by Nigel Dennis
To accommodate her, they walked slowly.
At the end of Bread Street they came to a fork. “Well, Mr. Guide, which way?” said the man in brown. Morgan at once pointed to the left—and had no sooner done so than he was sure that he had picked the wrong road. “So far, so good,” said the man.
They passed the last of the streetlamps and entered the old, dim section of Mell. None of the rooms in the low houses showed any lights: in one window they saw the massive green trumpet of a gramophone blooming between cotton-lace side-curtains. A few moments later, the houses dropped away, the cobbles turned to dust, and Morgan knew they were on the empty road that he had followed to the grove on his first morning in Mell. He stopped and said humbly: “I’m very sorry, but I misdirected you: this road leads nowhere.”
“Hell!” said the girl, and they all jumped.
“Why didn’t you say so before?” said the man in brown good-naturedly.
“I didn’t realize. Now, I really do know. It’s back to the fork and down the other road.”
They started back, all walking with the impatient speed of people who are getting bored. At the fork they took the other road. “Yes, this is it,” said Morgan.
A dark shape soon showed in the centre of the road; it was an old pump wrapped at the waist with burlap and wire, its rusty mouth hanging over a stone trough of dirty water. “This is where I sit,” said the girl firmly: “You others can go on.” Without a thought to her splendid dress, she plumped down on one end of the trough, and her escort at once stirred his immaculate feet and kicked away some rolls of horse-dung. “Don’t worry,” she said, pulling her skirt nearly up to the waist, and unveiling long white haunches to the dark world. She freed and removed her stockings and shoes, and after rubbing her fingers between each pair of little toes, slewed around and dumped her bare legs up to the calves in the black water. The three men were fascinated. “Cigarette, Tommy?” she asked, and her escort pulled out a gold case. “I guess we’d better go ahead,” said the brown man; and the escort, pulling out his gold lighter, gave them a hasty, frowning nod, indicating that while they went on with their envelope, he would stand guard over the treasure.
“I bet she’ll make him pay for every blister,” the brown man said as they walked out of earshot. Morgan had been thinking just the same thing; and he had liked the brown man ever since he first saw him protesting against his conspicuous rôle; so now he looked at the man with respect and warmth, and thought suddenly: Thank God! I’ve found a friend.
The street fell into a steep curving slope; they trotted down in exact, friendly step. The streetlights disappeared again; the dusty road took over. “Some place for a mayor to live,” the man said, glancing at Morgan rather doubtfully.
Ahead of them they saw, one on each side of the road, identical houses with gables and high garden walls. “I know for sure it’s one of these; I don’t know which,” said Morgan. “Here, take this,” said the man, pushing the envelope over to Morgan and running across the road to where a figure had appeared. But the figure only shook its head when questioned, deaf or ignorant of English. The man came back, looking at his watch impatiently. He and Morgan stared at the gables, with their identical backgrounds of bright stars and running, wispy clouds. “I’ll try this one; you take that, eh?” said the brown man.
Morgan found an iron gate in the middle of the wall and pushed it timidly. The hinges screamed; at once a dog let loose with high, sharp yelps and came tearing out of the darkness, throwing himself at Morgan’s legs, bouncing off them, dashing at them again. “Get down, Goddam you!” he said to it, raising the precious envelope high in the air and peering into the darkness.
But he could only see that he was within one of those garden walls in which the owner takes too much pride to consider how much the shrubs and little trees must struggle to breathe under its crushing height. Morgan marched staunchly first into one bush, then into another: at each snap and crash of boughs and leaves, the dog screamed frantically and tore between his legs. His feet found a path and followed it down one side of the house; it led him to the back door. Swearing, he went on, turned the west corner and followed the third side, where there was only a foot of space between the house and the garden wall, every inch packed with a jungle of bushes, and, for path, a thin groove left in the gravel by dripping rain water. His face stinging, he pushed through, headed by the hysterical dog; and a light came on in the housetop, showing him a front door set under a painted overhang. He found an iron bell-pull and tugged it.
