It May Never Happen

by V. S. Pritchett

  They both smiled, united by the same irony. I felt sad; I might have been their son.

  But the cashier was watching our little group. “Press on, Mr. Sawston,” he moaned. “Press on! Boy. Come here.” Colouring I went to the side of his desk. He had his pen longways in his teeth and he went on turning the pages of his ledger.

  “I do not want you to waste Miss Hester’s time,” he said. “We are very busy. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I lied. I was fifteen years and two months old. I stood their waiting for his next remark. He went on turning the pages of his ledger. “Um. Um. Um,” he sighed on his three notes. I had never been so near to this legendary noise before. It was like the rumination of humanity. A cage had been opened and out had come the humdrum rumour of the human race, the neutral, aimless, mindless rumble of the ape, digesting its inexplicable years on earth.

  “Yes?” said Mr. Drake, observing me again, surprised to see me still there. Then: “That’s all.” I went back in a sulk. My cheeks were hot. I scowled at Miss Hester Browne. She had been my undoing.

  In the garden of the house where I lodged was a chestnut tree. In the morning when I left to catch my train the sky was clear and blue and against it the leaves of the tree hung down like the tongues of dark green dogs and the pink candles of blossom stood up from among them. I listened to the sound of my feet on the pavement. It was without will of mine that they touched the ground. There was a throbbing in my ears, so that I could hear only my own body, the clapping of my heart. I seemed to be flying, not walking. Would people in the train be uneasy because I was mad? The spirit and the flesh—two animals that were always in my head—were pulling me apart. The spirit was desire, the spirit was Hester Browne; the flesh had no desire, it clothed the torpor and the innumerable dreads of the mind and body.

  My train went on to London, past the factories. Why were there no lakes, no mountains? For: “He, neglected and oppressed, wished to be with them and at rest.” And why was great literature so boring? Into the pages of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. I had put a folded sheet of the Windsor Magazine with a poem printed on it.

  Stars of the heavens I love her

  Spread the glad news afar,

  it began. I was ashamed to think that terrible poem described my feelings better than anything in Scott.

  “I should say you were an idealist,” Mr. Turpin said gravely to me while he opened the firm’s letters. In the morning, when he was tired, he used to talk about life.

  But now, Mr. Drake had broken me. I was watched. Shame, vanity, spite thickened my head and bit my throat. The spirit and the flesh turned a somersault inside me, I tore up my cutting from the magazine; the flesh triumphed. I hated Hester Browne. My desire had become a poison. I saw the deadly nightshade shadows under her eyes and I was pleased by what Mr. Turpin had said.

  Turpin wore a small, mauve silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, and it was very long. An idealist! I bought myself a handkerchief and wore it like his. Williams shuffled over to me and, putting his hand over his mouth in his secretive way, bent towards me slyly so that I could smell the tobacco on his breath.

  “Imitation,” he sneered, “is the sincerest form of flattery.”

  Giving a sharp look back at me, he went off.

  Now I hated Hester Browne I had the courage to observe her. She began to arrive after her sister and went breathless and damp-skinned to her desk. The pretty eyes were sticky with sleep as if she hadn’t washed. To a connoisseur like Turpin this was very attractive. Her dress, the one with the small daisies, had scores of small creases in it. There was a week like this, her lips sulked and an exciting hay-like smell followed her in a warm current as she walked.

  “Do you notice, Mr. Turpin, anything about the atmosphere?” said Williams.

  “Yes, I do,” said Mr. Turpin shortly. “Pleasanter than leather, isn’t it?”

  “A matter of opinion,” leered Mr. Williams. Up went the inevitable hand to his lips. “Perhaps a matter of experience.”

  There was a lift up to the top floor of the warehouse and sometimes I had to take messages there. I was waiting on the third floor when the lift went groaning past me. Inside were two people, a man and a woman. The man was limp and tall and his head was close to her looking down at her neck. She was the elder Miss Browne. She was talking violently and the man was Mr. Turpin who paid no attention to what she said but kept murmuring:

  “You great big doll.”

  “He’s a married man,” she was saying. “Look at his face. It’s a cruel face. The way he speaks to her even.”

  Two coats, a skirt, and a pair of trousers were carried upstairs out of my sight.

  “I can be cruel too, duckie,” Mr. Turpin was saying as his patent shoes went up beyond me.

