Short Stories 1927-1956 Read online

  Indeed, my foot was actually on the step of the car, when, as if at a definite summons, I turned my head and discovered not only that the door was now open, but that a figure – Mr Bloom’s – was standing a pace or so beyond the threshold, his regard steadily fixed on me. Mr Bloom – a memorable figure. He must have been well over six feet in height, but he carried his heavy head and heavy shoulders with a pronounced stoop. He was both stout and fat, and yet his clothes now hung loosely upon him, as if made to old measurements – a wide, black morning-coat and waistcoat, and brown cloth trousers. I noticed in particular his elegant boots. They were adorned with what I had supposed was an obsolete device – imitation laces. A well-cut pair of boots, nonetheless, by a good maker. His head was bald on the crown above a fine lofty forehead – but it wore a superfluity of side hair, and his face was bushily bearded. With chin drawn up a little, he was surveying me from under very powerful magnifying spectacles, his left hand resting on the inside handle of the door.

  He had taken me so much by surprise that for the moment I was speechless. We merely looked at one another; he, with a more easily justifiable intentness than I. He seemed, as the saying goes, to be sizing me up; to be fitting me in; and it was his voice that at length set the porch echoing again – a voice, as might have been inferred from the look of him, sonorous but muffled, as if his beard interfered with its resonance.

  ‘I see you are interested in the appearance of my house,’ he was saying.

  The greeting was courteous enough; and yet extraordinarily impersonal. I made the lamest apologies, adding some trivial comment on the picturesqueness of the scene, and the general ‘evening effects’. But of this I am certain; the one thing uppermost in my mind, even at this stage in our brief acquaintance, was the desire not to continue it. Mr Bloom had somehow exhausted my interest in his house. I wanted to shake him off, to go away. He was an empty-looking man in spite of his domed brow. If his house had suggested vacancy, so did he; and yet – I wonder.

  Far from countenancing this inclination, however, he was inviting me not to leave him. He was welcoming the interloper. With a slow comprehensive glance to left and right, he actually stepped out at last under the porch, and – with a peculiar tentative gesture – thrust out a well-kept, fleshy hand in my direction, as if with the intention of putting me entirely at my ease. He then stood solemnly scrutinizing my tiny car, which, with him as solitary passenger, would appear more like a perambulator!

  At a loss for any alternative, I withdrew a pace or so, and took another long look at the façade – the blank windows, their red-brick mouldings, the peeping chimney-stacks, the quiet, serene sufficiency of it all. There was, I remember, a sorry little array of half-made, abandoned martins’ nests plastered up under the narrow jutting of the roof. But this craning attitude was fatiguing, and I turned and looked back at Mr Bloom.

  Mr Bloom apparently had not stirred. Thus inert, he resembled the provincial statue of some forgotten Victorian notability – his feet set close together in those neat, polished, indoor boots, his fat fingers on his watch-chain. And now he seemed to be smiling at me out of his bluish-grey, rather prominent eyes, from under those thick distorting glasses. He was suggesting that I should come in, an invitation innocent of warmth, but more pressing than the mere words implied. To a mouse the wreathing odour of toasted cheese – before the actual trap comes into sight – must be similar in effect. There was a suppressed eagerness in the eyes behind those glasses. They had rolled a little in their sockets. And yet, even so, why should I have distrusted him? It would be monstrous to take this world solely on its face value. I was on the point of blurting out a churlish refusal when he stepped back and pushed the door open. The glimpse within decided me.

  For the hall beyond that hospitable gape was peculiarly attractive. Not very lofty, but of admirable proportions, it was panelled in light wood, the carving on its cornice and pilasters tinged in here and there with gilt. From its roof hung three chandeliers of greenish-grey glass – entrancing things, resembling that mysterious exquisite ice that comes from Waterford. The evening light swam softly in through the uncurtained windows as if upon the stillness of a dream.

