Miss Hargreaves

by Frank Baker

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘He came into the shop one day, Henry; and bought an old book about some queer saint-chappie. Joseph, he’s called; Joseph of Cupertino. He used to fly.’

  ‘First time I’ve heard of an aviator-saint.’

  ‘Idiot. This was in the seventeenth century. Nothing to do with aeroplanes. He used to fly all over the church. The monks had a job to keep him down. It’s a fact, you needn’t laugh. At least–it is to the R.C.s. He hadn’t much brain, either. Like me in that way.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see what flying’s got to do with Connie.’

  I shuddered. ‘It might,’ I said cautiously, ‘have more to do with her than you imagine.’

  ‘You’ve got something fresh up your sleeve about Connie,’ said Henry suspiciously. I was silent. I felt I didn’t dare tell him about the swan. It might not be true, after all. And, if I blabbed about it, it might yet come true. Which was the last thing I wanted, attracted as I was by the miraculous.

  ‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘I think you’d far better go to this doctor fellow. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Something’s just gone askew in your mind–that’s what it is.’

  ‘Thank you, Henry,’ I said bitterly. ‘And in your mind, too, I suppose.’

  Henry ignored this. I could see that bath sticking in his throat again. He swallowed rapidly. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘he could prove you had known Miss Hargreaves years ago? That’d get you somewhere, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It’s too damn prosaic an explanation,’ I objected. ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘You don’t want it?’

  ‘No. I–’ I hesitated. I was burning to take him into my confidence about the swan. I couldn’t resist throwing out a hint.

  ‘I might have done something pretty big to-day,’ I said. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when I’m sure.’

  ‘You haven’t murdered her, have you?’

  ‘Not quite. Just a little metempsychosis.’

  ‘A little what-osis?’

  ‘Metempsyche.’

  Henry stared at me.

  ‘I wonder if–’ I mused to myself, looking at a vase of montbretias on the table. I was suddenly tempted to try to turn them into a cotton-reel. Don’t know why. Just came into my head. Another peak.

  ‘Be a reel of cotton!’ I hissed, throwing a lot of invisible dust at them.

  Nothing happened. The clock ticked on. I laughed weakly.

  ‘Only my little joke,’ I said feebly. ‘Only my little joke. So long, Henry.’

  I left him. Through the window I could see him holding up the montbretias and looking at them. There was a rather scared expression on his face, I thought.

  Things fly round a bit too quickly in Cornford. I believe if you sent a telegram to yourself you’d get it before you sent it.

  ‘Marjorie’s broken-hearted,’ said mother, the moment I got in.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I said. ‘Hearts don’t break as easily as that.’

  ‘How can you be so unkind? Marjorie actually told Jim she was certain you were going to marry this wretched woman. Of course, I don’t believe anything so fantastic as that, but I do wish you would tell us the truth, Norman.’

  ‘Truth!’ I laughed cynically.

  ‘First you say one thing, then you say another. What are we to believe?’

  ‘I’ll tell you something about truth,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They say Truth lies at the bottom of a well. I’ve got drowned in it. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Norman, I really believe you are ill.’

  The way my mother said that word ‘ill’. I wish you could have heard it. ‘You can’t go on like this,’ she continued. ‘You’ve dropped your work completely; you won’t settle down to a thing. And it’s all because of this Miss Hargreaves. I–’

  I suddenly lost my temper.

  ‘Damn Miss Hargreaves!’ I cried. ‘Blast Miss Hargreaves! To hell with–’ I caught back my words, appalled at what I had said. Who knew what might not happen to her now?

  ‘I’m sorry I swore,’ I said. ‘Is father upstairs?’

  ‘Father is in his room, messing about as usual.’ Mother turned rather coldly away from me, obviously offended. I went upstairs. Father calmed me. He always does. He’s never yet told me I’m a liar. He doesn’t necessarily believe what you tell him, but at any rate he never voices his disbelief.

  I had to tell him all about the swan; it was intolerable to keep it to myself any longer.

