But I had an engagement that evening in town I could not break. The most I could do was to delay my going until the afternoon and to give the morning to Dan. He proposed that I should send on my bag by the carrier and that we should walk along the shore, striking inland to Green Peldon, lunch at the ‘Dun Cow’ and from there I could take the bus, into Colchester.
I said goodbye to Miss Hartigan who had tried in vain to get me for a few moments by myself. Her ‘Don’t forget to let me know how you get on,’ I recognised as a pathetic cry for help I should gladly have given her had I known how.
I remember well that walk, the wind at our back, the sun shining on the barley stubble where ploughs were already at work, the narrow margin of sand that bounded the sea wall, the smell of seaweed. Then the heavy clay of lanes that ran between unslashed hedges overgrown with bramble; farms with outbuildings falling to pieces; poor pasture that was once good corn land, until we came at last to Green Peldon.
As we sat over our cheese and ale Dan told me that he had decided to go abroad. He had a doctor friend in Geneva whom he would see about his eyes; something had got to be done about them. And then he launched out again into his wild theories, breaking off to remind me of some long-forgotten incident of our schooldays or some war experience that was supposed to prove the truth of what he said. There was little I could do to cheer him, for Dan was in no listening mood. The bus came at last.
‘Goodbye!’ I said, ‘and let me know what you are doing and where you are.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ he answered. ‘I shall be all right.’ And then as the bus was moving off he added, ‘You might look in at Spenser’s, the opticians, on your way to the station. Tell them they must forward the glasses at latest by tonight’s post. If they can’t do that, they had better cancel the order.’
When a minute later I looked back, his tall lanky figure still stood disconsolately at the crossroads.
I wrote my duty letter to Miss Hartigan and a few days later received a reply in which she told me that Dan had gone abroad. It was quite a short note. She hoped the change of scene would take him out of himself, but when she thanked me for what I had done, I knew that my intervention had been a complete failure and that I had let her down.
A week later I heard from Dan. He wrote from somewhere in the Jura. I gathered that his friend was away from home and that he was filling in time sketching. It was a fairly cheerful letter. He asked for a few good thrillers, a new pipe and a supply of his favourite tobacco. But there was a postscript that left me troubled.
‘If by chance anything should happen to me in the next month or so, you might see what could be made out of those stories of mine, and if, as you say, they don’t hang together, I give you full leave to make some sort of an introductory yarn in which the character of the anonymous author, disguised and distorted according to your taste, gives by his lack of unity a certain cohesion to the whole. You know what I mean, I think. Cast me as hero or villain or both. I am sending along a bundle of verse to vary the cargo. Use it or not as you think fit.’
A week later came a picture postcard from Geneva acknowledging the receipt of my parcel and then there was a long gap of three months.
The new year had got well into its stride before I heard again from Dan Hartigan. The letter was dated from Portico House.
‘I’ve just been reading Paradise Lost,’ he wrote, ‘that glorious passage in the fourth book where Eve conversing with Adam describes the beauties of the morning, noon and night. The double reference to “this her solemn bird,”—she was not thinking of her husband—conjured up your face as last I saw it. Hence this letter. I’ve taken my plunge. You’d blame me I expect, if you knew, but if you realised the extraordinary peace—stillness rather—that possesses my soul, I think you would understand.
‘My self is no longer divided, and as a result, I suppose, I am filled with a tingling vitality. It must have been rather too overpowering for my aunt and since there is now no occasion for the anxious solicitude with which she surrounded me she departed to keep house and conscience for one of my cousins in Ireland. You must come down and see me. Portico House has been winter-cleaned under the personal supervision of its resident proprietor. The whole place is swept and garnished, and though at times it is a bit solitary it’s good for work and I’m turning out some first-rate stuff. I feed like a fighting cock and to everyone’s surprise sleep the sleep of the just. I’ve bought a lovely little five-tonner at Burnham and shall be sailing her round one of these days. Now what about a long weekend? You can take your choice. They are all the same to me.’
