James Hilton: Collected Novels

by James Hilton

  Nevertheless, they reached Sandmouth without trouble and called immediately at the boarding house. David was a little apprehensive, because Gerald was apt to take sudden dislikes to strangers; but the first encounter seemed to him to pass well enough, and he left on a tiptoe of hopefulness that did not quite amount to confidence. When he called back later in the afternoon he found the two of them eating pink ice cream out of huge cones. “Ice cream is a thing you should never have unless you know where it comes from!” Jessica would have exclaimed, indignantly; but David, neither knowing nor caring where it came from, merely smiled: for the boy at that moment looked just like any other boy. It had been a dream that that should begin to happen some day.

  “How did you manage?” he asked later.

  “All right.”

  “He’s really been good?”

  “Yes.”

  “He can’t help it, you know, even when he isn’t. Wasn’t he frightened at all—by anything?”

  “He didn’t like the big waves when we walked along the beach, but I made him laugh.”

  “You did?”

  “I said things in German. I said, ‘Hurtig mit Donnergepolter entrollte der tückische Marmor’—and he began to laugh and then made me say it over and over again.”

  David smiled eagerly. “You know, that’s just the way I do it too—anything to make him laugh, anything I can think of, when he gets into one of those panics. I believe that’s the only way to tackle them until he can tackle them himself.”

  “Is it true that when he was younger he was run over by a train?”

  “Good God, no! Did he say that? Oh, he’s an awful little story-teller—you mustn’t believe everything he says. He just imagines things, you know, and everything he imagines is more the truth to him than what really happens. That’s why he has these panics—through imagining things. He doesn’t really tell lies.”

  “I know.”

  “If you do know, you belong to a very small minority, I can tell you. And I think he must feel you do—that’s why you get on so well with him.”

  He had been talking English and she German most of the time. They couldn’t either of them be sure that the other grasped an exact meaning; but David didn’t care. He had never found it possible to put everything he meant into speech; indeed, he had sometimes felt that words offered a merely surface exactness that was both an illusion and a danger. That was why he avoided scientific jargon, preferring to write on medical certificates “bad cold,” because he knew well enough that a bad cold might mean anything, and that a bad cold was in this respect rather like life. And so, listening to Leni’s German, which she no longer tried to simplify for him, he caught the mood rather than the detail, and felt no more eager to dispel an occasional word obscurity than Whistler must have wanted the mists to disappear before he would paint a sunset.

  The following Friday he took Gerald to Sandmouth again. The repeated experiment was almost too successful, for the boy enjoyed himself so much that when the time came to return to Calderbury he burst into tears and refused to be comforted. That, clearly, was as big a danger as anything else; and David, promising that he should sec Leni again, was privately aware that it had better not happen. It would be disastrous if Gerald should develop some deep attachment that could not continue; and how could it, since the girl would soon recover and be at work again? At least he assumed so, and she assumed so too; for her money was coming to an end, and even if she could not dance again for some time (as she certainly could not), there might be some other temporary job to tide over the interval; they had talked over that possibility together, and he had been quite optimistic about her getting a commercial post requiring knowledge of German.

  They walked to the railway station, the three of them, with these thoughts and possibilities somewhat strangled by the need for pacifying Gerald. He made a scene on the platform, clinging to Leni’s hand and refusing to budge. “Good-bye,” said David, harassed by all this, as he leaned out of the window when the struggle was over. “Good-bye—and good luck about the job…” Something in her eyes made him add, as the guard began whistling: “By the way, if it doesn’t come off—the job, I mean…” Then the train began to move. “Well, write and let me know,” he added, lamely.

  She didn’t have to write and let him know. Jessica wrote. Jessica, in fact, handled the situation as she always handled situations—masterfully, with a fine eye for essentials and a bold seizure of opportunities. She was a shrewd woman, and after Gerald’s successive Fridays at Sandmouth and his delighted chatter about them, it did not take her long to realize that whatever had happened there had been fortunate. In her remarkably efficient way she wished well to the boy, though the well-wishing hardly lessened her impatience of his tantrums. If someone else had both the knack and the inclination to deal with them, then by all means let it happen. “Who is this woman who looks after Gerald when you’re in Sandmouth?” she asked David.

  David had acquired a habit of reticence about his patients’ private affairs, added to which there was the vagueness that existed in his own mind when he asked himself who Leni was. Come to think about it, he simply didn’t know.

  “She’s just a patient of mine—she broke her wrist.”

  “Is she a lady?”

  David wondered, not so much whether she was or not, as whether Jessica would think her one or not. At length he said: “Oh yes, I should say she is.”

  “Living by herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of family?”

  “She hasn’t any.”

  “Of course not, silly, if she lives by herself. I meant what kind of family does she come from?”

  “I don’t know—I really don’t know much about her affairs.”

  “Is she well off?”

  “Oh no, on the contrary—in fact—”

  “In fact, you’ve already decided not to send her a bill—I thought as much!”

  “No, no—I was going to say that she’s quite poorly off—at the moment she’s trying to find work.”

