Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Dennis Parry

‘Ah,’ said Turpin, ‘but I’m a bit easier in my mind since I saw ’ow ’e wanted to keep ’is ma out of this. ’E never came by that thing straight.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it now?’

  ‘That’s tricky. Find it again some’ow, I suppose, and ’and it in to the old lady.’

  ‘It may involve a good deal of explaining.’

  There was a pause during which the same thought evidently occurred to both of us. Finally, in his official voice, Turpin said: ‘It seems, sir, that we might be better circumstanced to consider this ’ere problem, if we knew what was inside.’

  My Public School morality revolted a little. But it had no deep roots, and I was just as inquisitive as Turpin.

  ‘It might save dropping a brick,’ I agreed.

  The case was closed, but a small key with an elaborately patterned head had been left in the lock. I turned it and instantly the lid sprang up owing to pressure from inside. The interior was packed with scores of letters. It would have been difficult to imagine any more embarrassing contents, owing to the popular disapproval of people who pry into other’s correspondence. I closed the case again rapidly, but not before my eye had taken in that the topmost layer of letters were all addressed to Mrs. Eleanor Ellison and bore Chinese stamps of an old issue. ‘Doesn’t tell us much,’ I said sheepishly.

  Turpin felt that there was an implied slur on his judgment and in the process of defending himself his language became even more forcible than usual.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a sod like Mr. Cedric don’t nick papers to curl ’is ’air. I bet there’s something in them letters that’s worth a mint of money. Help ’im to put the bite on some poor bastard, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘You mean blackmail?’

  Turpin nodded. Personally, however, though I agreed that anything which Cedric took the trouble to acquire was likely to have a firm cash value, I did not believe that he would go in for blatant crime. For a man in his position there were too many opportunities of reaping equal profits by misusing rather than contravening the law.

  I was seized with a sudden impulse of bourgeoisie oblige.

  ‘Look, Turpin, if you like I’ll give this thing back to Mrs. Ellison.’

  He was only too thankful to be rid of the task. I did not myself much look forward to it. My hope was that I might catch the old lady in one of her confused moments. Alas, it was not to be. I found her sitting up in bed, clear-eyed and fresh from her afternoon nap, and wearing her best expression of composed benevolence.

  When I produced the case she was visibly startled, but she listened politely to my slurred explanation how I had found it on the stairs. Clearly, however, she knew what had happened.

  ‘Thank you, David,’ she said at length. ‘There has been a misunderstanding. That case should never have left my possession.’

  An instant later the complication which I most feared had come about. Nurse Fillis walked in. Seeing the object in Mrs. Ellison’s hands she let out a loud involuntary gasp and the rich colour drained out of her face.

  Mrs. Ellison said: ‘I don’t think we’re ready for you yet, Nurse.’ After a pause, she added: ‘This is not quite your moment.’

  She spoke with her normal patrician urbanity. But on the last words she allowed her glance to slide round to the bedside table on which stood a contraption of silver and velvet with an inset travelling-clock and a row of hooks for hanging up small personal objects. One of them bore a fob-watch which I had sometimes seen pinned onto Mrs. Ellison’s dress and another a ring of keys. Gently Mrs. Ellison took the keys and placed them under her pillow.

  I knew now to what end Cedric’s nauseous persuasions had been directed.

  ‘I—I—’ said Nurse Fillis.

  ‘That will do now,’ said Mrs. Ellison. ‘Come and get me up in about half an hour.’

  ‘David,’ said Mrs. Ellison, ‘I’m sure that I can trust you. What do you think is in the case?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and the cock crew once.

  ‘Letters which my son, Varvara’s father, sent me over a period of more than twenty years.’

  ‘They must be very interesting.’

  Her face lit up. Her next remark showed that I had accidentally given her the lead which she wanted.

