by Muriel Spark
In the garden were white stone statues of the period. They represented the Four Seasons and Four Arts (Painting, Sculpture, Music and Literature). The Seasons were female figures and the Arts, male, but all garbed so that it made very little difference. The Painter held a palette in one hand and a paint-brush in the other; the Sculptor worked on a stone lion; the Musician held a flute in his left hand, with his arm stretched out, and with the other, corrected a music score that was cleverly set up in stone in front of him; the Writer reclined, making notes in a book. The Seasons were garlanded according to the time of year they represented; their hair flowed; Winter was adorned with holly and icicles; Spring with flowers of the field; Summer with roses and cherries; Autumn had a necklace of grapes, and leaned on a sheaf of corn. The garden was very striking. Some of my clients would exclaim over it, with delight; others would just stare and, with a strange silence, say nothing at all. As for the statues, they struck me as odd sometimes when I turned suddenly and looked back at them. They looked exactly the same as before; that is, they seemed to have recomposed their features. What had been their expression behind my back?
The Dragon erupted in her spare time with Daniele the cutter, and they made love after lunch in the room off the cool back kitchen where the Dragon slept. Her red hair was growing longer and she kept it flying loose. She said it was Pre-Raphaelite, to go with the house.
In August came extraordinary rains, leaving the air between downfalls soporific and bewildered. The Dragon said to me, ‘Why do you work so hard? What is it all for?’ Nobody had ever before asked me a question like that. It seemed sacrilegious. I began to notice that my clients arrived late for their fittings. When you live out of town, you must expect certain delays. But, in fact they didn’t come so very late to the house; rather, they were kept gossiping with the Dragon in her office, no matter that I was kept waiting in my workroom. Later, she wouldn’t tell me what my clients had to say to her or she to them. I noticed that, with me, curiously enough, people started to speak in a low careful voice after they had first talked to the Dragon. When the Dragon took a boat out on the lake with Daniele, her red hair blew over her face; mostly, she came back drenched from the rain. Now, one day, I observed that she was breathing fire.
‘Emily,’ I said, ‘I think you’re not very well.’
‘Can you wonder?’ she said; and the smoke rose from her nostrils, flaming like her hair. ‘Can you wonder? Always no, no, no on the telephone. Always, keep away, nobody come here, Madam is busy, have you an appointment? It wears you down,’ she said, ‘always playing the negative role.’ Her nose was perfectly cool by now as if there had been no smoke, no flame flaring.
I agreed to let her invite the local people for an evening party. She brought a group from the smart hotel across the lake whom she had somehow got friendly with. She brought a number of Spaniards who were touring the lake, to make Daniele happy, and Daniele’s sister from Milan also arrived. I noticed that three of my most exclusive clients were among the women who came to that party. And there was the handsome truck-driver. The Dragon had called in a caterer of the first importance and ordered refreshments of the last rarity. She was efficient.
The Dragon had taken over, and I knew it when the forest formed around me. She came through the people, the trees, towards me, blowing fire. Then I saw that the statues, the Four Seasons, the Four Artists, were wearing materials from my workroom. They were pinned and draped as if the statues were my working manikins, and my guests marvelled at them. One of the statues, the Winter one, was actually wearing an evening dress that I was in the process of sewing. I looked round for Daniele. He was entertaining the boat-officer from the little lake port by blowing smoke through two cigarettes stuck one in each of his nostrils. The Dragon was drinking her Pimm’s, green-eyed, watching me. I went up to the good-looking truck-driver who was standing around not knowing what to do with himself, and I said, ‘Where are you going with your truck?’ He was going to Düsseldorf with a load, and back again across Europe. His name was Simon K. Clegg, the ‘K’ standing for Kurt. For a few moments we discussed the adventures of heavy transport in the Common Market. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s go.’
