it indirectly. He told his wife what Miss Thompson had said to him and
asked her to speak to Mrs. Davidson. The missionary`s attitude seemed rather
arbitrary and it could do no harm if the girl were allowed to stay in Pago-Pago
another fortnight. But he was not prepared for the result of his diplomacy. The
missionary came to him straightway.
"Mrs. Davidson tells me that Thompson has been speaking to you."
Dr. Macphail, thus directly tackled, had the shy man`s resentment at being forced out
into the open. He felt his temper rising, and he flushed.
"I don`t see that it can make any difference if she goes to Sydney rather than to San
Francisco, and so long as she promises to behave while she`s here it`s dashed hard to
persecute her."
The missionary fixed him with his stern eyes. "Why is she unwilling to go back to
San Francisco?"
"I didn`t inquire," answered the doctor with some asperity. "And I think one does
better to mind one`s own business."
Perhaps it was not a very tactful answer.
"The governor has ordered her to be deported by the first boat that leaves the island.
He`s only done his duty and I will not interfere. Her presence is a peril here."
"I think you`re very harsh and tyrannical."
The two ladies looked up at the doctor with some alarm, but they need not have
feared a quarrel, for the missionary smiled gently.
"I`m terribly sorry you should think that of Dr. Macphail. Believe me, my heart
bleeds for the unfortunate woman, but I`m only trying to do my duty."
The doctor made no answer. He looked out of the window sullenly. For once it was
not raining and across the bay you saw nestling among the trees the huts of a native
village.
"I think I`ll take advantage of the rain stopping to go out," he said.
"Please don`t bear me malice because I can`t accede to your wish," said Davidson,
with a melancholy smile. "I respect you very much, doctor, and I should be sorry if
you thought ill of me."
"I have no doubt you have a sufficiently good opinion of yourself to bear mine with
equanimity," he retorted.
"That`s one on me," chuckled Davidson.
When Dr. Macphail, vexed with himself because he had been uncivil to no purpose,
went downstairs, Miss Thompson was waiting for him with her door ajar.
"Well," she said, "have you spoken to him?"
"Yes, I`m sorry, he won`t do anything," he answered, not looking at her in his
embarrassment.
But then he gave her a quick glance, for a sob broke from her. He saw that her face
was white with fear. It gave him a shock of dismay. And suddenly he had an idea.
"But don`t give up hope yet. I think it`s a shame the way they`re treating you and I`m
going: to see the governor myself."
"Now?"
He nodded. Her face brightened.
"Say, that`s real good of you. I`m sure he`ll let me stay if you speak for me. I just
won`t do a thing I didn`t ought all the time I`m here."
Dr. Macphail hardly knew why he had made up his mind to appeal to the governor.
He was perfectly indifferent to Miss Thompson`s affairs, the missionary had irritated
him, and with him temper was a smouldering thing. He found the governor at home.
He was a large, handsome man, a sailor, with a grey toothbrush moustache; and he
wore a spotless uniform of white drill.
"I`ve come to see you about a woman who`s lodging in the same house as we are,"
he said. "Her name`s Thompson."
"I guess I`ve heard nearly enough about her, Dr. Macphail," said the governor,
smiling. "I`ve given her the order to get out next Tuesday and that`s all I can do."
"I wanted to ask you if you couldn`t stretch a point and let her stay here till the boat
comes in from San Francisco so that she can go to Sydney. I will guarantee her good
behaviour."
The governor continued to smile, but his eyes grew small and serious.
"I`d be very glad to oblige you, Dr. Macphail, but I`ve given the order and it must
stand."
The doctor put the case as reasonably as he could, but now the governor ceased to
smile at all. He listened sullenly, with averted gaze. Macphail saw that he was
making no impression.
"I`m sorry to cause any lady inconvenience, but she`ll have to sail on Tuesday and
that`s all there is to it."
"But what difference can it make?"
"Pardon me, doctor, but I don`t feel called upon to explain my official actions except
to the, proper authorities."
Macphail looked at him shrewdly. He remembered Davidson`s hint that he had used
threats, and in the governor`s attitude he read a singular embarrassment.
"Davidson`s a damned busybody," he said hotly.
"Between ourselves, Dr. Macphail, I don`t say that I have formed a very favourable
opinion of Mr. Davidson, but I am bound to confess that he was within his rights in
pointing out to me the danger that the presence of a woman of Miss Thompson`s
character was to a place like this where a number of enlisted men are stationed
among a native population."
He got up and Dr. Macphail was obliged to do so too.
"I must ask you to excuse me. I have an engagement. Please give my respects to Mrs.
Macphail."
The doctor left him crest-fallen. He knew that Miss Thompson would be waiting for
him, and unwilling to tell her himself that he had failed, he went into the house by
the back door and sneaked up the stairs as though he had something to hide.
At supper he was silent and ill-at-ease, but the missionary was jovial and animated.
Dr. Macphail thought his eyes rested on him now and then with triumphant goodhumour. It struck him suddenly that Davidson knew of his visit to the governor and
of its ill success. But how on earth could he have heard of it? There was something
sinister about the power of that man. After supper he saw Horn on the verandah and,
as though to have a casual word with him, went out.
"She wants to know if you`ve seen the governor," the trader whispered.
"Yes. He wouldn`t do anything. I`m awfully sorry, I can`t do anything more."
"I knew he wouldn`t. They daren`t go against the missionaries."
"What are you talking about?" said Davidson affably, corning out to join them.
"I was just saying there was no chance of your getting over to Apia for at least
another week," said the trader glibly.
He left them, and the two men returned into the parlour. Mr. Davidson devoted one
hour after each meal to recreation. Presently a timid knock was heard at the door.
"Come in," said Mrs. Davidson, in her sharp voice.
The door was not opened. She got up and opened it. They saw Miss Thompson
standing at the threshold. But the change in her appearance was extraordinary. This
was no longer the flaunting hussy who had jeered at them in the road, but a broken,
frightened woman. Her hair, as a rule so elaborately arranged, was tumbling untidily
over her neck. She wore bedroom slippers and a skirt and blouse. They were unfresh
and bedraggled. She stood at the door with the tears streaming down her face and did
not dare to enter.
"What do you want?" said Mrs. Davidson harshly.
"May I speak to Mr. Davidson?" she said in a choking voice.
The missionary rose and went towards her.
"Come right in, Miss Thompson," he said in cordial tones. "What can I do for you?"
She entered the room.
"Say, I`m sorry for what I said to you the other day an` for - for everythin` else. I
guess I was a bit lit up. I beg pardon."
"Oh, it was nothing. I guess my back`s broad enough to bear a few hard words."
She stepped towards him with a movement that was horribly cringing.
"You`ve got me beat. I`m all in. You won`t make me go back to `Frisco?"
His genial manner vanished and his voice grew on a sudden hard and stern.
"Why don`t you want to go back there?"
She cowered before him.
"I guess my people live there. I don`t want them to see me like this. I`ll go anywhere
else you say."
"Why don`t you want to go back to San Francisco?"
"I`ve told you."
He leaned forward, staring at her, and his great, shining eyes seemed to try to bore
into her soul. He gave a sudden gasp.
"The penitentiary."
She screamed, and then she fell at his feet, clasping his legs.
"Don`t send me back there. I swear to you before God I`ll be a good woman. I`ll give
all this up."
She burst into a torrent of confused supplication and the tears coursed down her
painted cheeks. He leaned over her and, lifting her face, forced her to look at him.
"Is that it, the penitentiary?"
"I beat it before they could get me, she gasped. "If the bulls grab me it`s three years
for mine."
He let go his hold of her and she fell in a heap on the floor, sobbing bitterly. Dr.
Macphail stood up.
"This alters the whole thing," he said. "You can`t make her go back when you know
this. Give her another chance. She wants to turn over a new leaf."
"I`m going to give her the finest chance she`s ever had. If she repents let her accept
her punishment."
She misunderstood the words and looked up. There was a gleam of hope in her heavy
eyes.
"You`ll let me go?"
"No. You shall sail for San Francisco on Tuesday."
She gave a groan of horror and then burst into low, hoarse shrieks which sounded
hardly human, and she beat her head passionately on the ground. Dr. Macphail
sprang to her and lifted her up:
"Come on, you mustn`t do that. You`d better go to your room and lie down. I`ll get
you something."
He raised her to her feet and partly dragging her, partly carrying her, got her
downstairs. He was furious with Mrs. Davidson and with his wife because they made
no effort to help. The half-caste was standing on the landing and with his assistanc he
managed to get her on the bed. She was moaning and crying. She was almost
insensible. He gave her a hypodermic injection. He was hot and exhausted when he
went upstairs again.
"I`ve got her to lie down."
The two women and Davidson were in the same, positions as when he had left them.
They could not have moved or spoken since he went.
"I was waiting for you," said Davidson, in a strange, distant voice. "I want you all to
pray with me for the soul of our erring sister."
He took the Bible off a shelf, and sat down at the table at which they had supped. It
had not been cleared, and he pushed the tea-pot out of the way. In a powerful voice,
resonant and deep, he read to them the chapter in which is narrated the meeting of
Jesus Christ with the woman taken in adultery.
"Now kneel with me and let us pray for the soul of our dear sister, Sadie Thompson."
He burst into a long, passionate prayer in which he implored God to have mercy on
the sinful woman. Mrs. Macphail and Mrs. Davidson knelt with covered eyes. The
doctor, taken by surprise, awkward and sheepish, knelt too. The missionary`s prayer
had a savage eloquence. He was extraordinarily moved, and as he spoke the tears ran
down his cheeks. Outside, the pitiless rain fell, fell steadily, with a fierce malignity
that was all too human.
At last he stopped. He paused for a moment and said:
"We will now repeat the Lord`s prayer."
They said it and then, following him, they rose from their knees. Mrs. Davidson`s
face was pale and restful. She was comforted and at peace, but the Macphails felt
suddenly bashful. They did not know which way to look.
"I`ll just go down and see how she is now," said Dr. Macphail.
When he knocked at her door it was opened for him by Horn. Miss Thompson was in
a rocking-chair, sobbing quietly.
"What are you doing there?" exclaimed Macphail. " I told you to lie down."
"I can`t lie down. I want to see Mr. Davidson."
"My poor child, what do you think is the good of it? You`ll never move him."
"He said he`d come if I sent for him."
Macphail motioned to the trader.
"Go and fetch him."
He waited with her in silence while the trader went upstairs. Davidson came in.
"Excuse me for asking you to come here," she said, looking at him sombrely.
"I was expecting you to send for me. I knew the Lord would answer my prayer."
They stared at one another for a moment and then she looked away. She kept her
eyes averted when she spoke.
"I`ve been a bad woman. I want to repent,"
"Thank God! thank God! He has heard our prayers."
He turned to the two men. "
"Leave me alone with her. Tell Mrs. Davidson that, our prayers have been answered."
They went out and closed the door behind them.
"Gee whizz," said the trader.
That night Dr. Macphail could not get to sleep till late, and when he heard the
missionary come upstairs he looked at his watch. It was two o`clock. But even then
he did not go to bed at once, for through the wooden partition that separated their
rooms he heard him praying aloud, till he himself, exhausted, fell asleep.
When he saw him next morning he was surprised at his appearance. He was paler
than ever, tired, but his eyes shone with an inhuman fire. It looked as though he were
filled with an overwhelming joy.
"I want you to go down presently and see Sadie," he said. "I can`t hope that her body
is better, but her soul - her soul is transformed."
The doctor was feeling wan and nervous.
"You were with her very late last night," he said.
"Yes, she couldn`t bear to have me leave her."
"You look as pleased as Punch," the doctor said irritably.
Davidson`s eyes shone with ecstasy.
"A great mercy has been vouchsafed me. Last night I was privileged to bring a lost
soul to the loving arms of Jesus."
Miss Thompson was again in the rocking-chair. The bed had not been made. The
room was in disorder. She had not troubled to dress herself, but wore a dirty
dressing-gown, and her hair was tied in a sluttish knot. She had given her face a dab
with a wet towel, but it was all swollen and creased with crying. She looked a drab.
She raised her eyes dully when the doctor came in. She was cowed and broken.
"Where`s Mr. Davidson?" she asked;
"He`ll come presently if you want him," answered Macphail acidly. "I came here to
see how you were."
"Oh, I guess I`m OK. You needn`t worry about that"
"Have you had anything to eat?"
"Horn brought me some coffee."
She looked anxiously at the door.
"D`you think he`ll come down soon? I feel as if it wasn`t so terrible when he`s with
me."
"Are you still going on Tuesday?"
"Yes, he says I`ve got to go. Please tell him to come right along. You can`t do me any
good. He`s the only one as can help me now."
"Very well," said Dr. Macphail.
During the next three days the missionary spent almost all his time with Sadie
Thompson. He joined the others only to have his meals. Dr. Macphail noticed that he
hardly ate.
"He`s wearing himself out," said Mrs. Davidson pitifully. "He`ll have a breakdown if
he, doesn`t take care, but he won`t spare himself."
She herself was white and pale. She told Mrs. Macphail that she had no sleep. When
the missionary came upstairs from Miss Thompson he prayed till he was exhausted,
but even then he did not sleep for long. After an hour or two he got up and dressed
himself, and went for a tramp along the bay. He had strange dreams.
"This morning he told me that he`d been dreaming about the mountains of
Nebraska," said Mrs. Davidson.
"That`s curious," said Dr. Macphail.
He remembered seeing them from the windows of the train when he crossed
America. They were like huge mole-hills, rounded and smooth, an they rose from the
plain abruptly. Dr. Macphail remembered how it struck him that they were like a
woman`s breasts.
Davidson`s restlessness was intolerable even to himself. But he was buoyed up by a
wonderful exhilaration. He was tearing out by the roots the last vestiges of sin that
lurked in the hidden corners of that poor woman`s heart. He read with her and prayed
with her.
"It`s wonderful," he said to them one day at supper. "It`s a true rebirth. Her soul,
which was black as night, is now pure and white like the new-fallen snow. I am
humble and afraid. Her remorse for all her sins is beautiful. I am not worthy to touch
the hem of her garment."
"Have you the heart to send her back to San Francisco?" said the doctor. "Three years
in an American prison. I should have thought you might have saved her from that."
"Ah, but don`t you see? It`s necessary. Do you think my heart doesn`t bleed for her?
I love her as I love my wife and my sister. All the time that she is in prison I shall
suffer all the pain that she suffers."
"Bunkum," cried the doctor impatiently.
"You don`t understand because you`re blind. She`s sinned, and she must suffer. I
know what she`ll end-dure. She`ll be starved and tortured and humiliated. I want her
to accept the punishment of man as a sacrifice to God. I want her to accept it
joyfully. She has an opportunity which is offered to very few of us. God is very good
and very merciful."
Davidson`s voice trembled with excitement. He could hardly articulate the words
that tumbled passionately from his lips.
"All day I pray with her and when I leave her I pray again, I pray with all my might
and main, so that Jesus may grant her this great mercy. I want to put in her heart the
passionate desire to be punished so that at the end, even if I offered to let her go, she
would refuse. I want her to feel that the bitter punishment of prison is the thankoffering that she places at the feet of our Blessed Lord, who gave his life for her."
The days passed slowly. The whole household, intent on the wretched, tortured
woman down-stairs, lived in a state of unnatural excitement. She was like a victim
that was being prepared for the savage rites of a bloody idolatry. Her terror numbed
her. She could not bear to let Davidson out of her sight; it was only when he was
with her that she had courage, and she hung upon him with a slavish dependence.
She cried a great deal, and she read the Bible, and prayed. Sometimes she was
exhausted and apathetic. Then she did indeed look forward to her ordeal, for it
seemed to offer an escape, direct and concrete, from the anguish she was enduring.
She could not bear much longer the vague terrors which now assailed her. With her
sins she had put aside all personal vanity, and she slopped about her room, unkempt
and dishevelled, in her tawdry dressing-gown. She had not taken off her nightdress
for four days, nor put on stockings. Her room was littered and untidy. Meanwhile the
rain fell with a cruel persistence. You felt that the heavens must at last be empty of
water, but still it poured down, straight and heavy, with a maddening iteration, on the
iron roof. Everything was damp and clammy. There was mildew on the wail and on
the boots that stood on the floor. Through the sleepless nights the mosquitoes droned
their angry chant.
"If it would only stop raining for a single day it wouldn`t be so bad," said Dr.
Macphail.
They all looked forward to the Tuesday when the boat for San Francisco was to
arrive from Sydney. The strain was intolerable. So far as Dr. Macphail was
concerned, his pity and his resentment were alike extinguished by his desire to be rid
of the unfortunate woman. The inevitable must be accepted. He felt he would breathe
more freely when the ship had sailed. Sadie Thompson was to be escorted on board
by a clerk in the governor`s office. This person called on the Monday evening and
told Miss Thompson to be prepared at eleven in the morning. Davidson was with her.
"I`ll see that everything is ready. I mean to come on board with her myself."
Miss Thompson did not speak.
When Dr. Macphail blew out his candle and crawled cautiously under his mosquito
curtains, he gave a sigh of relief.
"Well, thank God that`s over. By this time tomorrow she`ll be gone."
"Mrs. Davidson will be glad too. She says he`s wearing himself to a shadow," said
Mrs. Macphail. "She`s a different woman."
"Who?"
"Sadie, I should never have thought it possible. It makes one humble."
Dr. Macphail did not answer, and presently he fell asleep. He was tired out, and he
slept more soundly than usual.
He was awakened in the morning by a hand placed on his arm, and, starting up, saw
Horn by the side of his bed. The trader put his finger on his mouth to prevent any
exclamation from Dr. Macphail and beckoned to him to come. As a rule he wore
shabby ducks, but now he was barefoot and wore only the lava-lava of the natives.
He looked suddenly savage, and Dr. Macphail, getting out of bed, saw that he was
heavily tattooed. Horn made him a sign to come on to the verandah. Dr. Macphail got
out of bed and followed the trader out.
"Don`t make a noise," he whispered. "You`re wanted. Put on a coat and some shoes.
Quick."
Dr. Macphail`s first thought was that something had happened to Miss Thompson.
"What is it? Shall I bring my instruments?"
"Hurry, please, hurry."
Dr. Macphail crept back into the bedroom, put on a waterproof over his pyjamas, and
a pair of rubber-soled shoes. He rejoined the trader, and together they tiptoed down
the stairs. The door leading out to the road was open and at it were standing half a
dozen natives.
"What is it?" repeated the doctor.
"Come along with me," said Horn.
He walked out and the doctor followed him. The natives came after them in a little
bunch. They crossed the road and came on to the beach. The doctor saw a group of
natives standing round some object at the water`s edge. They hurried along, a couple
of dozen yards perhaps, and the natives opened out as the doctor came up. The trader
pushed him forwards. Then he saw, lying half in the water and half out, a dreadful
object, the body of Davidson. Dr. Macphail bent down - he was not a man to lose his
head in an emergency - and turned the body over. The throat was cut from ear to ear,
and in the right hand was still the razor with which the deed was done.