  “She wants a job, then? I suppose she’s presentable in appearance?”

  “Presentable?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t notice, would you? You never do notice the most obvious things about people. What I’m really wondering is if she’d come here to help with Gerald.”

  “You mean to live here?”

  “Why not, if she wants something to do?”

  “Well…”

  “You don’t think she’d come?”

  “I don’t know…I hadn’t ever thought about it.”

  “My dear David, you never think of anything. Give me her address and I’ll write to her.”

  “The address…ah, let me see now—I think I can remember it—it’s the Salway Private Hotel, Beach Street.”

  “Her name first, stupid—I can’t write without knowing that, can I?”

  “Krafft—Leni Krafft.”

  “Goodness—it sounds foreign.”

  “Oh yes, I forgot to tell you—she is foreign—and she doesn’t speak much English.”

  “Oh, really now? She’s not a Hottentot, by any chance, or a wild woman from Borneo? You’re always so vague about these things.”

  “She’s German.”

  “Well, that’s all right. At any rate it might have been worse. The Murdochs always had German governesses. What made her leave Germany?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I shall write to her, anyhow. I suppose she can understand a letter written in plain English?”

  “Oh yes.”

  So Leni got a letter written in plain English. It offered her the job of looking after Gerald at a salary of sixty pounds a year if she proved satisfactory after a trial.

  Leni came to Calderbury in March. “You’d better meet the train,” said Jessica, “since you’re the one who knows her”; and David said all right, he would if he got through his visits in time; otherwise Susan would have to do the recognizing as best she could. But it hap
pened that he did finish in time, though it was dusk when he reached the station. The station-master nodded as he climbed to the platform.

  “Evening, doctor. Off on your travels ?”

  “No. I’m just meeting somebody.”

  “Train’s late to-night. Only just left the junction. Twenty minutes yet if you’ve anything else to do.”

  “No, thanks, I don’t think I have. I’ll just walk up and down.”

  “Well, it’s good exercise, they say.”

  A laugh—silence—his own footsteps thudding softly on the wooden planks—chimes from the Cathedral—a quarter to five. And as he walked he began to think, really for the first time in his life, about Leni. She was coming to Calderbury. She was coming to live in his house. It was odd the way these things happened.

  He watched the darkness fill the sky and absorb the lights of Calderbury into a faint glow over the roof tops. He heard five chimes from the Cathedral, the last stroke blown a little sad by a wind that suddenly veered. Then, with a whang of wire and a small answering clatter, the signal fell. The train emerged from the cutting across the river, clanked over the iron bridge, and came streaking through the water meadows like a familiar friendly ghost. Whereat Calderbury’s one porter held himself ready for the improbable event of any one requiring his services. “G’d evening, doctor.”

  They talked for a moment about the porter’s little girl, who had been ill and was now recovering.

  The train was in.

  “Shall I take ’is luggage, sir?”

  “Whose luggage?”

  “Your friend’s. Thought you was meeting a friend.”

  “Oh yes…but…it’s a lady. I don’t know whether she’ll have any luggage. Well, maybe she will… Yes, take it down!”

  She was already stepping out of the train, carrying a suitcase and a wicker basket.

  “Leni!”

  “Oh, du kleine doktor!”

  They didn’t know what else to say to each other at first. There was the business of handing over the luggage, surrendering her ticket, passing the barrier with the small crowd from the train. People who knew David kept up a chorus of good-evenings. On the way down the steps to the street level he said: “Gerald’s looking forward to your arrival.”

  Leni exclaimed in German: “I couldn’t believe I was really coming!”

  “It was Jessie’s idea—I don’t know why I never thought of it myself.”

  The porter, walking ahead, pricked up his ears. Afterwards he reported: “They didn’t talk much, but when the doctor said something she answered in some foreign lingo and ’e seemed to understand it all right from the way he smiled back at ’er…”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LENI SETTLED DOWN AT the house in Shawgate and Gerald was happy. It was miraculous, the success she had in calming the boy’s nervousness and brightening his moods whenever they darkened; she could do it as well as David, and, of course, the trouble had always been that David had so little time for doing it. Now, instead of Jessica’s rigid discipline of scoldings and repetitions, Leni imposed her more elastic sway; and Jessica, freed from an irksome duty, seemed satisfied. David was satisfied too. After the first surprise of Leni’s presence he regarded it with sudden simplicity. It was his mission far more to mend what was wrong than to question what was right, and her position in his household soon appeared to him as unarguably right as a flower or the morning mail delivery. For just as he had a childlike inquisitiveness on the surface, so he was apt to seem incurious when he knew people better, not from any lack of interest, but because of his complete acceptance of them as they were. And if someone had suggested that there was anything odd in a German ex-stage dancer becoming his son’s governess, he would first of all have had to recollect that she was a German ex-stage dancer, and then have answered, with complete sincerity, that it was no odder than anything else. He wasn’t bothered, for instance, by any mystery there might be about her name and past; it did not seem to matter to him since he called her Leni and liked her. He called everyone by their first names.

