Short Stories 1895-1926 Read online

  ‘How very like poor human beings,’ she went on, pursuing her small privy thoughts, slipping down, as she did so, from kneeling to sitting, and automatically readjusting the tortoiseshell comb in her dark hair; ‘punctually they go to church (some of them), not attempting to guess, or not capable, I suppose, of really knowing, what for; but confident that the bishop or rector or somebody will be in the pulpit and that they will be fed.

  ‘And then comes a day … Now what is the difference,’ mused Selina, contemplatively narrowing her inward gaze, ‘what is the real difference between Farmer Trepolpen and God, and between that fussy, forward – still she was adventurous – little Leghorn, who must lay the most delicious little cream-coloured eggs, and Me? Surely no: He cannot want me (He cannot expect me to go to church and praise and pray) simply for the sake of my wretched little hard-boiled bits of goodness. Does He really only think of us twice in twenty-four hours, like the tides, like matins and evensong, as – well, as I think of Him?

  ‘And if in between-whiles He did think of me or I of Him, isn’t there any inexhaustible store of heavenly manna which my trussed-up soul – and I suppose the others – though I wouldn’t mind the doves and the sea-gull or … Oh dear, oh dear!’

  Selina stared softly on, down the sunlit and intensely still staircase into the shadow. ‘Of course,’ began again that still small voice within in faraway tones, ‘it’s not quite like that, it’s not on all fours. It’s a bigger dream than that. If they, silly cackling creatures, mercifully don’t know what that carnivorous old egg-hunter is after, I’m pretty certain he doesn’t know eventually himself. Merely keeping them alive: though that’s something. But not the other. Anyhow, suppose, just suppose not. Suppose there’s someone, a kind of unseen circumspectious spirit, kneeling crunched-up there at a little square staircase window. Oh, ever so happy and dreamy and sorrowful and alone, and not in the least muddle-minded – omniscient, I suppose, though that, of course, must be omni – omni-sensitive, too – just staring down in sheer joy and interest at the farmer, and the sunshine, and the valley, and the yard, and the hens, and that delicious filthy duck-pond and – and the Atlantic, absolutely all Its, and … What wouldn’t I … ?’

  But at that moment, and only just in time to dissever the philosophical net in which poor Selina’s soul was definitely strangling, a whiff of hot baked ‘splitters’ wafted itself up the staircase, and Selina with an exclamatory ‘Lawks!’ and a thin flying hand flung up once more to her tortoiseshell comb, remembered her tea.

  1 As printed in The Nap and Other Stories (1936). First published in New Statesman, 1 November 1919.

  Seaton’s Aunt1

  I had heard rumours of Seaton’s aunt long before I actually encountered her. Seaton, in the hush of confidence, or at any little show of toleration on our part, would remark, ‘My aunt’, or ‘My old aunt, you know’, as if his relative might be a kind of cement to an entente cordiale.

  He had an unusual quantity of pocket-money; or, at any rate, it was bestowed on him in unusually large amounts; and he spent it freely, though none of us would have described him as an ‘awfully generous chap’. ‘Hullo, Seaton,’ we would say, ‘the old Begum?’ At the beginning of term, too, he used to bring back surprising and exotic dainties in a box with a trick padlock that accompanied him from his first appearance at Gummidge’s in a billycock hat to the rather abrupt conclusion of his schooldays.

  From a boy’s point of view he looked distastefully foreign with his yellowish skin, slow chocolate-coloured eyes, and lean weak figure. Merely for his looks he was treated by most of us true-blue Englishmen with condescension, hostility, or contempt. We used to call him ‘Pongo’, but without any much better excuse for the nickname than his skin. He was, that is, in one sense of the term what he assuredly was not in the other sense, a sport.

  Seaton and I, as I may say, were never in any sense intimate at school; our orbits only intersected in class. I kept deliberately aloof from him. I felt vaguely he was a sneak, and remained quite unmollified by advances on his side, which, in a boy’s barbarous fashion, unless it suited me to be magnanimous, I haughtily ignored.