"He`s quite cold," said the doctor. "He must have been dead some time."
"One of the boys saw him lying there on his way to work just now and came and told
me. Do you think he did it himself?"
"Yes. Someone ought to go for the police."
Horn said something in the native tongue, and two youths started off.
"We must leave him here till they come," said the doctor.
"They mustn`t take him into my house. I won`t have him in my house."
"You`ll do what the authorities say," replied the doctor sharply. "In point of fact I
expect they`ll take him to the mortuary."
They stood waiting where they were. The trader took a cigarette from a fold in his
lava-lava and gave one to Dr. Macphail. They smoked while they stared at the
corpse. Dr. Macphail could not understand.
"Why do you think he did it?" asked Horn.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. In a little while native police came along, under
the charge of a marine, with a stretcher, and immediately afterwards a couple of
naval officers and a naval doctor. They managed everything in businesslike manner.
"What about the wife." said one of the officers.
"Now that you`ve come I`ll go back to the house and get some things on. I`ll see that
it`s broken to her. She`d better not see him till he`s been fixed up a little."
"I guess that`s right," said the naval doctor. When Dr. Macphail went back he found
his wife nearly dressed.
"Mrs. Davidson`s in a dreadful state about her husband," she said to him as soon as
he appeared. "He hasn`t been to bed all night. She heard him leave Miss Thompson`s
room at two, but he went out. If he`s been walking about since then he`ll be
absolutely dead."
Dr. Macphail told her what had happened and asked her to break the news to Mrs.
Davidson.
"But why did he do it?" she asked, horror-stricken.
"I don`t know."
"But I can`t. I can`t."
"You must."
She gave him a frightened look and went out He heard her go into Mrs. Davidson`s
room. He waited a minute to gather himself together and then began to shave and
wash. When he was dressed he sat down on the bed and waited for his wife. At last
she came.
"She wants to see him," she said.
"They`ve taken him to the mortuary. We`d better go down with her. How did she take
it?"
"I think she`s stunned. She didn`t cry. But she`s trembling like a leaf."
"We`d better go at once."
When they knocked at her door Mrs. Davidson came out. She was very pale, but dryeyed. To the doctor she seemed unnaturally composed. No word was exchanged, and
they set out in silence down the road. When they arrived at the mortuary Mrs.
Davidson spoke.
"Let me go in and see him alone."
They stood aside. A native opened a door for her and closed it behind her. They sat
down and waited. One or two white men came and talked to them in undertones. Dr.
Macphail told them again what he knew of the tragedy. At last the door was quietly
opened and Mrs. Davidson came out. Silence fell upon them.
"I`m ready to go back now," she said.
Her voice was hard and steady. Dr. Macphail could not understand the look in her
eyes. Her pale face was very stern. They walked back slowly, never saying a word,
and at last they came round the bend on the other side of which stood the ir house.
Mrs. Davidson gave a gasp, and for moment they stopped still. An incredible sound
assaulted their ears. The gramophone which had been silent for so long was playing,
playing ragtime loud and harsh.
"What`s that?" cried Mrs. Macphail with horror.
"Let`s go on," said Mrs. Davidson.
They walked up the steps and entered the hall. Miss Thompson was standing at her
door, chatting with a sailor. A sudden change had taken place in her. She was no
longer the cowed drudge of the last days. She was dressed in all her finery, in her
white dress, with the high shiny boots over which her fat legs bulged in their cotton
stockings; her hair was elaborately arranged; and she wore that enormous hat
covered with gaudy flowers. Her face was painted, her eyebrows were boldly black,
and her lips were scarlet. She held herself erect. She was the flaunting quean that
they had known at first. As they came in she broke into a loud, jeering laugh; and
then, when Mrs. Davidson involuntarily stopped, she collected the spittle in her
mouth and spat. Mrs. Davidson cowered back, and two red spots rose suddenly to her
cheeks. Then, covering her face with her hands, she broke away and ran quickly up
the stairs. Dr. Macphail was outraged. He pushed past the woman into her room.
"What the devil are you doing?" he cried. "Stop that, damned machine."
He went up to it and tore the record off. She turned on him.
"Say, doc, you can that stuff with me. What the hell are you doin` in my room? "
"What do you mean?" he cried. "What d`you mean?"
She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or
the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer.
"You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You`re all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"
Dr. Macphail gasped. He understood.
Jane
By W. Somerset Maugham
I remember very well the occasion on which I first saw Jane Fowler. It is indeed only
because the details of the glimpse I had of her then are so clear that I trust my
recollection at all, for, looking back, I must confess that I find it hard to believe that
it has not played me a fantastic trick. I had lately returned to London from China and
was drinking a dish of tea with Mrs. Tower. Mrs.Tower had been seized with the
prevailing passion for decoration; and with the ruthlessness of her sex had sacrificed
chairs in which she had comfortably sat for years, tables, cabinets, ornaments, on
which her eyes had dwelt in peace since she was married, pictures that had been
familiar to her for a generation; and delivered herself into the hands of an expert.
Nothing remained in her drawing-room with which she had any association, or to
which any sentiment was attached; and she had invited me that day to see the
fashionable glory in which she now lived. Everything that could be pickled was
pickled and what couldn`t be pickled was painted. Nothing matched, but everything
harmonised.
"Do you remember that ridiculous drawing-room suite that I used to have?" asked
Mrs. Tower.
The curtains were sumptuous yet severe; the sofa was covered with Italian brocade;
the chair on which I sat was in petit point. The room was beautiful, opulent without
garishness and original without affectation; yet to me it lacked something and while I
praised with my lips I asked myself why I so much preferred the rather shabby chintz
of the despised suite, the Victorian water-colours that I had known so long, and the
ridiculous Dresden china" that had adorned the chimney piece. I wondered what it
was that I missed in all these rooms that the decorators were turning out with a
profitable industry. Was it heart? But Mrs. Tower looked about her happily.
"Don`t you like my alabaster lamps?" she said. "They give such a soft light."
"Personally I have a weakness for a light that you can see by," I smiled.
"It`s so difficult to combine that with a light that you can`t be too much seen by,"
laughed Mrs. Tower.
I had no notion what her age was. When I was quite a young man she was a married
woman a good deal older than I, but now she treated me as her contemporary. She
constantly said that she made no secret of her age, which was forty, and then added
with a smile that all women took five years off. She never sought to conceal the fact
that she dyed her hair (it was a very pretty brown with reddish tints), and she said she
did this because hair was hideous while it was going grey; as soon as hers was white
she would cease to dye it.
"Then they`ll say what a young face I have."
Meanwhile it was painted, though with discretion, and her eyes owed not a little of
their vivacity to art. She was a handsome woman, exquisitely gowned, and in the
sombre glow of the alabaster lamps did not look a day more than the forty she gave
herself.
"It is only at my dressing-table that I can suffer the naked brightness of a thirty-twocandle electric bulb," she added with smiling cynicism. "There. I need it to tell me
first the hideous truth and then to enable me to take the necessary steps to correct it."
We gossiped pleasantly about our common friends and Mrs. Tower brought me up to
date in the scandal of the day. After roughing it here and there it was very agreeable
to sit in a comfortable chair, the fire burning brightly on the hearth, charming teathings set out on a charming table, and talk with this amusing, attractive woman. She
treated me as a prodigal returned from his husks and was disposed to make much of
me. She prided herself on her dinner-parties; she took no less trouble to have her
guests suitably assorted than to give them excellent food; and there were few persons
who did not look upon it as a treat to be bidden to one of them. Now she fixed a date
and asked me whom 1 would like to meet.
"There`s only one thing I must tell you. If Jane Fowler is still here I shall have to put
it off."
"Who is Jane Fowler?" I asked.
Mrs. Tower gave a rueful smile.
"Jane Fowler is my cross."
"Oh!"
"Do you remember a photograph that I used to have on the piano before I had my
room done of a woman in a tight dress with tight sleeves and a gold locket, with her
hair drawn back from a broad forehead and her ears showing and spectacles on a
rather blunt nose? Well, that was Jane Fowler."
"You had so many photographs about the room in your unregenerate days," I said,
vaguely.
"It makes me shudder to think of them. I`ve made them into a huge brown-paper
parcel and hidden them in an attic."
"Well, who is Jane Fowler?" I asked again, smiling.
"She`s my sister-in-law. She was my husband`s sister and she married a
manufacturer in the north. She` been a widow for many years, and she`s very wellto-do."
"And why is she your cross?"
"She`s worthy, she`s dowdy, she`s provincial. She looks twenty years older than I do
and she`s quite capable of telling anyone she meets that we were at school together.
She has an overwhelming sense of family affection, and because I am her only living
connection she`s devoted to me. When she comes to London it never occurs to her
that she should stay anywhere but here - she thinks it would hurt my feelings - and
she`ll pay me visits of three or four weeks. We sit here and she knits and reads. And
sometimes she insists on taking me to dine at Claridge`s and she looks like a funny
old charwoman and everyone I particularly don`t want to be seen by is sitting at the
next table. When we are driving home she says she loves giving me a little treat.
With her own hands she makes me tea-cozies that I am forced to use when she is
here and doilies and centrepieces for the dining-room table."
Mrs. Tower paused to take breath.
"I should have thought a woman of your tact would find a way to deal with a
situation like that."
"Ah, but don`t you see, I haven`t a chance. She`s so immeasurably kind. She has a
heart of gold. She bores me to death, but I wouldn`t for anything let her suspect it."
"And when does she arrive?"
"To-morrow."
But the answer was hardly out of Mrs. Tower`s mouth when the bell rang. There
were sounds in the hall of a slight commotion and in a minute or two the butler
ushered in an elderly lady.
"Mrs. Fowler," he announced.
"Jane!" cried Mrs. Tower, springing to her feet "I wasn`t expecting you to-day."
"So your butler has just told me. I certainly said today in my letter."
Mrs. Tower recovered her wits-.
"Well, it doesn`t matter. I`m very glad to see you whenever you come. Fortunately
I`m doing nothing this evening."
"You mustn`t let me give you any trouble. If I can have a boiled egg for my dinner
that`s all I shall want."
A faint grimace for a moment distorted Mrs. Tower`s handsome features. A boiled
egg!
"Oh, I think we can do a little better than that."
I chuckled inwardly when I recollected that the two ladies were contemporaries. Mrs.
Fowler looked a good fifty-five. She was a rather big woman; she wore a black straw
hat with a wide brim, and from it a black lace veil hung over her shoulders, a cloak
that oddly combined severity with fussiness, a long black dress, voluminous as
though she wore several petticoats under it, and stout boots. She was evidently shortsighted, for she looked at you through large gold-rimmed spectacles.
"Won`t you have a cup of tea?" asked Mrs. Tower.
"If it wouldn`t be too much trouble. I`ll take off my mantle."
She began by stripping her hands of the black gloves she wore, and then took off her
cloak. Round her neck was a solid gold chain from which hung a large gold locket in
which I felt certain was photograph of her deceased husband. Then she took off her
hat and placed it neatly with her gloves and cloak on the sofa corner. Mrs. Tower
pursed her lips. Certainly those garments did not go very well with the austere but
sumptuous beauty of Mrs. Tower`s redecorated drawing-room. I wonded where on
earth Mrs. Fowler had found the extraordinary clothes she wore. They were not old
and the materials were expensive. It was astounding to think that dressmakers still
made things that had not been worn for a quarter of a century. Mrs. Fowler`s grey
hair was very plainly done, showing all her forehead and her ears, with a parting in
the middle. It had evidently never known the tongs of Monsieur Marcel. Now her
eyes fell on the tea-table with its teapot of Georgian silver and its cups in old
Worcester.
"What have you done with the tea-cozy I gave you last time I came up, Marion?" she
asked. "Don`t you use it?"
"Yes, I use it every day, Jane," answered Mrs. Tower glibly. "Unfortunately we had
an accident with it a, little while ago. It got burnt."
"But the last one I gave you got burnt."
"I`m afraid you`ll think us very careless."
"It doesn`t really matter," smiled Mrs. Fowler. "I shall enjoy making you another. I`ll
go to Liberty`s to-morrow and buy some silks."
Mrs. Tower kept her face bravely.
"I don`t deserve it, you know. Doesn`t your vicar`s wife need one?"
"Oh, I`ve just made her one," said Mrs. Fowler brightly.
I noticed that when she smiled she showed white, small and regular teeth. They were
a real, beauty. Her smile was certainly very sweet.
But I felt it high time for me to leave the two ladies to themselves, so I took my
leave.
Early next morning Mrs. Tower rang me up, and I heard at once from her voice that
she was in high spirits.
"I`ve got the most wonderful news for you," she said. "Jane is going to be married."
"Nonsense."
"Her fiance is coining to dine here to-night to be introduced to me, and I want you to
come too."
"Oh, but I shall be in the way."
"No, you won`t. Jane suggested herself that I should ask you. Do come."
She was bubbling over with laughter.
"Who is he?"
"I don`t know. She tells me he`s an architect. Can you imagine the sort of man Jane
would marry?"
I had nothing to do and I could trust Mrs. Tower to give me a good dinner.
When I arrived Mrs. Tower, very splendid in a tea-gown a little too young for her,
was alone.
"Jane is putting the finishing touches to her appearance. I`m longing for you to see
her. She`s all in a flutter. She says he adores her. His name is Gilbert and when she
speaks of him her voice gets all funny and tremulous. It makes me want to laugh."
"I wonder what he`s like."
"Oh, I`m sure I know. Very big and massive, with a bald head and an immense gold
chain across an immense tummy. A large, fat, clean-shaven, red face and a booming
voice."
Mrs. Fowler came in. She wore a very stiff black silk dress with a wide skirt and a
train. At the neck it was cut into a timid V and the sleeves came down to the elbows.
She wore a necklace of diamonds set in silver. She carried in her hands a long pair of
black gloves and a fan of black ostrich feathers. She managed (as so few people do)
to look exactly what she was. You could never have thought her anything in the
world but the respect-able relict of a north-country manufacturer of ample means.
"You`ve really got quite a pretty neck, Jane," said Mrs. Tower with a kindly smile.
It was indeed astonishingly young when you compared it with her weather-beaten
face. It was smooth and unlined and the skin was white. And I noticed then that her
head was very well placed on her shoulders.
"Has Marion told you my news?" - she said, turning to me with that really charming
smile of hers as if we were already old friends.
"I must congratulate you," I said.
"Wait to do that till you`ve seen my young man."
"I think it`s too sweet to hear you talk of your young man," smiled Mrs. Tower.
Mrs. Fowler`s eyes certainly twinkled behind her preposterous spectacles.
"Don`t expect anyone too old. You wouldn`t like me to marry a decrepit old
gentleman with one foot in the grave, would you?"
This was the only warning she gave us. Indeed there was no time for any further
discussion, for the butler flung open the door and in a loud voice announced:
"Mr. Gilbert Napier."
There entered a youth in a very well-cut dinner jacket. He was slight, not very tall,
with fair hair in which there was a hint of a natural wave, clean-shaven and blueeyed. He was not particularly good-looking, but he had a pleasant, amiable face. In
ten years he would probably be wizened and sallow; but now, in extreme youth, he
was fresh, and clean and blooming. For he was certainly not more than twenty-four.
My first thought was that this was the son of Jane Fowler`s fiance (I had not known
he was a widower)come to say that his father was prevented from dining by a sudden
attack of gout. But his eyes fell immediately on Mrs. Fowler, his face lit up, and he
went towards her with both hands outstretched. Mrs. Fowler gave him hers, a demure
smile on her lips, and turned to her sister-in-law.
"This is my young man, Marion," she said.
He held out his hand.
"I hope you`ll like me, Mrs. Tower," he said. "Jane tells me you`re the only relation
she has in the world."
Mrs. Tower`s face was wonderful to behold. I saw then to admiration how bravely
good breeding and social usage could combat the instincts of the natural woman. For
the astonishment and then the dismay that for an instant she could not conceal were
quickly driven away, and her face assumed an expression of affable welcome. But
she was evidently at a loss for words. It was not unnatural if Gilbert felt a certain
embarrassment, and I was too busy preventing myself from laughing to think of
anything to say. Mrs. Fowler alone kept perfectly calm.
"I know you`ll like him, Marion. There`s no one enjoys good food more than he
does. She turned to the young man. "Marion` s dinners are famous. "I know," he
beamed.
Mrs. Tower made some quick rejoinder and we went downstairs. I shall not soon
forget the exquisite comedy of that meal. Mrs. Tower could not make up her mind
whether the pair of them were playing a practical joke on her or whether Jane by
wilfully concealing her fiance`s age had hoped to make her look foolish. But then
Jane never jested and she was incapable of doing a malicious thing. Mrs. Tower was
amazed exasperated and perplexed. But she had recovered herself-control, and for
nothing would she have forgotten that she was a perfect hostess whose duty it was to
make her party go. She talked vivaciously; but I wondered if Gilbert Napier saw how
hard and vindictive was the expression of her eyes behind the mask of friendliness
that she turned to him. She was measuring him. She was seeking to delve into the
secret of his soul. I could see that she was in a passion, for under her rouge her
cheeks glowed with an angry red.
"You`ve got a very high colour, Marion," said Jane, looking at her amiably through
her great round spectacles.
"I dressed in a hurry. I daresay I put on too much rouge."
"Oh, is it rouge? I thought it was natural. Otherwise I shouldn`t have mentioned it."
She gave Gilbert a shy little smile. "You know, Marion and I were at school together.
You would never think it to look at us now, would you? But of course I`ve lived a
very quiet life."
I do not know what she meant by these remarks; it was almost incredible that she
made them in complete simplicity; but anyhow they goaded Mrs. Tower to such a
fury that she flung her own vanity to the winds. She smiled brightly.
"We shall neither of us see fifty again, Jane," she said.
If the observation was meant to discomfit the widow it failed.
"Gilbert says I mustn`t acknowledge to more than forty-nine for his sake," she
answered blandly.
Mrs. Tower`s hands trembled slightly, but she found a retort.
"There is of course a certain disparity of age between you," she smiled.
"Twenty-seven years," said Jane. "Do you think it`s too much? Gilbert says I`m very
young for my age. I told you I shouldn`t like to marry a man with one foot in the
grave."
I was really obliged to laugh, and Gilbert laughed too. His laughter was frank and
boyish. It looked as though he were amused at everything Jane said. But Mrs. Tower
was almost at the end of her tether, and I was afraid that unless relief came she would
for once forget that she was a woman of the world. 1 came to the rescue as best I
could.
"I suppose you`re very busy buying your trousseau," I said.
"No. I wanted to get my things from the dress-maker in Liverpool I`ve been to ever
since I was first married. But Gilbert won`t let me. He`s very masterful, and of
course he has wonderful taste."
