Twenty-One Stories

  But the thought of the tobacconist’s shop which his father kept down a dozen wooden stairs drew him on. He was twelve years old, and already boys at the County School mocked him because he had never smoked a cigarette. The packets were piled twelve deep below, Gold Flake and Player’s, De Reszke, Abdulla, Woodbines, and the little shop lay under a thin haze of stale smoke which would completely disguise his crime. That it was a crime to steal some of his father’s stock Charlie Stowe had no doubt, but he did not love his father; his father was unreal to him, a wraith, pale, thin, indefinite, who noticed him only spasmodically and left even punishment to his mother. For his mother he felt a passionate demonstrative love; her large boisterous presence and her noisy charity filled the world for him; from her speech he judged her the friend of everyone, from the rector’s wife to the ‘dear Queen’, except the ‘Huns’, the monsters who lurked in Zeppelins in the clouds. But his father’s affection and dislike were as indefinite as his movements. Tonight he had said he would be in Norwich, and yet you never knew. Charlie Stowe had no sense of safety as he crept down the wooden stairs. When they creaked he clenched his fingers on the collar of his night-shirt.

  At the bottom of the stairs he came out quite suddenly into the little shop. It was too dark to see his way, and he did not dare touch the switch. For half a minute he sat in despair on the bottom step with his chin cupped in his hands. Then the regular movement of the searchlight was reflected through an upper window and the boy had time to fix in memory the pile of cigarettes, the counter, and the small hole under it. The footsteps of a policeman on the pavement made him grab the first packet to his hand and dive for the hole. A light shone along the floor and a hand tried the door, then the footsteps passed on, and Charlie cowered in the darkness.

  At last he got his courage back by telling himself in his curiously adult way that if he were caught now there was nothing to be done about it, and he might as well have his smoke. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then remembered that he had no matches. For a while he dared not move. Three times the searchlight lit the shop, as he muttered taunts and encouragements. ‘May as well be hung for a sheep,’ ‘Cowardy, cowardy custard,’ grown-up and childish exhortations oddly mixed.

  But as he moved he heard footfalls in the street, the sound of several men walking rapidly. Charlie Stowe was old enough to feel surprise that anybody was about. The footsteps came nearer, stopped; a key was turned in the shop door, a voice said: ‘Let him in,’ and then he heard his father, ‘If you wouldn’t mind being quiet, gentlemen. I don’t want to wake up the family.’ There was a note unfamiliar to Charlie in the undecided voice. A torch flashed and the electric globe burst into blue light. The boy held his breath; he wondered whether his father would hear his heart beating, and he clutched his night-shirt tightly and prayed, ‘O God, don’t let me be caught.’ Through a crack in the counter he could see his father where he stood, one hand held to his high stiff collar, between two men in bowler hats and belted mackintoshes. They were strangers.

  ‘Have a cigarette,’ his father said in a voice dry as a biscuit. One of the men shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do, not when we are on duty. Thank you all the same.’ He spoke gently, but without kindness: Charlie Stowe thought his father must be ill.

  ‘Mind if I put a few in my pocket?’ Mr Stowe asked, and when the man nodded he lifted a pile of Gold Flake and Players from a shelf and caressed the packets with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to be done about it, and I may as well have my smokes.’ For a moment Charlie Stowe feared discovery, his father stared round the shop so thoroughly; he might have been seeing it for the first time. ‘It’s a good little business,’ he said, ‘for those that like it. The wife will sell out, I suppose. Else the neighbours’ll be wrecking it. Well, you want to be off. A stitch in time. I’ll get my coat.’

  ‘One of us’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,’ said the stranger gently.

  ‘You needn’t trouble. It’s on the peg here. There, I’m all ready.’

  The other man said in an embarrassed way, ‘Don’t you want to speak to your wife?’ The thin voice was decided, ‘Not me. Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. She’ll have her chance later, won’t she?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ one of the strangers said and he became very cheerful and encouraging. ‘Don’t you worry too much. While there’s life . . .’ and suddenly his father tried to laugh.

