Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 3

  I tried in vain to welcome the suggestion; but the light even of only six candles is a little stupefying when one has to gaze through them at one’s host, and Mr Bloom was sitting up immediately opposite to me on the other side of the table.

  ‘My own personal view,’ he explained, ‘is that his ill-health was in no way due to these investigations. It was, I assure you, against my wish that he should continue them even on his own account. Flatly, two heads, two wills, two cautions even, are better than one in such matters. Dr Ponsonby – I should explain that Dr Ponsonby is my medical adviser; he attended my poor sister in her last illness – Dr Ponsonby, unfortunately, lives at some little distance, but he did not hesitate to sacrifice all the time he could spare. On the other hand, as far as I can gather, he was not in the least surprised that when the end came, it came suddenly. My secretary, Mr Dash, was found dead in his bed – that is, in his bedroom. Speaking for myself, I should —’ back went his head again, and once more his slightly bolting eyes gazed out at me like polished agates across the silvery lustre of the candlelight – ‘speaking for myself,’ his voice had muffled itself almost into the inarticulate beneath his beard, ‘I should prefer to go quickly when I have to go at all.’

  The white plump hand replenished his glass with champagne. ‘Not that I intend to imply that I have any immediate desire for that. While as for you, my dear young sir,’ he added almost merrily, ‘having enjoyed only a morsel of my experience in this world, you must desire that consummation even less.’

  ‘You mean, to die, Mr Bloom?’ I put it to him. His chin lowered itself into his collar again; the eyelids descended over his eyes.

  ‘Precisely. Though it is as well to remember there is more than one way of dying. There is first the body to be taken into account; and there is next – what remains: though nowadays, of course – well, I leave it to you.’

  Mr Bloom was a peculiar conversationalist. Like an astute letter-writer he ignored questions in which he was not interested, or which he had no wish to answer; and with the agility of a chimpanzee in its native wilds would swing off from a topic not to his liking to another that up to that point had not even been hinted at. Quite early in our extravagantly tête-à-tête meal I began to suspect that the secret of his welcome to a visitor who had involuntarily descended on him from out of the blue, was an insensate desire to hear himself talk. His vanity was elephantine. Events proved this surmise to be true only in part. But in the meantime it became pretty evident why Mr Bloom should be in want of company; I mean of ordinary human company, though he seemed to have wearied of his secretary’s some little time before that secretary had been summoned away.

  ‘You will agree, my dear sir, that to see eye to eye with an invalid for any protracted period is a severe strain. Illness breeds fancies, not all of them considerate. Not a happy youth, ever: introspective – an ‘introvert’ in the cant term of our time. But still meaning well; and, oh yes, endeavouring not to give way when – when in company. My sister never really liked him, either. Not at all. But then, she was the prey of conventions that are yet for some, perhaps, a safeguard. We shared the same interests, of course – he and I. Our arrangement was based on that. He had his own views, but was at times, oh yes’ – he filled his glass again – ‘exceedingly obstinate about them. He had little staying power. He began to fumble, to hesitate, to question, to fluster himself – and me, too, for that matter – at the very moment perhaps when we were arriving at an excessively interesting juncture.

  ‘You know the general process, of course?’ He had glanced up over his food at me, but not in order to listen to any answer I might have given. ‘It is this’ – and he forthwith embarked on a long and tedious discourse concerning the sweet uses of the planchette, of automatic writing, table-rapping, the hidden slate, ectoplasm, and all the other – to me rather disagreeable – paraphernalia of the spiritualistic séance. Nothing I could say or do, not even unconcealed and deliberate yawning, had the least effect upon Mr Bloom’s fluency. ‘Lung trouble’ appeared to have been the primary cause of his secretary’s final resignation. But if the unfortunate young man had night after night been submitted to the experience that I was now enduring, exasperation and boredom alone would have accounted for it. How on earth indeed, I asked myself, could he have endured Mr Bloom so long.

  I ceased to listen. The cascade of talk suddenly came to an end. Mr Bloom laid his hands on either side of his dessert plate and once more fixed me in silence under his glasses. ‘You, yourself, have possibly dabbled a little in my hobby?’ he enquired.

