Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 8

  ‘And you’ll strive not to be sick, dear child,’ she implored me suddenly, while I was nibbling my way slowly through the bun. But it was not until rumours of the tremendous fact of Miss Coppin’s early and unforeseen return had been borne in on us that Miss Duveen lost all presence of mind. She burst into tears; seized and kissed repeatedly my sticky hands; implored me to be discreet; implored me to be gone; implored me to retain her in my affections, ‘as you love your poor dear mother, Arthur,’ and I left her on her knees, her locket pressed to her bosom.

  Miss Coppin was, I think, unusually astonished to see a small strange boy walk softly past her bedroom door, within which she sat, with purple face, her hat strings dangling, taking off her boots. Ann, I am thankful to say, I did not encounter. But when I was safely out in the garden in the afternoon sunshine, the boldness and the romance of this sally completely deserted me. I ran like a hare down the alien path, leapt from stone to stone across the river; nor paused in my flight until I was safe in my own bedroom, and had – how odd is childhood! – washed my face and entirely changed my clothes.

  My grandmother, when I appeared at her tea-table, glanced at me now and again rather profoundly and inquisitively, but the actual question hovering in her mind remained unuttered.

  It was many days before we met again, my friend and I. She had, I gathered from many mysterious nods and shrugs, been more or less confined to her bedroom ever since our escapade, and looked dulled and anxious; her small face was even a little more vacant in repose than usual. Even this meeting, too, was full of alarms; for in the midst of our talk, by mere chance or caprice, my grandmother took a walk in the garden that afternoon, and discovered us under our damson tree. She bowed in her dignified, aged way. And Miss Duveen, with her cheeks and forehead the colour of her petticoat, elaborately curtseyed.

  ‘Beautiful, very beautiful weather,’ said my grandmother.

  ‘It is indeed,’ said my friend, fixedly.

  ‘I trust you are keeping pretty well?’

  ‘As far, ma’am, as God and a little weakness of the heart permit,’ said Miss Duveen. ‘He knows all,’ she added, firmly.

  My grandmother stood silent a moment.

  ‘Indeed He does,’ she replied politely.

  ‘And that’s the difficulty,’ ventured Miss Duveen, in her odd, furtive, friendly fashion.

  My grandmother opened her eyes, smiled pleasantly, paused, glanced remotely at me, and, with another exchange of courtesies, Miss Duveen and I were left alone once more. But it was a grave and saddened friend I now sat beside.

  ‘You see, Arthur, all bad things, we know, are best for us. Motives included. That comforts me. But my heart is sadly fluttered. Not that I fear or would shun society; but perhaps your grandmother … I never had the power to treat my fellow-creatures as if they were stocks and stones. And the effort not to notice it distresses me. A little hartshorn might relieve the palpitation, of course; but Miss Coppin keeps all keys. It is this shouting that makes civility such a task.’

  ‘This shouting’ – very faintly then I caught her meaning, but I was in no mood to sympathize. My grandmother’s one round-eyed expressionless glance at me had been singularly disconcerting. And it was only apprehension of her questions that kept me from beating a retreat. So we sat on, Miss Duveen and I, in the shade, the day drawing towards evening, and presently we walked down to the water-side, and under the colours of sunset I flung in my crumbs to the minnows, as she talked ceaselessly on.

  ‘And yet,’ she concluded, after how involved a monologue, ‘and yet, Arthur, I feel it is for your forgiveness I should be pleading. So much to do; such an arch of beautiful things might have been my gift to you. It is here,’ she said, touching her forehead. ‘I do not think, perhaps, that all I might say would be for your good. I must be silent and discreet about much. I must not provoke’ – she lifted her mittened finger, and raised her eyes – ‘Them,’ she said gravely. ‘I am tempted, terrified, persecuted. Whispering, wrangling, shouting: the flesh is a grievous burden, Arthur; I long for peace. Only to flee away and be at rest! But,’ she nodded, and glanced over her shoulder, ‘about much – great trials, sad entanglements, about much the Others say, I must keep silence. It would only alarm your innocence. And that I will never, never do. Your father, a noble, gallant gentleman of the world, would have understood my difficulties. But he is dead … Whatever that may mean. I have repeated it so often when Miss Coppin thought that I was not – dead, dead, dead, dead. But I don’t think that even now I grasp the meaning of the word. Of you, dear child, I will never say it. You have been life itself to me.’