She looked at him with a little affectionate smile, demurely, as though she were a girl
of seventeen.
Mrs. Tower went quite pale under her make-up.
"We`re going to Italy for our honeymoon. Gilbert has never had a chance of studying
Renaissance architecture, and of course it`s important for an architect to see things
for himself. And we shall stop in Paris on the way and get my clothes there."
"Do you expect to be away long?"
"Gilbert has arranged with his office to stay away for six months. It will be such a
treat for him, won`t it? You see, he`s never had more than a fortnight`s holiday
before."
"Why not?" asked Mrs. Tower in a tone that no effort of will could prevent from
being icy.
"He`s never been able to afford it, poor dear."
"Ah!" said Mrs. Tower, and into the exclamation put volumes.
Coffee was served and the ladies went upstairs. Gilbert and I began to talk in the
desultory way in which men talk who have nothing whatever to say to one another;
but in two minutes a note was brought in to me by the butler. It was from Mrs. Tower
and ran as follows:
Come upstairs quickly and then go as soon as you can. Take him with you. Unless I
have it out with Jane at once I shall have a fit.
I told a facile lie.
"Mrs. Tower has a headache and wants to go to bed. I think if you don`t mind we`d
better clear out."
"Certainly," he answered.
We went upstairs and five minutes later were on the doorstep. I called a taxi and
offered the young man a lift.
"No, thanks," he answered." I`ll just walk to the corner and jump on a bus."
Mrs. Tower sprang to the fray as soon as she heard the front door close behind us.
"Are you crazy, Jane?" she cried. "Not more than most people who don`t habitually
live in a lunatic asylum, I trust," Jane answered blandly.
"May I ask why you`re going to marry this young man?" asked Mrs. Tower with
formidable politeness.
"Partly because he won`t take no for an answer. He`s asked me five times. I grew
positively tired of refusing him."
"And why do you think he`s so anxious to marry you?"
"I amuse him."
Mrs. Tower gave an exclamation of annoyance.
"He`s an unscrupulous rascal. I very nearly told him so to his face."
"You would have been wrong, and it wouldn`t have been very polite."
"He`s penniless and you`re rich. You can`t be such a besotted fool as not to see that
he`s marrying you for your money."
Jane remained perfectly composed. She observed her sister-in-law`s agitation with
detachment.
"I don`t think he is, you know,, she replied. "I think he s very fond of me."
"You`re an old woman, Jane."
"I`m the same age as you are, Marion," she smiled.
"I`ve never let myself go. I`m very young for my age. No one would think I was
more than forty. But even I wouldn`t dream of marrying a boy twenty years younger
than myself."
"Twenty-seven," corrected Jane.
"Do you mean to tell me that you can bring yourself to believe that it`s possible for a
young man to care for a woman old enough to be his mother?"
"I`ve lived very much in the country for many years. I daresay there`s a great deal
about human nature that 1 don`t know. They tell me there`s a man called Freud, an
Austrian, I believe -"
But Mrs. Tower interrupted her without any politeness at all.
"Don`t be ridiculous, Jane. It`s so undignified. It`s so ungraceful. I always thought
you were a sensible woman. Really you`re the last person I should ever have thought
likely to fall in love with a boy."
"But I`m not in love with him. I`ve told him that. Of course I like him very much or I
wouldn`t think of marrying him. I thought it only fair to tell him quite plainly what
my feelings were towards him."
Mrs. Tower gasped. The blood rushed to her head and her breathing oppressed her.
She had no fan, but she seized the evening paper and vigorously fanned herself with
it.
"If you`re not in love with him why do you want to marry him?"
"I`ve been a widow a very long time and I`ve led a very quiet life. I thought I`d like a
change."
"If you want to marry just to be married why don`t you marry a man of your own
age?"
"No man of my own age has asked me five times. In fact no man of my own age has
asked me at all."
Jane chuckled as she answered. It drove Mrs. Tower to the final pitch of frenzy.
"Don`t laugh, Jane. I won`t have it. I don`t think you can be right in your mind. It`s
dreadful."
It was altogether too much for her and she burst into tears. She knew that at her age it
was fatal to cry; her eyes would be swollen for twenty-four hours and she would look
a sight. But there was no help for it. She wept. Jane remained perfectly calm. She
looked at Marion through her large spectacles and reflectively smoothed the lap of
her black silk dress.
"You`re going to be so dreadfully unhappy," Mrs. Tower sobbed, dabbing her eyes
cautiously in the hope that the black on her lashes would not smudge.
"I don`t think so, you know," Jane answered in those equable, mild tones of hers, as
if there were a little smile behind the words. "We`ve-talked it over very thoroughly. I
always think I`m a very easy person to live with. I think I shall make Gilbert very
happy and comfortable. He`s never had anyone to look after him properly. We`re
only marrying after mature consideration. And we`ve decid ed that if either of us
wants his liberty the other will place no obstacles in the way of his getting it."
Mrs. Tower had by now recovered herself sufficiently to make a cutting remark.
"How much has he persuaded you to settle on him?"
"I wanted to settle a thousand a year on him, but he wouldn`t hear of it. He was quite
upset when I made the suggestion. He says he can earn quite enough for his own
needs."
"He`s more cunning than I thought," said Mrs. Tower acidly.
Jane paused a little and looked at her sister-in-law with kindly but resolute eyes.
"You see, my dear, it`s different for you," she said. "You`ve never been so very much
a widow, have you?"
Mrs. Tower leaked at her. She blushed a little. She even felt slightly uncomfortable.
But of course Jane was much too simple to intend an innuendo. Mrs. Tower gathered
herself together with dignity. "I`m so upset that I really must go to bed," she said.
`We`ll resume the conversation to-morrow morning."
"I`m afraid that won`t be very convenient, dear. Gilbert and I are going to get the
licence to-morrow morning."
Mrs. Tower threw up her hands in a gesture of dismay, hut she found nothing more to
say.
The marriage took place at a registrar`s office. Mrs. Tower and I were the witnesses.
Gilbert in a smart blue suit looked absurdly young, and he was obviously nervous. It
is a trying moment for any man. But Jane kept her admirable composure. She might
have been in the habit of marrying as frequently as a woman of fashion. Only a slight
colour on her cheeks suggested that beneath her calm was some faint excitement. It
is a thrilling moment for any woman. She wore a very full dress of silver grey velvet,
in the cut of which I recognised the hand of the dressmaker in Liverpool (evidently a
widow of unimpeachable character), who had made her gowns for so many years;
but she had so far succumbed to the frivolity of the occasion as to wear a large
picture hat covered with blue ostrich feathers. Her gold-rimmed spectacles made it
extra ordinarily grotesque. When the ceremony was over the registrar (somewhat
taken aback, I thought, by the difference of age between the pair he was marrying)
shook hands with her, tendering his strictly official congratulations; and the
bridegroom, blushing slightly, kissed her. Mrs. Tower, resigned but implacable,
kissed her; and then the bride looked at me expectantly. It was evidently fitting that I
should kiss her too. I did. I confess that I felt, a little shy as we walked out of the
registrar`s office past loungers who waited cynically to see the bridal pairs, and it
was with relief that I stepped into Mrs. Tower`s car. We drove to Victoria Station, for
the happy couple were to go over to Paris by the two o`clock train, and Jane had
insisted that the wedding-breakfast should be eaten at the station restaurant. She said
it always made her nervous not to be on the platform in good time. Mrs. Tower,
present only from a strong sense of family duty, was able to do little to make the
party go of well; she ate nothing (for which Icould not blame her, since food was
execrable, and anyway hate champagne at luncheon) and talked in a strained voice.
But Jane went through the menu conscientiously.
"I always think one should make a hearty meal before starting out on a journey," she
said.
We saw them off, and I drove Mrs. Tower back to her house.
"How long do you give it?" she said. "Six months?"
"Let`s hope for the best," I smiled.
"Don`t be so absurd. There can be no best. You don`t think he`s marrying her for
anything but her money, do you? Of course it can`t last. My only hope is that she
won`t have to go through as much suffering as she deserves."
I laughed. The charitable words were spoken in such a tone as to leave me in small
doubt of Mrs. Tower`s meaning.
"Well, if it doesn`t last you`ll have the consolation of saying `I told you so,`" I said.
"I promise you I`ll never do that."
"Then you`ll have the satisfaction of congratulating yourself on your self-control in
not saying `I told you so.`"
"She`s old and dowdy and dull." "Are you sure she`s dull?" I said. "It`s true she
doesn`t say very much, but when she says anything it`s very much to the point."
"I`ve never heard her make a joke in my life."
I was once more in the Far East when Gilbert and Jane returned from their
honeymoon, and this time I remained away for nearly two years. Mrs. Tower was a
bad correspondent and though I sent her an occasional picture-postcard I received no
news from her. But I met her within a week of my return to London; I was dining out
and found that I was seated next to her. It was an immense party - I think we were
four-and-twenty like the blackbirds in the pie - and, arriving somewhat late, I was too
confused by the crowd in which I found myself to notice who was there. But when
we sat down, looking round the long table I saw that a good many of my fellowguests were well known to the public from their photographs in the illustrated papers.
Our hostess had a weakness for the persons technically known as celebrities, and this
was an unusually brilliant gathering. When Mrs. Tower and I had exchanged the
conventional remarks that two people make when they have not seen one another for
a couple of years I asked about Jane.
"She`s very well," said Mrs. Tower with a certain dryness.
"How has the marriage turned out?"
Mrs. Tower paused a little and took a salted almond from the dish in front of her.
"It appears to be quite a success."
"You were wrong, then?"
"I said it wouldn`t last and I still say it won`t last. It`s contrary to human nature."
"Is she happy?"
"They`re both happy."
"I suppose you don`t see very much of them."
"At first I saw quite a lot of them. But now..." Mrs. Tower pursed her lips a little.
"Jane is becoming very grand."
"What do you mean?" I laughed.
"I think I should tell you that she`s here tonight."
"Here?"
I was startled. I looked round the table again. Our hostess was a delightful and an
entertaining woman, but I could not imagine that she would be likely to invite to a
dinner such as this the elderly and dowdy wife of an obscure; architect. Mrs. Tower
saw my perplexity and was shrewd enough to see what was in my mind. She smiled
thinly.
"Look on the left of our host."
I looked. Oddly enough the woman who sat there had by her fantastic appearance
attracted my attention the moment I was ushered into the crowded drawing-room. I
thought I noticed a gleam of recognition in her eye, but to the best of my belief I had
never seen her before. She was not a young woman, for her hair was iron-grey; it was
cut very short and clustered thickly round her well-shaped head in tight curls. She
made no attempt at youth, for she was conspicuous in that gathering by using neither
lipstick, rouge nor powder. Her face, not a particularly handsome one, was red and
weather-beaten; but because it owed nothing to artifice had a naturalness that was
very pleasing. It contrasted oddly with the whiteness of her shoulders. They were
really magnificent. A woman of thirty might have been proud of them. But her dress
was extraordinary. I had not seen often anything more audacious. It was cut very low,
with short skirts, which were then the fashion, in black and yellow; it had almost the
effect of fancy-dress and yet so became her that though on anyone else it would have
been outrageous, on her it had the inevitable simplicity of nature. And to complete
the impression of an eccentricity in which there was no pose and of an extravagance
in which there was no ostentation she wore, attached by a broad black ribbon, a
single eyeglass.
"You`re not going to tell me that is your sister-in-law," I gasped.
"That is Jane Napier," said Mrs. Tower icily.
At that moment she was speaking. Her host was turned towards her with an
anticipatory smile. A bald-ish white-haired man, with a sharp, intelligent face, who
sat on her left, was leaning forward eagerly, and the couple who sat opposite, ceasing
to talk with one another, listened intently. She said her say and they all, with a
sudden movement, threw themselves back in their chairs and burst into vociferous
laughter. From the other side of the table a man addressed Mrs. Tower: I recognised a
famous statesman.
"Your sister-in-law has made another joke, Mrs. Tower," he said.
Mrs. Tower smiled.
"She`s priceless, isn`t she?"
"Let me have a long drink of champagne and then for heaven`s sake tell me all about
it," I said.
Well, this is how I gathered it had all happened. At the beginning of their honeymoon
Gilbert took Jane to various dressmakers in Paris and he made no objection to her
choosing a number of gowns after her own heart; but he persuaded her to have a
`frock` or two made according to his own design. It appeared that he had a knack for
that kind of work. He engaged a smart French maid. Jane had never had such a thing
before. She did her own mending and when she wanted `doing up` was in the habit
of ringing for the housemaid. The dresses Gilbert had devised were very different
from anything she had worn before; but he had been careful not to go too far too
quickly, and because it pleased him she persuaded herself, though not without
misgivings, to wear them in preference to those she had chosen herself. Of course
she could not wear them with the voluminous petticoats she had been in the habit of
using, and these, though it cost her an anxious moment, she discarded.
"Now, if you please," said Mrs. Tower, with something very like a sniff of
disapproval, "she wears nothing but thin silk tights. It`s a wonder to me she doesn`t
catch her death of cold at her age."
Gilbert and the French maid taught her how to wear her clothes, and, unexpectedly
enough, she was very quick at learning. The French maid was in raptures over
Madame`s arms and shoulders. It was a scandal not to show anything so fine.
"Wait a little, Alphonsine," said Gilbert. "The next lot of clothes I design for Madame
we`ll make the most of her."
The spectacles of course were dreadful. No one could look really well in goldrimmed spectacles. Gilbert tried some with tortoise-shell rims. He shook his head.
"They`d look all right on a girl," he said. "You`re too old to wear spectacles, Jane."
Suddenly he had an inspiration. "By George, I`ve got it. You must wear an eyeglass."
"Oh, Gilbert, I couldn`t."
She looked at him, and his excitement, the excitement of the artist, made her smile.
He was so sweet to her she wanted to do what she could to please him.
"I`ll try," she said.
When they went to an optician and, suited with the right size, she placed an eyeglass
jauntily in her eye Gilbert clapped his hands. There and then, before the astonished
shopman, he kissed her on both cheeks.
"You look wonderful," he cried.
So they went down to Italy and spent happy months studying Renaissance and
Baroque architecture. Jane not only grew accustomed to her changed appearance but
found she liked it. At first she was a little shy when she went into the dining-room of
a hotel and people turned round to stare at her - no one had ever raised an eyelid to
look at her before - but presently she found that the sensation was not disagreeable.
Ladies came up to her and asked her where she got her dress.
"Do you like it?" she answered demurely. "My husband designed it for me."
"I should like to copy it if you don`t mind."
Jane had certainly for many years lived a very quiet life, but she was by no means
lacking in the normal instincts of her sex. She had her answer ready.
"I`m so sorry, but my husband`s very particular and he won`t hear of anyone copying
my frocks. He wants me to be unique."
She had an idea that people would laugh when she said this, but they didn`t; they
merely answered:
"Oh, of course I quite understand. You are unique."
But she saw them making mental notes of what she wore, and for some reason this
quite `put her about.` For once in her life when she wasn`t wearing what everybody
else did, she reflected, she didn`t see why everybody else should want to wear what
she did.
"Gilbert," she said, quite sharply for her, "next time you`re designing dresses for me I
wish you`d design things that people can`t copy."
"The only way to do that is to design things that only you can wear."
"Can`t you do that?"
"Yes, if you`ll do something for me."
"What is it?"
"Cut off your hair."
I think this was the first time that Jane jibbed. Her hair was long and thick, and as a
girl she had been quite vain of it; to cut it off was a very drastic proceeding. This
really was burning her boats behind her. In her case it was not the first step that cost
so much, it was the last; but she took it ("I know Marion will think me a perfect fool,
and I shall never be able to go to Liverpool again," she said), and when they passed
through Paris on their way home Gilbert led her (she felt quite sick, her heart was
beating so fast) to the best hairdresser in the world. She came out of his shop with a
jaunty, saucy, impudent head of crisp grey curls. Pygmalion had finished his fantastic
masterpiece: Galatea was come to life.
"Yes," I said, "but that isn`t enough to explain why Jane is here to-night amid this
crowd of duchesses, cabinet ministers and such like; nor why she is sitting on one
side of her host with an admiral of the Fleet on I the other."
"Jane is a humorist," said Mrs. Tower. "Didn`t you see them all laughing at what she
said?"
There was no doubt now of the bitterness in Mrs. Tower`s heart.
"When Jane wrote and told me they were back from their honeymoon I thought I
must ask them both to dinner. I didn`t much like the idea, but I felt it had to be done.
I knew the party would be deadly and I wasn`t going to sacrifice any of the people
who really mattered. On the other hand I didn`t want Jane to think I hadn`t any nice
friends. You know I never have more than eight, but on this occasion I thought it
would make things go better if I had twelve. I`d been too busy to see Jane until the
evening of the party. She kept us all waiting a little - that was Gilbert`s cleverness and at last she sailed in. You could have knocked me down with a feather. She made
the rest of the women look dowdy and provincial. She made me feel like a painted
old trollop."
Mrs. Tower drank a little champagne.
"I wish I could describe the frock to you. It would have been quite impossible on
anyone else; on her it was perfect. And the eyeglass! I`d known her for thirty-five
years and I`d never seen her without spectacles."
"But you knew she had a good figure."
"How should I? I`d never seen her except in the clothes you first saw her in. Did you
think she had a good figure? She seemed not to be Unconscious of the sensation she
made but to take it as a matter of course. I thought of my dinner and I heaved a sigh
of relief. Even if she was a little heavy in hand, with that appearance it didn`t so very
much matter. She was sitting at the other end of the table and I heard a good deal of
laughter; I was glad to think that the other people were playing up well; but after
dinner I was a good deal taken aback when no less than three men came up to me and
told me that my sister-in-law was priceless, and did I think she would allow them to
call on her. I didn`t quite know whether I was standing on my head or my heels.
Twenty-four hours later our hostess of to-night rang me up and said she had heard
my sister-in-law was in London and she was priceless and would I ask her to
luncheon to meet her. She has an infallible instinct, that woman: in a month everyone
was talking about Jane. I am here to-night, not because I`ve known our hostess for
twenty years and have asked her to dinner a hundred times, but because I`m Jane`s
sister-in-law."
Poor Mrs. Tower. The position was galling, and though I could not help being
amused, for the tables were turned on her with a vengeance, I felt that she deserved
my sympathy.
"People never can resist those who make them laugh," 1 said, trying to console her.
"She never makes me laugh."
Once more from the top of the table I heard a guffaw and guessed that Jane had said
another amusing thing.
"Do you mean to say that you are the only person who doesn`t think her funny?" I
asked, smiling.
"Had it struck you that she was a humorist?"
"I`m bound to say it hadn`t."
"She says just the same things as she`s said for the last thirty-five years. I laugh when
I see every-one else does because I don`t want to seem a perfect fool, but I am not
amused."