  I had indeed. In my young days my family had possessed an elderly female friend – a Miss Algood. She had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids, and it was an unwritten law in our household that all possible consideration and affection should be shown to her in all circumstances. She, poor soul, had come down in the world – until indeed she had come down at last to one small room on the top floor in lodgings in Westbourne Park. She was gaunt, loquacious, and affectionate; and she had a consuming interest in the other world. I hear her now: ‘On the other side, my dear Charles.’ ‘Another plane, Charles.’ ‘When I myself pass over.’ It is curious; she was absolutely fearless and quixotically independent.

  For old sake’s sake, and I am afraid for very little else, I used to go to tea with her occasionally. And we would sit together, the heat welling up out of the sun-struck street outside her window; and she would bring out the hateful little round Victorian table, and the wine-glass and the cardboard alphabet; and we would ask questions of the unseen, the mischievous and the half-crazy concerning the unknowable; and she would become flushed and excited, her lean hands trembling, while she urged me now to empty my mind, and now, to concentrate! And though I can honestly say I never deliberately tampered with that execrable little wine-glass in its wanderings over the varnished table; and though she herself never, so far as I could detect, deliberately cooked the messages it spelt out for us; we enjoyed astonishing revelations. Revelations such as an intelligent monkey or parrot might invent – yet which by any practical test proved utterly valueless.

  These ‘spiritistic’ answers to our cross-examination were at the same time so unintelligibly intelligent, and yet so useless and futile, that I had been cured once and for all of the faintest interest in ‘the other side’ – thus disclosed I mean. If anything, in fact, the experience had even a little tarnished the side Mr Bloom now shared with me.

  For this reason alone his first mention of the subject had almost completely taken away my appetite for his chicken, his jelly and his champagne. After all, that ‘other side’s’ border-line from which, according to the poet, no traveller returns, must be a good many miles longer even than the wall of China, and not all its gates can lead to plains of peace or paradise or even of mere human endurableness.

  I explained at last to Mr Bloom that my interest in spiritualism was of the tepidest variety. Alas, his prominent stone-blue eyes – lit up as they were by this concentrated candle-light – incited me to be more emphatic than I intended. I told him I detested the whole subject. ‘I am convinced,’ I assured him, ‘that if the messages, communications, whatever you like to call them, that you get that way are anything else than the babblings and mumblings of sub-consciousness – a deadly dubious term, in itself – then they are probably the work of something or somebody even more “sub” than that.’

  Convinced! I knew, of course, practically nothing at first hand about the subject – Miss Algood, poor soul, was only the fussiest and flimsiest of amateurs – but ignorance, with a glimmer of intuition, perhaps gives one assurance. ‘Whatever I have heard,’ I told him flatly, ‘from that source – of the future, I mean, which awaits us when we get out of this body of ours, Mr Bloom, fills me with nothing but regret that this life is not the end of everything. I don’t say that you get nowhere, even by that route, and I don’t say that you mayn’t get further some day than you intend, but,’ I stupidly blustered on, ‘my own personal opinion is that the wh
ole business, so conducted, is a silly and dangerous waste of time.’

  His eyes never wavered, he lowered his head by not so much as the fraction of an inch, and then, as if in an aside, his lips hardly stirring, he ejaculated ‘Quite so, but not exactly nowhere, it may be.’

  And then, as I sat looking at him – it is difficult to put it into words – his face ‘went out’ so to speak; it became a face (not only abandoned but) forsaken, vacant, and as if uncurtained too, bleak and mute as a window. The unspeculating eyes remained open, one inert hand lay on the table beside his plate, but he, Mr Bloom, was gone. And for perhaps two minutes I myself sat on there, in the still clear candle-light of that festal board, in a solitude I do not covet to experience again. Yet – as I realized even then – Mr Bloom had succeeded in this miserable manoeuvre merely by a trick. The next instant his bluish eyes became occupied, his face took life, and he once again looked out at me with a leer of triumph, an almost coquettish vanity, though he blinked a little as if the light offended him, and as if he were trying to conceal the fact that he had not much appreciated the scene or state which he had come from.