  ‘I know it’s impossible,’ I said. ‘But still–’

  ‘H’m.’ He was very slowly tapping out letters on an old Oliver typewriter. ‘Swans are funny creatures. I wouldn’t trust a swan with a five-pound note. No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, but the point about this swan–’ I began. Then I stopped. What was the use of talking about it? Somehow I had simply got to convince myself that the whole thing was pure coincidence. A good many things that seem surprising are coincidental. I dare say my being alive and writing this book is a coincidence, really, if one could only get to the bottom of it all. What a damn mystery life is!

  ‘Give me a drop of whisky, will you, father?’ I asked.

  ‘Go ahead, my boy. You’ll find the siphon on the top of the butterfly cabinet. You might put back those oak-eggars, will you?’

  I drank and fell back into a chair; I felt like drinking myself silly. Father lit a cigarette and poured himself a drink.

  ‘Do you think I’m batty, father?’ I said.

  ‘Battiness,’ he remarked, ‘is far more common than one supposes.’

  ‘Nothing seems real to me to-day.’

  ‘Reality isn’t what it’s thought to be,’ he said, blowing out great clouds of smoke, then blowing them away from himself to me. ‘No. Reality is–well–there’s that fellow who talks on the wireless–who is it? Lord Elton, or is it Eddystone? No! Edison, that’s the fellow. We’re here today gone to-morrow and some say to-morrow never comes, so perhaps we don’t go. Who knows?’

  ‘Do you believe in psychology, father?’

  ‘How do you know you’re real? You might not be here at all. There’s only one thing I’m certain of, my boy; and that is–I’m not certain of anything. You can’t prove a damn thing. Two and two make four; so they say. But who the hell knows what two is?’

  I helped myself to some more whisky. For several minutes we were silent. It was queer how I felt that my father had the key to the whole mystery of Miss Hargreaves, if only he could find the right lock to put it into. But you never could pin father down to anything definite; if you could, he wouldn’t be father.

  ‘Music now,’ he said presently. He rose, stubbed out his cigarette in an old bowler hat he uses as an ash-tray, and found his violin.

  ‘I can’t play,’ I said. ‘I’ve got an addled mind.’

  ‘Well, you can listen to me, then. Music’s the only thing in this world that isn’t addled.’

  He stood by the open window and started to play one of his own tunes. I wish I could write it down for you, but it would lose something if I tried to tape it out to minims and quavers and so on. It was, as usual, the long cantabile type of melody that always seemed to grow as naturally as speech from him. More naturally. I knew that when he started he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was going to play. He gave the violin a life of its own; never interfered with it. The violin had a song to sing; father was merely there to help it.

  ‘There,’ he said, laying down his fiddle. I was moved and I said nothing. ‘I,’ continued father, ‘and this gut and carved wood–animal and vegetable–together we combine to produce something that’s never been in the world before. Listen.’

  I listened. ‘Can’t hear anything,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the point,’ he said. ‘Neither can I. But if you had sharp enough ears, you’d be able to hear that tune going on somewhere. You don’t suppose it’s dead, do you?’

  ‘What’re you gett
ing at, father?’ I sat up, keenly interested.

  ‘An idea of mine,’ he said. ‘Just an idea of mine. About sound. Go and strike a great fat arpeggio chord of D flat on the piano, boy.’

  I went to the piano.

  ‘Hold the loud pedal down,’ he said. ‘Strike bass D flat–then A flat a fifth higher–then tenor F–and so on right up the piano to the highest F. Then sit still with your foot down on the loud pedal. Listen. You’ll understand something.’

  I did as he commanded, very slowly and powerfully striking the notes, then sitting silently, the loud pedal down, and listening. Slowly, slowly, the great chord trembled away into space. For nearly a minute we could hear it. It was hard to break the silence afterwards a silence that was no longer a silence and never, never could be again.

  ‘My God!’ I said.