"Like Queen Victoria," I said.
It was a foolish jest and Mrs. Tower was quite right sharply to tell me so. I tried
another tack.
"Is Gilbert here?" I asked, looking down the table.
"Gilbert was asked because she won`t go out without him, but to-night he`s at a
dinner of the Architects` Institute or whatever it`s called."
"I`m dying to renew my acquaintance with her."
"Go and talk to her after dinner. She`ll ask you to her Tuesdays."
"Her Tuesdays?"
"She`s at home every Tuesday evening. You`ll meet there everyone you ever heard
of. They`re the best parties in London. She`s done in one year what I`ve failed to do
in twenty."
"But what you tell me is really miraculous. How has it been done?"
Mrs. Tower shrugged her handsome but adipose shoulders.
"I shall be glad if you`ll tell me," she replied.
After dinner I tried to make my way to the sofa on which Jane was sitting, but I was
intercepted and it was not till a little later that my hostess came up to me and said:
"I must introduce you to the star of my party. Do you know Jane Napier? She`s
priceless. She`s much more amusing than your comedies."
I was taken up to the sofa. The admiral who had been sitting beside her at dinner was
with her still, showed no sign of moving, and Jane, shaking hands with me,
introduced me to him.
"Do you know Sir Reginald Frobisher?"
We began to chat. It was the same Jane as I had known before, perfectly simple,
homely and unaffected, but her fantastic appearance certainly gave a peculiar savour
to what she said. Suddenly I found myself shaking with laughter. She had made a
remark, sensible and to the point, but not in the least witty, which her manner of
saying and the blind look she gave me through her eyeglass made perfectly
irresistible. I felt light-hearted and buoyant. When I left her she said to me:
"If you`ve got nothing better to do, come and see us on Tuesday evening. Gilbert will
be so glad to see you."
"When he`s been a month in London he`ll know that he can have nothing better to
do," said the admiral.
So, on Tuesday but rather late, I went to Jane`s. I confess I was a little surprised at
the company. It was quite a remarkable collection of writers, painters and politicians,
actors, great ladies and great beauties; Mrs. Tower was right, it was a grand party; I
had seen nothing like it in London since Stafford House was sold. No particular
entertainment was provided. The refreshments were adequate without being
luxurious. Jane in her quiet way seemed to be enjoying herself; I could not see that
she took a great deal of trouble with her guests, but they seemed to like being there,
and the gay, pleasant party did not break up till two in the morning. After that I saw
much of her. I not only went often to her house, but seldom went out to luncheon or
to dinner without meeting her. I am an amateur of humour and I sought to discover in
what lay her peculiar gift. It was impossible to repeat anything she said, for the fun,
like certain wines, would not travel. She had no gift for epigram. She never made a
brilliant repartee. There was no malice in her remarks not sting in her rejoinders.
There are those who think that impropriety, rather than brevity, is the soul of wit; but
she never said a thing that could have brought a blush to a Victorian cheek. I think
her humour was unconscious and I am sure it was unpremeditated. It flew like a
butterfly from flower to flower, obedient only to its own caprice and pursuivant of
neither method nor intention. It depended on the way she spoke and on the way she
looked. Its subtlety gained by the flaunting and extravagant appearance that Gilbert
had achieved for her; but her appearance was only an element in it. Now of course
she was the fashion and people laughed if she but opened her mouth. They no longer
wondered that Gilbert had married a wife so much older than himself. They saw that
Jane was a woman with whom age did not count. They thought him a devilish lucky
young fellow. The admiral quoted Shakespeare to me: "Age cannot wither her, nor
custom stale her infinite variety." Gilbert was delighted with her success. As I came
to know him better I grew to like him. It was quite evident that he was neither a
rascal nor a fortune-hunter. He was not only immensely proud of Jane but genuinely
devoted to her. His kindness to her was touching. He was a very unselfish and sweettempered young man.
"Well, what do you think of Jane now?" he said to me once, with boyish triumph.
"I don`t know which of you is more wonderful," I said. "You or she."
"Oh, I`m nothing."
"Nonsense. You don`t think I`m such a fool as not to see that it`s you, and you only,
who`ve made Jane what she is."
"My only merit is that I saw what was there when it wasn`t obvious to the naked eye,
he answered.
"I can understand your seeing that she had in her the possibility of that remarkable
appearance, but how in the world have you made her into a humorist?"
"But I always thought the things she said a perfect scream. She was always a
humorist."
"You`re the only person who ever thought so."
Mrs. Tower, not without magnanimity, acknowledged that she had been mistaken in
Gilbert. She grew quite attached to him. But notwithstanding appearances she never
faltered in her opinion that the marriage could not last. I was obliged to laugh at her.
"Why, I`ve never seen such a devoted couple," I said.
"Gilbert is twenty-seven now. It`s just the time for a pretty girl to come along. Did
you notice the other evening at Jane`s that pretty little niece of Sir Reginald`s? I
thought Jane was looking at them both with a good deal of attention, and I wondered
to myself."
"I don`t believe Jane fears the rivalry of any gir under the sun."
"Wait and see," said Mrs. Tower.
"You gave it six months."
"Well, now I give it three years."
When anyone is very positive in an opinion it is only human nature to wish him
proved wrong. Mrs. Tower was really too cocksure. But such satisfaction was not
mine, for the end that she had always and confidently predicted to the ill-assorted
match did in point of fact come. Still, the fate seldom give us what we want in the
way we wan it, and though Mrs. Tower could flatter herself that she had been right, I
think after all she would sooner have been wrong. For things did`not happen at all in
the way she expected.
One day I received an urgent message from her and fortunately went to see her at
once. When I was shown into the room Mrs. Tower rose from her chair and came
towards me with the stealthy swiftness of a leopard stalking his prey. I saw that she
was excited.
"Jane and Gilbert have separated," she said.
"Not really? Well, you were right after all."
Mrs. Tower looked at me with an expression I could not understand.
"Poor Jane," I muttered.
"Poor Jane!" she repeated, but in tones of such derision that I was dumbfounded.
She found some difficulty in telling me exactly what had occurred.
Gilbert had left her a moment before she leaped to the telephone to summon me.
When he entered the room, pale and distraught, she saw at once that something
terrible had happened. She knew what he was going to say before he said it.
"Marion, Jane has left me."
She gave him a little smile and took his hand.
"I knew you`d behave like a gentleman. It would have been dreadful for her for
people to think that you had left her."
"I`ve come to you because I knew I could count on your sympathy."
"Oh, I don`t blame you, Gilbert," said Mrs. Tower, very kindly. "It was bound to
happen."
He sighed.
"I suppose so. I couldn`t hope to keep her always. She was too wonderful and I`m a
perfectly commonplace fellow."
Mrs. Tower patted his hand. He was really behaving beautifully.
"And what is going to happen now?"
"Well, she`s going to divorce me."
"Jane always said she`d put no obstacle in your way if ever you wanted to marry a
girl."
"You don`t think it`s likely I should ever be willing to marry anyone else after being
Jane`s husband," he answered.
Mrs. Tower was puzzled.
"Of course you mean that you`ve left Jane."
"I? That`s the last thing I should ever do."
"Then why is she divorcing you?"
"She`s going to marry Sir Reginald Frobisher as soon as the decree is made
absolute."
Mrs. Tower positively screamed. Then she felt so faint that she had to get her
smelling salts.
"After all you`ve done for her?"
"I`ve done nothing for her."
"Do you mean to say you`re going to allow yourself to be made use of like that?"
"We arranged before we married that if either of us wanted his liberty the other
should put no hindrance in the way."
"But that was done on your account. Because you were twenty-seven years younger
than she was."
"Well, it`s come in very useful for her," he answered bitterly.
Mrs. Tower expostulated, argued, and reasoned; but Gilbert insisted that no rules
applied to Jane, and he must do exactly what she wanted. He left Mrs. Tower
prostrate. It relieved her a good deal to give me a full account of this interview. It
pleased her to see that I was as surprised as herself, and if I was not so indignant with
Jane as she was she ascribed that to the criminal lack of morality incident to my sex.
She was still in a state of extreme agitation when the door was opened and the butler
showed in - Jane herself. She was dressed in black and white as no doubt befitted her
slightly ambiguous position, but in a dress so original and fantastic, in a hat so
striking, that I positively gasped at the sight of her. But she was as ever bland and
collected. She came forward to kiss Mrs. Tower, but Mrs. Tower withdrew herself
with icy dignity.
"Gilbert has been here," she said.
"Yes, I know," smiled Jane. "I told him to come and see you. I`m going to Paris tonight and I want you to be very kind to him while I am away. I`m afraid just at first
he`ll be rather lonely and I shall feel more comfortable if I can count on your keeping
an eye on him."
Mrs. Tower clasped her hands.
"Gilbert has just told me something that I can hardly bring myself to believe. He tells
me that you`re going to divorce him to marry Reginald Frobisher."
"Don`t you remember, before I married Gilbert." said you advised me to marry a man
of my own age. The admiral is fifty-three."
"But, Jane, you owe everything to Gilbert," said Mrs. Tower indignantly. "You
wouldn`t exist without him. Without him to design your clothes, you`ll be nothing."
"Oh, he`s promised to go on designing my clothes," Jane answered blandly.
"No woman could want a better husband. He`s always been kindness itself to you."
"Oh, I know he`s been sweet."
"How can you be so heartless?"
"But I was never in love with Gilbert," said Jane. "I always told him that. I`m
beginning to feel the need of the companionship of a man of my own age. I think
I`ve probably been married to Gilbert long enough. The young have no
conversation." She paused a little and gave us both a charming smile. "Of course I
shan`t lose sight of Gilbert. I`ve arranged that with Reginald. The admiral has a niece
that would just suit him. As soon as we`re married we`ll ask them to stay with us at
Malta -you know that the admiral is to have the Mediterranean Command - and I
shouldn`t be at all surprised if they fell in love with one another."
Mrs. Tower gave a little sniff.
"And have you arranged with the admiral that if you want your liberty neither should
put any hindrance in the way of the other?"
"I suggested it," Jane answered with composure. "But the admiral says he knows a
good thing when he sees it and he won`t want to marry anyone else, and if anyone
wants to marry me - he has eight twelve-inch guns on his flagship and he`ll discuss
the matter at short range." She gave us a look through her eyeglass which even the
fear of Mrs. Tower`s wrath could not prevent me from laughing at. "I think the
admiral`s a very passionate man."
Mrs. Tower indeed gave me an angry frown.
"I never thought you funny, Jane," she said, "I never understood why people laughed
at the things you said."
"I never thought I was funny myself, Marion," smiled Jane, showing her bright,
regular teeth. "I am glad to leave London before too many people come round to our
opinion."
"I wish you`d tell me the secret of your astonishing success," I said.
She turned to me with that bland, homely look I knew so well.
"You know, when I married Gilbert and settled in London and people began to laugh
at what I said no one was more surprised than I was. I`d said the same things for
thirty years and no one ever saw anything to laugh at. I thought it must be my clothes
or my bobbed hair or my eyeglass. Then I discovered it was because I spoke the
truth. It was so unusual that people thought it humorous. One of these days someone
else will discover the secret, and when people habitually tell the truth of course
there`ll be nothing funny in it."
"And why am I the only person not to think it funny?" asked Mrs. Tower.
Jane hesitated a little as though she were honestly searching for a satisfactory
explanation.
"Perhaps you don`t know the truth when you see it, Marion dear, she answered in her
mild good-natured way.
It certainly gave her the last word. I felt that Jane would always have the last word.
She was priceless.
Agatha Christie. Parker Pyne Investigates. (1934)
THE CASE OF THE DISCONTENTED HUSBAND
Undoubtedly one of Mr Parker Pyne's greatest assets was his sympathetic manner. It
was a manner that invited confidence. He was well acquainted with the kind of
paralysis that descended on clients as soon as they got inside his office. It was Mr
Pyne's task to pave the way for the necessary disclosures.
On this particular morning he sat facing a new client, a Mr Reginald Wade. Mr
Wade, he deduced at once, was the inarticulate type. The type that finds it hard to put
into words anything connected with the emotions.
He was a tall, broadly built man with mild, pleasant blue eyes and a well-tanned
complexion. He sat pulling absent-mindedly at a little mustache while he looked at
Mr Parker Pyne with all the pathos of a dumb animal.
"Saw your advertisement, you know," he jerked. "Thought I might as well come
along. Rum sort of show, but you never know, what?"
Mr Parker Pyne interpreted these cryptic remarks correctly. "When things go badly,
one is willing to take a chance," he suggested.
"A chance - any chance. Things are in a bad way with me, Mr Pyne. I don't know
what to do about it. Difficult, you know; damned difficult."
"That," said Mr Pyne, "is where I come in. I do know what to do! I am a specialist in
every kind of human trouble."
"Oh, I say - bit of a tall order, that!"
"Not really. Human troubles are easily classified into a few main heads. There is ill
health. There is boredom. There are wives who are in trouble over their husbands.
There are husbands -" he paused - "who are in trouble over their wives."
"Matter of fact, you've hit it. You've hit it absolutely."
"Tell me about it," said Mr Pyne.
"There's nothing much to tell. My wife wants me to give her a divorce so that she can
marry another chap."
"Very common indeed in these days. Now you, I gather, don't see eye to eye with her
in this business?"
"I'm fond of her," said Mr Wade simply. "You see - well, I'm fond of her."
A simple and somewhat tame statement, but if Mr Wade had said, "I adore her. I
worship the ground she walks on. I would cut myself into little pieces for her," he
could not have been more explicit to Mr Parker Pyne.
"All the same, you know," went on Mr Wade, "what can I do? I mean, a fellow's so
helpless. If she prefers this other fellow - well, one's got to play the game; stand aside
and all that."
"The proposal is that she should divorce you?"
"Of course. I couldn't let her be dragged through the divorce court."
Mr Pyne looked at him thoughtfully. "But you come to me? Why?"
The other laughed in a shamefaced manner. "I don't know. You see, I'm not a clever
chap. I can't think of things. I thought you might - well, suggest something. I've got
six months, you see. She agreed to that. If at the end of six months she is still of the
same mind - well, then, I get out. I thought you might give me a hint or two. At
present everything I do annoys her.
"You see, Mr Pyne, what it comes to is this: I'm not a clever chap! I like knocking
balls about. I like a round of golf and a good set of tennis. I'm no good at music and
art and such things. My wife's clever. She likes pictures and the opera and concerts,
and naturally she gets bored with me. This other fellow - nasty longhaired chap - he
knows all about these things. He can talk about them. I can't. In a way, I can
understand a clever, beautiful woman getting fed up with an ass like me."
Mr Parker Pyne groaned. "You have been married - how long?... Nine years? And I
suppose you have adopted that attitude from the start. Wrong, my dear sir;
disastrously wrong! Never adopt an apologetic attitude with a woman. She will take
you at your own valuation - and you deserve it. You should have gloried in your
athletic prowess. You should have spoken of art and music as 'all that nonsense my
wife likes.' You should have condoled with her on not being able to play games
better. The humble spirit, my dear sir, is a washout in matrimony! No woman can be
expected to stand up against it. No wonder your wife has been unable to last the
course."
Mr Wade was looking at him in bewilderment.
"Well," he said, "what do you think I ought to do?"
"That certainly is the question. Whatever you should have done nine years ago, it is
too late now. New tactics must be adopted. Have you ever had any affairs with other
women?"
"Certainly not."
"I should have said, perhaps, any light flirtations?"
"I never bothered about women much."
"A mistake. You must start now."
Mr Wade looked alarmed. "Oh, look here, I couldn't really. I mean -"
"You will be put to no trouble in the matter. One of my staff will be supplied for the
purpose. She will tell you what is required of you, and any attentions you pay her she
will, of course, understand to be merely a matter of business."
Mr Wade looked relieved. "That's better. But do you really think - I mean, it seems to
me that Iris will be keener to get rid of me than ever."
"You do not understand human nature, Mr Wade. Still less do you understand
feminine human nature. At the present moment you are, from the feminine point of
view, merely a waste product. Nobody wants you. What use has a woman for
something that no one wants? None whatever. But take another angle. Suppose your
wife discovers that you are looking forward to regaining your freedom as much as
she is?"
"Then she ought to be pleased."
"She ought to be, perhaps, but she will not be! Moreover, she will see that you have
attracted a fascinating young woman - a young woman who could pick and choose.
Immediately your stock goes up. Your wife knows that all her friends will say it was
you who tired of her and wished to marry a more attractive woman. That will annoy
her."
"You think so?"
"I am sure of it. You will no longer be 'poor dear old Reggie.' You will be 'that sly
dog Reggie.' All the difference in the world! Without relinquishing the other man,
she will doubtless try to win you back. You will not be won. You will sensible and
give to her all her arguments. 'Much better to part."Temperamentally unsuited.' You
realize that while what she said was true - that you had never understood her - it is
also true that she had never understood you. But we need not go into this now; you
will be given full instructions when the time comes."
Mr Wade seemed doubtful still. "You really think that this plan of yours will do the
trick?" he asked dubiously.
"I will not say I am absolutely sure of it," said Mr Parker Pyne cautiously. "There is a
bare possibility that your wife may be so overwhelmingly in love with this other man
that nothing you could say or do will affect her, but I consider that unlikely. She has
probably been driven into this affair through boredom - boredom with the
atmosphere of uncritical devotion and absolute fidelity with which you have most
unwisely surrounded her. If you follow my instructions, the chances are, I should say,
ninety-seven percent in your favor."
"Good enough," said Mr Wade. "I'll do it. By the way - er - how much?"
"My fee is two hundred guineas, payable in advance."
Mr Wade drew out a check book.
The grounds of Lorrimer Court were lovely in the afternoon sunshine. Iris Wade,
lying on a long chair, made a delicious spot of color. She was dressed in delicate
shades of mauve and by skillful make-up managed to look much younger than her
thirty-five years.
She was talking to her friend Mrs Massington, whom she always found sympathetic.
Both ladies were afflicted with athletic husbands who talked stocks and shares and
golf alternately.
"- and so one learns to live and let live," finished Iris.
"You're wonderful, darling," said Mrs Massington and added too quickly: "Tell me,
who is this girl?"
Iris raised a weary shoulder. "Don't ask me! Reggie found her. She's Reggie's little
friend! So amusing. You know he never looks at girls as a rule. He came to me and
hemmed and hawed, and finally said he wanted to ask this Miss de Sara down for the
weekend. Of course I laughed - I couldn't help it. Reggie, you know! Well, here she
is."
"Where did he meet her?"
"I don't know. He was very vague about it all."
"Perhaps he's known her some time."