  When the door had closed Charlie Stowe tiptoed upstairs and got into bed. He wondered why his father had left the house again so late at night and who the strangers were. Surprise and awe kept him for a little while awake. It was as if a familiar photograph had stepped from the frame to reproach him with neglect. He remembered how his father had held tight to his collar and fortified himself with proverbs, and he thought for the first time that, while his mother was boisterous and kindly, his father was very like himself, doing things in the dark which frightened him. It would have pleased him to go down to his father and tell him that he loved him, but he could hear through the window the quick steps going away. He was alone in the house with his mother, and he fell asleep.

  1930

  PROOF POSITIVE

  THE tired voice went on. It seemed to surmount enormous obstacles to speech. The man’s sick, Colonel Crashaw thought, with pity and irritation. When a young man he had climbed in the Himalayas, and he remembered how at great heights several breaths had to be taken for every step advanced. The five-foot-high platform in the Music Rooms of The Spa seemed to entail for the speaker some of the same effort. He should never have come out on such a raw afternoon, thought Colonel Crashaw, pouring out a glass of water and pushing it across the lecturer’s table. The rooms were badly heated, and yellow fingers of winter fog felt for cracks in the many windows. There was little doubt that the speaker had lost all touch with his audience. It was scattered in patches about the hall – elderly ladies who made no attempt to hide their cruel boredom, and a few men, with the appearance of retired officers, who put up a show of attention.

  Colonel Crashaw, as president of the local Psychical Society, had received a note from the speaker a little more than a week before. Written by a hand which trembled with sickness, age or drunkenness, it asked urgently for a special meeting of the society. An extraordinary, a really impressive, experience was to be described while still fresh in the mind, though what the experience had been was left vague. Colonel Crashaw would have hesitated to comply if the note had not been signed by a Major Philip Weaver, Indian Army, retired. One had to do what one could for a brother officer; the trembling of the hand must be either age or sickness.

  It proved principally to be the latter when the two men met for the first time on the platform. Major Weaver was not more than sixty, thin, and dark, with an ugly obstinate nose and satire in his eye, the most unlikely person to experience anything unexplainable. What antagonized Crashaw most was that Weaver used scent; a white handkerchief which drooped from his breast pocket exhaled as rich and sweet an odour as a whole altar of lilies. Several ladies prinked their noses, and General Leadbitter asked loudly whether he might smoke.

  It was quite obvious that Weaver understood. He smiled provocatively and asked very slowly, ‘Would you mind not smoking? My throat has been bad for some time.’ Crashaw murmured that it was terrible weather; influenza throats were common. The satirical eye came round to him and considered him thoughtfully, while Weaver said in a voice which carried half-way across the hall, ‘It’s cancer in my case.’

  In the shocked vexed silence that followed the unnecessary intimacy he began to speak without waiting for any introduction from Crashaw. He seemed at first to be in a hurry. It was only later that the terrible impediments were placed in the way of his speech. He had a high voice, which sometimes broke into a squeal, and must have been peculiarly disagreeable on the parade-ground. He paid a few compliments to the local society; his remarks were just sufficiently exaggerated to be irritating. He was
glad, he said, to give them the chance of hearing him; what he had to say might alter their whole view of the relative values of matter and spirit.

  Mystic stuff, thought Crashaw.

  Weaver’s high voice began to shoot out hurried platitudes. The spirit, he said, was stronger than anyone realized; the physiological action of heart and brain and nerves were subordinate to the spirit. The spirit was everything. He said again, his voice squeaking up like bats into the ceiling, ‘The spirit is so much stronger than you think.’ He put his hand across his throat and squinted sideways at the window-panes and the nuzzling fog, and upwards at the bare electric globe sizzling with heat and poor light in the dim afternoon. ‘It’s immortal,’ he told them very seriously, and they shifted, restless, uncomfortable and weary, in their chairs.