Six inches of old wire came rasping out, a bell tinkled, the dog screamed, a voice roared out from the back door. Morgan roared too, and crashed his way around to the back door; but the person had closed it and was now pulling the bolts and shouting at the front door. He beat on the back door until he heard the steps turn and come down the passage again.
The door opened, the dog raced into the house screaming, a burst of light fell into Morgan’s eyes. Through his blinking lids he saw a huge woman with a large grey moustache, wearing a chocolate dress imprinted with red peonies: hanging menacingly from her right fist was a clawed implement for taking lids off stove-tops.
“How do you do: is the mayor at home? Does he live here? The burgomaster?” cried Morgan, trying gaily to outshout the dog. He waved the large envelope, which was now streaked with dirt and torn at one corner, where the dog had bitten it. Smiling, he held it in the light, pointing his finger at the word ‘Mayor.’
The woman bent, and frowned with enormous brows at the significant words; then she put out a large hand and firmly took the envelope. She gave him a deep bow and a grim smile, and closed the door on him. He heard her walk away down the passage and slowly climb the stairs. A little later the light went out and the dog stopped barking.
The brown man was waiting outside the iron gate. “I hope you struck oil, because I didn’t,” he said. “Well,” said Morgan, suddenly starting to feel worried: “I didn’t actually see the Mayor.” “Who did you see?” “I guess his wife, or housekeeper.” He described his adventure, and his new friend looked more and more grim. “I hope I’m wrong,” he said, when Morgan was through, “but I got the impression from the owner of my house that your house was the local insane asylum.”
“Oh, my God!”
“But I probably was wrong,” his friend said.
“By God, I hope you were!”
“No doubt of it.”
They stood together, wondering, and the man added reflectively: “Checking up might be something of a headache. Oh well, let’s have a try.”
They beat on the front and back doors and shouted. High upstairs the dog answered them, but no human voice replied, no light showed in any window. Scratched and breathless they returned to the road, where the man leaned against the wall and said: “Just a minute before we go on. Cigarette?”
“Thank you. I see I’ve made an awful mess. The more I think of it, the more sure I am that when that house was explained to me … But how could I confuse …?”
“Skip it; never mind that. What we must do is figure out what comes next. You look young to me; I guess you are inexperienced. You may not know that people who have donated a lot of dough to a worthy cause expect equal love and gratitude in return. If they don’t get it, the first thing they do is lynch the messenger. See?” Morgan nodded, very much impressed by such wisdom.
At last the man said: “The two babies we left on the road don’t count. They couldn’t make the grade, so they’ve got no right to be nosey. O.K.?”
“Positively.”
“But as for the others …” The man looked at Morgan and said firmly: “Now, for them we’re going to have to do a few little elaborations. We may be the goats, but we don’t have to be the sacrifices. See what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
“O.K. Now; I think perhaps you’d better leave that part in my hands. I think I’m more experienced handling people than you are. You keep a steady head and just don’t say a word.”
&nb
sp; “I’ll be too glad. I’m truly sorry to have got you in such a mess.”
“My own fault, bud. I’m old enough to know I should have kept my lip buttoned right at the start. This’ll teach me.”
They started up the road.
“Maybe you ought to smile while I’m elaborating,” said the man.
“Yes, I will; that would be right…. Er, are you going to be in Mell a long time?”
“No, sir, I am not. I just took myself a week-end here, and tomorrow I’ve to be in Tutin to take old Senator Fitch home to his folks in Colorado—and it’s going to cost them plenty. I may be dumb at my age, but you’d think an old man of eighty-two would know better than to ship himself to Poland in hot weather to orate about democracy.”
“Yes, I thought I read that he died in Warsaw last week.”
“He did just that. I’m an undertaker.”
Soon they saw the red cigarette ends of the girl and her escort. “Well, how did it go?” asked the girl, rising lazily from the trough.
“Ask no questions, you’ll hear no lies,” said the undertaker.
