The Collected Stories

  Unfortunately, though, on the day that James carried his thirty-first bunch of blooms to the house of Miss Smith he was observed. He saw the curtains move as he reached up to lay the flowers on the window-sill. A moment later Miss Smith, in her dressing-gown, had caught him by the shoulder and pulled him into the house.

  ‘James Machen! It would be James Machen, wouldn’t it? Flowers from the creature, if you please! What are you up to, you dozy James?’

  James said nothing. He looked at Miss Smith’s dressing-gown and thought it was particularly pretty: blue and woolly, with an edging of silk.

  ‘You’ve been trying to get us into trouble,’ cried Miss Smith. ‘You’ve been stealing flowers all over the town and putting them at our house. You’re an underhand child, James.’

  James stared at her and then ran away.

  After that, James thought of Miss Smith almost all the time. He thought of her face when she had caught him with the flowers, and how she had afterwards told his father and nearly everyone else in the town. He thought of how his father had had to say he was sorry to Miss Smith, and how his mother and father had quarrelled about the affair. He counted up all the things Miss Smith had ever said to him, and all the things she had ever done to him, like giving him seed-cake at the Christmas party. He hadn’t meant to harm Miss Smith as she said he had. Giving people flowers wasn’t unkind; it was to show them you liked them and wanted them to like you.

  ‘When somebody hurts you,’ James said to the man who came to cut the grass, ‘what do you do about it?’

  ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I suppose you hurt them back.’

  ‘Supposing you can’t,’ James argued.

  ‘Oh, but you always can. It’s easy to hurt people.’

  ‘It’s not, really,’ James said.

  ‘Look,’ said the man, ‘all I’ve got to do is to reach out and give you a clip on the ear. That’d hurt you.’

  ‘But I couldn’t do that to you because you’re too big. How d’you hurt someone who’s bigger than you?’

  ‘It’s easier to hurt people who are weaker. People who are weaker are always the ones who get hurt.’

  ‘Can’t you hurt someone who is stronger?’

  The grass-cutter thought for a time. ‘You have to be cunning to do that. You’ve got to find the weak spot. Everyone has a weak spot.’

  ‘Have you got a weak spot?’

  ‘I suppose so,’

  ‘Could I hurt you on your weak spot?’

  ‘You don’t want to hurt me, James.’

  ‘No, but just could I?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘My little daughter’s smaller than you. If you hurt her, you see, you’d be hurting me. It’d be the same, you see.’

  ‘I see,’ said James.

  All was not well with Miss Smith. Life, which had been so happy when her baby was born, seemed now to be directed against her. Perhaps it was that the child was becoming difficult, going through a teething phase that was pleasant for no one; or perhaps it was that Miss Smith recognized in him some trait she disliked and knew that she would be obliged to watch it develop, powerless to intervene. Whatever the reason, she felt depressed. She often thought of her teaching days, of the big square schoolroom with the children’s models on the shelves and the pictures of kings on the walls. Nostalgically, she recalled the feel of frosty air on her face as she rode her bicycle through the town, her mind already practising the first lesson of the day. She had loved those winter days: the children stamping their feet in the playground, the stove groaning and crackling, so red and so fierce that it had to be penned off for safety’s sake. It had been good to feel tired, good to bicycle home, shopping a bit on the way, home to tea and the wireless and an evening of reading by the fire. It wasn’t that she regretted anything; it was just that now and again, for a day or two, she felt she would like to return to the past.

  ‘My dear,’ Miss Smith’s husband said, ‘you really will have to be more careful.’

  ‘But I am. Truly I am. I’m just as careful as anyone can be.’

  ‘Of course you are. But it’s a difficult age. Perhaps, you know, you need a holiday.’

  ‘But I’ve had difficult ages to deal with for years –’

  ‘Now now, my dear, it’s not quite the same, teaching a class of kids.’

  ‘But it shouldn’t be as difficult. I don’t know –’

  ‘You’re tired. Tied to a child all day long, every day of the week, it’s no joke. We’ll take an early holiday.’