But I never crossed the threshold of Portico House again and it was all the same to Dan Hartigan. For the yacht capsized in a squall and he and the man from whom he had bought her were both drowned. Dan’s body was never recovered.
After some difficulty I managed to find out Miss Hartigan’s address in Ireland and wrote to her without, however, receiving a reply. Shortly afterwards I saw the notice of her death after an operation in a nursing home in Cork.
I was sitting one day in the smoking-room at the club when I heard Hartigan’s name mentioned. Two men were talking about him.
‘He was a clever fellow, a bit morbid perhaps, but a wonderful artist in his own line.’
‘And that wasn’t the sea,’ said the other; ‘that was a tragic business. It ought never to have happened. By the way, didn’t Hartigan lose a limb in the war or something like that?’
‘He’d lost an eye, right or left, I can’t remember which, but that was quite recent; on the continent, I think. Pretty awful for an artist. But if you ever have a chance of getting hold of any of his work take my advice and freeze on to it. You won’t be sorry.’
‘Right or left, I can’t remember which.’
I suppose if I had wanted to I could have found out. Perhaps it was because I wished to remain in ignorance that I made no effort to attend the sale at Portico House, for a house speaks of the personality of a man and Dan had said that he had arranged this to his liking.
Which part of his nature had at the end held undivided sway? There were, he had told me, two doors to his citadel, two gateways to his city, and to gain control one had to be demolished. He had hesitated and then made a choice that was ultimate. Was it the right eye or the left eye that he had lost or rather sacrificed?
Knowing Dan and having read his stories; I am inclined to think—
But after all the data are as much yours as mine. Read what he has written and judge for yourselves.
THE DABBLERS
IT WAS a wet July evening. The three friends sat around the peat fire in Harborough’s den, pleasantly weary after their long tramp across the moors. Scott, the ironmaster, had been declaiming against modern education. His partner’s son had recently entered the business with everything to learn, and the business couldn’t afford to teach him. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that from preparatory school to university, Wilkins must have spent the best part of three thousand pounds on filling a suit of plus-fours with brawn. It’s too much. My boy is going to Steelborough grammar school. Then when he’s sixteen I shall send him to Germany so that he can learn from our competitors. Then he’ll put in a year in the office; afterwards, if he shows any ability, he can go up to Oxford. Of course he’ll be rusty and out of his stride, but he can mug up his Latin in the evenings as my shop stewards do with their industrial history and economics.’
‘Things aren’t as bad as you make out,’ said Freeman, the architect. ‘The trouble I find with schools is in choosing the right one where so many are excellent. I’ve entered my boy for one of those old country grammar schools that have been completely remodelled. Wells showed in The Undying Fire what an enlightened headmaster can do when he is given a free hand and isn’t buried alive in mortar and tradition.’
‘You’ll probably find,’ said Scott, ‘that it’s mostly eyewash; no discipline, and a lot of talk about self-expression and education for service.’
‘There you�
�re wrong. I should say the discipline is too severe if anything. I heard only the other day from my young nephew that two boys had been expelled for a raid on a hen-roost or some such escapade; but I suppose there was more to it than met the eye. What are you smiling about, Harborough?’
‘It was something you said about headmasters and tradition. I was thinking about tradition and boys. Rum, secretive little beggars. It seems to me quite possible that there is a wealth of hidden lore passed on from one generation of schoolboys to another that it might be well worth while for a psychologist or an anthropologist to investigate. I remember at my first school writing some lines of doggerel in my books. They were really an imprecation against any one who should steal them. I’ve seen practically the same words in old monkish manuscripts; they go back to the time when books were of value. But it was on the fly-leaves of Abbott’s Via Latina and Lock’s Arithmetic that I wrote them. Nobody would want to steal those books. Why should boys start to spin tops at a certain season of the year? The date is not fixed by shopkeepers, parents are not consulted, and though saints have been flogged to death I have found no connection between top whipping and the church calendar. The matter is decided for them by an unbroken tradition, handed down, not from father to son, but from boy to boy. Nursery rhymes are not perhaps a case in point, though they are stuffed with odd bits of folklore. I remember being taught a game that was played with knotted handkerchiefs manipulated by the fingers to the accompaniment of a rhyme which began: “Father Confessor, I’ve come to confess.” My instructor, aged eight, was the son of a High Church vicar. I don’t know what would have happened if old Tomlinson had heard the last verse:
‘ “Father Confessor, what shall I do?”