The four of them walked slowly back to the hotel, the girl leaning on her escort’s arm. The undertaker led the way into the lobby; Morgan, following the girl, saw that the hem of her dress was spattered with muck and that there was a broad wet band across her satin behind. The yellow-toothed spokeswoman was exactly where they had left her, on the sofa, but now she was holding one of the fifty-dollar girl’s hands firmly in both her own; the two of them seemed pleased and rather coy. Half a dozen others donors lay sleepily in chairs, but they bounced to their feet on seeing the delegates.
“Well!” they cried, “we’d just about given you up!”
“I can’t wait!” exclaimed the spokeswoman, “and nor can this generous little sweetheart.”
The undertaker shook his head with incredible gravity, and said slowly: “I don’t have much to say … He was one of those simple, kindly old buzzards you read about. It took me and my friend here”—indicating Morgan, who smiled all over his face—“a pretty long while to explain to him what it was all about: he’s not educated, you see, just good from the bottom up. Then, when he got the idea, he just burst into tears. He stammered, in Polish, I guess, but meantime waved his arms over and over in a way that, believe me, was stronger than any words. I gathered he was asking what he could do in return; and I tried to tell him: nothing—that we were too happy. After that, we left him….”
The undertaker paused to let the bliss sink in, and then gracefully concluded: “And so, ladies and gentlemen, I think we may go to our beds knowing we have done the human race a good evening’s service.”
They walked in silence to the elevators. Morgan stepped out at the undertaker’s floor and said: “I’m more grateful than I can say. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“Say nothing of it.” The undertaker looked at his watch. “If it weren’t that I have to make that early train, I’d ask you to my room for a nightcap.” He took a card from his billfold: “Any time you happen to be in Colorado.”
“I could have been there this very summer,” said Morgan. “So long, and thank you again.”
*
His own room was dark as a dungeon; he entered it thinking: So, my only friend is an undertaker. Divver’s room was dark and empty, too: Morgan closed the adjoining door, switched on his light and tried not to picture Divver, settled in an armchair listening to the engineer’s bubbling anecdotes and edicts, while that woman contentedly worked on a pink bed jacket with the big wooden needles of the languid female. The clock struck twelve, and he thought: there was a time when I was always asleep at this hour.
A letter from his mother, the fourth in two weeks, lay on his bedside table. He had preferred not to open his mother’s second letter; but, ashamed to destroy it unread, he had carried it about carefully in his pocket until, like anything that is so scrupulously guarded, it had at last escaped by a secret passage. He had opened the third letter, and discovered with surprise that it was affectionate and undemanding: it reminded him, in fact, of the cordial protestations of love that often precede the loved one’s annihilation. And so now the fourth one filled him with apprehension: he walked to the window, then to the toilet, began to undress, examined in the mirror the dark shadows under his eyes, and tried to find in his condition one substantial thing that would stand like a breastwork between him and the letter. But the only proof he could find of his independence, of having obtained his heart’s desire and made himself a new life with his own hands, was a feeling of intolerable boredom; and he could hardly believe that a word so commonplace represented a condition of such disgust, or that in destroying his drugs he had merely exposed his nerves to a most painful wear and tear.