"Oh, I don't think so," said Mrs Wade. "Of course," she went on, "I'm delighted simply delighted. I mean, it makes it so much easier for me, as things are. Because I
have been unhappy about Reggie; he's such a dear old thing. That's what I kept
saying to Sinclair - that it would hurt Reggie so. But he insisted that Reggie would
soon get over it; it looks as if he were right. Two days ago Reggie seemed
heartbroken - and now he wants this girl down! As I say, I'm amused. I like to see
Reggie enjoying himself. I fancy the poor fellow actually thought I might be jealous.
Such an absurd idea! 'Of course,' I said, 'have your friend down.' Poor Reggie - as
though a girl like that could ever care about him. She's just amusing herself."
"She's extremely attractive," said Mrs Massington. "Almost dangerously so, if you
know what I mean. The sort of girl who cares only for men. I don't feel, somehow,
she can be a really nice girl."
"Probably not," said Mrs Wade.
"She has marvelous clothes," said Mrs Massington.
"Almost too exotic, don't you think?"
"But very expensive."
"Opulent. She's too opulent-looking."
"Here they come," said Mrs Massington.
Madeleine de Sara and Reggie Wade were walking across the lawn. They were
laughing and talking together and seemed very happy. Madeleine flung herself into a
chair, tore off the bret she was wearing and ran her hands through her exquisitely
dark curls. She was undeniably beautiful.
"We've had such a marvelous afternoon!" she cried. "I'm terribly hot. I must be
looking too dreadful."
Reggie Wade started nervously at the sound of his cue. "You look - you look -" He
gave a little laugh. "I won't say it," he finished.
Madeleine's eyes met his. It was a glance of complete understanding on her part. Mrs
Massington noted it alertly.
"You should play golf," said Madeleine to her hostess. "You miss such a lot. Why
don't you take it up? I have a friend who did and became quite good, and she was a
lot older than you."
"I don't care for that sort of thing," said Iris coldly.
"Are you bad at games? How rotten for you! It makes one feel so out of things. But
really, Mrs Wade, coaching nowadays is so good that almost anyone can play fairly
well. I improved my tennis no end last summer. Of course I'm hopeless at golf."
"Nonsense!" said Reggie. "You only need coaching. Look how you were getting
those brassie shots this afternoon."
"Because you showed me how. You're a wonderful teacher. Lots of people simply
can't teach. But you've got the gift. It must be wonderful to be you - you can do
everything."
"Nonsense. I'm no good - no use whatever." Reggie was confused.
"You must be very proud of him," said Madeleine, turning to Mrs Wade. "How have
you managed to keep him all these years? You must have been very clever. Or have
you hidden him away?"
Her hostess made no reply. She picked up her book with a hand that trembled.
Reggie murmured something about changing, and went off.
"I do think it's so sweet of you to have me here," said Madeleine to her hostess.
"Some women are so suspicious of their husbands' friends. I do think jealousy is
absurd, don't you?"
"I do indeed. I should never dream of being jealous of Reggie."
"That's wonderful of you! Because anyone can see that he's a man who's frightfully
attractive to women. It was a shock to me when I heard he was married. Why do all
the attractive men get snapped up young?"
"I'm glad you find Reggie so attractive," said Mrs Wade.
"Well, he is, isn't he? So good-looking, and so frightfully good at games. And that
pretended indifference of his on women. That spurs us one, of course."
"I suppose you have a lot of men friends," said Mrs Wade.
"Oh, yes. I like men better than women. Women are never really nice to me. I can't
think why."
"Perhaps you are too nice to their husbands," said Mrs Massington with a tinkly
laugh.
"Well, one's sorry for people sometimes. So many nice men are tied to such dull
wives. You know, 'arty' women and highbrow women. Naturally, the men want
someone young and bright to talk to. I think the modern ideas of marriage and
divorce are so sensible. Start again while one is still young with someone who shares
one's tastes and ideas. It's better for everybody in the end. I mean, the highbrow
wives probably pick up some long-haired creature of their own type who satisfies
them. I think cutting your losses and starting again is a wise plan, don't you, Mrs
Wade?"
"Certainly."
A certain frostiness in the atmosphere seemed to penetrate Madeleine's
consciousness. She murmured something about changing for tea and left them.
"Detestable creatures these modern girls are," said Mrs Wade. "Not an idea in their
heads."
"She's got one idea in hers, Iris," said Mrs Massing ton. "That girl's in love with
Reggie."
"Nonsense!"
"She is. I saw the way she looked at him just now. She doesn't care a pin whether he's
married or not. She means to have him. Disgusting, I call it."
Mrs Wade was silent a moment, then she laughed uncertainly.
"After all," she said, "what does it matter?"
Presently Mrs Wade, too, went upstairs. Her husband was in his dressing room
changing. He was singing.
"Enjoyed yourself, dear?" said Mrs Wade.
"Oh, er - rather, yes."
"I'm glad. I want you to be happy."
"Yes, rather."
Acting a part was not Reggie Wade's strong point, but as it happened, the acute
embarrassment occasioned by his fancying he was doing so did just as well. He
avoided his wife's eye and jumped when she spoke to him. He felt ashamed; hated
the farce of it all. Nothing could have produced a better effect. He was the picture of
conscious guilt.
"How long have you known her?" asked Mrs Wade suddenly.
"Er - who?"
"Miss de Sara, of course."
"Well I don't quite know. I mean - oh some time."
"Really? You never mentioned her."
"Didn't I? I suppose I forgot."
"Forgot indeed!" said Mrs Wade. She departed with a whisk of mauve draperies.
After tea Mr Wade showed Miss de Sara the rose garden. They walked across the
lawn conscious of two pairs of eyes raking their backs.
"Look here." Safe out of sight in the rose garden, Mr Wade unburdened himself.
"Look here, I think we'll have to give this up. My wife looked at me just now as
though she hated me."
"Don't worry," said Madeleine. "It's quite all right."
"Do you think so? I mean, I don't want to put her against me. She said several nasty
things at tea."
"It's all right," said Madeleine again. "You're doing splendidly."
"Do you really think so?"
"Yes." In a lower voice she went on: "Your wife is walking round the corner of the
terrace. She wants to see what we're doing. You'd better kiss me."
"Oh!" said Mr Wade nervously. "Must I? I mean -"
"Kiss me!" said Madeleine fiercely.
Mr Wade kissed her. Any lack of elan in the performance was remedied by
Madeleine. She flung her arms round him. Mr Wade staggered.
"Oh!" he said.
"Did you hate it very much?" said Madeleine.
"No, of course not," said Mr Wade gallantly. "It - it just took me by surprise." He
added wistfully: "Have we been in the rose garden long enough, do you think?"
"I think so," said Madeleine. "We've put in a bit of good work here."
They returned to the lawn. Mrs Massington informed them that Mrs Wade had gone
to lie down. Later, Mr Wade joined Madeleine with a perturbed face.
"She's in an awful state - hysterics."
"Good."
"She saw me kissing you."
"Well, we meant her to."
"I know, but I couldn't say that, could I? I didn't know what to say. I said it had just just - well, happened."
"Excellent."
"She said you were scheming to marry me and that you were no better than you
should be. That upset me - it seemed such awfully rough luck on you. I mean, when
you're just doing a job. I said that I had the utmost respect for you and that what she
said wasn't true at all, and I'm afraid I got angry when she went on about it."
"Magnificent!"
"And then she told me to go away. She doesn't want ever to speak to me again. She
talked of packing up and leaving." His face was dismayed.
Madeleine smiled. "I'll tell you the answer to that one. Tell her that you'll be the one
to go; that you'll pack up and clear out to town."
"But I don't want to!"
"That's all right. You won't have to. Your wife would hate to think of you amusing
yourself in London."
The following morning Reggie Wade had a fresh bulletin to impart.
"She says she's been thinking, and that it isn't fair for her to go away when she
agreed to stay six months. But she says that as I have my friends down here she
doesn't see why she shouldn't have hers. She is asking Sinclair Jordan."
"Is he the one?"
"Yes, and I'm damned if I'll have him in my house!"
"You must," said Madeleine. "Don't worry. I'll attend to him. Say that on thinking
things over you have no objection, and that you know she won't mind your asking
me to stay on, too."
"Oh, dear!" sighed Mr Wade.
"Now don't lose heart," said Madeleine. "Everything is going splendidly. Another
fortnight - and all your troubles will be over."
"A fortnight? Do you really think so?" demanded Mr Wade.
"Think so? I'm sure of it," said Madeleine.
A week later Madeleine de Sara entered Mr Parker Pyne's office and sank wearily
into a chair.
"Enter the Queen of Vamps," said Mr Parker Pyne, smiling.
"Vamps!" said Madeleine. She gave a hollow laugh. "I've never had such uphill work
being a vamp. That man is obsessed by his wife! It's a disease."
Mr Parker Pyne smiled. "Yes, indeed. Well, in one way it made our task easier. It is
not every man, my dear Madeleine, whom I would expose to your fascination so
light-heartedly."
The girl laughed. "If you knew the difficulty I had to make him even kiss me as
though he liked it!"
"A novel experience for you, my dear. Well, is your task accomplished?"
"Yes. I think all is well. We had a tremendous scene last night. Let me see, my last
report was three days ago?"
"Yes."
"Well, as I told you, I only had to look at that miserable worm, Sinclair Jordan, once.
He was all over me - especially as he thought from my clothes that I had money. Mrs
Wade was furious, of course. Here were both her men dancing attendance on me. I
soon showed where my preference lay. I made fun of Sinclair Jordan, to his face and
to her. I laughed at his clothes, and at the length of his hair. I pointed out that he had
knock-knees."
"Excellent technique," said Mr Parker Pyne appreciatively.
"Everything boiled up last night. Mrs Wade came out in the open. She accused me of
breaking up her home. Reggie Wade mentioned the little matter of Sinclair Jordan.
She said that that was only the result of her unhappiness and loneliness. She had
noticed her husband's abstraction for some time but had had no idea as to the cause
of it. She said they had always been ideally happy, that she adored him and he knew
it, and that she wanted him and only him.
"I said it was too late for that. Mr Wade followed his instructions splendidly. He said
he didn't give a damn! He was going to marry me! Mrs Wade could have her Sinclair
as soon as she pleased. There was no reason why the divorce proceedings shouldn't
be started at once; waiting six months was absurd.
"Within a few days, he said, she should have the necessary evidence and could
instruct her solicitors. He said he couldn't live without me. Then Mrs Wade clutched
her chest and talked about her weak heart and had to be given brandy. He didn't
weaken. He went up to town this morning, and I've no doubt she's gone after him by
this time."
"So that's all right," said Mr Pyne cheerfully. "A very satisfactory case."
The door flew open. In the doorway stood Reggie Wade.
"Is she here?" he demanded, advancing into the room. "Where is she?" He caught
sight of Madeleine.
"Darling!" he cried. He seized both her hands. "Darling, darling. You knew, didn't
you, that it was real last night - that I meant every word I said to Iris? I don't know
why I was blind so long. But I've known for the last three days."
"Known what?" said Madeleine faintly.
"That I adored you. That there was no woman in the world for me but you. Iris can
bring her divorce and when it's gone through you'll marry me, won't you? Say you
will. Madeleine, I adore you."
He caught the paralyzed Madeleine in his arms just as the door flew open again, this
time to admit a thin woman dressed in untidy green.
"I thought so!" said the newcomer. "I followed you! I knew you'd go to her!"
"I can assure you -" began Mr Parker Pyne, recovering from the stupefaction that had
descended upon him.
The intruder took no notice of him. She swept on:
"Oh, Reggie, you can't want to break my heart! Only come back! I'll not say a word
about all this. I'll learn golf. I won't have any friends you don't care about. After all
these years, when we've been so happy together -"
"I've never been happy till now," said Mr Wade, still gazing at Madeleine. "Dash it
all, Iris, you wanted to marry that ass Jordan. Why don't you go and do it?"
Mrs Wade gave a wail. "I hate him! I hate the very sight of him." She turned to
Madeleine. "You wicked woman! You horrible vampire - stealing my husband from
me."
"I don't want your husband," said Madeleine distractedly.
"Madeleine!" Mr Wade was gazing at her in agony.
"Please go away," said Madeleine.
"But look here, I'm not pretending. I mean it."
"Oh, go away!" cried Madeleine hysterically. "Go away!"
Reggie moved reluctantly towards the door. "I shall come back," he warned her.
"You've not seen the last of me." He went out, banging the door.
"Girls like you ought to be flogged and branded!" cried Mrs Wade. "Reggie was an
angel to me always till you came along. Now he's so changed I don't know him."
With a sob, she hurried out after her husband.
Madeleine and Mr Parker Pyne looked at each other.
"I can't help it," said Madeleine helplessly. "He's a very nice man - a dear - but I don't
want to marry him. I'd no idea of all this. If you knew the difficulty I had making him
kiss me!"
"Ahem!" said Mr Parker Pyne. "I regret to admit it, but it was an error of judgment
on my part." He shook his head sadly, and drawing Mr Wade's file towards him,
wrote across it:
FAILURE - owing to natural causes.
N.B. They should have been foreseen.
THE CASE OF THE RICH WOMAN
The name of Mrs Abner Rymer was brought to Mr Parker Pyne. He knew the
name and he raised his eyebrows. Presently his client was shown into the room.
Mrs Rymer was a tall woman, big-boned. Her figure was ungainly and the
velvet dress and the heavy fur coat she wore did not disguise the fact. The
knuckles of her large hands were pronounced. Her face was big and broad and
highly colored. Her black hair was fashionably dressed, and there were many
tips of curled ostrich in her hat.
She plumped herself down on a chair with a nod.
"Good morning," she said. Her voice had a rough accent. "If you're any good
at all you'll tell me how to spend my money!"
"Most original," murmured Mr Parker Pyne. "Few ask that in these days. So
you really find it difficult Mrs Rymer?"
"Yes, I do," said the lady bluntly. "I've got three fur coats, a lot of Paris
dresses and such like. I've got a car and a house in Park Lane. I've had a yacht
but I don't like the sea. I've got a lot of those high-class servants that look down
their nose at you. I've traveled a bit and seen foreign parts. And I'm blessed if I
can think of anything more to buy or do." She looked hopefully at Mr Pyne.
"There are hospitals," he said.
"What? Give it away, you mean? No, that I won't do! That money was
worked for, let me tell you, worked for hard. If you think I'm going to hand it
out like so much dirt - well, you're mistaken. I want to spend it; spend it and get
some good out of it. Now, if you've got any ideas that are worth while in that
line, you can depend on a good fee."
"Your proposition interests me," said Mr Pyne. "You do not mention a
country house."
"I forgot it, but I've got one. Bores me to death."
"You must tell me more about yourself. Your problem is not easy to solve."
"I'll tell you and willing. I'm not ashamed of what I've come from. Worked in
a farmhouse, I did, when I was a girl. Hard work it was, too. Then I took up
with Abner - he was a workman in the mills near by. He courted me for eight
years, and then we got married."
"And you were happy?" asked Mr Pyne.
"I was. He was a good man to me, Abner. We had a hard struggle of it,
though; he was out of a job twice, and children coming along. Four we had,
three boys and a girl. And none of them lived to grow up. I dare say it would
have been different if they had." Her face softened; looked suddenly younger.
"His chest was weak - Abner's was. They wouldn't take him for the war. He
did well at home. He was made foreman. He was a clever fellow, Abner. He
worked out a process. They treated him fair, I will say; gave him a good sum
for it. He used that money for another idea of his. That brought in money hand
over fist. He was a master now, employing his own workmen. He bought two
concerns that were bankrupt and made them pay. The rest was easy. Money
came in hand over fist. It's still coming in.
"Mind you, it was rare fun at first. Having a house and a tiptop bathroom and
servants of one's own. No more cooking and scrubbing and washing to do. Just
sit back on your silk cushions in the drawing-room and ring the bell for tea like any countess might! Grand fun it was, and we enjoyed it. And then we
came up to London. I went to swell dressmakers for my clothes. We went to
Paris and the Riviera. Rare fun it was."
"And then?" said Mr' Parker Pyne.
"We got used to it, I suppose," said Mrs Rymer. "After a bit it didn't seem so
much fun. Why, there were days when we didn't even fancy our meals properly
- us, with any dish we fancied to choose from! As for baths - well, in the end,
one bath a day's enough for anyone. And Abner's health began to worry him.
Paid good money to doctors, we did, but they couldn't do anything. They tried
this and they tried that. But it was no use. He died." She paused. "He was a
young man, only forty-three."
Mr Pyne nodded sympathetically.
"That was five years ago. Money's still rolling in. It seems wasteful not to be
able to do anything with it. But as I tell you, I can't think of anything else to
buy that I haven't got already."
"In other words," said Mr Pyne, "your life is dull. You are not enjoying it."
"I'm sick of it," said Mrs Rymer gloomily. "I've no friends. The new lot only
want subscriptions, and they laugh at me behind my back. The old lot won't
have anything to do with me. My rolling up in a car makes them shy. Can you
do anything, or suggest anything?"
"It is possible that I can," said Mr Pyne slowly. "It will be difficult, but I
believe there is a chance of success. I think it's possible I can give you back
what you have lost - your interest in life."
"How?" demanded Mrs Rymer curtly.
"That," said Mr Parker Pyne, "is my professional secret. I never disclose my
methods beforehand. The question is, will you take a chance? I do not
guarantee success, but I do think there is a reasonable possibility of it."
"And how much will it cost?"
"I shall have to adopt unusual methods, and therefore it will be expensive.
My charges will be one thousand pounds, payable in advance."
"You can open your mouth all right, can't you?" said Mrs Rymer
appreciatively. "Well, I'll risk it. I'm used to paying top price. Only when I pay
for a thing, I take good care that I get it."
"You shall get it," said Mr Parker Pyne. "Never fear."
"I'll send you the check this evening," said Mrs Rymer, rising. "I'm sure I
don't know why I should trust you. Fools and their money are soon parted, they
say. I dare say I'm a fool. You've got nerve, to advertise in all the papers that
you can make people happy!"
"Those advertisements cost me money," said Mr Pyne. "If I could not make
my words good, that money would be wasted. I know what causes
unhappiness, and consequently I have a clear idea of how to produce an
opposite condition."
Mrs Rymer shook her head doubtfully and departed, leaving a cloud of
expensive mixed essences behind her.
The
handsome
Claude
Luttrell
strolled
into
the
office.
"Something in my line?"
Mr Pyne shook his head. "Nothing so simple," he said. "No, this is a difficult
case. We must, I fear, take a few risks. We must attempt the unusual."
"Mrs Oliver?"
Mr Pyne smiled at the mention of the world-famous novelist.
"Mrs Oliver," he said, "is really the most conventional of all of us. I have in
mind a bold and audacious coup. By the way, you might ring up Doctor
Antrobus."
"Antrobus?"
"Yes. His services will be needed."
A week later Mrs Rymer once more entered Mr Parker Pyne's office. He rose
to receive her.