  It was August. Mr. Cook put his carnation in a glass of water and smelled it from time to time. He was 62 on the Bank Holiday and went up in an aeroplane. Mr. Greenhythe’s secretary, an elderly woman who looked like Queen Victoria, put a pamphlet with the heading Repent Ye on our desks. Turpin read it through carefully. Then he lit his cigarette with it and said respectfully:

  “I must go upstairs and thank her.” Hodgkin took a clean sheet of paper and wrote with flourishes the words The Marriage of Figaro. Underneath he wrote in smaller letters: The Duke: Rupert Hodgkin. He looked in a pocket mirror and watched the movements of his mouth. “Press on, Mr. Hodgin,” said Mr. Drake. Mr. Sawston and Hester Browne went out to lunch together, waiting for Mr. Drake to go first.

  On an afternoon in the middle of that week children in the street began shouting at a balloon in the sky. “Listen to those children,” said Mr. Porter tenderly, making a mistake in a weighing slip as he spoke. Between two and three was a slow hour; we all went to look at the balloon.

  “Before the war,” said Mr. Drake, unbending. “There used to be a number of balloons.” We did not notice the elder Miss Browne get down from her desk and go into Mr. Greenhythe’s room and so we were astonished to see her coming out of it. The top part of her was gliding in a drowsy and smiling dream. She had the smile of one who has opened a bazaar, of a boaconstrictor that has fed.

  Mr. Drake pulled himself together.

  “March I,” came Mr. Drake’s voice. “By goods, cash. £26 17s. 1d.” And her voice repeated, “£26 17s. Id”.

  “March 3,” Mr. Drake went on. “By goods, cash. £462 16s. 3d. March 14,” the voice was chanting the office litany. “Have you got March 14, Miss Browne? Goods, thirteen and a penny? Put a query against that.”

  He peered over Miss Browne to the page to see she had done this. As she wrote in the great ledger she was looking at the childish pink and white frock of her sister like a woman who is thinking of lengthening the sleeves. She also looked ironically at the slack, shiny coat of Mr. Sawston.

  There was a bell over Mr. Greenhythe’s door and it snapped two or three times. It was my business to answer the bell and sometimes the old man used to ring it by mistake or forget what he wanted. I went into his office which had a green light, for the sun-blind was down. His elderly secretary was just leaving the room. The old lion put down the telephone.

  “Boy,” he said breathlessly, “the Alexandra Castle has docked.”

  I stared at him. He looked at me suspiciously.

  “Is your father well?” he asked.

  I said he was.

  He looked absently at his secretary.

  “What was I thinking about?” he asked pathetically.

  “Mr. Sawston,” she said.

  “Ah, boy!” he barked at me, showing his little teeth. “Send Mr. Sawston to me.”

  Mr. Sawston went into Mr. Greenhythe’s room.

  “Sawston’s on the carpet,” Williams said.

  “Hi yi,” said Cook, smelling his carnation. “What do I ca-ah? What do I ca-ah? I’ve got tickets for the Palladium.”

  Turpin leaned across to Hester Browne, who was looking resentfully towards Mr. Greenhythe’s door and straightening her shoulder st
raps.

  “Keep on doing that,” said Mr. Turpin in a dead voice. “And I will bite your shoulders.”

  “I was thinking, Mr. Drake,” said the elder Miss Browne with a yawn, “what thousands of people there must be at the sea.”

  A pencil rolled down the desk and dropped on to the floor. “Boy,” called a curt voice. “Pick up my pencil.” It was Sawston. He was back again. Suddenly sitting at the desk. His eyebrows appeared to be stamped an inch higher on his forehead. His eyes seemed to be filled with points of flint. I picked up the pencil.

  “The damned, impudent old man,” he said so loudly that everyone looked up. He did not look at Hester Browne. She spoke to him.

  “Shut up,” he said very loudly.

  He collected his invoice forms together, folded his blotter and put those into his desk. Then he put away his pens and his round ruler.

  The girl put her hand on his sleeve, but he lifted it off. Then he got down, looked round the office, taking in every detail of it and after that walked to the cloakroom. He came out in his bowler-hat with his mackintosh over his shoulder. He stopped, lit a cigarette and threw the match-stick over the counter. We all stared. At three o’clock in the afternoon, smoking without permission, Mr. Sawston walked out of the office.

  A moan, indignant, and forlorn, like the sound of a ship’s siren as it goes out with foreboding into the ruin of the sea, went up from Mr. Drake.

  “Mr. Sawston!” called the appalled voice. Mr. Sawston glanced back, showed the whites of his eyes and raised his bowler hat. He was gone. Hester Browne jumped down, knocked her stool over and ran to the counter.

  “Hetty,” shouted her sister and came heavily after her. “Leave that man alone!”

  She was in time to catch Hester by the sleeve.

  “Stop it,” shouted Hester and, turning like a rat, struck at the elder one’s face.

  “Ooh you, you … you,” cried Miss Browne and hit out. The young one’s sleeve tore, down went the elder’s glasses.

  “Just look at that,” said Williams.

  They were at each other’s hair, screeching and shouting.

