It was the last day of a torrid week in London – the flaming crest of what the newspapers call a heat wave. The exhausted inmates of the dazzling, airless streets – plate-glass, white stone, burnished asphalt, incessant roar, din, fume and odour – have the appearance at such times of insects trapped in an oven of a myriad labyrinthine windings and chambers; a glowing brazen maze to torture Christians in. To have a mind even remotely resembling it must be Satan’s sole privilege!
I had been shopping; or rather, I had been loafing about from one department on to another in one of the huge ‘stores’ in search of bathing-drawers, a preventative of insect bites, and a good holiday ‘shocker’, and had retired at last incapable of buying anything – even in a world where pretty well everything except peace of mind can be bought, and sold. The experience had been oppressive and trying to the temper.
Too hot, too irritable even to lunch, I had drifted into a side street, and then into a second-hand bookshop that happened still to be open this idle Saturday afternoon; and having for ninepence acquired a copy of a book on psycho-analysis which I didn’t want and should never read, I took refuge in a tea shop.
In spite of the hot-water fountain on the counter it was a degree or two cooler in here, though even the marble-top tables were tepid to the touch. Quiet and drowsy, too. A block of ice surmounted the dinner-wagon by the counter. The white clock face said a quarter to three. Few chairs were now occupied; the midday mellay was over. A heavy slumbrousness muffled the place – the flies were as idle as the waitresses, and the waitresses were as idle as the flies.
I gave my order, and sat back exhausted in a listless vacancy of mind and body. And my dazed eyes, having like the flies little of particular interest to settle on, settled on the only fellow reveller that happened to be sitting within easy reach. At first glimpse there could hardly be a human being you would suppose less likely to attract attention. He was so scrupulously respectable, so entirely innocent of ‘atmosphere’. Even a Chelsea psychic would have been compelled to acknowledge that this particular human being had either disposed of his aura or had left it at home. And yet my first glimpses of him had drawn me out of the vacuum into which I had sunk as easily as a cork is drawn out of an empty bottle.
He was sitting at a table to the left, and a little in front of me. The glare from the open door and the gentler light from the cream-blinded shop window picked out his every hair and button. It flooded in on him from the sparkling glittering street, focused him, ‘placed’ him, arranged him – as if for a portrait in the finest oils for next year’s Academy. Limelight on the actor-manager traversing the blasted heath is mere child’s play by comparison.
Obviously he was not ‘the complete Londoner’ – though that can hardly be said to be a misfortune. On the other hand, there was nothing rural, and only a touch or so of the provincial, in his appearance. He wore a neat – an excessively neat – pepper-and-salt tweed suit, the waistcoat cut high and exhibiting the points of a butterfly collar and a triangle of black silk cravat slipped through a gold mourning ring. His ears maybe were a little out of the mode. They had been attached rather high and flat on either side of his conical head with its dark, glossy, silver-speckled hair.
The nose was straight, the nostrils full. They suggested courage of a kind; possibly, even, on occasion, bravado. He looked the kind of man, I mean, it is well to keep out of a corner. But the eyes that were now peering vacantly down that longish nose over a trim but unendearing moustache at the crumbs on his empty plate were too close together. So, at least, it seemed to me. But then I am an admirer of the wide expressive brow – such as our politicians and financiers display. Those eyes at any rate gave this spruce and respectable person just a hint, a glint of the fox. I have never heard, though, that the fox is a dangerous animal even in a corner; only that he has his wits about him and preys on geese – whereas my stranger in the tea shop had been refreshing himself with Osborne biscuits.
It was hot. The air was parched and staled. And heat – unless in Oriental regions – is not conducive to exquisite manners. Far otherwise. I continued to watch this person, indolently speculating whether his little particularities of appearance did not match, or matched too precisely. Those ears and that cravat, for example; or those spruce-moustached nostrils and the glitter of the close-neighbouring eyes. And why had he brought to mind a tightly-packed box with no address on it? He began to be a burden, yet I could not keep my eyes away from him – nor from his hands. They were powerful and hairy, with large knuckles; and now that they were not in use he had placed them on his knees under the dark polished slab of his marble table. Beneath those knees rested his feet (the toes turned in a little) in highly-polished boots, with thickish soles and white socks.