  We were both of us quick-footed, and at Prisoner’s Base used occasionally to hide together. And so I best remember Seaton – his narrow watchful face in the dusk of a summer evening; his peculiar crouch, and his inarticulate whisperings and mumblings. Otherwise he played all games slackly and limply; used to stand and feed at his locker with a crony or two until his ‘tuck’ gave out; or waste his money on some outlandish fancy or other. He bought, for instance, a silver bangle, which he wore above his left elbow, until some of the fellows showed their masterly contempt of the practice by dropping it nearly red-hot down his neck.

  It needed, therefore, a rather peculiar taste, and a rather rare kind of schoolboy courage and indifference to criticism, to be much associated with him. And I had neither the taste nor, probably, the courage. None the less, he did make advances, and on one memorable occasion went to the length of bestowing on me a whole pot of some outlandish mulberry-coloured jelly that had been duplicated in his term’s supplies. In the exuberance of my gratitude I promised to spend the next half-term holiday with him at his aunt’s house.

  I had clean forgotten my promise when, two or three days before the holiday, he came up and triumphantly reminded me of it.

  ‘Well, to tell you the honest truth, Seaton, old chap —’ I began graciously: but he cut me short.

  ‘My aunt expects you,’ he said; ‘she is very glad you are coming. She’s sure to be quite decent to you, Withers.’

  I looked at him in sheer astonishment; the emphasis was so uncalled for. It seemed to suggest an aunt not hitherto hinted at, and a friendly feeling on Seaton’s side that was far more disconcerting than welcome.

  We reached his aunt’s house partly by train, partly by a lift in an empty farm-cart, and partly by walking. It was a whole-day holiday, and we were to sleep the night; he lent me extraordinary night-gear, I remember. The village street was unusually wide, and was fed from a green by two converging roads, with an inn, and a high green sign at the corner. About a hundred yards down the street was a chemist’s shop – a Mr Tanner’s. We descended the two steps into his dusky and odorous interior to buy, I remember, some rat poison. A little beyond the chemist’s was the forge. You then walked along a very narrow path, under a fairly high wall, nodding here and there with weeds and tufts of grass, and so came to the iron garden-gates, and saw the high flat house behind its huge sycamore. A coach-house stood on the left of the house, and on the right a gate led into a kind of rambling orchard. The lawn lay away over to the left again, and at the bottom (for the whole garden sloped gently to a sluggish and rushy pond-like stream) was a meadow.

  We arrived at noon, and entered the gates out of the hot dust beneath the glitter of the dark-curtained windows. Seaton led me at once through the little garden-gate to show me his tadpole pond, swarming with what (being myself not in the least interested in low life) seemed to me the most horrible creatures – of all shapes, consistencies, and sizes, but with which Seaton was obviously on the most intimate of terms. I can see his absorbed face now as, squatting on his heels he fished the slimy things out in his sallow palms. Wearying at last of these pets, we loitered about awhile in an aimless fashion. Seaton seemed to be listening, or at any rate waiting, for something to happen or for someone to come. But nothing did happen and no one came.

  That was just like Seaton. Anyhow, the first view I got of his aunt was when, at the summons of a distant gong, we turned from the garden, very hungry and thirsty, to go in to luncheon. We were approaching the house, when Seaton suddenly came to a standstill. Indeed, I have always had the impression that he plucked at my sleeve. Something, at least, seemed to catch me back, as it were, as he cried, ‘Look out, there she is!’

  She was standing at an upper window which opened wide on a hinge, and at first sight she looked an excessively tall and overwhelming figure. This, however, was main
ly because the window reached all but to the floor of her bedroom. She was in reality rather an undersized woman, in spite of her long face and big head. She must have stood, I think, unusually still, with eyes fixed on us, though this impression may be due to Seaton’s sudden warning and to my consciousness of the cautious and subdued air that had fallen on him at sight of her. I know that without the least reason in the world I felt a kind of guiltiness, as if I had been ‘caught’. There was a silvery star pattern sprinkled on her black silk dress, and even from the ground I could see the immense coils of her hair and the rings on her left hand which was held fingering the small jet buttons of her bodice. She watched our united advance without stirring, until, imperceptibly, her eyes raised and lost themselves in the distance, so that it was out of an assumed reverie that she appeared suddenly to awaken to our presence beneath her when we drew close to the house.