  It was then that his voice grew tired and his speech impeded. The knowledge that he had entirely lost touch with his audience may have been the cause. An elderly lady at the back had taken her knitting from a bag, and her needles flashed along the walls when the light caught them, like a bright ironic spirit. Satire for a moment deserted Weaver’s eyes, and Crashaw saw the vacancy it left, as though the ball had turned to glass.

  ‘This is important,’ the lecturer cried to them. ‘I can tell you a story –’ His audience’s attention was momentarily caught by his promise of something definite, but the stillness of the lady’s needles did not soothe him. He sneered at them all: ‘Signs and wonders,’ he said.

  Then he lost the thread of his speech altogether.

  His hand passed to and fro across his throat and he quoted Shakespeare, and then St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. His speech, as it grew slower, seemed to lose all logical order, though now and then Crashaw was surprised by the shrewdness in the juxtaposition of two irrelevant ideas. It was like the conversation of an old man which flits from subject to subject, the thread a subconscious one. ‘When I was at Simla,’ he said, bending his brows as though to avoid the sunflash on the barrack square, but perhaps the frost, the fog, the tarnished room broke his memories. He began to assure the wearied faces all over again that the spirit did not die when the body died, but that the body only moved at the spirit’s will. One had to be obstinate, to grapple . . .

  Pathetic, Crashaw thought, the sick man’s clinging to his belief. It was as if life were an only son who was dying and with whom he wished to preserve some form of communication . . .

  A note was passed to Crashaw from the audience. It came from a Dr Brown, a small alert man in the third row; the society cherished him as a kind of pet sceptic. The note read: ‘Can’t you make him stop? The man’s obviously very ill. And what good is his talk, anyway?’

  Crashaw turned his eyes sideways and upwards and felt his pity vanish at sight of the roving satirical eyes that gave the lie to the tongue, and at the smell, overpoweringly sweet, of the scent in which Weaver had steeped his handkerchief. The man was an ‘outsider’; he would look up his record in the old Army Lists when he got home.

  ‘Proof positive,’ Weaver was saying, sighing a shrill breath of exhaustion between the words. Crashaw laid his watch upon the table, but Weaver paid him no attention. He was supporting himself on the rim of the table with one hand. ‘I’ll give you,’ he said, speaking with increasing difficulty, ‘proof pos . . .’ His voice scraped into stillness, like a needle at a record’s end, but the quiet did not last. From an expressionless face, a sound which was more like a high mew than anything else, jerked the audience into attention. He followed it up, still without a trace of any emotion or understanding, with a succession of incomprehensible sounds, a low labial whispering, an odd jangling note, while his fingers tapped on the table. The sounds brought to mind innumerable séances, the bound medium, the tambourine shaken in mid-air, the whispered trivialities of ghosts in the darkness, the dinginess, the airless rooms.

  Weaver sat down slowly in his chair and let his head fall backwards. An old lady began to cry nervously, and Dr Brown scrambled on to the platform and bent over him. Colonel Crashaw saw the doctor’s hand tremble as he picked the handkerchief from the pocket and flung it away from him. Crashaw, aware of another and more unpleasant smell, heard Dr Brown whisper, ‘Send them all away. He’s dead.’

  He spoke with a distress unusual in a doctor accustomed to every kind of death. Crashaw, before he complied, glanced over Dr Brown’s shoulder at the dead man. Major Weaver’s appearance disquieted him. In a long life he had seen many forms of death, men shot by their own hand, and men killed in the field, but never such a suggestion of mortality. The body might have been one fished from the sea a long while after death; the flesh of the face seemed as ready to fall as an over-ripe fruit. So it was with no great shock of surprise that he heard Dr Brown’s whispered statement: ‘The man must have been dead a week.’

  What the Colonel thought of most was Weaver’s claim – ‘Proof positive’ – proof, he had probably meant, that the spirit outlived the body, that it tasted eternity. But all he had certainly revealed was how, without the body’s aid, the spirit in seven days decayed into whispered nonsense.