I left the party and climbed into the truck beside him and off we went. Suddenly I remembered my raincoat and my passport, the two indispensable vade-mecums of travel, but Simon Kurt said, for a raincoat and a passport leave it to him. The Dragon ran up the road after us a little way, snorting and breathing green fire from her mouth — perhaps it had a copper sulphate or copper chloride basis; I have heard that you can get a green flame from skilfully blowing green Chartreuse on to a lighted candle. She was followed by Daniele. However, off we went, waving, leaving the Dragon and Daniele and the party and all my household to sort out the mess and the anxiety, and the stitching and matching, forever.
Forever? Before we reached the city of Como, nearly twenty-five miles from my house, my conversation with Simon K. Clegg had turned on the meaning of forever. We parked the truck and went for a walk into town to a bar where we ordered coffee and ice-creams. Simon said he definitely felt that he didn’t understand ‘forever’, and doubted if there was any such thing as always and always, if that’s what it meant. I told him that so far as I knew to date, forever was slip-stitch, split-stitch, cross-stitch, back-stitch; and also buttonhole and running-stitches.
‘You’ve got me guessing,’ said Simon. ‘It’s above my head, all that. Don’t you want a lift, then? Get away from the party and all?’
I explained that the Dragon was in my home, questioning the value of all the materials and the sewing, the buckram, the soft, soft silk; and the run-and-fell seams, the fine lace edging. Buttonholes. Satin-stitch. I told him about her liaison with Daniele the cutter.
‘Her what?’
‘Her love affair.’
‘They should go away on holiday,’ was Simon’s point of view.
‘There’s too much work to do.’
‘Well, if she’s the lady in charge, it’s up to her what she does in business hours. The garment industry’s flourishing.’
‘I am the lady in charge,’ I said.
He was taken aback, as if he had been deceived.
‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you were some sort of employee.’
Really, he was a nice-looking truck-driver. He pushed away his glass of ice-cream as if he had something newly on his mind.
He said, ‘My sister works in a textile and garment factory in Lyons. Good pay, short hours. She’s a seamer.’
‘A seamstress,’ I said.
‘She calls it seamer.’
‘I sew my seams by hand,’ I said.
‘By hand? How do you do that?’
‘With a needle and thread.’
‘What does that involve?’ he said, in a way that forced me to realize he had never seen a needle and thread.
I explained the technique of how you use the fingers of your right hand to replace the needle and shuttle of the sewing machine, while holding the material with your left hand. He listened carefully. He was almost deferential. ‘It must save you a lot of electricity,’ he observed.
‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you’ve seen someone sewing on a button?’
‘I don’t have any clothes with buttons. Not in my line.’
But he was thinking of something else.
‘Would you mind lying low in the cabin of the truck while I pass the customs and immigration?’ he said. ‘It’s quite comfortable and they won’t look in there. They just look at my papers. I’ve delivered half my load and I’ve got to take the rest across the St Gotthard to a hotel at Brunnen in Switzerland. Then on to Düsseldorf. Health crackers from Lyons.’
But I, too, was thinking of something else, and I didn’t answer immediately.
‘I thought you were an employee,’ he said. ‘If I’d known you were the employer I’d have thought up something better.
It saddened me to hear the anxiety in his voice. I said, ‘I’m afraid I’m in charge of m
y business.’ I was thinking of the orders mounting up for next winter. I had a lady from Boston who was coming specially next Tuesday across the Atlantic, across the Alps, to order her dresses from my range of winter fabrics which included a length of wool so soft you would think it was muslin, coloured pale shrimp, and I had that deep blue silk-velvet, not quite midnight blue, but something like midnight with a glisten of royal blue which I would line with identical coloured silk, for an evening occasion, with the quarter-centimetre wide lace hand-sewn on all the seams. I had another client from Milan for my grey wool-chiffon with the almost indiscernible orange stripe, to be made up as a three-piece garment flowing like a wintry cloud; I had the design ready for the cutter and I had matched all the threads.
I was going on to think of other lengths and bales and clients when Simon penetrated my thoughts and ideas with his voice. ‘Look, you’re breathing fire. You must have some sort of electricity,’ he said; and he stood up and took the check off the table. He looked shaken. ‘I can see that you could be a Dragon in your way.