For, the last two weeks had introduced him into a new world of the most disillusioning kind. Where he had once heedlessly dozed far into the morning, he now awoke, like any normal, grown-up man, with a violent palpitation of the heart and a sharp sense of horror at the prospect of another day. His eyes, no longer dim and bleary, were pinned down at the instant of waking by the sharp, standard lines of the hotel room, while a kind of fear that was new to him warned him that unless he single-handed made some further bold decision these dreary pieces of furniture would continue to surround him like coffins. Where his drugged ears had once easily rejected an unpleasant noise, such as a brisk call to him to come, they now nervously anticipated the monotonous sounds of a Mell morning—the tinny clank of the cathedral clock, the hawkings, slipper-shufflings and discordant whistlings that were Divver’s anthem to a new day. Where he had once reached, through a comfy haze, for his morning pill, he now snatched at the nearest book, and buried himself in it, until the same old waiter, with the same old grin, carried in the same old tray, whose silverware, so gorgeous to a drugged taste, was now the dullest electroplate. When he fled from it all into the sunny fresh air his mind, clear at last of sentimental rubbish, recognized the parade of antiquity as tedious vanity, and there was not a relic or triptych in Mell with which he was not on terms of familiar boredom. When he walked by the cathedral and glimpsed the eleven apostles—their sandstone mantles embroidered with the ’phone numbers of countless pilgrims; their faces nicked to the bone by centuries of Baltic storm, Napoleonic cannon and little boys’ slingshots—he could close his eyes and summon up each one’s special posture and anatomical defects as precisely as a gloomy old roué can envisage the girls in the local brothel. In what already seemed like the good old days, he had only had to wander a few miles before he was too somnolent to think; now, it took long, brisk walks under the hottest sun to win even half an hour’s unconsciousness; and when night came he found that he could day-dream for hours before he was worn out enough to sleep. Recently, he had been spending many mornings sitting by the tennis courts, swinging his racket and inviting invitations; but they came only from people who were as bored as himself—and presumably as desperate and unattractive, he thought, as he fled from their clutches. He was interminably pestered by a new and urgent sexual energy, which kept him chained, as it were, to a homeless and rabid dachshund: he stared ferociously at all the attractive females, glowered down the front of their summer dresses and up their skirts, stripped to the flesh and carried off to his bed some ten or twenty waitresses a day. After dark, boredom and sexuality made him a prowler: he sat hopefully on the fringes of noisy, happy groups in bars, laughing at their jokes and hoping shamelessly that his enthusiasm would serve as an introduction. But the intolerable stink of loneliness was always detected by these sensitive people, who shut it out by hastily drawing into tighter phalanxes. He only came to know, and to dread, greying, drunken female phantoms of the gay ’twenties who—dormant in alcohol through these hard years of social conscience, awaiting a glorious resurrection of Prohibition and Scott Fitzgerald—gladly threw their bitten arms around his neck and, screaming to their party, “Isn’t he a sweet boy? Darling, I love you for ever!” left a hot stew of Scotch in h
is nose, and fatty, crimson imprints on his lips and cheeks.
In haughtier hours he had managed to ignore the tourists and to dream, instead, of winning the love of those endearing figures that populate European novels: some marvellous old dame, who has suffered so harrowingly that wisdom glows through her furrowed patina; or a village priest, an old gentleman smelling of boiled cabbage and living with his housekeeper in amiable filth, sitting under an oil lamp over a shabby table cover, turning the pages of a worn Homer with black fingernails. But the living priest of Mell had turned out to be quite different: he existed to accommodate tourists as surely as telephone wires to accommodate birds of passage. He was young; his spotless robe bore the tag of the best dry cleaner in Tutin; he spoke fluent English and surprised the mothers of American children by talking knowingly about Superman and Dick Tracy. During the one conversation Morgan had with him the priest casually removed one of his eyes and polished it with a silk handkerchief. He had detached interest in this eye, which he explained was a real blessing, an artificial creation which synchronized perfectly with the movements of the other, all-seeing eye. Its life likeness, he explained, was due to a hunchbacked girl in Warsaw, who could copy the pupils, whites and irises of the sitter’s real eye with the skill of Filippo Lippi. Cyclopean clients applied to her from all over the world, the priest said; but she would consent to harmonize only the eyes of anti-Fascists: and the priest reeled off an extraordinary list of French, English, and American cabinet ministers who, thanks to this dedicated cripple, need never be suspected of looking two ways: “she is an example to all of us who suffer from physical or mental handicaps,” said the priest. He lived in an electrified brick villa, and he invited Morgan to the next meeting of the camera club he had founded. Many American visitors were members, and they exchanged “photo-notes” with him during their winter absence. “I must confess that I am a dyed-in-the-wool shutterbug,” said the priest, and his eyes lit mischievously in a synchronical twinkle. Morgan watched him walk away, and felt shocked to the bone; he would have expected such an attitude in a Protestant clergyman, but not in a man who seriously believed in God.