  ‘So this is your friend, Mr Smithers, I suppose?’ she said, bobbing to me.

  ‘Withers, aunt,’ said Seaton.

  ‘It’s much the same,’ she said, with eyes fixed on me. ‘Come in, Mr Withers, and bring him along with you.’

  She continued to gaze at me – at least, I think she did so. I know that the fixity of her scrutiny and her ironical ‘Mr’ made me feel peculiarly uncomfortable. None the less she was extremely kind and attentive to me, though, no doubt, her kindness and attention showed up more vividly against her complete neglect of Seaton. Only one remark that I have any recollection of she made to him: ‘When I look on my nephew, Mr Smithers, I realize that dust we are, and dust shall become. You are hot, dirty, and incorrigible, Arthur.’

  She sat at the head of the table, Seaton at the foot, and I, before a wide waste of damask tablecloth, between them. It was an old and rather close dining-room, with windows thrown wide to the green garden and a wonderful cascade of fading roses. Miss Seaton’s great chair faced this window, so that its rose-reflected light shone full on her yellowish face, and on just such chocolate eyes as my schoolfellow’s, except that hers were more than half-covered by unusually long and heavy lids.

  There she sat, steadily eating, with those sluggish eyes fixed for the most part on my face; above them stood the deep-lined fork between her eyebrows; and above that the wide expanse of a remarkable brow beneath its strange steep bank of hair. The lunch was copious, and consisted, I remember, of all such dishes as are generally considered too rich and too good for the schoolboy digestion – lobster mayonnaise, cold game sausages, an immense veal and ham pie farced with eggs, truffles, and numberless delicious flavours; besides kickshaws, creams and sweetmeats. We even had a wine, a half-glass of old darkish sherry each.

  Miss Seaton enjoyed and indulged an enormous appetite. Her example and a natural schoolboy voracity soon overcame my nervousness of her, even to the extent of allowing me to enjoy to the best of my bent so rare a spread. Seaton was singularly modest; the greater part of his meal consisted of almonds and raisins, which he nibbled surreptitiously and as if he found difficulty in swallowing them.

  I don’t mean that Miss Seaton ‘conversed’ with me. She merely scattered trenchant remarks and now and then twinkled a baited question over my head. But her face was like a dense and involved accompaniment to her talk. She presently dropped the ‘Mr’, to my intense relief, and called me now Withers, or Wither, now Smithers, and even once towards the close of the meal distinctly Johnson, though how on earth my name suggested it, or whose face mine had reanimated in memory, I cannot conceive.

  ‘And is Arthur a good boy at school, Mr Wither?’ was one of her many questions. ‘Does he please his masters? Is he first in his class? What does the reverend Dr Gummidge think of him, eh?’

  I knew she was jeering at him, but her face was adamant against the least flicker of sarcasm or facetiousness. I gazed fixedly at a blushing crescent of lobster.

  ‘I think you’re eighth, aren’t you, Seaton?’

  Seaton moved his small pupils towards his aunt. But she continued to gaze with a kind of concentrated detachment at me.

  ‘Arthur will never make a brilliant scholar, I fear,’ she said, lifting a dexterously burdened fork to her wide mouth …

  After luncheon she preceded me up to my bedroom. It was a jolly little bedroom, with a brass fender and rugs and a polished floor, on which it was possible, I afterwards found, to play ‘snow-shoes’. Over the washstand was a little black-framed water-colour drawing, depicting a large eye with an extremely fishlike intensity in the spark of light on the dark pupil; and in ‘illuminated’ lettering beneath was printed very minutely, ‘Thou God Seest ME’, followed by a long looped monogram, ‘S.S.’, in the corner. The other pictures were all of the sea; brigs on blue water; a schooner over-topping chalk cliffs; a rocky island of prodigious steepness, with two tiny sailors dragging a monstrous boat up a shelf of beach.

  This is the room, Withers, my poor dear brother William died in when a boy. Admire the view!’