  1930

  THE SECOND DEATH

  SHE found me in the evening under the trees that grew outside the village. I had never cared for her and would have hidden myself if I’d seen her coming. She was to blame, I’m certain, for her son’s vices. If they were vices, but I’m very far from admitting that they were. At any rate he was generous, never mean, like others in the village I could mention if I chose.

  I was staring hard at a leaf or she would never have found me. It was dangling from the twig, its stalk torn across by the wind or else by a stone one of the village children had flung. Only the green tough skin of the stalk held it there suspended. I was watching closely, because a caterpillar was crawling across the surface making the leaf sway to and fro. The caterpillar was aiming at the twig, and I wondered whether it would reach it in safety or whether the leaf would fall with it into the water. There was a pool underneath the trees, and the water always appeared red, because of the heavy clay in the soil.

  I never knew whether the caterpillar reached the twig, for, as I’ve said, the wretched woman found me. The first I knew of her coming was her voice just behind my ear.

  ‘I’ve been looking in all the pubs for you,’ she said in her old shrill voice. It was typical of her to say ‘all the pubs’ when there were only two in the place. She always wanted credit for the trouble she hadn’t really taken.

  I was annoyed and I couldn’t help speaking a little harshly. ‘You might have saved yourself the trouble,’ I said, ‘you should have known I wouldn’t be in a pub on a fine night like this.’

  The old vixen became quite humble. She was always smooth enough when she wanted anything. ‘It’s for my poor son,’ she said. That meant that he was ill. When he was well I never heard her say anything better than ‘that dratted boy’. She’d make him be in the house by midnight every day of the week, as if there were any serious mischief a man could get up to in a little village like ours. Of course we soon found a way to cheat her, but it was the principle of the thing I objected to – a grown man of over thirty ordered about by his mother, just because she hadn’t a husband to control. But when he was ill, though it might be with only a small chill, it was ‘my poor son’.

  ‘He’s dying,’ she said, ‘and God knows what I shall do without him.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see how I can help you,’ I said. I was angry, because he’d been dying once before and she’d done everything but actually bury him. I imagined it was the same sort of dying this time, the sort a man gets over. I’d seen him about the week before on his way up the hill to see the big-breasted girl at the farm. I’d watched him till he was like a little black dot, which stayed suddenly by a square box in a field. That was the barn where they used to meet. I have very good eyes and it amuses me to try how far and how clearly they can see. I met him again some time after midnight and helped him get into the house without his mother knowing, and he was w
ell enough then – only a little sleepy and tired.

  The old vixen was at it again. ‘He’s been asking for you,’ she shrilled at me.

  ‘If he’s as ill as you make out,’ I said, ‘it would be better for him to ask for a doctor.’

  ‘Doctor’s there, but he can’t do anything.’ That startled me for a moment, I’ll admit it, until I thought, ‘the old devil’s malingering. He’s got some plan or other.’ He was quite clever enough to cheat a doctor. I had seen him throw a fit that would have deceived Moses.

  ‘For God’s sake come,’ she said, ‘he seems frightened.’ Her voice broke quite genuinely, for I suppose in her way she was fond of him. I couldn’t help pitying her a little, for I knew that he had never cared a mite for her and had never troubled to disguise the fact.

  I left the trees and the red pool and the struggling caterpillar, for I knew that she would never leave me alone, now that her ‘poor boy’ was asking for me. Yet a week ago there was nothing she wouldn’t have done to keep us apart. She thought me responsible for his ways, as though any mortal man could have kept him off a likely woman when his appetite was up.

  I think it must have been the first time I had entered their cottage by the front door, since I came to the village ten years ago. I threw an amused glance at his window. I thought I could see the marks on the wall of the ladder we’d used the week before. We’d had a little difficulty in putting it straight, but his mother slept sound. He had brought the ladder down from the barn, and when he’d got safely in, I carried it up there again. But you could never trust his word. He’d lie to his best friend, and when I reached the barn I found the girl had gone. If he couldn’t bribe you with his mother’s money, he’d bribe you with other people’s promises.