There is, I agree, something peculiarly vulgar in thus picking a fellow-creature to pieces. But even Keats so dissected Miss Brawne; and even when he was in love with her: and it was certainly not love at first sight between myself and this stranger.
Whether he knew it or not, he was attaching himself to me; he was making his influence felt. It was odd, then, that he could remain so long unconscious of so condensed a scrutiny. Maybe that particular nerve in him had become atrophied. He looked as if a few other rather important nerves might be atrophied. When he did glance up at me – the waitress having appeared with my tea at the same moment – there was a far-away startled look in his bleak blue-black eyes – as if he had been called back.
Nothing more; and even at that it was much such a look as had been for some little time fixed on the dry biscuit crumbs in his empty plate. He seemed indeed to be a man accustomed to being startled or surprised into vigilance without reason. But having seen me looking at him, he did not hesitate. He carefully took up his hat, his horn-handled and gold-mounted umbrella, and a large rusty scaling leather bag that lay on a chair beside him; rose; and stepping gently over with an almost catlike precision, seated himself in the chair opposite to mine. I continued to pour out my tea.
‘You will excuse me troubling you,’ he began in a voice that suggested he could sing tenor though he spoke bass, ‘but would you kindly tell me the number of the omnibus that goes from here to King’s Cross? I am a stranger to this part of London.’
I called after the waitress: ‘What is the number of the bus,’ I said, ‘that goes from here to King’s Cross?’
‘The number of the bus, you say, that goes from here to King’s Cross?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘to King’s Cross.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask the counter.’ And she tripped off in her silk stockings and patent leather shoes.
‘The counter will know,’ I assured him. He looked at me, moving his lips over his teeth as if either or both for some reason had cause to be uneasy.
‘I am something of a stranger to London altogether,’ he said, ‘and I don’t usually come these ways: it’s a novelty to me. The omnibuses are very convenient.’
‘Don’t you? Is it?’ I replied. ‘Why not?’ They were rather point-blank questions (and a gentleman, said Dr Johnson, does not ask questions) but somehow they had slipped out as if at his pressing invitation.
He looked at me, his eyes seeming to draw together into an intenser focus. He was not exactly squinting, but I have noticed a similar effect in the eyes of a dog when its master is about to cry ‘Fetch it!’
‘You see,’ he said, ‘I live in the country, and only come to London when I seem to need company – badly, I mean. There’s a great contrast between the country and this. All these houses. So many strange faces. It takes one out of oneself.’
I glanced round at the sparsely occupied tables. A cloud apparently had overlaid the sun, for a dull coppery glow was now reflected from the drowsy street. I could even hear the white-faced clock ticking. To congratulate him on his last remark would hardly have been courteous after so harmless an advance. I merely looked at him. What kind of self, I was vaguely speculating, would return into his hospitality when he
regained his usual haunts?
‘I have a nice little place down there,’ he went on, ‘but there’s not much company. Lonely: especially now. Even a few hours makes all the difference. You would be surprised how friendly a place London can be; the people, I mean. Helpful.’
What can only be described as a faint whinny had sounded in his voice as he uttered that ‘helpful’. Was he merely to prove yet another of those unfortunate travellers who have lost the return halves of their railway tickets? Had he marked me down for his prey!
‘It is not so much what they say,’ he continued, laying his hand on the marble table; ‘but just their being about, you know.’ I glanced at the heavy ring on its third finger and then at his watch-chain – woven apparently of silk or hair – with little gold rings at intervals along it to secure the plait. His own gaze continued to rest on me with so penetrating, so corkscrew-like an intensity, that I found myself glancing over my shoulder in search of the waitress. She however was now engaged in animated argument with the young lady at the pay-desk.