  How generously, how tenderly she smiled on me from her perplexed, sorrowful eyes.

  ‘You have all the world before you, all the world. How splendid it is to be a Man. For my part I have sometimes thought, though they do not of course intend to injure me, yet I fancy, sometimes, they have grudged me my part in it a little. Though God forbid but Heaven’s best.’

  She raised that peering, dark, remote gaze to my face, and her head was trembling again. ‘They are saying now to one another – “Where is she? where is she? It’s nearly dark, m’m, where is she?” O, Arthur, but there shall be no night there. We must believe it, we must – in spite, dear friend, of a weak horror of glare. My cousin, Miss Coppin, does not approve of my wishes. Gas, gas, gas, all over the house, and when it is not singing, it roars. You would suppose I might be trusted with but just my own one bracket. But no – Ann, I think – indeed I fear, sometimes, has no —’ She started violently and shook her tiny head. ‘When I am gone,’ she continued disjointedly, ‘you will be prudent, cautious, dear child? Consult only your heart about me. Older you must be … Yes, certainly, he must be older,’ she repeated vaguely. ‘Everything goes on and on – and round!’ She seemed astonished, as if at a sudden radiance cast on an old and protracted perplexity.

  ‘About your soul, dear child,’ she said to me once, touching my hand, ‘I have never spoken. Perhaps it was one of my first duties to keep on speaking to you about your soul. I mention it now in case they should rebuke me when I make my appearance there. It is a burden; and I have so many burdens, as well as pain. And at times I cannot think very far. I see the thought; but it won’t alter. It comes back, just like a sheep – “Ba-aa-ah”, like that!’ She burst out laughing, twisting her head to look at me the while. ‘Miss Coppin, of course, has no difficulty; gentlemen have no difficulty. And this shall be the occasion of another of our little confidences. We are discreet?’ She bent her head and scanned my face. ‘Here,’ she tapped her bosom, ‘I bear his image. My only dear one’s. And if you would kindly turn your head, dear child, perhaps I could pull him out.’

  It was the miniature of a young, languid, fastidious-looking officer which she showed me – threaded on dingy tape, in its tarnished locket.

  ‘Miss Coppin, in great generosity, has left me this,’ she said, polishing the glass on her knee, ‘though I am forbidden to wear it. For you see, Arthur, it is a duty not to brood on the past, and even perhaps, indelicate. Some day, it may be, you, too, will love a gentle girl. I beseech you, keep your heart pure and true. This one could not. Not a single word of blame escapes me. I own to my Maker, never to anyone else, it has not eased my little difficulty. But it is not for us to judge. Whose office is that, eh?’ And again, that lean small forefinger, beneath an indescribable grimace; pointed gently, deliberately, from her lap upward. ‘Pray, pray,’ she added, very violently, ‘pray, till the blood streams down your face! Pray, but rebuke not. They all whisper about it. Among themselves,’ she added, peering out beneath and between the interlacing branches. ‘But I simulate inattention, I simulate …’ The very phrase seemed to have hopelessly confused her. Again, as so often now, that glassy fear came into her eyes; her foot tapped on the gravel.

  ‘Arthur,’ she cried suddenly, taking my hand tightly in her lap, ‘you have been my refuge in a time of trouble. You will never know it, child. My refuge, and my peace. We shall seldo
m meet now. All are opposed. They repeat it in their looks. The autumn will divide us; and then, winter; but, I think, no spring. It is so, Arthur, there is a stir; and then they will hunt me out.’ Her eyes gleamed again, far and small and black in the dusky pallor of her face.

  It was indeed already autumn; the air golden and still. The leaves were beginning to fall. The late fruits were well-nigh over. Robins and tits seemed our only birds now. Rain came in floods. The Wandle took sound and volume, sweeping deep above our stepping stones. Very seldom after this I even so much as saw our neighbour. But I chanced on her again one still afternoon, standing fixedly by the brawling stream, in a rusty-looking old-fashioned cloak, her scanty hair pushed high up on her forehead.