  I looked out of the window across the tree-tops. It was a day hot with sunshine over the green fields, and the cattle were standing swishing their tails in the shallow water. But the view at the moment was no doubt made more vividly impressive by the apprehension that she would presently enquire after my luggage, and I had brought not even a toothbrush. I need have had no fear. Hers was not that highly civilized type of mind that is stuffed with sharp, material details. Nor could her ample presence be described as in the least motherly.

  ‘I would never consent to question a schoolfellow behind my nephew’s back,’ she said, standing in the middle of the room ‘but tell me, Smithers, why is Arthur so unpopular? You, I understand, are his only close friend.’ She stood in a dazzle of sun, and out of it her eyes regarded me with such leaden penetration beneath their thick lids that I doubt if my face concealed the least thought from her. ‘But there, there,’ she added very suavely, stooping her head a little, ‘don’t trouble to answer me. I never extort an answer. Boys are queer fish. Brains might perhaps have suggested his washing his hands before luncheon; but – not my choice, Smithers. God forbid! And now, perhaps, you would like to go into the garden again. I cannot actually see from here, but I should not be surprised if Arthur is now skulking behind that hedge.’

  He was. I saw his head come out and take a rapid glance at the windows.

  ‘Join him, Mr Smithers; we shall meet again, I hope, at the tea-table. The afternoon I spend in retirement.’

  Whether or not, Seaton and I had not been long engaged with the aid of two green switches in riding round and round a lumbering old grey horse we found in the meadow, before a rather bunched-up figure appeared, walking along the field-path on the other side of the water, with a magenta parasol studiously lowered in our direction throughout her slow progress, as if that were the magnetic needle and we the fixed Pole. Seaton at once lost all nerve and interest. At the next lurch of the old mare’s heels he toppled over into the grass, and I slid off the sleek broad back to join him where he stood, rubbing his shoulder and sourly watching the rather pompous figure till it was out of sight.

  ‘Was that your aunt, Seaton?’ I enquired; but not till then.

  He nodded.

  ‘Why didn’t she take any notice of us, then?’

  ‘She never does.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, she knows all right, without; that’s the dam awful part of it.’ Seaton was one of the very few fellows at Gummidge’s who had the ostentation to use bad language. He had suffered for it too. But it wasn’t, I think, bravado. I believe he really felt certain things more intensely than most of the other fellows, and they were generally things that fortunate and average people do not feel at all – the peculiar quality, for instance, of the British schoolboy’s imagination.

  ‘I tell you, Withers,’ he went on moodily, slinking across the meadow with his hands covered up in his pockets, ‘she sees everything. And what she doesn’t see she knows without.’

  ‘But how?’ I said, not because I was much interested, but becau
se the afternoon was so hot and tiresome and purposeless, and it seemed more of a bore to remain silent. Seaton turned gloomily and spoke in a very low voice.

  ‘Don’t appear to be talking of her, if you wouldn’t mind. It’s – because she’s in league with the Devil.’ He nodded his head and stooped to pick up a round flat pebble. ‘I tell you,’ he said, still stooping, ‘you fellows don’t realize what it is. I know I’m a bit close and all that. But so would you be if you had that old hag listening to every thought you think.’

  I looked at him, then turned and surveyed one by one the windows of the house.

  ‘Where’s your pater?’ I said awkwardly.

  ‘Dead, ages and ages ago, and my mother too. She’s not my aunt even by rights.’

  ‘What is she, then?’

  ‘I mean she’s not my mother’s sister, because my grandmother married twice; and she’s one of the first lot. I don’t know what you call her, but anyhow she’s not my real aunt.’

  ‘She gives you plenty of pocket-money.’

  Seaton looked steadfastly at me out of his flat eyes. ‘She can’t give me what’s mine. When I come of age half of the whole lot will be mine; and what’s more’ – he turned his back on the house – ‘I’ll make her hand over every blessed shilling of it.’

  I put my hands in my pockets and stared at Seaton; ‘Is it much?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who told you?’ He got suddenly very angry, a darkish red came into his cheeks, his eyes glistened, but he made no answer, and we loitered listlessly about the garden until it was time for tea …