  He gave me no time to reflect on this piece of buffoonery. ‘So, so,’ he was informing me, ‘shutters up or shutters down, we are what we are; and all that you have been saying, my dear Mr Dash, amuses me. Extraordinary! Most amusing! Illuminating! Quite so! Quite so! Capital! You tell me that you know nothing about the subject. Precisely. And that it is silly and dangerous. Ah, yes! And why not? Dangerous! Well, one word in your ear. Here, my dear sir, we are in the very thick of it; a positive hotbed. But if there is one course I should avoid,’ his eyes withdrew themselves, and the thick glasses blazed into the candle-light once more, ‘it would be that of taking any personal steps to initiate you into – into our mysteries. No; I shall leave matters completely to themselves.’

  He had scarcely raised his voice; his expression had never wavered; he continued to smile at me; only his thick fingers trembled a little on the tablecloth. But he was grey with rage. It seemed even that the scalp of his head had a little raised the hair on its either side, so intense was his resentment.

  ‘A happy state – ignorance, Mr Dash. That of our first parents.’

  And then, like a fool, I flared up and mentioned Miss Algood. He listened, steadily smiling.

  ‘I see. A superannuated novice, a would-be professional medium,’ he insinuated at last with a shrug of his great heavy shoulders. ‘You pay your money and you take your choice. Pooh! Banal!’

  I hotly defended my well-meaning sentimental old friend.

  ‘Ah, indeed, a retired governess! An – an old maid!’ and once more his insolence nearly mastered him. ‘Have no fear, Mr Dash, she is not on my visiting list. There are deeps, and vasty deeps.’

  With that he thrust out a hand and snatched up the chicken bone that lay on my plate.

  ‘Come out there!’ he called baldly. ‘Here, you!’ His head dipped out of sight as he stooped; and a yellowish dog – with a white-gleaming sidelong eye – of which up to the present I had seen or heard no sign, came skulking out from under a chair in the corner of the room to enjoy its evening meal. For awhile only the crunching of teeth on bones broke the silence.

  ‘Greedy, you! You glutton!’ Mr Bloom was cajoling him. ‘Aye, but where’s Steve? An animal’s intelligence, Mr Dash’ – his voice floated up to me from under the other side of the table – ‘is situated in his belly. And even when one climbs up to human prejudices one usually detects as primitive a source.’

  For an instant I could make no reply to this pleasantry. He took advantage of the pause to present me with a smile, and at the same moment filled a little tulip-shaped glass for me with green Chartreuse.

  ‘There, there: I refuse to disagree,’ he was saying. ‘Your company has been very welcome to me; and – well, one should never embark on one’s little private preserves without encouragement. My own in particular meet with very scant courtesy usually. That animal could tell a tale.’ The crunching continued. ‘Couldn’t yer, you old rascal? Where’s Steve; where’s Steve? Now get along back!’ The scrunching ceased. The yellowish dog retreated into its corner.

  ‘And now, Mr Dash,’ declared Mr Bloom, ‘if you have sufficiently refreshed yourself, let us leave these remains. These last few months I have detested being encumbered with servants in the house. A foreign element. They are further away from us, I assure you, in all that really matters, than that rascal, Chunks, there in the corner. Eh, you old devil?’ he called at his pet, ‘Ain’t it so? Now, let me see,’ he took out his watch, a gold half-hunter, its engraving almost worn away with long service – ‘nine o’clock; h’m; h’m; h’m! Just nine! We have a long evening before us. Believe me, I am exceedingly grateful for your company, and regret that – but there, I see you have already condoned an old man’s foibles.’

  There was something curiously aimless, even pathetic in the tone of that last remark. He had eaten with excellent appetite, and had accounted for at least four-fifths of our champagne. But he rose from the table looking more dejected than I should have supposed possible, and shuffled away in his slippers, as if the last ten minutes had added years to his age.

  He was leading the way with one of the candlesticks in his hand, but, to avoid their guttering, I suppose, had blown out two of its candles. A dusky moonlight loomed beyond the long hinged windows of his study. The faint earthy odour of spring and night saturated the air, for one of them was open. He paused at sight of it, glancing about him.