  Miss Smith did feel tired, but she knew that it wasn’t tiredness that was really the trouble. Her baby was almost three, and for two years she knew she had been making mistakes with him. Yet somehow she felt that they weren’t her mistakes: it was as though some other person occasionally possessed her: a negligent, worthless kind of person who was cruel, almost criminal, in her carelessness. Once she had discovered the child crawling on the pavement beside his pram: she had forgotten apparently to attach his harness to the pram hooks. Once there had been beads in his pram, hundreds of them, small and red and made of glass. A woman had drawn her attention to the danger, regarding curiously the supplier of so unsuitable a plaything. ‘In his nose he was putting one, dear. And may have swallowed a dozen already. It could kill a mite, you know.’ The beads were hers, but how the child had got them she could not fathom. Earlier, when he had been only a couple of months, she had come into his nursery to find an excited cat scratching at the clothes of his cot; and on another occasion she had found him eating a turnip. She wondered if she might be suffering from some kind of serious absent-mindedness, or blackouts. Her doctor told her, uncomfortingly, that she was a little run down.

  ‘I’m a bad mother,’ said Miss Smith to herself; and she cried as she looked at her child, warm and pretty in his sleep.

  But her carelessness continued and people remarked that it was funny in a teacher. Her husband was upset and unhappy, and finally suggested that they should employ someone to look after the child. ‘Someone else?’ said Miss Smith. ‘Someone else? Am I then incapable? Am I so wretched and stupid that I cannot look after my own child? You speak to me as though I were half crazy.’ She felt confused and sick and miserable. The marriage teetered beneath the tension, and there was no question of further children.

  Then there were two months without incident. Miss Smith began to feel better; she was getting the hang of things; once again she was in control of her daily life. Her child grew and flourished. He trotted nimbly beside her, he spoke his own language, he was wayward and irresponsible, and to Miss Smith and her husband he was intelligent and full of charm. Every day Miss Smith saved up the sayings and doings of this child and duly reported them to her husband. ‘He is quite intrepid,’ Miss Smith said, and she told her husband how the child would tumble about the room, trying to stand on his head. ‘He has an aptitude for athletics,’ her husband remarked. They laughed that they, so unathletic in their ways, should have produced so physically lively an offspring.

  ‘And how has our little monster been today?’ Miss Smith’s husband asked, entering the house one evening at his usual time.

  Miss Smith smiled, happy after a good, quiet day. ‘Like gold,’ she said.

  Her husband smiled too, glad that the child had not been a nuisance to her and glad that his son, for his own sake, was capable of adequate behaviour. ‘I’ll just take a peep at him,’ he announced, and he ambled off to the nursery.

  He sighed with relief as he climbed the stairs, thankful that all was once again well in the house. He was still sighing when he opened the nursery door and smelt gas. It hissed insidiously from the unlit fire. The room was sweet with it. The child, sleeping, sucked it into his lungs.

  The child’s face was blue. They carried him from the room, both of them helpless and inadequate in the situation. And then they waited, without speaking, while his life was recovered, until the moment when the doctor, white-coated and stern, exp
lained that it had been a nearer thing than he would wish again to handle.

  ‘This is too serious,’ Miss Smith’s husband said. ‘We cannot continue like this. Something must be done.’

  ‘I cannot understand –’

  ‘It happens too often. The strain is too much for me, dear.’

  ‘I cannot understand it.’

  Every precaution had been taken with the gas-fire in the nursery. The knob that controlled the gas pressure was a key and the key was removable. Certainly, the control point was within the child’s reach but one turned it on or off, slipped the key out of its socket and placed it on the mantelpiece. That was the simple rule.

  ‘You forgot to take out the key,’ Miss Smith’s husband said. In his mind an idea took on a shape that frightened him. He shied away, watching it advance, knowing that he possessed neither the emotional nor mental equipment to fight it.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Miss Smith said. ‘I never forget it. I turned the fire off and put the key on the mantelpiece. I remember distinctly.’