"This delay, I assure you, has been necessary," he said. "Many things had to
be arranged, and I had to secure the services of an unusual man who had to
come half across Europe."
"Oh!" She said it suspiciously. It was constantly present in her mind that she
had paid out a check for a thousand pounds and the check had been cashed.
Mr Parker Pyne touched a buzzer. A young girl, dark, Oriental-looking, but
dressed in white nurse's kit, answered it.
"Is everything ready, Nurse de Sara?"
"Yes. Doctor Constantine is waiting."
"What are you going to do?" asked Mrs Rymer, with a touch of uneasiness.
"Introduce you to some Eastern magic, dear lady," said Mr Parker Pyne.
Mrs Rymer followed the nurse up to the next floor.
Here she was ushered into a room that bore no relation to the rest of the
house. Oriental embroideries covered the walls. There were divans with soft
cushions and beautiful rugs on the floor. A man was bending over a coffeepot.
He straightened as they entered.
"Doctor Constantine," said the nurse.
The doctor was dressed in European clothes, but his face was swarthy and his
eyes were dark and oblique with a peculiarly piercing power in their glance.
"So this is my patient?" he said in a low, vibrant voice.
"I'm not a patient," said Mrs Rymer.
"Your body is not sick," said the doctor, "but your soul is weary. We of the
East know how to cure that disease. Sit down and drink a cup of coffee."
Mrs Rymer sat down and accepted a tiny cup of the fragrant brew. As she
sipped it the doctor talked.
"Here in the West, they treat only the body. A mistake. The body is only the
instrument. A tune is played upon it. It may be a sad, weary tune. It may be a
gay tune full of delight. That last is what we shall give you. You have money.
You shall spend it and enjoy. Life shall be worth living again. It is easy - easy so easy..."
A feeling of languor crept over Mrs Rymer. The figures of the doctor and the
nurse grew hazy. She felt blissfully happy and very sleepy. The doctor's figure
grew bigger. The whole world was growing bigger.
The doctor was looking into her eyes. "Sleep," he was saying. "Sleep. Your
eyelids are closing. Soon you will sleep. You will sleep. You will sleep..."
Mrs Rymer's eyelids closed. She floated with a wonderful great big world...
When her eyes opened it seemed to her that a long time had passed. She
remembered several things vaguely - strange, impossible dreams; then a feeling
of waking; then further dreams. She remembered something about a car and the
dark, beautiful girl in nurse's uniform bending over her.
Anyway, she was properly awake now, and in her own bed.
At least, was it her own bed? It felt different. It lacked the delicious softness
of her own bed. It was vaguely reminiscent of days almost forgotten. She
moved, and it creaked. Mrs Rymer's bed in Park Lane never creaked.
She looked round. Decidedly, this was not Park Lane. Was it a hospital? No,
she decided, not a hospital. Nor was it a hotel. It was a bare room, the walls an
uncertain shade of lilac. There was a deal washstand with a jug and basin upon
it. There was a deal chest of drawers and a tin trunk. There were unfamiliar
clothes hanging on pegs. There was the bed covered with a much-mended quilt
and there was herself in it.
"Where am I?" said Mrs Rymer.
The door opened and a plump little woman bustled in. She had red cheeks
and a good-humored air. Her sleeves were rolled up and she wore an apron.
"There!" she exclaimed. "She's awake. Come in, doctor."
Mrs Rymer opened her mouth to say several things - but they remained
unsaid, for the man who followed the plump woman into the room was not in
the least like the elegant, swarthy Doctor Constantine. He was a bent old man
who peered through thick glasses.
"That's better," he said, advancing to the bed and taking up Mrs Rymer's
wrist. "You'll soon be better now, my dear."
"What's been the matter with me?" demanded Mrs Rymer.
"You had a kind of seizure," said the doctor. "You've been unconscious for a
day or two. Nothing to worry about."
"Gave us a fright, you did, Hannah," said the plump woman. "You've been
raving, too, saying the oddest things."
"Yes, yes, Mrs Gardner," said the doctor repressively. "But we mustn't excite
the patient. You'll soon be up and about again, my dear."
"But don't you worry about the work, Hannah," said Mrs Gardner. "Mrs
Roberts has been in to give me a hand and we've got on fine. Just lie still and
get well, my dear."
"Why do you call me Hannah?" said Mrs Rymer.
"Well,
it's
your
name,"
said
Mrs
Gardner,
bewildered.
"No, it isn't. My name is Amelia. Amelia Rymer. Mrs Abner Rymer."
The doctor and Mrs Gardner exchanged glances.
"Well, just you lie still," said Mrs Gardner.
"Yes, yes; no worry," said the doctor.
They withdrew. Mrs Rymer lay puzzling. Why did they call her Hannah, and
why had they exchanged that glance of amused incredulity when she had given
them her name? Where was she, and what had happened?
She slipped out of bed. She felt a little uncertain on her legs, but she walked
slowly to the small dormer window and looked out - on a farmyard!
Completely mystified, she went back to bed. What was she doing in a
farmhouse that she had never seen before?
Mrs Gardner re-entered the room with a bowl of soup on a tray.
Mrs Rymer began her questions. "What am I doing in this house?" she
demanded. "Who brought me here?"
"Nobody brought you, my dear. It's your home. Leastways, you've lived here
for the last five years - and me not suspecting once that you were liable to fits."
"Lived here? Five years?"
"That's right. Why, Hannah, you don't mean that you still don't remember?"
"I've never lived here! I've never seen you before."
"You see, you've had this illness and you've forgotten."
"I've never lived here."
"But you have, my dear." Suddenly Mrs Gardner darted across to the chest of
drawers and brought to Mrs Rymer a faded photograph in a frame.
It represented a group of four persons: a bearded man, a plump woman (Mrs
Gardner), a tall, lank maid with a pleasantly sheepish grin, and somebody in a
prim dress and apron — herself!
Stupefied, Mrs Rymer gazed at the photograph. Mrs Gardner put the soup
down beside her and quietly left the room.
Mrs Rymer sipped the soup mechanically. It was good soup, strong and hot.
All the time her brain was in a whirl. Who was mad? Mrs Gardner or herself?
One of them must be! But there was the doctor, too.
"I'm Amelia Rymer," she said firmly to herself. "I know I'm Amelia Rymer
and nobody's going to tell me different."
She had finished the soup. She put the bowl back or the tray. A folded
newspaper caught her eye and she picked it up and looked at the date on it,
October 19.
What day had she gone to Mr Parker Pyne's office?
Either the fifteenth or the sixteenth. Then she must have been ill for three
days.
"That
rascally
doctor!"
said
Mrs
Rymer
wrathfully.
All the same, she was a shade relieved. She had heard of cases where people
had forgotten who they were for years at a time. She had been afraid some such
thing had happened to her.
She began turning the pages of the paper, scanning the columns idly, when
suddenly a paragraph caught her eye.
Mrs Abner Rymer, widow of Abner Rymer, the "button shank" king, was
removed yesterday to a private home for mental cases. For the past two days
she has persisted in declaring she was not herself, but a servant girl named
Hannah Moorhouse.
"Hannah Moorhouse! So that's it," said Mrs Rymer. "She's me, and I'm her.
Kind of double, I suppose. Well, we can soon put that right! If that oily
hypocrite of a Parker Pyne is up to some game or other -"
But at this minute her eye was caught by the name Constantine staring at her
from the printed page. This time it was a headline.
DR. CONSTANTINE'S CLAIM
At a farewell lecture given last night on the eve of his departure for Japan, Dr
Claudius Constantine advanced some startling theories. He declared that it was
possible to prove the existence of the soul by transferring a soul from one body
to another. In the course of his experiments in the East he had, he claimed,
successfully effected a double transfer - the soul of a hypnotized body A being
transferred to a hypnotized body B and the soul of B to the body of A. On
recovering from the hypnotic sleep, A declared herself to be B, and B thought
herself to be A. For the experiment to succeed, it was necessary to find two
people with a great bodily resemblance.
It was an undoubted fact that two people resembling each other were en
rapport. This was very noticeable in the case of twins, but two strangers,
varying widely in social position but with a marked similarity of feature, were
found to exhibit the same harmony of structure.
Mrs Rymer cast the paper from her. "The scoundrel! The black scoundrel!"
She saw the whole thing now! It was a dastardly plot to get hold of her
money. This Hannah Moorhouse was Mr Pyne's tool - possibly an innocent
one. He and that devil Constantine had brought off this fantastic coup. But
she'd expose him! She'd show him up! She'd have the law on him! She'd tell
everyone.
Abruptly Mrs Rymer came to a stop in the tide of her indignation. She
remembered that first paragraph. Hannah Moorhouse had not been a docile
tool. She had protested; had declared her individuality. And what had
happened?
"Clapped into a lunatic asylum, poor girl," said Mrs Rymer.
A chill ran down her spine.
A lunatic asylum. They got you in there and they never let you get out. The
more you said you were sane, the less they'd believe you. There you were and
there you stayed. No, Mrs Rymer wasn't going to run the risk of that.
The door opened and Mrs Gardner came in.
"Ah, you've drunk your soup, my dear. That's good. You'll soon be better
now."
"When
was
I
taken
ill?"
demanded
Mrs
Rymer.
"Let me see. It was three days ago - on Wednesday. That was the fifteenth.
You were took bad about four o'clock."
"Ah!" The ejaculation was fraught with meaning. It had been just about four
o'clock when Mrs Rymer had entered the presence of Doctor Constantine.
"You slipped down in your chair," said Mrs Gardner. "'Oh!' you says. 'Oh!'
just like that. And then: 'I'm falling asleep,' you says in a dreamy voice. 'I'm
falling asleep.' And fall asleep you did, and we put you to bed and sent for the
doctor, and here you've been ever since."
"I suppose," Mrs Rymer ventured, "there isn't any way you could know who I
am - apart from my face, I mean."
"Well, that's a queer thing to say," said Mrs Gardner. "What is there to go by
better than a person's face, I'd like to know? There's your birthmark, though, if
that satisfies you better."
"A birthmark?" said Mrs Rymer, brightening. She had no such thing.
"Strawberry mark just under the right elbow," said Mrs Gardner. "Look for
yourself, my dear."
"This will prove it," said Mrs Rymer to herself. She knew that she had no
strawberry mark under the right elbow. She turned back the sleeve of her
nightdress. The strawberry mark was there.
Mrs Rymer burst into tears.
Four days later, Mrs Rymer rose from her bed. She had thought out several
plans of action and rejected them.
She might show the paragraph in the paper to Mrs Gardner and the doctor
and explain. Would they believe her? Mrs Rymer was sure they would not.
She might go to the police. Would they believe her? Again she thought not.
She might go to Mr Pyne's office. That idea undoubtedly pleased her best.
For one thing, she would like to tell that oily scoundrel what she thought of
him. She was debarred from putting this plan into operation by a vital obstacle.
She was at present in Cornwall (as she had learned), and she had no money for
the journey to London. Two and four-pence in a worn purse seemed to
represent her financial position.
And so, after four days, Mrs Rymer made a sporting decision. For the present
she would accept things! She was Hannah Moorhouse. Very well, she would be
Hannah Moorhouse. For the present she would accept the role, and later, when
she had saved sufficient money she would go to London and beard the swindler
in his den.
And having thus decided, Mrs Rymer accepted her role with perfect good
temper, even with a kind of sardonic amusement. History was repeating itself
indeed. This life here reminded her of her girlhood. How long ago that seemed!
The work was a bit hard after her years of soft living, but after the first week
she found herself slipping into the ways of the farm.
Mrs Gardner was a good-tempered, kindly woman.
Her husband, a big, taciturn man, was kindly also. The lank, shambling man
of the photograph had gone and another farmhand came in his stead, a goodhumored giant of forty-five, slow of speech and thought, but with a shy twinkle
in his blue eyes.
The weeks went by. At last the day came when Rymer had enough money to
pay her fare to London. But she did not go. She put it off. Time enough, she
thought. She wasn't easy in her mind about asylums yet. That scoundrel, Parker
Pyne, was clever. He'd get a doctor to say she was mad and she'd be clapped
out
of
sight
with
no
one
knowing
anything
about
it.
"Besides," said Mrs Rymer to herself, "a bit of a change does one good."
She rose early and worked hard. Joe Welsh, the new farmhand, was ill that
winter, and she and Mrs Gardner nursed him. The big man was pathetically
dependent on them.
Spring came - lambing time; there were wild flowers in the hedges, a
treacherous softness in the air. Joe Welsh gave Hannah a hand with her work.
Hannah did Joe's mending.
Sometimes, on Sundays, they went for a walk together. Joe was a widower.
His wife had died four years before. Since her death he had, he frankly
confessed it, taken a drop too much.
He didn't go much to the Crown nowadays. He bought himself some new
clothes. Mr and Mrs Gardner laughed.
Hannah made fun of Joe. She teased him about his clumsiness. Joe didn't
mind. He looked bashful but happy.
After spring came summer - a good summer that year. Everyone worked
hard.
Harvest was over. The leaves were red and golden on the trees.
It was October eighth when Hannah looked up one day from a cabbage she
was cutting and saw Mr Parker Pyne leaning over the fence.
"You!" said Hannah, alias Mrs Rymer. "You..."
It was some time before she got it all out, and when she had said her say, she
was out of breath.
Mr Parker Pyne smiled blandly. "I quite agree with you," he said.
"A cheat and a liar, that's what you are!" said Mrs Rymer, repeating herself.
"You with your Constantines and your hypnotizing and that poor girl Hanna
Moorhouse shut up with loonies."
"No," said Mr Parker Pyne, "there you misjudge me. Hannah Moorhouse is
not in a lunatic asylum because Hannah Moorhouse never existed."
"Indeed?" said Mrs Rymer. "And what about the photograph of her that I saw
with my own eyes?"
"Faked," said Mr Pyne. "Quite a simple thing to manage."
"And the piece in the paper about her?"
"The whole paper was faked so as to include items in a natural manner which
would carry conviction. As it did."
"That rogue, Doctor Constantine!"
"An assumed name - assumed by a friend of mine with a talent for acting."
Mrs Rymer snorted. "Ho! And I wasn't hypnotized either, I suppose?"
"As a matter of fact, you were not. You drank your coffee a preparation of
Indian hemp. After that other drugs were administered and you were brought
down here by car and allowed to recover consciousness."
"Then Mrs Gardner has been in it all the time?" said Mrs Rymer.
Mr Parker Pyne nodded.
"Bribed by you, I suppose! Or filled up with a lot of lies!"
"Mrs Gardner trusts me," said Mr Pyne. "I saved her only son from penal
servitude."
Something in his manner silenced Mrs Rymer on the tack. "What about the
birthmark?" she demanded.
Mr Pyne smiled. "It is already fading. In another six months it will have
disappeared altogether."
"And what's the meaning of all this tomfoolery? Making a fool of me,
sticking me down here as a servant - me with all that good money in the bank.
But I suppose I needn't ask. You've been helping yourself to it, my fine fellow.
That's the meaning of all this."
"It is true," said Mr Parker Pyne, "that I did obtain from you, while you were
under the influence of drugs, a power of attorney and that during your - er absence, I have assumed control of your financial affairs, but I can assure you,
my dear madam, that apart from that original thousand pounds, no money of
yours has found its way into my pocket. As a matter of fact, by judicious
investments
your
He beamed at her.
financial
position
is
actually
improved."
"Then why -" began Mrs Rymer.
"I am going to ask you a question, Mrs Rymer," said Mr Pyne. "You are an
honest woman. You will answer me honestly, I know. I am going to ask you if
you are happy."
"Happy! That's a pretty question! Steal a woman's money and ask her if she's
happy. I like your impudence!"
"You are still angry," he said. "Most natural. But leave my misdeeds out of it
for the moment. Mrs Rymer, when you came to my office a year ago today, you
were an unhappy woman. Will you tell me that you are unhappy now? If so, I
apologize, and you are at liberty to take what steps you please against me.
Moreover, I will refund you the thousand pounds you paid me. Come, Mrs
Rymer, are you an unhappy woman now?"
Mrs Rymer looked at Mr Parker Pyne, but she dropped her eyes when she
spoke at last.
"No," she said. "I'm not unhappy." A tone of wonder crept into her voice.
"You've got me there. I admit it. I've not been as happy as I am now since
Abner died. I - I'm going to marry a man who works here - Joe Welsh. Our
banns are going up next Sunday; that is, they were going up next Sunday."
"But now, of course," said Mr Pyne, "everything is different."
Mrs Rymer's face flamed. She took a step forward.
"What do you mean - different? Do you think if I had all the money in the
world it would make me a lady? I don't want to be a lady, thank you; a helpless,
good-for-nothing lot they are. Joe's good enough for me and I'm good enough
for him. We suit each other and we're going to be happy. As for you, Mr Nosey
Parker, you take yourself off and don't interfere with what doesn't concern
you!"
Mr Parker Pyne took a paper from his pocket and handed it to her. "The
power of attorney," he said. "Shall I tear it up? You will assume control of your
own fortune now, I take it."
A strange expression came over Mrs Rymer's face. She thrust back the paper.
"Take it. I've said hard things to you - and some of them you deserved. You're
a downy fellow, but all the same I trust you. Seven hundred pounds I'll have in
the bank here - that'll buy us a farm we've got our eye on. The rest of it - well,
let the hospitals have it."
"You cannot mean to hand over your entire fortune to hospitals?"
"That's just what I do mean. Joe's a dear, good fellow, but he's weak. Give
him money and you'd ruin him. I've got him off the drink now, and I'll keep him
off it. Thank God, I know my own mind. I'm not going to let money come
between me and happiness."
"You are a remarkable woman," said Mr Pyne slowly. "Only one woman in a
thousand would act as you are doing."
"Then only one woman in a thousand's got sense," said Mrs Rymer.
"I take off my hat to you," said Mr Parker Pyne, and there was an unusual
note in his voice. He raised his hat with solemnity and moved away.
"And Joe's never to know, mind!" Mrs Rymer called after him.
She stood there with the dying sun behind her, a great blue-green cabbage in
her hands, her head thrown back and her shoulders squared. A grand figure of a
peasant woman, outlined against the setting sun...
THE PORTOBELLO ROAD
by Muriel Spark
“The incredible we believe immediately. The impossible takes a bit longer.”
We live in an age of what we casually—without embarrassment—call
“scientific miracles.” And if the innate paradox no longer grates on the literate ear, I
suppose it is because the contradiction in terms is no longer a contradiction in
attitude. The quickening pace of scientific progress has so far outrun the capacity of
most of us to comprehend, that we are now in the absurd position of accepting
science on faith: prepared to believe almost any statement from almost any source
cloaked in the vestments of that same “science” which is the discipline of skepticism,
the attitude that accepts nothing without evidence, and credits no effect without a
cause.