  ‘If there is an animal I cannot endure,’ he muttered over his shoulder at me, ‘it is the cat – the feline cat. They have a history; they retreat into the past; we meet them in far other circumstances. Yes, yes.’

  He had closed and bolted the window, drawn shutters and curtains, while he was speaking.

  ‘And now, bless my soul, Mr Dash, how about your room – a room for you? I ought to have thought of that before: bachelor habits. Now where shall we be – put?’ With feet close together he stood looking at me. ‘My secretary’s, now? Would that meet the case? He was a creature for comfort. But one has fancies, reluctances, perhaps. As I say, the upper rooms are all bare, dismantled, though we might together put up a camp-bed and – and water in the bath-room. I myself sleep in here.’

  He stepped across and drew aside a curtain hung between the bookcases. But there was not light enough to see beyond it.

  ‘The room I propose is also on this floor, so we should not, if need be, be far apart. Eh? What think we? Well, now, come this way.’

  He paused. Once more he led me out, and stopped at the third door of the corridor on the left-hand side. So long was this pause, one might have supposed he was waiting for permission to enter. I followed him in. It was a lofty room – a bed and sitting-room combined, and its curtains and upholstery were of a pale purple. Its window was shut, the air stuffy and faintly sweet. The bed was in the further corner to the left of the window; and there again the dusky moonlight showed.

  I stood looking at the mute inanimate things around me in that blending of the two faint lights. No doubt if I had been ignorant that the owner, or rather user, of the room had made his last exit thence, I should have noticed nothing unusual in its stillness, its vacant calm. And yet, well, I had left a friend only that afternoon still a little breathless after his scramble up the nearer bank of the Jordan. And now – this was the last place on earth – these four walls, these colours, this bookcase, that table, that window – which Mr Bloom’s secretary had set eyes on before setting out, not to return.

  My host watched me. He would, I think, have shut and pulled the curtains over these windows too, if I had given him the opportunity.

  ‘How’s that, then? You think, you will be – but there, I hesitate to press the matter … In fact, Mr Dash, this is the only room I can offer you.’

  I mumbled my thanks and assured him not very graciously that I should be comfortable.

  ‘Capital!’ cried Mr Bloom. ‘Eureka! My onl
y apprehension – well, you know how touchy, how sensitive people can be. Why, my dear Mr Dash, in a world as superannuated as ours is every other mouthful of air we breathe must have been somebody’s last. I leave you reconciled, then. You will find me in the study, and I can promise you that one little theme shall not intrude on us again. The bee may buzz, but Mr Bloom will keep his bonnet on! The fourth door on the right – after turning to your right down the corridor. Ah! I am leaving you no light.’

  He lit the twin wax candles on his late secretary’s dressing-table, and withdrew.

  I myself stood for awhile gazing stupidly out of the window. In spite of his extraordinary fluency, Mr Bloom, I realized, was a secretive old man. I had realized all along of course that it was not my beautiful eyes he was after; nor even my mere company. The old creature – admirable mask though his outward appearance might be – was on edge. He was detesting his solitude, though until recently, at any rate, it had been the one aim of his life. It had even occurred to me that he was not much missing his secretary. Quite the reverse. He had spoken of him with contempt, but not exactly with the contempt one feels for the completely gone and worsted. Two things appeared to have remained unforgiven in Mr Bloom’s mind indeed: some acute disagreement between them, and the fact that Mr Champneys had left him without due notice – unless inefficient lungs constitute due notice.

  I took one of the candles and glanced at the books. They were chiefly of fiction and a little poetry, but there was one on mosses, one on English birds, and a little medical handbook in green cloth. There was also a complete row of manuscript books with pigskin backs labelled Proceedings. I turned to the writing-table. Little there of interest – a stopped clock, a dried-up inkwell, a tarnished silver cup, and one or two more books: The Sentimental Journey, a Thomas à Kempis, bound in limp maroon leather. I opened the Thomas à Kempis and read the spidery inscription on the fly-leaf: ‘To darling Sidney, with love from Mother. F.C.’ It startled me, as if I had been caught spying. ‘Life surely should never come quite to this,’ some secret sentimental voice within piped out of the void. I shut the book up.