  Empty, it would have been a fascinating room; but just now it was grotesquely packed with old furniture – beautiful, costly things in themselves, but, in this hugger-mugger, robbed of all elegance and grace. Only the narrowest alley-way had been left unoccupied – an alley-way hardly wide enough to enable a human being to come and go without positively mounting up off the floor, as in the Land-and-Water game beloved of children. It might have been some antique furniture dealer’s interior, prepared for ‘a moonlight flit’. Mr Bloom smiled at the air of surprise which must have been evident in my face. ‘Here today,’ he murmured, as if he were there and then preparing to be off – ‘and gone tomorrow.’

  But having thus enticed me in under his roof, he rapidly motioned me on, not even turning his head to see if I were following him. For so cumbersome a man he was agile, and at the dusky twist of the corridor I found him already awaiting me, his hand on an inner door. ‘This is the library,’ he informed me, with a suavity that suggested that I was some wealthy visitor to whom he wished to dispose of the property. ‘One moment,’ he added hurriedly, ‘I think I neglected to shut the outer door.’

  A library is often in effect little better than a mausoleum. But on a sunny morning this room must have looked as jocund as some ‘beauty’s’ boudoir. It was evening now. Dimmed old Persian rugs lay on the floor; there was a large writing-table. The immense armchairs were covered with vermilion morocco leather, and the walls, apart from a few engravings and mezzotints, were lined with exquisitely bound books, and jade and geranium and primrose-yellow were apparently Mr Bloom’s favourite colours. On one side many of the books had been removed and lay stacked up in portable bundles beneath the shelves on which they had stood. Opposite these was a lofty chimneypiece surmounted by mouldings in plaster – some pagan scene. And once again the self-sacrificing pelican showed in the midmost panel – still engaged in feeding her young.

  I was looking out of the long windows when Mr Bloom reappeared. He still seemed to be smiling in his non-committal fashion and treated me to yet another slow scrutiny; the most conspicuous feature of his person, apart from his spectacles, being at such moments the spade-guinea that dangled from his watch-chain. Brown trousers, my friend, I was thinking to myself, why brown? And why not wear clothes that fit?

  ‘You are a lover of books?’ he was murmuring, in that flat, muffled voice of his; and we were soon conversing amiably enough on the diversions of literature. He led me steadily from shelf to shelf; but for the time being he was only making conversation. He was definitely detaining me, and staved off every opportunity I attempted to seize of extricating myself from his company. At last I bluntly held out my hand, and in spite of his protestations – so insistent that he began stuttering – I made my way out of the room.

  Daylight was failing now, and the spectacle of that hoard of furniture in the gloaming was oddly depressing. Mr Bloom had followed me out, cooing, as he came on, his apologies and regrets that I could spare him no more time – ‘The upper rooms … the garden … my china.’ I persisted, nevertheless, and myself opened the outer door. And there in the twilight, with as disconsolate an appearance as a cocker-spaniel that has wearied of waiting for its mistress, sat my car.

  I had actually taken my seat in it – having omitted to shake hands with Mr Bloom – when I noticed not only that in a moment of absent-mindedness I must have locked the gears but that the Yale gear-key which usually lay in the little recess to the left of the dash-board was missing. Accidents of this kind may be absurdly disconcerting. I searched my pockets; leapt out and searched them again; and not only in vain, but without the faintest recollection in my mind of having even touched the key. It was a ridiculous, a mortifying situation. With eyes fixed, in an effort to recall my every movement, I gazed out over the wide green turf beneath the motionless che
stnut trees, and then at last turned again, and looked at Mr Bloom.

  With plump hands held loosely and helplessly a little in front of him, and head on one side, he was watching my efforts with an almost paternal concern.

  ‘I have mislaid the key,’ I almost shouted at him, as if he were hard of hearing.

  ‘Is it anything of importance? Can I get you anything? Water? A little grease?’

  That one word, grease, was accompanied with so ridiculous a trill that I lost patience.

  ‘It’s the gear-key,’ I snapped at him. ‘She’s fixed, immovable, useless! I wish to heaven I …’ I stopped aimlessly, fretfully searching the porch and the turf beyond it. Mr Bloom watched me with the solicitude of a mother. ‘I ought to have been home an hour ago,’ I stuttered over my shoulder.