This very scientific spirit has destroyed, for most of us, the capacity to believe
in the witches, elves, demons, fairies, and angels that frightened and delighted our
forerunners. Now, more and more of our new scientific knowledge rests on proofs as
abstruse and mysterious as the motives of godlets and demons once were.
In any case, the modern mind can achieve the “willing suspension of disbelief”
much more readily for a spaceship than a flying carpet, for an equation than an
incantation. Concomitantly, the field of “pure fantasy” is out of favor, and its
practitioners are few.
Among these, two of the most competent are Mr. Bretnor and Miss Spark.
Perhaps there is some significance in the fact that the one was raised In the Orient
and has lived since in the pragmatic United States; and that the other was born and
raised in commonsense Edinburgh, and then went to live in Africa?
****
One day in my young youth at high summer, lolling with my lovely companions
upon a haystack, I found a needle. Already and privately for some years I had been
guessing that I was set apart from the common run, but this of the needle attested the
fact to my whole public, George, Kathleen, and Skinny. I sucked my thumb, for
when I had thrust my idle hand deep into the hay, the thumb was where the needle
had stuck.
When everyone had recovered, George said, “She put in her thumb and pulled out a
plum.” Then we were into our merciless hacking-hecking laughter again.
The needle had gone fairly deep into the thumby cushion and a small red river
flowed and spread from this tiny puncture. So that nothing of our joy should lag,
George put in quickly, “Mind your bloody thumb on my shirt.”
Then hac-hec-hoo, we shrieked into the hot Borderland afternoon. Really I should
not care to be so young of heart again. That is my thought every time I turn over my
old papers and come across the photograph. Skinny, Kathleen, and myself are in the
photo atop the haystack. Skinny had just finished analyzing the inwards of my find.
“It couldn’t have been done by brains. You haven’t much brains, but you’re a lucky
wee thing.”
Everyone agreed that the needle betokened extraordinary luck. As it was becoming a
serious conversation, George said, “I’ll take a photo.”
I wrapped my hanky round my thumb and got myself organized. George pointed up
from his camera and shouted, “Look, there’s a mouse!”
Kathleen screamed and I screamed, although I think we knew there was no mouse.
But this gave us an extra session of squalling hee-hoo’s. Finally we three composed
ourselves for George’s picture. We look lovely and it was a great day at the time, but
I would not care for it all over again. From that day, I was known as Needle.
One Saturday in recent years, I was mooching down the Portobello Road, threading
among the crowds of marketers on the narrow pavement, when I saw a woman. She
had a haggard, careworn, wealthy look, thin but for the breasts forced up high like a
pigeon’s. I had not seen her for nearly five years. How changed she was! But I
recognized Kathleen, my friend; her features had already begun to sink and protrude
in the way that mouths and noses do in people destined always to be old for their
years. When I had last seen her, nearly five years ago, Kathleen, barely thirty, had
said, “I’ve lost all my looks; it’s in the family. All the women are handsome as girls,
but we go off early, we go brown and nosey.”
I stood silently among the people, watching. As you will see, I wasn’t in a position to
speak to Kathleen. I saw her shoving in her avid manner from stall to stall. She was
always fond of antique jewelry and of bargains. I wondered that I had not seen her
before on the Portobello Road on my Saturday morning ambles. Her long, stiffcrooked fingers pounced to select a jade ring from amongst the jumble of brooches
and pendants, onyx, moonstone, and gold, set out on the stall.
“What d’you think of this?” she said.
I saw then who was with her. I had been half-conscious of the huge man following
several paces behind her, and now I noticed him.
“It looks all right,” he said. “How much is it?”
“How much is it?” Kathleen asked the vendor.
I took a good look at this man accompanying Kathleen. It was her husband. The
beard was unfamiliar, but I recognized beneath it his enormous mouth, the bright,
sensuous lips, the large brown eyes forever brimming with pathos.
It was not for me to speak to Kathleen, but I had a sudden inspiration which caused
me to say quietly, “Hallo, George.”
The giant of a man turned round to face the direction of my voice. There were so
many people—but at length he saw me.
“Hallo, George,” I said again.
Kathleen had started to haggle with the stall owner, in her old way, over the price of
the jade ring. George continued to stare at me, his big mouth slightly parted so that I
could see a wide slit of red lips and white teeth between the fair, grassy growths of
beard and mustache.
“My God,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” said Kathleen.
“Hallo, George!” I said again, quite loud this time, and cheerfully.
“Look!” said George. “Look who’s standing there, over beside the fruit stall.”
Kathleen looked but didn’t see. “Who is it?” she said impatiently.
“It’s Needle,” he said. “She said, ‘Hallo George.’”
“Needle,” said Kathleen. “Who do you mean? You don’t mean our old friend Needle
who—”
“Yes. There she is. My God!” He looked very ill, although when I had said, “Hallo,
George,” I had spoken friendly enough.
“I don’t see anyone faintly resembling poor Needle,” said Kathleen, looking at him.
She was worried.
George pointed straight at me. “Look there. I tell you that is Needle.”
“You’re ill, George. Heavens, you must be seeing things. Come on home. Needle
isn’t there. You know as well as I do, Needle is dead.”
I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether
depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one’s executors
can never do properly. Papers to be looked over, even after the executors have torn
them up. Lots of business except, of course, on Sundays and Holy Days of
Obligation, plenty to take an interest in for the time being. I take my recreation on
Saturday mornings. If it is a wet Saturday, I wander up and down the substantial
lanes of Woolworth’s as I did when I was young and visible. There is a pleasurable
spread of objects on the counters which I now perceive and exploit with a certain
detachment, since it suits with my condition of life. Creams, toothpastes, combs and
hankies, cotton gloves, flimsy flowering scarves, writing-paper and crayons, icecream cones and orangeade, screwdrivers, boxes of tacks, tins of paint, of glue, of
marmalade; I always liked them but far more now that I have no need of any. When
Saturdays are fine, I go instead to the Portobello Road where formerly I would jaunt
with Kathleen in our grownup days. The barrow-loads do not change much, of apples
and rayon vests in common blues and low-taste mauve, of silver plate, trays and
teapots long since changed hands from the bygone citizens to dealers, from shops to
the new flats and breakable homes, and then over to the barrow-stalls and the dealers
again: Georgian spoons, rings, earrings of turquoise and opal set in the butterfly
pattern of true-lovers’ knot, patch-boxes with miniature paintings of ladies on ivory,
snuff-boxes of silver with Scotch pebbles inset.
Sometimes as occasion arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a
Catholic, has a Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the
church. But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their
aimless purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and
stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire, and ogle the merchandise. I hear the
tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children wanting to
hold and have.
That is how I came to be on the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw
George and Kathleen. I would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed
it’s one of the things I can’t do now—to speak out unless inspired. And most
extraordinary, on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from
poor George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by
the fruit barrow, repeating in so friendly a manner, “Hallo, George!”
****
We were bound for the south. When our education, what we could get of it from the
north, was thought to be finished, one by one we were sent or sent for to London.
John Skinner, whom we called Skinny, went to study more archaeology, George to
join his uncle’s tobacco farm, Kathleen to stay with her rich connections and to
potter intermittently in the Mayfair hat shop which one of them owned. A little later I
also went to London to see life, for it was my ambition to write about life, which first
I had to see.
“We four must stick together,” George said very often in that yearning way of his. He
was always desperately afraid of neglect. We four looked likely to shift off in
different directions and George did not trust the other three of us not to forget all
about him. More and more as the time came for him to depart for his uncle’s tobacco
farm in Africa, he said, “We four must keep in touch.”
Before he left, he told each of us anxiously, “I’ll write regularly, once a month. We
must keep together for the sake of the old times.” He had three prints taken from the
negative of that photo on the haystack, wrote on the back of them, “George took this
the day that Needle found the needle,” and gave us a copy each. I think we all wished
he could become a bit more callous.
During my lifetime I was a drifter, nothing organized. It was difficult for my friends
to follow the logic of my life. By the normal reckonings I should have come to
starvation and ruin, which I never did. Of course, I did not live to write about life as I
wanted to do. Possibly that is why I am inspired to do so now in these peculiar
circumstances.
I taught in a private school in Kensington for almost three months, very small
children. I didn’t know what to do with them but I was kept fairly busy escorting
incontinent little boys to the lavatory and telling the little girls to use their
handkerchiefs. After that I lived a winter holiday in London on my small capital, and
when that had run out I found a diamond bracelet in the cinema for which I received
a reward of fifty pounds. When it was used up, I got a job with a publicity man,
writing speeches for absorbed industrialists, in which the dictionary of quotations
came in very useful. So it went on. I got engaged to Skinny, but shortly after that I
was left a small legacy, enough to keep me going for six months. This somehow
decided me that I didn’t love Skinny, so I gave him back the ring.
But it was through Skinny that I went to Africa. He was engaged with a party of
researchers to investigate King Solomon’s mines, that series of ancient workings
ranging from the ancient port of Ophir, now called Beira, across Portuguese East
Africa and Southern Rhodesia to the mighty jungle city of Zimbabwe, whose temple
walls still stand by the approach to an ancient and sacred mountain, where the rubble
of that civilization scatters itself over the surrounding Rhodesian waste. I
accompanied the party as a sort of secretary. Skinny vouched for me, he paid my
fare, he sympathized by his action with my inconsequential life although, when he
spoke of it, he disapproved.
A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things,
give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it
vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away
with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it. Skinny, when I had broken off our
engagement, lectured me about this, but still he took me to Africa knowing I should
probably leave his unit within a few months.
We were there a few weeks before we began inquiring for George who was farming
about four hundred miles away to the north. We had not told him of our plans.
“If we tell George to expect us in his part of the world, he’ll come rushing to pester
us the first week. After all, we’re going on business,” Skinny had said.
Before we left, Kathleen told us, “Give George my love and tell him not to send
frantic cables every time I don’t answer his letters right away. Tell him I’m busy in
the hat shop and being presented. You would think he hadn’t another friend in the
world, the way he carries on.”
We had settled first at Fort Victoria, our nearest place of access to the Zimbabwe
ruins. There we made inquiries about George. It was clear he hadn’t many friends.
The older settlers were the most tolerant about the half-caste woman he was living
with, as we found, but they were furious about his methods of raising tobacco which
we learned were most unprofessional and in some mysterious way disloyal to the
whites. We could never discover how it was that George’s style of tobacco farming
gave the blacks opinions about themselves, but that’s what the older settlers claimed.
The newer immigrants thought he was unsociable and, of course, his living with that
woman made visiting impossible.
I was myself a bit put off by this news about the brown woman. I was brought up in a
university town to which came Indian, African, and Asiatic students in a variety of
tints and hues. I was brought up to avoid them for reasons connected with local
reputation and God’s ordinances. You cannot easily go against what you were
brought up to do unless you are a rebel by nature.
Anyhow, we visited George eventually, taking advantage of the offer of transport
from some people bound north in search of game. He had heard of our arrival in
Rhodesia and though he was glad—almost relieved—to see us, he pursued a policy
of sullenness for the first hour.
“We wanted to give you a surprise, George.”
“How were we to know that you’d get to hear of our arrival, George? News here
must travel faster than light, George.”
“We did hope to give you a surprise, George.”
We flattered and “Georged” him until at last he said, “Well, I must say it’s good to
see you. All we need now is Kathleen. We four simply must stick together. You find,
when you’re in a place like this, there’s nothing like old friends.”
He showed us his drying sheds. He showed us a paddock where he was
experimenting with a horse and a zebra mare, attempting to mate them. They were
frolicking happily, but not together. They passed each other in their private play time
and again, but without acknowledgment and without resentment.
“It’s been done before,” George said. “It makes a fine, strong beast, more intelligent
than a mule and sturdier than a horse. But I’m not having any success with this pair;
they won’t look at each other.”
After a while he said, “Come in for a drink and meet Matilda.”
She was dark brown, with a subservient hollow chest and round shoulders, a gawky
woman, very snappy with the houseboys. We said pleasant things as we drank on the
porch before dinner, but we found George difficult. For some reason he began to rail
at me for breaking off my engagement to Skinny, saying what a dirty trick it was
after all those good times in the old days. I diverted attention to Matilda. I supposed,
I said, that she knew this part of the country very well?
“No,” said she, “I been a-shellitered my life. I not put out to working. Me nothing to
go from place to place is allowed like dirty girls does.” In her speech she gave every
syllable equal stress.
George explained, “Her father was a white magistrate in Natal. She had a sheltered
upbringing, different from the other coloreds, you realize.”
“Man, me no black-eyed Susan,” said Matilda, “no, no.”
On the whole, George treated her as a servant. She was about four months advanced
in pregnancy, but he made her get up and fetch for him, many times. Soap: that was
one of the things Matilda had to fetch. George made his own bath soap, showed it
proudly, gave us the recipe which I did not trouble to remember; I was fond of nice
soaps during my lifetime and George’s smelled of brilliantine and looked likely to
soil one’s skin.
“D’yo brahn?” Matilda asked me.
George said, “She is asking if you go brown in the sun.”
“No, I go freckled.”
“I got sister-in-law go freckles.”
She never spoke another word to Skinny nor to me, and we never saw her again.
Some months later, I said to Skinny, “I’m fed up with being a camp follower.”
He was not surprised that I was leaving his unit, but he hated my way of expressing
it. He gave me a Presbyterian look. “Don’t talk like that. Are you going back to
England or staying?”
“Staying, for a while.”
“Well, don’t wander too far off.”
I was able to live on the fee I got for writing a gossip column in a local weekly,
which wasn’t my idea of writing about life, of course. I made friends, more than I
could cope with, after I left Skinny’s exclusive little band of archaeologists. I had the
attractions of being newly out from England and of wanting to see life. Of the
countless young men and go-ahead families who purred me along the Rhodesian
roads, hundred after hundred miles, I only kept up with one family when I returned
to my native land. I think that was because they were the most representative, they
stood for all the rest: people in those parts are very typical of each other, as one
group of standing stones in that wilderness is like the next.
I met George once more in a hotel in Bulawayo. We drank highballs and spoke of
war. Skinny’s party were just then deciding whether to remain in the country or
return home. They had reached an exciting part of their research, and whenever I got
a chance to visit Zimbabwe, he would take me for a moonlight walk in the ruined
temple and try to make me see phantom Phoenicians flitting ahead of us, or along the
walls. I had half a mind to marry Skinny; perhaps, I thought, when his studies were
finished. The impending war was in our bones: so I remarked to George as we sat
drinking highballs on the hotel veranda in the hard, bright, sunny July winter of that
year.
George was inquisitive about my relations with Skinny. He tried to pump me for
about half an hour and when at last I said, “You are becoming aggressive, George,”
he stopped. He became quite pathetic. He said, “War or no war, I’m clearing out of
this.”
“It’s the heat does it,” I said.
“I’m clearing out in any case. I’ve lost a fortune in tobacco. My uncle is making a
fuss. It’s the other bloody planters; once you get the wrong side of them, you’re
finished in this wide land.”
“What about Matilda?” I asked.
He said, “She’ll be all right. She’s got hundreds of relatives.”
I had already heard about the baby girl. Coal black, by repute, with George’s
features. And another on the way, they said.
“What about the child?”
He didn’t say anything to that. He ordered more highballs and when they arrived, he
swizzled his for a long time with a stick. “Why didn’t you ask me to your twentyfirst?” he said then.
“I didn’t have anything special, no party, George. We had a quiet drink among
ourselves, George, just Skinny and the old professors and two of the wives and me,
George.”
“You didn’t ask me to your twenty-first,” he said. “Kathleen writes to me regularly.”
This wasn’t true. Kathleen sent me letters fairly often in which she said, “Don’t tell
George I wrote to you as he will be expecting word from me and I can’t be bothered
actually.”
“But you,” said George, “don’t seem to have any sense of old friendships, you and
Skinny.”
“Oh, George!” I said.
“Remember the times we had,” George said. “We used to have times.” His large
brown eyes began to water.
“I’ll have to be getting along,” I said.
“Please don’t go. Don’t leave me just yet. I’ve something to tell you.”
“Something nice?” I laid on an eager smile. All responses to George had to be
overdone.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” George said.
“How?” I said. Sometimes I got tired of being called lucky by everybody. There were
times when, privately practicing my writings about life, I knew the bitter side of my
fortune. When I failed again and again to reproduce life in some satisfactory and
perfect form, I was the more imprisoned, for all my carefree living, within my
craving for this satisfaction. Sometimes, in my impotence and need I secreted a
venom which infected all my life for days on end and which spurted out
indiscriminately on Skinny or on anyone who crossed my path.
“You aren’t bound by anyone,” George said. “You come and go as you please.
Something always turns up for you. You’re free, and you don’t know your luck.”
“You’re a damn sight more free than I am,” I said sharply. “You’ve got your rich
uncle.”
“He’s losing interest in me,” George said. “He’s had enough.”
“Oh well, you’re young yet. What was it you wanted to tell me?”
“A secret,” George said. “Remember we used to have those secrets?”
“Oh, yes we did.”
“Did you ever tell any of mine?”
“Oh no, George.” In reality, I couldn’t remember any particular secret out of the
dozens we must have exchanged from our schooldays onward.
“Well, this is a secret, mind. Promise not to tell.”
“Promise.”
“I’m married.”
“Married, George! Oh, who to?”
“Matilda.”
“How dreadful!” I spoke before I could think, but he agreed with me.
“Yes, it’s awful, but what could I do?”
“You might have asked my advice,” I said pompously.
“I’m two years older than you are. I don’t ask advice from you, Needle, little beast.”
“Don’t ask for sympathy then.”
“A nice friend you are,” he said. “I must say, after all these years.”
“Poor George!” I said.
“There are three white men to one white woman in this country,” said George. “An
isolated planter doesn’t see a white woman and, if he sees one, she doesn’t see him.
What could I do? I needed the woman.”
I was nearly sick. One, because of my Scottish upbringing. Two, because of my
horror of corny phrases like, “I needed the woman,” which George repeated twice
again.
“And Matilda got tough,” said George, “after you and Skinny came to visit us. She
had some friends at the Mission, and she packed up and went to them.”
“You should have let her go,” I said.
“I went after her,” George said. “She insisted on being married, so I married her.”
“That’s not a proper secret, then,” I said. “The news of a mixed marriage soon gets
about.”
“I took care of that,” George said. “Crazy as I was, I took her to the Congo and
married her there. She promised to keep quiet about it.”
“Well, you can’t clear off and leave her now, surely,” I said.
“I’m going to get out of this place. I can’t stand the woman and I can’t stand the
country. I didn’t realize what it would be like. Two years of the country and three
months of my wife have been enough.”
“Will you get a divorce?”
“No. Matilda’s Catholic. She won’t divorce.”