I slipped out of the bar while he was paying the bill at the counter. I waited till after dark and hired a car to take me back to my villa. Everyone had gone home. The statues in the garden stood again unclothed. Emily Butler was in the living-room talking to Daniele. I had been sorry to part with the nice-looking truck-driver. He seemed to have a certain liking for me, a sympathy with my nature and my looks which I know are very much those of the serious unadorned seamstress. Some people like that sort of personality. But when I thought of how, as Simon had observed, I was really the Dragon in the case I couldn’t have gone over the border with him. Perhaps forever. Neither my temperament nor my temperature would stand it.
I stood, now, at the living-room door and looked at Emily and Daniele. Emily gasped; Daniele sprang to his feet, his eyes terrified.
‘She’s breathing fire,’ said Emily, and escaped through the french windows. Daniele followed her quickly, knocking over a chair as he went. He looked once over his shoulder, and then he was away after Emily.
I went to the kitchen and made some hot milk. I waited there while the sound of their creeping back, and the bumps of hasty packing went on in Daniele’s room upstairs and Emily’s at the back of the house.
Finally, they bundled themselves into the hall and out of the house, into Daniele’s car, and away, without even waiting for their wages.
My business flourishes and I manage it without a Dragon. Without a cutter too, for I’ve found I have a talent for cutting. I’ve also invented a new stitch, the dragon-stitch. It looks lovely on the uneven hems of those dresses people like, which suggest the nineteen-thirties — for the evening but not too much. The essence of the dragon-stitch is that you see all the stitches; they are large, in a bright-coloured thick thread to contrast with the colour of the dress; one line and two forks, one line and two forks, in, out and away, all along the dipping and rising hemline, as if for always and always.
The Leaf Sweeper
Behind the town hall there is a wooded parkland which, towards the end of November, begins to draw a thin blue cloud right into itself; and as a rule the park floats in this haze until mid-February. I pass every day, and see Johnnie Geddes in the heart of this mist, sweeping up the leaves. Now and again he stops, and jerking his long head erect, looks indignantly at the pile of leaves, as if it ought not to be there; then he sweeps on. This business of leaf-sweeping he learnt during the years he spent in the asylum; it was the job they always gave him to do; and when he was discharged the town council gave him the leaves to sweep. But the indignant movement of the head comes naturally to him, for this has been one of his habits since he was the most promising and buoyant and vociferous graduate of his year. He looks much older than he is, for it is not quite twenty years ago that Johnnie founded the Society for the Abolition of Christmas.
Johnnie was living with his aunt then. I was at school, and in the Christmas holidays Miss Geddes gave me her nephew’s pamphlet, How to Grow Rich at Christmas. It sounded very likely, but it turned out that you grow rich at Christmas by doing away with Christmas, and so pondered Johnnie’s pamphlet no further.
But it was only his first attempt. He had, within the next three years, founded his society of Abolitionists. His new book, Abolish Christmas or We Die, was in great demand at the public library, and my turn for it came at last. Johnnie was really convincing, this time, and most people were completely won over until after they had closed the book. I got an old copy for sixpence the other day, and despite the lapse of time it still proves conclusively that Christmas is a national crime. Johnnie demonstrates that every human-unit in the kingdom faces inevitable starvation within a period inversely proportional to that in which one in every six industrial-productivity units, if you see what he means, stops producing toys to fill the stockings of the educational-intake units. He cites appalling statistics to show that 1.024 per cent of the time squandered each Christmas in reckless shopping and thoughtless churchgoing brings the nation closer to its doom by five years. A few readers protested, but Johnnie was able to demolish their muddled arguments, and meanwhile the Society for the Abolition of Christmas increased. But Johnnie was troubled. Not only did Christmas rage throughout the kingdom as usual that year, but he had private information that many of the Society’s members had broken the Oath of Abstention.