  ‘Hush!’ whispered father. He stood at the window, looking out. ‘Still there,’ he murmured. ‘Never dies, you know. Never dies. Going on, all round the world, my boy. You can’t cancel it. That’s my idea. You and your Miss Holgrave–that chord, my tune. Mysteries, boy; all mysteries. Don’t be surprised at anything. When you understand what that chord does, you’ll be near to understanding everything.’

  Mother came in. It’s always the same. Whenever father and I get talking, mother comes in. And, of course, she doesn’t know; she doesn’t understand the sort of things father and I talk about. Not that we understand them ourselves, as a matter of fact.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ mother asked. You could tell she was bursting with something important; I knew it was Hargreaves news.

  ‘Jim’s just met Mr Carver, the house-agent who was handling Lessways. Miss Hargreaves has bought the property.’

  Somehow, it didn’t surprise me. Vaguely I knew that I must be responsible, though I didn’t know exactly why.

  About half-past ten, feeling terribly uneasy, I went round to Canticle Alley again.

  Mrs Beedle shook her head mournfully.

  ‘No. She ain’t come back. I were thinking about these ’ere S O S’s, sir. They’ll be dragging the river, mark my words. Willy-nilly, she say to me, and those was her very words . . .’

  I tried to sleep. The moon straggled through on to my pillow. The infinite chord of D flat reverberated in my brain. I tossed about. I dreamt of swans wearing tall hats sailing over the hills in balloons to the perpetual accompaniment of father’s violin. Awful. About three I rose, put on my dressing-gown and went to the window. Below me, on the other side of the road, Lessways rose emptily to the moony sky. The board had gone. I thought of Miss Hargreaves in residence there. It was incredible. Baffled, bewildered, I gazed out at the night. Everything looked very cool and silvery. Far away, beyond the Cathedral, I could see the winding arc of the Thames.

  I went back to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. Again I rose. This time I dressed quickly, putting on an old sweater and a pair of flannel trousers. Creeping downstairs, I got my bicycle out of the shed, wheeled it down the garden and leapt on the saddle. In twenty minutes I had reached Cookham Bridge.

  I was glad I had come out. If you’ve got any serious thinking to do, you must do it at night. The longer I stayed on that bridge, listening to the lapping of the water against the boats, the greater was the sense of mystery which filled me. Father was right; we didn’t understand a damn thing. Old professors might tell me that the moon was carbon monoxide, or whatever they like to call it, but that didn’t make the moon any simpler. They might tell me that I, Norman Huntley, was only a mass of electrons formed in certain shapes to produce heart and lungs, brain and limbs. I was still a mystery.

  Take Miss Hargreaves, I said to myself. Another mystery–the only difference being that she was an unfamiliar mystery. There was simply, so far as I knew, no precedent for the way Miss Hargreaves had appeared in my life. And yet, actually, she wasn’t any more of a mystery than my little finger.

  Anything was possible. That’s what I felt that moonlit night as I leaned over the bridge. On the far bank of the river, beyond Hedsor wharf, was an apple orchard; sheltering behind it, graced by beautifully mown lawns, an old house that I had often admired. Why shouldn’t it be mine? Far away at the top of the hill, Lord Astor might be asleep in his bed. Why shouldn’t I be there? (Not as well. Instead of.) Move him out, I said, and put yourself there, the master of Cliveden. Or instead of there being the apples of autumn in that orchard, let there be the blossom of spring. Let there be light now; no darkness.

  My gosh! I thought how grand God must have felt when He’d said ‘let there be light’ and it worked. After all that darkness, how He must have revelled in His new creation, making things because He’d made light and now had got nothing to look at in the new light.

  Everything, it seemed to me, was just within my grasp. (Yes, I know it was all a horrible blasphemy, but there it is.) For that moment I accepted Miss Hargreaves without question or complaint. I felt proud of her; I realized these things didn’t happen to everybody. Naturally there were going to be complications. One couldn’t learn in a minute how to manage her. If she was still a little out of control–well, don’t all created things get out of control before long? Well, I mean, look at us ... God thought we were a very good job. And look at us . . . Well, I mean . . .