  ‘Most vexatious! Dear me! I am distressed. But my memory too … A Slough of Despond. Do you think by any chance, Mr Dash, you can have put the key into your pocket?’

  I stared at him. The suggestion was little short of imbecile; and yet he had evidently had the sagacity to look for my name on my licence! ‘What is the nearest town?’ I all but shouted.

  ‘The nearest,’ he echoed; ‘ah, the nearest! Now, let me see! The nearest town – garage, of course. A nice question. Come in again. We must get a map; yes, a map, don’t you think? That will be our best course; an excellent plan.’

  I thrust my hand into the leather pocket of the car, and produced my own. But only the eyes of an owl could have read its lettering in that light, and somehow it did not occur to me in this tranquil dusky scene to switch on the lamps. There was no alternative. I followed Mr Bloom into the house again, and on into his study. He lit a couple of candles and we sat down together at the writing-table and examined the map. It was the closest I ever got to him.

  The position was ludicrous. Montrésor was a good four miles from the nearest village of any size and seven from the nearest railway station – and that on a branch line. And here was this recluse peppering me with futile advice and offers of assistance, and yet obviously beaming with satisfaction at the dilemma I was in. There was not even a servant in the house to take a telegram to the village – if a telegram had been of the slightest use. I hastily folded up my map – folded it up wrong, of course – and sat glooming. He was breathing a little rapidly after this exercise of intelligence.

  ‘But why be disturbed?’ he entreated me. ‘Why? A misadventure; but of no importance. Indeed not. You will give me the pleasure of being my guest for the night – nothing but a happiness, I assure you. Say no more. It won’t incommode me in the slightest degree. This old house … A most unfortunate accident. They should make larger, heavier keys. Ridiculous! But then I am no mechanic.’

  He stooped round at me – the loose, copious creature – and was almost flirtatious. ‘Frankly, my dear young sir, I cannot regret an accident that promises me more of your company. We bookish people, you understand.’

  I protested, stood up, and once more began searching my pockets! His head jerked back into its habitual posture.

  ‘Ah! I see what is in your mind. Think nothing of it. Yes, yes, yes. Comforts, convenience curtailed, I agree. But my good housekeeper always prepares a meal sufficient for two – mere habit, Mr Dash, almost animal habit. And besides – why not? I will forage for myself. A meal miscellaneous, perhaps, but not unsatisfying.’ He beamed. ‘Why not take a look at the garden meanwhile before it is dark?’ The tones had fallen still flatter, the face had become impassive.

  I was cornered. It was useless to protest – it would have been atrociously uncivil. He himself thrust open the windows for me. Fuming within, I stumped out on to the terrace while he went off to ‘forage’. I saw in fancy those thick spectacles eyeing the broken meats in the great larder. What was wrong with the man? What made him so extortionately substantial, and yet in effect, so elusive and unreal? What indeed constitutes the reality of any fellow creature? The something, the someone within, surely; not the mere physical frame.

  In Mr Bloom’s company that physical frame seemed to be mainly a kind of stalking horse. If so, the fowler was exquisitely intent on not alarming his prey. Those honeyed decoy-notes. But then, what conceivably could he want with me? Whom had he been waiting for, skulking there at some convenient window? Why was he alone in this great house? Only Mr Bloom could answer these questions: and owing to some odd scruple of manners or what-not, I couldn’t put them to him. Ridiculous!

  My mind by this time had wearied of these vexations and had begun to follow my eyes. I was looking southward – a clear lustre as of glass was in the heavens. It had been a calm but almost colourless sunset, and westward the evening star floated like a morsel of silver in a dove-grey fleece of cloud drawn gently across the fading blue of the horizon. The countryside lay duskily purple and saturnine, and about a hundred yards away in this direction was a wide stretch of water – dead-white under the sky – a lake that must have been thronged with wild-fowl; yet not so much as a peewit crying.