  She stared at me for a moment or two, and then, with a scared look over her shoulder, threw me a little letter, shaped like a cock-hat, and weighted with a pebble stone, across the stream. She whispered earnestly and rapidly at me over the water. But I could not catch a single word she said, and failed to decipher her close spidery handwriting. No doubt I was too shy, or too ashamed, or in a vague fashion too loyal, to show it to my grandmother. It is not now a flattering keepsake. I called out loudly I must go in; and still see her gazing after me, with a puzzled, mournful expression on the face peering out of the cloak.

  Even after that we sometimes waved to one another across the water, but never if by hiding myself I could evade her in time. The distance seemed to confuse her, and quite silenced me. I began to see we were ridiculous friends, especially as she came now in ever dingier and absurder clothes. She even looked hungry, and not quite clean, as well as ill; and she talked more to her phantoms than to me when once we met.

  The first ice was in the garden. The trees stood bare beneath a pale blue sunny sky, and I was standing at the window, looking out at the hoar-frost, when my grandmother told me that it was unlikely that I should ever see our neighbour again.

  I stood where I was, without turning round, gazing out of the window at the motionless ghostly trees, and the few birds in forlorn unease.

  ‘Is she dead, then?’ I enquired.

  ‘I am told,’ was the reply, ‘that her friends have been compelled to have her put away. No doubt, it was the proper course. It should have been done earlier. But it is not our affair, you are to understand. And, poor creature, perhaps death would have been a happier, a more merciful release. She was sadly afflicted.’

  I said nothing, and continued to stare out of the window.

  But I know now that the news, in spite of a vague sorrow, greatly relieved me. I should be at ease in the garden again, came the thought – no longer fear to look ridiculous and grow hot when our neighbour was mentioned, or be saddled with her company beside the stream.

  1 As printed in BS (1942).

  Selina’s Parable1

  On the wide wooden staircase that led up to her big sea-windy bedroom in the old house in which Selina was staying was a low, square window. For Selina, every window in her small private world had a charm, an incantation all its own. Was it not an egress for her eye to a scene of some beauty, or life, or of forbiddingness; was it not the way of light; either her own outward, or the world’s inward? This small window in particular beguiled Selina, because, kneeling there (it was of too narrow a frame to permit a protracted standing or stooping) she looked out of it, and down from it, upon a farmyard. Selina knew farmyards that more seductively soothed her aesthetic sense – farmyards of richer ricks, of solider outbuildings, of a deeper peace. But since this farmyard, despite its litter and bareness, was busy with life – dog in kennel, chicken, duck, goose, gander and goslings, doves, a few wild birds, some even of the sea, an occasional horse and man – contemplation of it solaced her small mind, keeping it gently busy, and yet in a state narrowly bordering on trance.

  Selina was dark and narrow-shouldered, with eyes of so intense a brown that, when the spirit that lurked behind them was absorbed in what they gazed on, they were like two small black pools of water. And one long, warm, languorous afternoon she found herself kneeling once again at the low staircase window even more densely engrossed than usual. Towards the bottom of the farmyard, perhaps twenty paces distant, stood a low stone barn or little granary, its square door opening blackly into the sunlight upon a flight of, maybe, ten rough and weed-tousled stone steps. Beyond its roof stretched the green dreaming steeps of the valley. From outside this door, it was the farmer’s wont, morning and evening, to feed his winged stock.

  On this particular afternoon the hour was but hard on four. Something unusual was afoot. Selina watched the farmer ponderously traverse the yard, and, in his usual stout Alexander-Selkirkian fashion, ascend into the granary. Surely not thus unseasonably to dispense the good grain, but for some purpose or purposes unknown – unknown at least to Selina.

  Neverthless, all his chickens, such is faith, instinct, habit, and stupidity, had followed close upon his heels, and were now sleekly and expectantly clustered in mute concourse upon the steps and on the adjacent yardstones, precisely like an assemblage of humanity patiently waiting to be admitted into the pit of a theatre or into the nave of a church.