  “You little tart! You little tart! You—you—you—little tart!” screamed Miss Browne.

  The swing door on the counter flew open and Miss Browne fell through on to the floor.

  We rushed to them. Their blouses were ripped, their hair was down, their faces were bleeding. The little one underneath was biting her sister’s wrist, the big one was striking out and hitting the counter. They rolled.

  “Miss Browne. Miss Hester,” sobbed Mr. Drake shaking his pen at them and spattering them with ink. He bent to pull down Miss Browne’s skirt which was round her waist and exposing thighs whose might astonished us.

  At once the pair of them got free and flew at Mr. Drake. This was beyond us. Mr. Hodgkin stepped back, Mr. Cook lowered his head and blushed, Mr. Williams cried out.

  “Remove them, remove them,” pleaded Mr. Drake. Mr. Porter, eternally wrong, began to pull at Mr. Drake. A loud slap startled us. Miss Hester had caught Mr. Drake on the cheek. There was silence. And then we saw Mr. Turpin. Sitting sideways on his stool, detached, interested and thoughtful, he was watching us.

  “Mr. Turpin!” Drake and Porter called out together. It was a cry to the expert. Sadly he got down from his stool and came to the two panting girls.

  “Darlings …” he began and put his arms round their waists, but at this word the big one swooned and hung on him so that he was hardly able to support her. “I told Mr. Greenhythe,” she was gasping quietly. “Save her, save her. He’s a married man.”

  But the little one had jumped away. Screeching, she escaped us and ran into the street to follow Mr. Sawston. And that was the last we saw of either of them. The thing that struck us all dumb was that Mr. Sawston had not fallen to the fear that hung over all of us: he had not been sacked. He had sacked himself.

  THE APE

  The Fruit robbery was over. It was the greatest fruit robbery, and from our point of view, the most successful ever known in our part of the jungle. Not that we can take all the credit for that, for it was not ourselves who started the fight, but out enemies, a colony of apes who live in another tree. They were the first to attack and by the time the great slaughter was over hundreds of their dead, of both sexes, lay on the ground, and we had taken all their fruit. It was a fortunate triumph for us.

  But apes are not a complacent or ungrateful race. Once we were back in our tree binding up our wounds, we thought at once of commemorating our victory and thanking our god for it. For we are aware that if we do not thank our god for his benefactions he might well think twice before he sent us another fruit robbery of this triumphant kind. We thought therefore of how we might best please him. We tried to put ourselves in his place. What would most impress him? There were many discussions about this: we screamed and screeched in passionate argument and the din grew so loud—far louder than the noise we make in the ordinary business of eating or defending our places in the tree or making love and dying—that at last our oldest and wisest ape who lived at the very top, slyly observed: “If I were god and had been looking down at this tree of screeching monkeys for thousands of years, the thing that would really impress me would be silence.” We were dumbfounded. Then one or two of us shouted: “That’s got it. Let silence be the commemoration of our victory.”

  So at last it was arranged. On the anniversary of the day when the great fruit robbery began, we arranged that all of us would stop whatever we were doing and would be silent.

  But nothing is perfect in the jungle. You would think that all apes would be proud to be alike, and would have the wisdom to abide by the traditions of their race and the edicts of their leader. You would think all would destroy the individual doubt with the reflection that however different an ape may fancy he is, the glory of the ape is that as he is now so he always has been, unchangeable and unchanged. There were, however, some and one in particular as you will see, who did not think so.

  We heard of them from a pterodactyl, a rather ridiculous neighbour of ours.

  The pterodactyl lived on a cliff just above our tree and often, scaly and long necked, he would flop clumsily down to talk to us. He was a sensationalist and newsmonger, a creature with more curiosity than brains. He was always worried. What (he would ask us) is the meaning of life? We scratched our heads. Where was it all leading? We spat out fruit pips. Did we apes think that we would always go on as we were? That question was easy. Of course, we said. How fortunate we were, he said, for he had doubts about himself. “It seems to me that I am becoming—extinct,” he said.

  It was all very well of us to make light of it, he said, but “if I had not lived near you such an idea would never have entered my head”. We replied that we did not see what we had done to upset him. “Oh, not you in particular,” he said. “It is your young apes that are worrying me. They keep talking about their tails.”—“No livelier or more flourishing subject,” we said. “We apes delight in our tails.”—“As far as I can see,” the pterodactyl said, “among your younger apes, they are being worn shorter and will soon be discarded altogether”—“What!” we exclaimed—he could have touched us on no more sensitive spot—“How dare you make such a suggestion!”—“The suggestion,” the pterodactyl said, “does not come from me but from your young apes. There’s a group of them. They caught me by the neck the other day—I am very vulnerable in the neck—and ridiculed me publicly before a large audience. ‘A flying reptile,’ they said. ‘Study him while you can for the species won’t exist much longer—any more than we apes shall go about on four legs and have tails. We shall, at some unknown time in the future, but a time that comes rapidly nearer, cease to be apes. We shall become man. The pterodactyl, poor creature, came to the end of his evolutionary possibilities long ago.’”