  ‘They’re so interesting that many people would like to read them. And people aren’t always very considerate about how they borrow. Nor do they always give things back. I should not like to lose my son’s letters.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Mrs. Ellison continued, picking her way with tired finesse, ‘though I set so much store on the letters, my eyesight makes it rather a trial to re-read them. I don’t know if you care for strange stories and strange places, David—’

  ‘You mean, Doljuk? I’m absolutely sold on it.’

  She smiled at this outburst of youthful enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, if you were to look through them, you would learn a lot about the exciting side of life there—the fighting and so on.’ She paused, marshalling herself for a final effort of diplomacy.

  ‘But of course an old lady like myself tends to be more interested in domestic and family matters. For instance, I should like to read again about my dear son’s wife, and anything that he may have said about his marriage. There are so many letters and after all these years I forget. . . .’

  The effort of concentration was causing her voice to weaken rapidly. At the risk of a snub I tried to take some of the burden of explanation off.

  ‘You’d like me to read them and perhaps call your attention to . . . the points you mentioned?’

  Mrs. Ellison nodded. We had linked hands without ostensibly letting the right know what the left was doing. Nevertheless I do not doubt that she credited me with a full understanding of her object. After all I had been present when the meaning of ‘children’ under the Power of Appointment was discussed. No, she simply belonged to a period when any contortions were preferable to saying outright: ‘I want to find out what evidence there is whether my granddaughter was born in wedlock.’ Slowly, with shaking veined hands, she held out the case towards me. As I took it my sense of elation was damped by the reflection that I would now be responsible for the contents. Clearly Cedric thought that they might be valuable enough to make it worthwhile to suborn his mother’s personal attendant. Presumably, if he had got away with them, he would have destroyed any material which was in Varvara’s favour and abstracted for use in case of a legal battle the statements which told against her.

  It suddenly struck me that my position would be more comfortable if there were several copies of the letters. I made the suggestion tentatively, not sure how Mrs. Ellison would take it. Rather to my surprise she did not demur at the idea of her private correspondence going through the hands of a typist. The avowed object was to enable her more easily to read the pieces which I might pick out, but I am sure that she knew the real purpose of the precaution.

  A week later a large registered packet lay beside my plate at breakfast. Varvara who had taken to coming downstairs for that meal looked at it with unconcealed curiosity.

  ‘You have not opened your big letter.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is private?’

  ‘Most letters are.’

  After some heart-searching I had decided not to tell her about my task. I had not been forbidden to do so, but I felt that if Mrs. Ellison wished her to know, she should make the disclosure herself. Besides . . . suppose I found something which was prejudicial to her? It would be more than embarrassing to have her aware of it. Varvara did not share her uncle’s shameless indifference to truth, but one felt that she regarded it as subordinate to loyalty.

  Nurse Fillis joined in the conversation. She had been very, very nervous of me for some days after the encounter in Mrs. Ellison’s room, but of late her spirit was coming back.

  ‘One place I was at,’ she said, ‘the young man of the house used to get big packets every week. He made a terrific secret of them at first. But then it turned o
ut he was writing a novel and he kept on giving me bits of it to read. They were wicked—not spicy, I mean, but real dirt.’

  ‘I suppose they excited your instincts,’ said Varvara.

  Just as heavy drinkers can usually pick out chronic alcoholics and have the greatest scorn for them, so Varvara, a highly passionate girl, detected and despised poor Nurse Fillis’s complaint.

  On the afternoon when I left Mrs. Ellison’s room with the writing-case I had assumed that the office of nurse would change hands within the next few days. As nothing happened in forty-eight hours I thought the old lady had had some extraordinary lapse of memory and I was impertinent enough to give her a hint.

  ‘My dear boy,’ she said, ‘from time to time we all lose our heads’—she smiled faintly—‘or our hearts. One must make allowances.’

  ‘But theft—’

  Mrs. Ellison’s face became quite stern. ‘Not theft,’ she said. ‘Confusion of orders.’

  She did not miss many tricks. It would have ripped to pieces her cherished pavilion of reticence if she had had to listen to a string of hysterical accusations against her son. She herself gave me another modest reason for her charity.