  Gradually her wrist became stronger and one afternoon, when Jessica was out, David heard her playing the piano. It was more from the surgical than the musical angle that he viewed this experiment; he wished to see how far the fracture had impaired her finger movements. To his considerable surprise she began to play rather well, and things he had never heard before; they weren’t his kind of music, anyway. Then he put in front of her a Mozart Sonata, thinking he might give himself the pleasure of hearing it; but she shook her head. “I can’t read it,” she told him.

  “What? You can’t read music?”

  “Only very slowly.”

  “Then how do you learn all these things?”

  “Mostly from ear.”

  “You mean you’ve never been taught music?”

  She shook her head a third time.

  “Well, it’s very remarkable. You certainly ought to have training.”

  “May I practise while I am here?”

  “Why, certainly. You’ll find a lot of classical stuff in the cabinet—my own tastes.”

  “You play the piano?”

  “The violin—but not much. What time does a doctor have?”

  And he went away to his daily duties, vaguely wondering whether he should introduce her to Jaggers, the Cathedral organist, or to Yule, the Cathedral choirmaster, and let them share his discovery. Perhaps they might even give her lessons. And perhaps at the musical party he usually gave once a year he might ask her to play something. That wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

  After that, and mostly during the afternoons when Jessica was out, Leni played the piano in the drawing-room. He didn’t realize what she was doing until one day, by accident, he came in and heard her playing the piano part of the Kreutzer Sonata. He stood outside the drawing-room door and listened till she had finished. Then he entered.“But you learned that from music?”

  “It was very slow and difficult for me to pick out the notes, but when I had done that, then I knew it from memory. I’ve been practising a lot lately.”

  “Fine. But I still think you ought to have some proper training.”

  Smilingly he walked away, again registering an intention of talking to Jaggers or Yule about her. But at the back of his mind in such a matter there was always the thought of Jessica; she might not approve—one could never prophesy her attitude. After fifteen years of married life he had acquired an intense reluctance to make decisions of any kind outside his own immediate professional territory; only by such reluctance was he insulated against the kind of conflict in which, because it would so intensely bore him, he could not fight to any advantage.

  So he did not actually mention Leni to Jaggers or Yule or, indeed, to anyone; but he went on thinking he ought to do, and must do, and perhaps would do so, one of those days.

  But one of those days, a July day, David returned to Calderbury after his weekly visit to Sandmouth. There had been showers during the afternoon, but by evening the sky had totally cleared, and as he walked from the railway station the towers of the Cathedral seemed to exude a memory of both sunshine and rain. It was very beautiful at such a time, especially the view over the town, the mist rising above roofs, a hint of human cosiness in all that huddle of buildings. As David crossed the Close a lamplighter stopped near by, his face upturned to the glow he made.

  “Good night, doctor.”

  “Good night, Ben.”

  Suddenly, walking on towards Shawgate, he met Leni. “Why—” he began, as if he had not seen her for years. She stopped, smiling but silent. “Taking a walk?” he said.

  “Just for a while.”

  There came into the air a murmur that might have been anything or nothing till one realized what it was.

  “Choir practice,” she said, answering his thought. “I have heard it before.”

  “Do you often take a turn round here, then?”

  “Take a turn? What is that?”

  He put it into German for her
, and then a curious line of her mouth, lit by the merging of twilight and lamplight, gave him an impression of mishap that made him add: “Is anything the matter?”

  She answered, in German also: “Mrs. Newcome has told .me I must go.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “Must go? But where?”

  “Away.”

  “But why—why on earth—should she say that?”

  “She said she can’t afford to have me.”

  “But that’s absurd. We can afford it perfectly well.”

  “She said not.”

  A silence fell on them both, and into it, making an interruption, came the voice of a passer-by: “G’night, doctor.”

  “Good night,” answered David, not knowing, never knowing indeed, who the other was. Then he turned to Leni. “I really don’t understand it. I must see what Jessica has to say.”

  Without the suggestion made or accepted they walked together down Shawgate, saying little else. Leni walked so quietly at his side, asking no questions that he could not answer, not bothering him, not making any fuss. Absurd to say one couldn’t afford such rare and priceless negations. Lamplight caught her face as she glanced sideways to cross streets, and he noticed, till it began to preoccupy him, the look of calmness that matched perfectly with her silence. Even her despair had held that same calmness. And suddenly he remembered the dressing room where she had tried to end her life, the Pier where they had walked that night, the already mounting total of their experience. Absurd that now, after so much, she should go. He must talk to Jessica as soon as he had the chance, though he realized, even in making that decision, how little he cared to ask Jessica anything. It wasn’t that he was really afraid of her, or that there was truth in Calderbury’s popular notion that she ruled him with a rod of iron. He wasn’t; she couldn’t. It was rather that his own will to do what he liked in his own house had been worn into a shrug of the shoulders that yielded, by nonchalance, all that could never have been claimed by force. Furthermore, Jessica was so efficient that it was easy to let her encroach to the very rampart of self-preservation; and that rampart, for David, was the door of the surgery.