  In front of me the garden was densely walled in with trees, and an exceedingly skilful topiarian had been at work on the nearer yews. Year after year he must have been clipping his birds and arches and vast mushrooms and even an obelisk. They were now in their freshest green. Mr Bloom’s servants cannot have forsaken him in a batch. They were gone, though. Not a light showed in the dusk; no movement; no sound except out of the far distance, presently, the faint hypnotic churring of a night-jar. It is the bird of woody solitude. Well, there would be something of a moon that night, I knew. She would charm out the owls, and should at least ensure me a lullaby. But why this distaste, this sense of inward disquietude?

  And suddenly I wheeled about at the sound, as I thought, of a footstep. But no; I was alone. Mr Bloom must still be busy foraging in his back-quarters or his cellarage. And yet – is it credible? – once more in a last forlorn hope I began to search my pockets for the missing key! But this time Mr Bloom interrupted the operation. He came out sleeking his hands together in front of him and looking as amiably hospitable as a churchwarden at a parochial soirée. He led me in, volubly explaining the while that since he had been alone in the house he had all but given up the use of the upper rooms. ‘As a matter of fact, I am preparing to leave,’ he told me, ‘as soon as it is – convenient. Meanwhile I camp on the ground-floor. There is many a novelty in the ordinary routine of life, Mr Dash, that we seldom enjoy. It amused my secretary, this system of picnicking, poor fellow – at least for a while.’

  He came to a standstill on the threshold of the room into which he was leading me. A cluster of candles burned on the long oak table set out for our evening meal, but otherwise the room – larger than the study, and containing, apart from its cabinets of china and old ivory, almost as many books – was thickly curtained, and in gloom.

  ‘I must explain,’ he was saying, and he laid the four fingers of his left hand very gently on my shoulder, ‘that my secretary has left me. He has left me for good. He is dead.’ With owl-like solemnity he scrutinized the blank face I turned on him, as if he were expectant of sympathy. But I had none to give. You cannot even feign sympathy without some preparation.

  Mr Bloom glanced over his shoulder into the corridor behind us. ‘He has been a great loss,’ he added. ‘I miss him. On the other hand,’ he added more cheerfully, ‘we mustn’t allow our personal feelings to interfere with the enjoyment of what I am afraid even at best is a lamentably modest little meal.’

  Again Mr Bloom was showing himself incapable of facing facts. It was by no means a modest little meal. Our cold bouillon was followed by a pair of spring chickens, the white sauce on their delicate breasts adorned in a chaste design with fragments of cucumber, truffle and mushroom – hapless birds that seemed to have been fattened on cowslips and honeysuckle buds. There was an asparagus salad, so cold to the tongue as to suggest ice; and neighbouring it were old silver dishes of meringues and an amber-coloured wine jelly, thickly clotted with cream. After the sherry champagne was ou
r only wine; and it was solely owing to my abstemiousness that we failed to finish the second bottle.

  Between mouthfuls Mr Bloom indulged in general conversation – of the exclamatory order. It covered a pretty wide autobiographical field. He told me of his boyhood in Montrésor. The estate had been in his family for close on two centuries. For some years he had shared it with the last of his three sisters – all now dead.

  ‘She’s there!’ he exclaimed, pointing an instant with uplifted fork at a portrait that hung to the right of the chimneypiece. ‘And that’s my mother.’ I glanced up at Miss Bloom; but she was looking, in the other direction, and our real and painted eyes did not meet. It seemed incredible that these two could ever have been children, have played together, giggled, quarrelled, made it up. Even if I could imagine the extinguished lady in the portrait as a little girl, no feat of fancy could convert Mr Bloom into a small boy – a sufferable one, I mean.

  By the time I had given up the attempt, and, having abandoned the jelly, we had set to work on some Camembert cheese, Mr Bloom’s remarks about his secretary had become almost aggrieved.

  ‘He was of indispensable use to me in my literary work,’ he insisted as he chawed rapidly on, ‘modest enough in itself – I won’t trouble you with that – only an obscure by-way of interest. Indispensable. We differed in our views, of course: no human beings ever see perfectly eye to eye on such a topic … In a word, the occult. But he had an unusual flair of which he himself, you will hardly believe it, until he came to me, was completely ignorant.’ He laid his left hand on the table. ‘I am not denying that for one moment. We succeeded in attaining the most curious and interesting results from our little experiments. I could astonish you.’