George was fairly getting through the highballs, and I wasn’t far behind him. His
brown eyes floated shiny and liquid as he told me how he had written to tell his uncle
of his plight, “Except, of course, I didn’t say we were married. That would have been
too much for him. He’s a prejudiced, hardened old Colonial. I only said I’d had a
child by a colored woman and was expecting another, and he perfectly understood.
He came at once by plane a few weeks ago. He’s made a settlement on her, providing
she keeps her mouth shut about her association with me.”
“Will she do that?”
“Oh, yes, or she won’t be able to get the money.”
“But as your wife she has a claim on you, in any case.”
“If she claimed as my wife, she’d get far less. Matilda knows what she’s doing,
greedy bitch that she is. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”
“Only, you won’t be able to marry again, will you, George?”
“Not unless she dies,” he said. “And she’s as strong as an ox.”
“Well, I’m sorry, George,” I said.
“Good of you to say so,” he said. “But I can see by your chin that you disapprove of
me. Even my old uncle understood.”
“Oh, George, I quite understand. You were lonely, I suppose.”
“You didn’t even ask me to your twenty-first. If you and Skinny had been nicer to
me, I would never have lost my head and married the woman, never.”
“You didn’t ask me to your wedding,” I said.
“You’re a catty bissom, Needle, not like what you were in the old times when you
used to tell us your stories.”
“I’ll have to be getting along,” I said.
“Mind you keep the secret,” George said.
“Can’t I tell Skinny? He would be very sorry for you, George.”
“You mustn’t tell anyone. Keep it a secret. Promise?”
“Promise,” I said. I understood that he wished to enforce some sort of bond between
us with this secret, and I thought, “Oh well, I suppose he’s lonely. Keeping his secret
won’t do any harm.”
I returned to England with Skinny’s party just before the war.
I did not see George again till just before my death, five years ago.
After the war, Skinny returned to his studies. He had two more exams, over a period
of eighteen months, and I thought I might marry him when the exams were over.
“You might do worse than Skinny,” Kathleen used to say to me on our Saturday
morning excursions to the antique shops and the junk stalls.
She too was getting on in years. The remainder of our families in Scotland were
hinting that it was time we settled down with husbands. Kathleen was a little younger
than I, but looked much older. She knew her chances were diminishing but at that
time I did not think she cared very much. As for myself, the main attraction of
marrying Skinny was his prospective expeditions to Mesopotamia. My desire to
marry him had to be stimulated by the continual reading of books about Babylon and
Assyria; perhaps Skinny felt this, because he supplied the books and even started
instructing me in the art of deciphering cuneiform tables.
Kathleen was more interested in marriage than I thought. Like me, she had racketed
around a good deal during the war; she had actually been engaged to an officer in the
U. S. Navy, who was killed. Now she kept an antique shop near Lambeth, was doing
very nicely, lived in a Chelsea square, but for all that she must have wanted to be
married and have children. She would stop and look into all the prams which the
mothers had left outside shops or area gates.
“The poet Swinburne used to do that,” I told her once.
“Really? Did he want children of his own?”
“I shouldn’t think so. He simply liked babies.”
Before Skinny’s final exam, he fell ill and was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland.
“You’re fortunate after all not to be married to him,” Kathleen said. “You might have
caught T.B.”
I was fortunate, I was lucky ... so everyone kept telling me on different occasions.
Although it annoyed me to hear, I knew they were right, but in a way that was
different from what they meant. It took me a small effort to make a living; book
reviews, odd jobs for Kathleen, a few months with the publicity man again, still
getting up speeches about literature, art, and life for industrial tycoons. I was waiting
to write about life and it seemed to me that the good fortune lay in this, whenever it
should be. And until then I was assured of my charmed life, the necessities of
existence always coming my way and I with far more leisure than anyone else. I
thought of my type of luck after I became a Catholic and was being confirmed. The
Bishop touches the candidate on the cheek, a symbolic reminder of the sufferings a
Christian is supposed to undertake. I thought, how lucky, what a feathery symbol to
stand for the hellish violence of its true meaning.
I visited Skinny twice in the two years that he was in the sanatorium. He was almost
cured, and expected to be home within a few months. I told Kathleen after my last
visit.
“Maybe I’ll marry Skinny when he’s well again.”
“Make it definite, Needle, and not so much of the maybe. You don’t know when
you’re well off,” she said.
This was five years ago, in the last year of my life. Kathleen and I had become very
close friends. We met several times each week, and after our Saturday morning
excursions on the Portobello Road very often I would accompany Kathleen to her
aunt’s house in Kent for a long weekend.
One day in June of that year, I met Kathleen specially for lunch because she had
phoned me to say she had news.
“Guess who came into the shop this afternoon,” she said.
“Who?”
“George.”
We had half imagined George was dead. We had received no letters in the past ten
years. Early in the war we had heard rumors of his keeping a night club in Durban,
but nothing after that. We could have made inquiries if we had felt moved to do so.
At one time, when we discussed him, Kathleen had said, “I ought to get in touch with
poor George. But then I think he would write back. He would demand a regular
correspondence again.”
“We four must stick together,” I mimicked. “I can visualize his reproachful limpid
orbs,” Kathleen said.
Skinny said, “He’s probably gone native. With his coffee concubine and a dozen
mahogany kids.” “Perhaps he’s dead,” Kathleen said. I did not speak of George’s
marriage, nor of any of his confidences in the hotel at Bulawayo. As the years
passed, we ceased to mention him except in passing, as someone more or less dead
so far as we were concerned.
Kathleen was excited about George’s turning up. She had forgotten her impatience
with him in former days; she said, “It was so wonderful to see old George. He seems
to need a friend, feels neglected, out of touch with things.” “He needs mothering, I
suppose.”
Kathleen didn’t notice the malice. She declared, “That’s exactly the case with
George. It always has been, I can see it now.”
She seemed ready to come to any rapid new and happy conclusion about George. In
the course of the morning, he had told her of his wartime night club in Durban, his
game-shooting expeditions since. It was clear he had not mentioned Matilda. He had
put on weight, Kathleen told me, but he could carry it.
I was curious to see this version of George, but I was leaving for Scotland next day
and did not see him till September of that year just before my death.
While I was in Scotland I gathered from Kathleen’s letters that she was seeing
George very frequently, finding enjoyable company in him, looking after him.
“You’ll be surprised to see how he has developed.” Apparently he would hang ‘round
Kathleen in her shop most days. “It makes him feel useful,” as she maternally
expressed it. He had an old relative in Kent whom he visited at weekends; this old
lady lived a few miles from Kathleen’s aunt, which made it easy for them to travel
down together on Saturdays, and go for long country walks.
“You’ll see such a difference in George,” Kathleen said on my return to London in
September. I was to meet him that night, a Saturday. Kathleen’s aunt was abroad, the
maid on holiday, and I was to keep Kathleen company in the empty house.
George had left London for Kent a few days earlier. “He’s actually helping with the
harvest down there!” Kathleen told me lovingly.
Kathleen and I planned to travel down together, but on that Saturday she was
unexpectedly delayed in London on some business. It was arranged that I should go
ahead of her in the early afternoon to see to the provisions for our party; Kathleen
had invited George to dinner at her aunt’s house that night.
“I should be with you by seven,” she said. “Sure you won’t mind the empty house? I
hate arriving at empty houses, myself.”
I said no, I liked an empty house.
So I did, when I got there. I had never found the house more likable. It was a large
Georgian vicarage in about eight acres, most of the rooms shut and sheeted, there
being only one servant. I discovered that I wouldn’t need to go shopping; Kathleen’s
aunt had left many and delicate supplies with notes attached to them: “Eat this up
please do, see also fridge” and “A treat for three hungry people see also 2 bttles
beaune for yr party on back kn table.” It was like a treasure hunt as I followed clue
after clue through the cool, silent, domestic quarters.
A house in which there are no people—but with all the signs of tenancy—can be a
most tranquil good place. People take up space in a house out of proportion to their
size. On my previous visits I had seen the rooms overflowing, as it seemed, with
Kathleen, her aunt, and the little fat maidservant; they were always on the move. As I
wandered through that part of the house which was in use, opening windows to let in
the pale yellow air of September, I was not conscious that I, Needle, was taking up
any space at all. I felt I might have been a ghost.
The only thing to be fetched was the milk. I waited till after four when the milking
should be done, then set off for the farm which lay across two fields at the back of
the orchard. There, when the byreman was handing me the bottle, I saw George.
“Hallo, George,” I said.
“Needle! What are you doing here?” he said.
“Fetching milk,” I said.
“So am I. Well, it’s good to see you, I must say.”
As we paid the farmhand, George said, “I’ll walk back with you part of the way. But
I mustn’t stop; my old cousin’s without any milk for her tea. How’s Kathleen?”
“She was kept in London. She’s coming on later, about seven, she expects.”
We had reached the end of the first field. George’s way led to the left and on to the
main road.
“We’ll see you tonight, then, George?” I said.
“Yes, and talk about old times.”
“Grand,” I said.
But George got over the stile with me. “Look here,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you,
Needle.”
“We’ll talk tonight, George. Better not keep your cousin waiting for the milk.” I
found myself speaking to him almost as if he were a child.
“No, I want to talk to you alone. This is a good opportunity.”
We began to cross the second field. I had been hoping to have the house to myself for
a couple more hours and I was rather petulant
“See,” he said suddenly, “that haystack.”
“Yes,” I said absently.
“Let’s sit there and talk. I’d like to see you up on a haystack again. I still keep that
photo. Remember that time when—”
“I found the needle,” I said very quickly, to get it over.
But I was glad to rest. The stack had been broken up, but we managed to find a nest
in it. I buried my bottle of milk in the hay for coolness. George placed his carefully at
the foot of the stack.
“My old cousin is terribly vague, poor soul. A bit hazy in her head. She hasn’t the
least sense of time. If I tell her that I’ve only been gone ten minutes, she’ll believe
it.”
I giggled, and looked at him. His face had grown much larger, his lips full, wide, and
with a ripe color that appears strange in a man. His brown eyes were abounding as
before with some inarticulate plea.
“So you’re going to marry Skinny after all these years?”
“I really don’t know, George.”
“You played him up properly.”
“It isn’t for you to judge. I have my own reasons for what I do.”
“Don’t get sharp,” he said. “I was only funning.” To prove it, he lifted a tuft of hay
and brushed my face with it.
“D’you know,” he said next, “I didn’t think you and Skinny treated me very decently
in Rhodesia.”
“Well, we were busy, George. And we were younger then; we had a lot to do and see.
After all, we could see you any other time, George.”
“A touch of selfishness,” he said.
“I’ll have to be getting along, George.” I made to get down from the stack.
He pulled me back. “Wait, I’ve got something to tell you.”
“O.K., George, tell me.”
“First promise not to tell Kathleen. She wants it kept a secret, so that she can tell you
herself.”
“All right. Promise.”
“I’m going to marry Kathleen.”
“But you’re already married.”
Sometimes I heard news of Matilda from the one Rhodesian family with whom I still
kept up. They referred to her as “George’s Dark Lady” and of course they did not
know he was married to her. She had apparently made a good thing out of George,
they said, for she minced around all tarted up, never did a stroke of work, and was
always unsettling the respectable colored girls in the neighborhood. According to
accounts, she was a living example of the folly of behaving as George did.
“I married Matilda in the Congo,” George was saying.
“It would still be bigamy,” I said.
He was furious when I used that word bigamy. He lifted a handful of hay as if he
would throw it in my face, but controlling himself meanwhile he fanned it at me
playfully. “I’m not sure that the Congo marriage was valid,” he continued. “Anyway,
as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t.”
“You can’t do a thing like that,” I said.
“I need Kathleen. She’s been decent to me. I think we were always meant for each
other, me and Kathleen.”
“I’ll have to be going,” I said.
But he put his knee over my ankles, so that I couldn’t move. I sat still and gazed into
space.
He tickled my face with a wisp of hay.
“Smile up, Needle,” he said. “Let’s talk like old times.”
“Well?”
“No one knows about my marriage to Matilda except you and me.”
“And Matilda,” I said.
“She’ll keep still so long as she gets her payments. My uncle left an annuity for the
purpose, his lawyers see to it”
“Let me go, George.”
“You promised to keep it a secret,” he said. “You promised.”
“Yes, I promised.”
“And now that you’re going to marry Skinny, well be properly coupled off as we
should have been years ago. We should have been—but youth!—our youth got in the
way, didn’t it?”
“Life got in the way,” I said.
“But everything’s going to be all right now. You’ll keep my secret, won’t you? You
promised.” He had released my feet. I edged a little further from him.
I said, “If Kathleen intends to marry you, I shall tell her you’re married.”
“You wouldn’t do a dirty trick like that, Needle. You’re going to be happy with
Skinny, you wouldn’t—”
“I must. Kathleen’s my best friend,” I said swiftly.
He looked as if he would murder me and he did. He stuffed hay into my mouth until
it could hold no more, kneeling on my body to keep it still, holding both my wrists
tight in his huge left hand. I saw the red, full lines of his mouth and the white slit of
his teeth last thing on earth. Not another soul passed by as he pressed my body into
the stack, as he made a deep nest for me, tearing up the hay to make a groove the
length of my corpse, and finally pulling the warm, dry stuff in a mound over this
concealment, so natural-looking in a broken haystack. Then George climbed down,
took up his bottle of milk, and went his way. I suppose that was why he looked so
unwell when I stood, nearly five years later, by the barrow on the Portobello Road
and said in easy tones, “Hallo, George!”
The Haystack Murder was one of the notorious crimes of that year. My friends said,
“A girl who had everything to live for.” After a search that lasted twenty hours, when
my body was found, the evening papers said, “ ‘Needle’ is found: in haystack!”
Kathleen, speaking from that Catholic point of view which takes some getting used
to, said, “She was at Confession only the day before she died—wasn’t she lucky?”
The poor byrehand who sold us the milk was grilled for hour after hour by the local
police, and later by Scotland Yard. So was George. He admitted walking as far as the
haystack with me, but he denied lingering there.
“You hadn’t seen your friend for ten years?” the Inspector asked him.
“That’s right,” said George.
“And you didn’t stop to have a chat?”
“No. We’d arranged to meet later at dinner. My cousin was waiting for the milk; I
couldn’t stop.”
The old soul, his cousin, swore that he hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes in all,
and she believed it to the day of her death a few months later. There was the
microscopic evidence of hay on George’s jacket, of course, but the same evidence
was on every man’s jacket in the district that fine harvest year. Unfortunately, the
byreman’s hands were even brawnier and mightier than George’s. The marks on my
wrists had been done by such hands, so the laboratory charts indicated when my
post-mortem was all completed. But the wrist marks weren’t enough to pin down the
crime to either man. If I hadn’t been wearing my long-sleeved cardigan, it was said,
the bruises might have matched up properly with someone’s fingers.
Kathleen, to prove that George had absolutely no motive, told the police that she was
engaged to him. George thought this a little foolish. They checked up on his life in
Africa, right back to his living with Matilda. But the marriage didn’t come out—who
would think of looking up registers in the Congo? Not that this would have proved a
motive.
Just the same, George was relieved when the inquiries were over without the
marriage to Matilda being disclosed. He was able to have his nervous breakdown at
the same time Kathleen had hers, and they recovered together and got married, long
after the police had shifted their inquiries to an Air Force camp five miles from
Kathleen’s aunt’s home. Only a lot of excitement and drinks came of those
investigations. The Haystack Murder was one of the unsolved crimes that year.
Shortly afterward, the byrehand emigrated to Canada to start afresh, with the help of
Skinny who felt sorry for him.
After seeing George taken away home by Kathleen that Saturday on the Portobello
Road, I thought that perhaps I might be seeing more of him in similar circumstances.
The next Saturday I looked out for him, and at last there he was, without Kathleen,
half-worried, half-hopeful.
I dashed his hopes. I said, “Hallo, George!”
He looked in my direction, rooted in the midst of the Bowing market-mongers in that
convivial street. I thought to myself, “He looks as if he had a mouthful of hay.” It
was the new, bristly, maize-colored beard and mustache surrounding his great mouth
which suggested the thought, gay and lyrical as life.
“Hallo, George!” I said again.
I might have been inspired to say more on that agreeable morning, but he didn’t wait.
He was away down a side street along another street and down one more, zig-zag, as
far and as devious as he could take himself from the Portobello Road.
Nevertheless he was back again next week. Poor Kathleen had brought him in her
car. She left it at the top of the street, and got out with him, holding him tight by the
arm.
George was haggard. His eyes seemed to have got smaller as if he had been recently
in pain. He advanced up the road with Kathleen on his arm, letting himself lurch
from side to side with his wife bobbing beside him, as the crowds asserted their
rights of way.
“Oh, George!” I said. “You don’t look at all well, George.”
“Look!” said George. “Over there by the hardware barrow. That’s Needle.”
Kathleen was crying. “Come back home, dear,” she said.
“Oh, you don’t look well, George!” I said.
They took him to a nursing home. He was fairly quiet, except on Saturday mornings
when they had a hard time of it to keep him indoors and away from the Portobello
Road.
But a couple of months later, he did escape. It was a Monday.
They searched for him on the Portobello Road, but actually he had gone off to Kent
to the village near the scene of the Haystack Murder. There he went to the police and
gave himself up, but they could tell from the way he was talking that there was
something wrong with him.
“I saw Needle on the Portobello Road three Saturdays running,” he explained, “and
they put me in a private ward but I got away while the nurses were seeing to the new
patient. You remember the murder of Needle—well, I did it. Now you know the
truth, and that will keep bloody Needle’s mouth shut.”
Dozens of poor mad fellows confess to every murder. The police obtained an
ambulance to take him back to the nursing home. He wasn’t there long. Kathleen
gave up her shop and devoted herself to looking after him at home. But she found
that the Saturday mornings were a strain. He insisted on going to see me on the
Portobello Road and would come back to insist that he’d murdered Needle. Once he
tried to tell her something about Matilda, but Kathleen was so kind and solicitous, I
don’t think he had the courage to remember what he had to say.
Skinny had always been rather reserved with George since the murder. But he was
kind to Kathleen. It was he who persuaded them to emigrate to Canada so that
George should be well out of reach of the Portobello Road.
George has recovered somewhat in Canada but of course he will never be the old
George again, as Kathleen writes to Skinny. ‘That Haystack tragedy did for George,”
she writes. “I feel sorrier for George sometimes than I am for poor Needle. But I do
often have Masses said for Needle’s soul.”
I doubt if George will ever see me again on the Portobello Road. He broods much
over the crumpled snapshot he took of us on the haystack. Kathleen does not like the
photograph, I don’t wonder. For my part, I consider it quite a jolly snap, but I don’t
think we were any of us so lovely as we look in it, gazing blatantly over the ripe
cornfields, Skinny with his humorous expression, I secure in my difference from the
rest, Kathleen with her head prettily perched on her hand, each reflecting fearlessly
in the face of George’s camera the glory of the world, as if it would never pass.