  There was a dramatic pause. The sun shone on. The blue seemed to deepen. A few late-comers flurried in from the by-ways and hedges. The rest of the congregation was steadfast – with just a feverish effort apparent here and there of some one jealous individual to better her position at the expense of those more favourably situated. Then, after a prolonged interval, the square door was reopened, and the farmer emerged, empty-handed and apparently unconscious of the expectant assemblage awaiting him. Without so much as a glance of compassion or even of heed, he trod heavily down the stone steps through the assembled hens, careless to all appearance whether his swinging, cumbrous boots trod the more eager underfoot, and – wonder of wonders! – he left the door behind him, and at its very fullest gape.

  Selina sighed: the happiest of sighs, that of expectation and forbidden delight. It was as if the commissionaire of the theatre or the gaitered archdeacon of the cathedral had simply betrayed his edifice, and its treasures, to the mob. God bless me, thought Selina, they’ll go in and help themselves!

  Only one moiety of this brilliant speculation of Selina’s was to be proved justified. Led by a remarkably neat jimp blue-black Leghorn hen, deliciously feminine and adventurous, churchwarden’s helpmeet if ever there was one, the whole feathered mob, as if under the gesture of a magician, with an instantaneous and soundless ingurgitation of appetite and desire, swept upward and in. Threescore hens at least were there, the appropriate leaven of cocks, two couple of ducks, three doves, a few predatory wildings, while the little cluster of geese on the outskirts outstretched their serpentine necks and hissed.

  Selina, transfixed there in a felicity bordering upon rapture, watched. Like Athene above the plains of Troy, she gathered in her slim shoulders as if to swoop. What was happening within, beyond that strange square of velvety afternoon darkness? The rapine, the orgy, the indiscriminate gorge? Alas, no! Whether or not the marauders had discerned or even so much as descried the fatted bags of oats and maize and wheat that were undoubtedly shelved within that punctual hostel, Selina could not guess. This only was perfectly plain – that the concourse was now dejectedly emerging, dispirited and unfed. One by one, in ruffled groups, peevish, crestfallen, damped, the feathered congregation by ones and twos and threes reappeared, trod, or hopped, or fluttered down the shallow familiar disenchanted steps, the ducks, too, dumb and ignoble, the cocks simulating indifference or contempt, the wildings – as wild as ever.

  When Selina, still agape, came to herself, the farmyard was much as usual – dispersed clusters of huffed, short-memoried and dusting fowl, a pacing cock, the dog, head on paws, still asleep, doves in comparatively dispassionate courtship on the roof, duck and drake guzzling in that unfathomable morass of iniquity known as the duck pond.

  ‘Came to herself’ – for Selina’s was a type of mind that cannot but follow things up (as far as ever
she could go); it was compelled, that is, by sheer natural impulse, to spin queer little stories out of the actual, and even, alas, to moralize.

  ‘Why,’ she mused, ‘poor hen-brained things, they came to be fed. Always when the farmer opened the door and went in, grain, the bread of life, came out. Always. And he, surely, being a more or less generous creature, capable at any moment of magnanimity, and not, gracious goodness, a cold and bloated cynic, since one must at least think the best of what is and may be, why, of course, they simply could not but go in, as they did, and, to say the least of it, just see for themselves. You surely can’t impiously raid the given. Morning, and possibly afternoon, the poor creatures as best their natural powers allow, reward the farmer for his benefactions. A little indirectly, perhaps, but surely you wouldn’t expect the poor things to reason that he gives – well, what he does give – solely for gain, that his bounty is sheer profiteering, that it is their eggs, their poor carcases, or their positive offspring he is after, for his own – well, to them – immeasurably barbarous purposes.

  ‘Suppose with avid beak (a little magnified, of course) they surge in one day and carry off his last squalling baby – that puffy little Samuel – from his cradle. Suppose they do. It will serve him right: it will be tit for tat. They had believed in him – that was the point. Now they won’t: they can’t – at least not for ten minutes. Though they are always hungry. Yes, they had climbed up, lured on by sheer indifference masquerading as generosity, in the heat of the day, too, and that peculiarly slim and jimp black Leghorn pullet in particular, only to discover – nothing, just cool inner darkness and odoriferous vacancy. Even a horny, fussy old verger would at least have shooed them out again, have told them that they had made a mistake, that there wasn’t any extra thing “on” of that kind – no confirmation service, you know.’ And Selina fleetingly smiled, narrow cheek, delicate lip, and black abstracted eye.