  He stared at her, drilling his eyes into hers, hopelessly seeking the truth. When he spoke his voice was dry and weary.

  ‘The facts speak for themselves. You cannot suggest there’s another solution?’

  ‘But it’s absurd. It means he got out of his cot, turned the key, returned to bed and went to sleep.’

  ‘Or that you turned off the fire and idly turned it on again.’

  ‘I couldn’t have; how could I?’

  Miss Smith’s husband didn’t know. His imagination, like a pair of calipers, grasped the ugly thought and held it before him. The facts were on its side, he could not ignore them: his wife was deranged in her mind. Consciously or otherwise she was trying to kill their child.

  ‘The window,’ Miss Smith said. ‘It was open when I left it. It always is, for air. Yet you found it closed.’

  ‘The child certainly could not have done that. I cannot see what you are suggesting.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I am suggesting. Except that I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s too much for you, dear, and that’s all there is to it. You must have help.’

  ‘We can’t afford it.’

  ‘Be that as it may, we must. We have the child to think of, if not ourselves.’

  ‘But one child! One child cannot be too much for anyone. Look, I’ll be extra careful in future. After all, it is the first thing like this that has happened for ages.’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. We must advertise for a woman.’

  ‘Please –’

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry. It’s no use talking. We have talked enough and it has got us nowhere. This is something to be sensible about.’

  ‘Please let’s try again.’

  ‘And in the meanwhile? In the meanwhile our child’s life must be casually risked day in, day out?’

  ‘No, no.’

  Miss Smith pleaded, but her husband said nothing further. He pulled hard on his pipe, biting it between his jaws, unhappy and confused in his mind.

  Miss Smith’s husband did indeed advertise for a woman to see to the needs of their child, but it was, in fact, unnecessary in the long run to employ one. Because on his third birthday, late in the afternoon, the child disappeared. Miss Smith had put him in the garden. It was a perfectly safe garden: he played there often. Yet when she called him for his tea he did not come; and when she looked for the reason she found that he was not there. The small gate that led to the fields at the back of the house was open. She had not opened it; she rarely used it. Distractedly, she thought he must have managed to release the catch himself. ‘That is quite impossible,’ her husband said. ‘It’s too high and too stiff.’ He looked at her oddly, confirmed in his mind that she wished to be rid of her child. Together they tramped the fields with the police, but although they covered a great area and were out for most of the night they were unsuccessful.

  When the search continued in the light of the morning it was a search without hope, and the hopelessness in time turned into the fear of what discovery would reveal. ‘We must accept the facts,’ Miss Smith’s husband said, but she alone continued to hope. She dragged her legs over the wide countryside, seeking a miracle but finding neither trace nor word of her child’s wanderings.

  A small boy, so quiet she scarcely noticed him, stopped her once by a sawmill. He spoke some shy salutation, and when she blinked her eyes at his face she saw that he was James Machen. She passed him by, thinking only that she envied him his life, that for him to live and her child to die was proof indeed of a mocking Providence. She prayed to this Providence, promising a score of resolutions if only all would be well.

  But nothing was well, and Miss Smith brooded on the thought that her husband had not voiced. I released the gate myself. For some reason I have not wanted this child. God knows I loved him, and surely it wasn’t too weak a love? Is it that I’ve loved so many other children that I have none left that is real enough for my own? Pathetic, baseless theories flooded into Miss Smith’s mind. Her thoughts floundered and collapsed into wretched chaos.

  ‘Miss Smith,’ James said, ‘would you like to see your baby?’

  He stood at her kitchen door, and Miss Smith, hearing the words, was incapable immediately of grasping their meaning. The sun, reflected in the kitchen, was mirrored again in the child’s glasses. He smiled at her, more confidently than she remembered, revealing a silvery wire stretched across his teeth.

  ‘What did you say?’ Miss Smith asked.

  ‘I said, would you like to see your baby?’