‘ “Go to Rome and kiss the Pope’s toe.”
‘ “Father Confessor, I’d rather kiss you.”
‘ “Well, child, do.”
‘What was the origin of that little piece of doggerel?’ asked Freeman. ‘It’s new to me.’
‘I don’t know,’ Harborough replied. ‘I’ve never seen it in print. But behind the noddings of the knotted handkerchiefs and our childish giggles lurked something sinister. I seem to see the cloaked figure, cat-like and gliding, of one of those emissaries of the Church of Rome that creep into the pages of George Borrow—hatred and fear masked in ribaldry. I could give you other examples, the holly and ivy carols, for instance, which used to be sung by boys and girls to the accompaniment of a dance, and which, according to some people, embody a crude form of nature worship.’
‘And the point of all this is what?’ asked Freeman.
‘That there is a body of tradition, ignored by the ordinary adult, handed down by one generation of children to another. If you want a really good example—a really bad example I should say, I’ll tell you the story of the Dabblers.’ He waited until Freeman and Scott had filled their pipes and then began.
‘When I came down from Oxford and before I was called to the Bar, I put in three miserable years at school teaching.’
Scott laughed.
‘I don’t envy the poor kids you cross-examined,’ he said.
‘As a matter of fact, I was more afraid of them than they of me. I got a job as usher at one of Freeman’s old grammar schools, only it had not been remodelled and the headmaster was a completely incompetent cleric. It was in the eastern counties. The town was dead-alive. The only thing that seemed to warm the hearts of the people there was a dull smouldering fire of gossip, and they all took turns in fanning the flame. But I mustn’t get away from the school. The buildings were old; the chapel had once been the choir of a monastic church. There was a fine tithe barn, and a few old stones and bases of pillars in the headmaster’s garden, but nothing more to show where monks had lived for centuries except a dried-up fish pond.
‘Late in June at the end of my first year, I was crossing the playground at night on my way to my lodgings in the High Street. It was after twelve. There wasn’t a breath of air, and the playing fields were covered with a thick mist from the river. There was something rather weird about the whole scene; it was all so still and silent. The night smelt stuffy; and then suddenly I heard the sound of singing. I don’t know where the voices came from nor how many voices there were, and not being musical I can’t give you any idea of the tune. It was very ragged with gaps in it, and there was something about it which I can only describe as disturbing. Anyhow I had no desire to investigate. I stood still for two or three minutes listening and then let myself out by the lodge gate into the deserted High Street. My bedroom above the tobacconist’s looked out on to a lane that led down to the river. Through the open window I could still hear, very faintly, the singing. Then a dog began to howl, and when after a quarter of an hour it stopped: the June night was again still. Next morning in the masters’ common room I asked if anyone could account for the singing.
‘ “It’s the Dabblers,” said old Moneypenny, the science master, “they usually appear about now.”
‘Of course I asked who the Dabblers were.
‘ “The Dabblers,” said Moneypenny, “are carol singers born out of their due time. They are certain lads of the village who, for reasons of their own, desire to remain anonymous; probably choir-boys with a grievance, who wish to pose as ghosts. And for goodness’ sake let sleeping dogs lie. We’ve thrashed out the Dabbler controversy so often that I’m heartily sick of it.”
‘He was a cross-grained customer and I took him at his word. But later on in the week I got hold of one of the junior masters and asked him what it all meant. It seemed an established fact that the singing did occur at this particular time of the year. It was a sore point with Moneypenny, because on one occasion when somebody had suggested that it might be boys from the schoolhouse skylarking he had completely lost his temper.