He decided, then, to strike at the very roots of Christmas. Johnnie gave up his job on the Drainage Supply Board; he gave up all his prospects, and, financed by a few supporters, retreated for two years to study the roots of Christmas. Then, all jubilant, Johnnie produced his next and last book, in which he established, either that Christmas was an invention of the Early Fathers to propitiate the pagans, or it was invented by the pagans to placate the Early Fathers, I forget which. Against the advice of his friends, Johnnie entitled it Christmas and Christianity. It sold eighteen copies. Johnnie never really recovered from this; and it happened, about that time, that the girl he was engaged to, an ardent Abolitionist, sent him a pullover she had knitted, for Christmas; he sent it back, enclosing a copy of the Society’s rules, and she sent back the ring. But in any case, during Johnnie’s absence, the Society had been undermined by a moderate faction. These moderates finally became more moderate, and the whole thing broke up.
Soon after this, I left the district, and it was some years before I saw Johnnie again. One Sunday afternoon in summer, I was idling among the crowds who were gathered to hear the speakers at Hyde Park. One little crowd surrounded a man who bore a banner marked ‘Crusade against Christmas’; his voice was frightening; it carried an unusually long way. This was Johnnie. A man in the crowd told me Johnnie was there every Sunday, very violent about Christmas, and that he would soon be taken up for insulting language. As I saw in the papers, he was soon taken up for insulting language. And a few months later I heard that poor Johnnie was in a mental home, because he had Christmas on the brain and couldn’t stop shouting about it.
After that I forgot all about him until three years ago, in December, I went to live near the town where Johnnie had spent his youth. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I was walking with a friend, noticing what had changed in my absence, and what hadn’t. We passed a long, large house, once famous for its armoury, and I saw that the iron gates were wide open.
‘They used to be kept shut,’ I said.
‘That’s an asylum now,’ said my friend; ‘they let the mild cases work in the grounds, and leave the gates open to give them a feeling of freedom.’
‘But,’ said my friend, ‘they lock everything inside. Door after door. The lift as well; they keep it locked.’
While my friend was chattering, I stood in the gateway and looked in. Just beyond the gate was a great bare elm-tree. There I saw a man in brown corduroys, sweeping up the leaves. Poor soul, he was shouting about Christmas.
‘That’s Johnnie Geddes,’ I said. ‘Has he been here all these years?’
‘Yes,’ said my friend as we walked on.
‘I believe he gets worse at this time of year.’
‘Does his aunt see him?’
‘Yes. And she sees nobody else.’
We were, in fact, approaching the house where Miss Geddes lived. I suggested we call on her. I had known her well.
‘No fear,’ said my friend.
I decided to go in, all the same, and my friend walked on to the town. Miss Geddes had changed, more than the landscape. She had been a solemn, calm woman, and now she moved about quickly, and gave short agitated smiles. She took me to her sitting-room, and as she opened the door she called to someone inside,
‘Johnnie, see who’s come to see us!’
A man, dressed in a dark suit, was standing on a chair, fixing holly behind a picture. He jumped down.
‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. ‘A Happy and a Merry Christmas indeed. I do hope,’ he said, ‘you’re going to stay for tea, as we’ve got a delightful Christmas cake, and at this season of goodwill I would be cheered indeed if you could see how charmingly it’s decorated; it has “Happy Christmas” in red icing, and then there’s a robin and —’
‘Johnnie,’ said Miss Geddes, ‘you’re forgetting the carols.’
‘The carols,’ he said. He lifted a gramophone record from a pile and put it on. It was ‘The Holly and the Ivy’.
‘It’s “The Holly and the Ivy”,’ said Miss Geddes. ‘Can’t we have something else? We had that all morning.’
‘It is sublime,’ he said, beaming from his chair, and holding up his hand for silence.
While Miss Geddes went to fetch the tea, and he sat absorbed in his carol, I watched him. He was so like Johnnie, that if I hadn’t seen poor Johnnie a few moments before, sweeping up the asylum leaves, I would have thought he really was Johnnie. Miss Geddes returned with the tray, and while he rose to put on another record, he said something that startled me.