  ‘I’m a selfish old woman. It means a lot to have somebody about me who’s learnt to understand my helplessness and my ailments.’

  ‘She’s very fortunate to have struck such a tolerant employer,’ I said rather priggishly.

  ‘Be kind to Nurse Fillis,’ she continued. ‘She has a difficult life and she is capable of great goodness. She keeps a sister who’s slowly dying of Parkinson’s disease.’

  She was obviously sincere; and therefore I was the more amazed when, having uttered these words, she suddenly began to laugh.

  ‘I told Barbara that,’ she said, ‘and do you know what her answer was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She merely asked, “Is Parkinson’s disease infectious?” . . . Oh, there’s a lot of Ellison about that young woman, a terrible lot!’

  6

  Altogether there were a hundred and twenty-six letters. I still have—quite legitimately, as I shall explain—copies of all of them. Many seem to me to be of exceptional interest; their style, jaunty and rather self-consciously callous, says a good deal about the character of their writer, and so indirectly of his child. This is my excuse for the limited number of quotations which I shall give.

  I start with the first in the series, dated 17th November 1914, because it sets the tone and also because it may serve to correct in advance any impression that Fulk’s career in Sinkiang was one long succession of Boy’s Own Paper triumphs.

  ‘Dearest Mother,

  ‘There are rumours here that you are having a war. Personally I think they have been put about by the Chinks to push up the price of German ammunition. But if you are, well, it is not much different here. I have had a bit of trouble, that swine Yee again, the Governor, I told you about him, I think. Last week there was a riot, the boys have been boiling up for some while, and they got a few of the garrison in a Bad House, and gave them something they didn’t go in for.

  ‘Well, it so happened that a couple of chaps who took a leading part in the disturbance were friends of mine. And furthermore it happened that I had lately sold them one or two odds and ends—for keeping off thieves and shooting quail and so on. Is it my fault if they misbehave with my goods, any more than you’d blame the ironmonger if a man bought a saucepan from him and went out into the street and bashed somebody over the head with it? But there you are. I’ve always been the poor fish that got the blame.

  ‘Two or three nights after the riot I was in the outer courtyard. A couple of my caravans had come in and I was talking to the drivers and checking over the stuff. And then, damn me, if a dozen whacking great soldiers didn’t barge in through the open gate. I asked what they wanted and they said they had orders to take me before the Governor. Well, the boys from the caravans who’re a friendly lot were in favour of up and cut their throats. But I could see this was a special patrol because they’d been issued with the old Martini Henry rifles which go off once in two instead of once in ten like the rest of the armoury. So not wanting any bloodshed I said I’d go along. But the blasted noise had roused up Serafina and she came out with the baby to ask what was happening. Well, Mother, not to make a song about it, the fact is that people who go to the Governor’s palace don’t always come back, or they come back the worse for wear. Serafina started to bawl and the baby bawled too, and then the baby’s nurse popped up, always one for a bit of grue, just like our old nanny, and the noise would have drowned a steam siren. There is only one way to stop Serafina lamenting and that is to start her cursing. So I told her she was simply trying to disguise the fact that all she cared about was my money, and she’d be glad if I was killed, so that she could get her hands on it. When I came back several hours later she was still making a speech about the purity of her heart and the delicacy of her nature. You would like S., Mother, she would give you many a good laugh.

  ‘Well, because of all the uproar, I’d let them take me away without my sheepskin coat or my fur hat. The cold had just set in, and when it’s cold here believe me, Mother, it would take the nose off a brass monkey. The colder it is, the brighter the stars and the moon, and the mica on the slopes above the North Gate bats back the light so that if you look long enough you begin to imagine the whole place is winking at you. Anyway the chill got into my bones and started me shivering. Which would never do. Once let these Chinks think you are frightened of them and you are finished. So when we reached the palace, I made the soldiers let me stop in the guard-house and warm myself over a brazier.