‘ “All the same,” said Atkinson, “it might just as well be our boys as any others. If you are game next year we’ll try to get to the bottom of it.”
‘I agreed and there the matter stood. As a matter of fact when the anniversary came round I had forgotten all about the thing. I had been taking the lower school in prep. The boys had been unusually restless—we were less than a month from the end of term—and it was with a sigh of relief that I turned into Atkinson’s study soon after eight to borrow an umbrella, for it was raining hard.
‘ “By the bye,” he said, “tonight’s the night the Dabblers are due to appear. What about it?”
‘I told him that if he imagined that I was going to spend the hours between then and midnight in patrolling the school precincts in the rain, he was greatly mistaken.
‘ “That’s not my idea at all,” he said. “We won’t set foot out of doors. I’ll light the fire; I can manage a mixed grill of sorts on the gas ring and there are a couple of bottles of beer in the cupboard. If we hear the Dabblers we’ll quietly go the round of the dormitories and see if any one is missing. If they are, we can await their return.”
‘The long and short of it was that I fell in with his proposal. I had a lot of essays to correct on the Peasants’ Revolt—fancy kids of thirteen and fourteen being expected to write essays on anything—and I could go through them just as well by Atkinson’s fire as in my own cheerless little sitting-room.
‘It’s wonderful how welcome a fire can be in a sodden June. We forgot our lost summer as we sat beside it smoking, warming our memories in the glow from the embers.
‘ “Well,” said Atkinson at last, “it’s close on twelve. If the Dabblers are going to start, they are due about now.” He got up from his chair and drew aside the curtains.
‘ “Listen!” he said. Across the playground, from the direction of the playing-fields, came the sound of singing. The music—if it could be called such—lacked melody and rhythm and was broken by pauses; it was veiled, too, by the drip, drip of the rain and the splashing of water from the gutter spouts. For one moment I thought I saw lights moving, but my eyes must have been deceived by reflections on the window pane.
‘ “
We’ll see if any of our birds have flown,” said Atkinson. He picked up an electric torch and we went the rounds of the dormitories. Everything was as it should be. The beds were all occupied, the boys all seemed to be asleep. It was a quarter past twelve by the time we got back to Atkinson’s room. The music had ceased; I borrowed a mackintosh and ran home through the rain.
‘That was the last time I heard the Dabblers, but I was to hear of them again. Act II was staged up at Scapa. I’d been transferred to a hospital ship, with a dislocated shoulder for X-ray, and as luck would have it the right-hand cot to mine was occupied by a lieutenant, R.N.V.R., a fellow called Holster, who had been at old Edmed’s school a year or two before my time. From him I learned a little more about the Dabblers. It seemed that they were boys who for some reason or other kept up a school tradition. Holster thought that they got out of the house by means of the big wisteria outside B dormitory, after leaving carefully constructed dummies in their beds. On the night in June when the Dabblers were due to appear it was considered bad form to stay awake too long and very unhealthy to ask too many questions, so that the identity of the Dabblers remained a mystery. To the big and burly Holster there was nothing really mysterious about the thing; it was a schoolboys’ lark and nothing more. An unsatisfactory act, you will agree, and one which fails to carry the story forward. But with the third act the drama begins to move. You see I had the good luck to meet one of the Dabblers in the flesh.
‘Burlingham was badly shell-shocked in the war; a psychoanalyst took him in hand and he made a seemingly miraculous recovery. Then two years ago he had a partial relapse, and when I met him at Lady Byfleet’s he was going up to town three times a week for special treatment from some unqualified West End practitioner, who seemed to be getting at the root of the trouble. There was something extraordinarily likeable about the man. He had a whimsical sense of humour that must have been his salvation, and with it was combined a capacity for intense indignation that one doesn’t often meet with these days. We had a number of interesting talks together (part of his regime consisted of long cross-country walks, and he was glad enough of a companion) but the one I naturally remember was when in a tirade against English educational methods he mentioned Dr Edmed’s name—“the head of a beastly little grammar school where I spent five of the most miserable years of my life.”
The Double Eye Page 25