  ‘Oh, Miss Hargreaves!’ I breathed her name upon the cool night air. I longed to see her again. Couldn’t bear the thought of her going just when I was beginning fully to understand my responsibilities towards her. Whatever embarrassments she plunged me into–she was my own handiwork. Never again must I be tempted to play about with her. A strict sense of form must inspire all my dealings with her. No good getting drunk on swans and such like. Slowly I must adapt her to the conditions of Cornford society and guard her from all dangers of my impetuous will.

  Thus I thought, that autumn night over the Thames. And, even as I thought, my eyes were fixed on the bit of river running past the orchard.

  What was that strange melancholy singing? What was that boat doing out in mid-stream? Whose form huddled in the bows? Whose hat?

  Whose hat?

  ‘My God!’ I muttered. I rushed across the field to the bank.

  ‘Miss Hargreaves!’ I cried from the bank. ‘Miss Hargreaves!’

  Whether she heard me or not, I don’t know. At any rate, she paid not the slightest attention. I called again, louder, a little exasperated. What in God’s name did she imagine she was doing?

  ‘Can’t you hear me?’ I shouted.

  She looked up. I could just see that she was writing something in her note-book.

  ‘Who is that?’ she called irritably.

  ‘Me. Norman. What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Oh. You! Do you want anything?’

  ‘I want to get you home. You’ll die of cold.’

  ‘I’m busy now,’ she said. ‘Come and join me if you wish. But do please be quiet.’

  ‘How on earth did you get there?’ I asked.

  But she was writing in her note-book and did not answer me.

  ‘Where are your oars?’ I bawled.

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ she snapped. ‘If you must talk, come closer. I am not accustomed to shouting across a river.’

  There was only one way to reach her, short of swimming. I walked along the bank till I came to Cooper’s boat-house, nearer the bridge. Luckily there was nobody about, not even a prowling policeman. Taking one of the rowing-boats, I unmoored it, and rowed up to the little tributary. In a few minutes I was alongside her.

  ‘You’d better get into this boat,’ I said, ‘and I’ll row you back. What have you done with your oars?’

  ‘A minute! Wait–wait–’ She wrote rapidly. ‘I was hoping to set it to music,’ she murmured, pausing with her silver pencil tapping on the side of the boat, ‘but I cannot quite get the tune. No matter. I will read you my verses.’

  ‘They can wait,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get you home somehow. Don’t you realize Mrs Beedle is worried to death about you?’

  �
��I do wish,’ she said petulantly, ‘you would not keep interrupting. What is this Beedle woman to me? Listen.’

  Before I could say any more, in a low vibrant voice she started to recite.

  ‘River at Night. A Lament. I hope you follow me. A Lament.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I muttered. ‘I get you. Go on. Hurry up.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘Strike a match, dear,’ she said, ‘and hold it over the manuscript. I cannot see too well. Keep striking matches as quietly as you can.’

  I struck a match and held it near her note-book. Very tempted I was to set the thing on fire.

  She read:

  ‘Oh, water and breezelight and magical moon,

  And me all alone on the river!

  They tell me that dawn will be here very soon–

  They talk of a chill on the liver.’

  She paused. ‘You like it?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘What was the first line again?’ I asked.

  ‘ “Oh, water and breezelight and magical moon”.’

  I frowned. ‘Breezelight?’

  ‘Precisely. Breezelight.’

  ‘Don’t you mean moonlight?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ she cried. ‘If I write “magical breeze” the rhyme is annihilated. In any case, the breeze is not magical; the moon is. How stupid you are! This is verse two:

  Oh, for the wings, for the neck of a swan!

  To swim all the night and not shiver.

  Oh, say not the hour is eternally gone

  When I floated like floss on the river!’

  ‘Yes. I–I like that,’ I said uneasily. ‘But really now–I think we’d better–’

  ‘Verse three,’ she said, ‘goes like this. Why don’t you strike another match? I cannot be expected to read in the dark, can I?’

  I struck another match and she read verse three.

  ‘God made reservations to human desires,