  “Man!” we exclaimed. “Man! What is that?” And what on earth, we asked the pterodactyl, did he mean by “evolution”. We had never heard of it. We pressed the pterod
actyl to tell us more, but he would only repeat what he had already said. When he had flopped back to his cliff again we sat scratching ourselves, deep in thought. Presently our old and wisest ape, a horny and scarred old warrior who sits dribbling away quietly to himself ail day and rubbing his scars on the highest branch of all, gave a snigger and said, “Cutting off their tails to spite the ape.” We did not laugh. We couldn’t take the matter as lightly as he took it. We, on the contrary, raged. It was blasphemy. The joy, the pride, the whole apehood of us apes is in our tails. They are the flag under which we fight, the sheet-anchor of our patriotism, the vital insignia of our race. This young, decadent post-fruit-robbery generation was proposing to mutilate the symbol which is at the base of all our being. We did not hesitate. Spies were at once sent down to the lower branches to see if what the pterodactyl had told us was true and to bring the leader into our presence.

  But before I tell what happened I must describe what life in our tree is like. The tree is a vast and leafy one, dense in the ramification of its twigs and branches. In the upper branches where the air is freer and purer and the sunlight is plentiful, live those of us who are called the higher apes; in the branches below, and even to the bottom of the trunk, swarm the thousands of lower apes, clawing and scrambling over one another’s backs, massing on the boughs until they nearly break, clutching at twigs and leaves, hanging on to one another’s legs and tails and all bellowing and screeching in the struggle to get up a little higher and to find a place to sit, so that when we say, as we do, that the nature of life is struggle and war we are giving a faithful report from what is going on below us.

  We in the upper branches eat our fruit in peace and spit out the pips and drop the rind upon the crowd below. It is they who, without of course intending to do so, bring us our food. Each of them carries fruit for himself, but the struggle is so violent that it is hard for them to hold the fruit or to find a quiet place where they can eat it. Accordingly we send down some of our cleverer apes—those who are not quite at the top of the tree yet and perhaps will never get there because they have more brain than claw—and these hang down by their tails and adroitly flick the fruit out of the hands of the climbers. Very amusing it is to watch the astonishment of the climbers when they see their fruit go, because a minute before, they were full of confidence; then astonishment changes to anger and you see them grab the fruit from their nearest neighbours who in turn grab from the next. Failing in this, they have to go down once more to the bottom to get more fruit and begin again; and as no part of the struggle is more difficult than the one which takes place at the bottom, an ape will go to any lengths, even to the risk of his life, to avoid that catastrophe. So for thousands of years have we lived and only when fruit on our own tree is short or when we can bear no longer the sight of an abundance of fruit on another tree, occupied by just such a tribe of apes as ourselves, do our masses cease their engaging civil struggle and at an order from us higher apes above, go forth upon our great fruit robberies. It is plain that if in any respect an ape ceased to be an ape, our greatness would decline, and anarchy would follow, i.e. how would we at the top get our food?—and we should lose our tree and be destroyed by some stronger tribe. Our thoughts can therefore be imagined when the spies brought before us the leader of that group of apes who were preparing to monkey with our dearest emblem. He stood before us—and that is astonishing, for we apes do not habitually stand for long. Then he was paler than our race usually is, less hairy, fearless—very un-ape like that—and upright on his hind legs, not seeking support for his forelegs on some branch. These hung at his side or fidgeted with an aimless embarrassment behind his back. We growled at him and averted our eyes from his stupidly steadfast stare—for as a fighting race we are made subtle by fear and look restlessly, suspiciously around us, continually preparing for the sudden feint, the secret calculation, the necessary retreat, the unexpected attack. Nothing delivers an ape more readily to his enemy than a transparently straightforward look; but this upright ape had already lost so much of his apehood that he had forgotten the evasions of a warrior race. He was not even furtive. And in another way, too, he had lost our tradition. He spoke what was in his mind. This, I need hardly say, is ridiculous in a warrior whose business is to conceal his real purpose from his enemy. I note these facts merely as a matter of curiosity and to show how this new ape, from the very beginning, gave himself helplessly into our hands. We had supposed him to be guilty of race-treachery only, a bodily perversion which is, perhaps, a sin and not a crime—but the moment he spoke he went much further. He accused himself of sedition from his own mouth. He spoke as follows;