  Miss Smith had not slept for a long time. She was afraid to sleep because of the nightmares. Her hair hung lank about her shoulders, her eyes were dead and seemed to have fallen back deeper into her skull. She stood listening to this child, nodding her head up and down, very slowly, in a mechanical way. Her left hand moved gently back and forth on the smooth surface of her kitchen table.

  ‘My baby?’ Miss Smith said. ‘My baby?’

  ‘You have lost your baby,’ James reminded her.

  Miss Smith nodded a little faster.

  ‘I will show you,’ James said.

  He caught her hand and led her from the house, through the garden and through the gate into the fields. Hand in hand they walked through the grass, over the canal bridge and across the warm, ripe meadows.

  ‘I will pick you flowers,’ James said and he ran to gather poppies and cow-parsley and blue, beautiful cornflowers.

  ‘You give people flowers,’ James said, ‘because you like them and you want them to like you.’

  She carried the flowers and James skipped and danced beside her, hurrying her along. She heard him laughing; she looked at him and saw his small weasel face twisted into a merriment that frightened her.

  The sun was fierce on Miss Smith’s neck and shoulders. Sweat gathered on her forehead and ran down her cheeks. She felt it on her body, tightening her clothes to her back and thighs. Only the child’s hand was cool, and beneath her fingers she assessed its strength, wondering about its history. Again the child laughed.

  On the heavy air his laughter rose and fell; it quivered through his body and twitched lightly in his hand. It came as a giggle, then a breathless spasm; it rose like a storm from him; it rippled to gentleness; and it pounded again like the firing of guns in her ear. It would not stop. She knew it would not stop. As they walked together on this summer’s day the laughter would continue until they arrived at the horror, until the horror was complete.

  The Hotel of the Idle Moon

  The woman called Mrs Dankers placed a rose-tipped cigarette between her lips and lit it from the lighter on the dashboard. The brief spurt of light revealed a long, handsome face with a sharpness about it that might often have been reminiscent of the edge of a chisel. In the darkness a double funnel of smoke streamed from her nostrils, and she gave a tiny gasp of satisfaction. On a grass verge two hundred miles north of London the car was stationary except for the gentle rocking imposed
by the wind. Above the persistent lashing of the rain the radio played a popular tune of the thirties, quietly and without emotion. It was two minutes to midnight.

  ‘Well?’

  The car door banged and Dankers was again beside her. He smelt of rain; it dripped from him on to her warm knees.

  ‘Well?’ Mrs Dankers repeated.

  He started the engine. The car crept on to the narrow highway, its wipers slashing at the rain, its powerful headlights drawing the streaming foliage startlingly near. He cleared the windscreen with his arm. ‘It’ll do,’ he murmured. He drove on slowly, and the sound of the engine was lost in a medley of wind and rain and the murmur of music and the swish of the wipers.

  ‘It’ll do?’ said Mrs Dankers. ‘Is it the right house?’

  He twisted the car this way and that along the lane. The lights caught an image of pillars and gates, closed in upon them and lost them as the car swung up the avenue.

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘It’s the right house.’

  Within that house, an old man lying stiffly in bed heard the jangle of the bell at the hall door and frowned over this unaccustomed sound. At first he imagined that the noise had been caused by the wind, but then the bell rang again, sharply and in a peremptory manner. The old man, called Cronin, the only servant in the house, rose from his bed and dragged a coat on to his body, over his pyjamas. He descended the stairs, sighing to himself.

  The pair outside saw a light go on in the hall, and then they heard the tread of Cronin’s feet and the sound of a bar being pulled back on the door. Dankers threw a cigarette away and prepared an expression for his face. His wife shivered in the rain.

  ‘It’s so late,’ the old man in pyjamas said when the travellers had told him their tale. ‘I must wake the Marstons for guidance, sir. I can’t do this on my own responsibility.’

  ‘It’s wet and cold as well,’ Dankers murmured, smiling at the man through his widely spread moustache. ‘No night to be abroad, really. You must understand our predicament.’