  ‘You’d hardly recognize the palace by that name. Some of it was put up about 1750 in the usual Chink style—a series of big barns—pavilions, if you’re feeling polite—with carved roofs and long eaves. But the centre is quite different, a bit like the castle towers in Scotland—very rough stone, slit windows and passages, so low and narrow that you feel you’re crawling along a mole’s burrow. They say it was built by either the Keraits or the Uighurs. The Chinks don’t like it, they say it is haunted, but they don’t knock it down because once or twice these four-foot walls have turned out very useful in a siege.

  ‘On the bottom floor there’s one big room, almost circular. I don’t know what it’s called officially, but Yee uses it as a private audience chamber. When they took me in he was sitting at a little lacquered table, painting or doing calligraphy. Well, I ask you! What an act! It reminded me of father. You know I could never stand that trick of shuffling the papers and signing letters while people wait, just to show what a big cheese you are.

  ‘So after a minute I waited till he was on a delicate downstroke and I coughed as loud as I damned well could. He started all right. But he’s not a man who stops on the wrong foot for long.

  ‘ “I have read”, he said, “that there is a natural law which repeatedly gives symbolic warnings to the perceptive when they are in the presence of evil-doers.”

  ‘Well, I thought, my Chink is pretty good, but if the conversation is to be on that plane, I cannot run to it. So I tried to keep it simple.

  ‘ “I did not feel any warning,” I said.

  ‘ “Possibly not. But just now you caused me to spoil the character which represents Peace and Harmony.”

  ‘ “There can’t be much use for it round here,” I said, trying to put us on an easy footing.

  ‘ “You dare to tell me that!” he said. “You who have done as much as anyone to turn this city into a den of wild beasts!”

  ‘When anything goes wrong the authorities always like to pretend that the man who sells a gun is responsible for what the buyer does with it. Of course, traffic in arms is illegal in Sinkiang and punishable by death, but everybody knows it goes on and who’s in it. I scarcely thought that even Yee would be cad enough to bring that up against me.

  ‘ “I have proof against you, a hundred times over,” he said.

  ‘ “There is no need to cong
ratulate yourself on that, your Excellency,” I said. “Come down to my cellar any day and I will show you my goods.”

  Yee is a funny-looking chap. For a Chink he has a long face and rather pronounced features. As I stood there looking at him in the lamplight he reminded me of an old mountain goat. You stare at that long dreary mug and you don’t know whether to laugh or to be sorry for the poor brute. Then if you’re lucky you catch the wicked light in his eyes just before he catches you in the stomach!

  ‘ “I am willing to grant you the conventional immunity on that score, but I can no longer tolerate the fact that you have allied yourself with the enemies of the Government which has given you eight years’ hospitality.”

  ‘I do not know, Mother, whether the people in England still believe that the Chinks begin every sentence by saying, “Honourable Lotus Blossom, accept my unworthy salutations”. It is not so. They can talk as straight as anyone else, at least they can out here.

  ‘So I said to him, “What are you going to do about it?”

  ‘ “I am going to put you to death,” he said, “in accordance with my lawful powers.”

  ‘ “There will be a frightful fuss when the news gets back to England,” I said.

  ‘ “I have faced many fusses in the course of my duty,” he said. “Besides, you may possibly exaggerate the concern of your Government. I shall be fully supported by mine.”

  ‘Well, I must say I was uneasy. About half the soldiers had stayed in the room, a couple guarding Yee, and three just behind my back. Even if I had been armed I shouldn’t have stood a chance. Whilst I was weighing up the situation, the screen that stood across the entrance was edged aside and in strolled another brute. He was carrying one of those whacking great executioner’s swords.

  ‘ “Is your Excellency not being a little hasty?” I said. “It would be a pity to do anything irreparable.”

  ‘ “The whole object of this procedure is that it should be irreparable,” he said.

  ‘ “Can’t I at least say goodbye to my wife and child?”