‘Do you live far from London?’ I ventured.
‘About seventy miles,’ he replied with an obvious gulp of relief at this impetus to further conversation. ‘A nice old house too considering the rent, roomy enough but not too large. Its only drawback in some respects is there’s nothing near it – not within call, I mean; and we – I – suffer from the want of a plentiful supply of water. Especially now.’
Why so tactless a remark on this broiling afternoon should have evoked so vivid a picture of a gaunt yellow-brick building perched amid sloping fields parched lint-white with a tropical drought, its garden little more than a display of vegetable anatomies, I cannot say. It was a house of a hideous aspect; but I confess it stirred my interest. Whereupon my stranger, apparently, thought he could safely glance aside; and I could examine him more at leisure. It was not, I have to confess, a taking face. There was a curious hollowness in its appearance. He looked like the shell of a man, or rather, like a hermit crab – that neat pepper-and-salt tweed suit and so on being a kind of second-hand accumulation on his back.
‘And of course,’ he began again, ‘now that I am alone I become’ – he turned sharply back on me – ‘I become more conscious of it.’
‘Of the loneliness?’ I suggested.
Vacancy appeared on his face, as if he had for the instant stopped thinking. ‘Yes,’ he replied, once more transfixing me with those bleak close eyes of his, ‘the loneliness. It seems to worsen more and more as the other slips away into the past. But I suppose we most of us have much the same experience; just of that, I mean. And even in London …’
I busied myself with my tea things, having no particular wish at the moment to continue the conversation. But he hadn’t any intention of losing his victim as easily as all that.
‘There’s a case now here in the newspaper this morning,’ he went on, his glance wandering off to a copy of the Daily Mail that lay on the chair next the one he had just vacated. ‘A man not much older than I am – “found dead”. Dead. The only occupant of quite a good-sized house, I should judge, at Stoke Newington – though I don’t know the place personally. Lived there for years on end without even a charwoman to do for him – to – to work for him. Still even there there was some kind of company, I suppose. He could look out of the window; he could hear people moving about next door. Where I am, there isn’t another house in sight, not even a barn, and so far as I can see, what they call Nature doesn’t become any the more friendly however long you stay in a place – the birds and that kind of thing. It may get better in time; but it’s only a few months ago since I was left quite like this. When my sister died.’
Obviously I was hooked beyond hope of winning free again until this corkscrew persistent creature had had his way with me. The only course seemed to be to get the experience over as quickly as possible. It is not easy, however, to feign an active sympathy; and mention of his dead sister had produced in my mind only a faint reflex image of a dowdy lady no longer young in dingy black. Still, it was an image that proved to be not very far from the actuality.
‘Any close companionship like that’, I murmured, ‘when it is broken is a tragic thing.’
He appeared to have seen no significance in my remark. ‘And you see, once there were three of us. Once. It never got into the papers – at least not into the London papers, except just by mention, I mean.’ He moistened his lips. ‘Did you ever happen to come across a report about a lady, a Miss Dutton, who was “missing”?’
It was a pretty stupid question, for after all, few human beings are so gifted as to be able to recall the names even of the protagonists in genuine causes célèbres. To bear in mind every sort of Miss Dutton whose disappearance would be referred to only in news-snippets borrowed by the Metropolitan press from the provincial, would be rather too much of a tax even for those interested in such matters. I sipped my tea and surveyed him as sagaciously as possible; ‘Not that I can actually recall,’ I said. ‘Miss – Dutton? It isn’t a very uncommon name. You knew her?’
‘Knew her!’ he repeated, placing his hands on his knees and sitting stiffly back in his chair, his eyes unflinchingly fixed on mine. ‘She lived with us a matter of two years or more. It was us she left. It was my house she was missing from. It caused quite a stir in the neighbourhood. It was the talk of the countryside. There was an Inquiry; and all that.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Pretty near a year ago. Yes; a year yesterday.’
‘Do you mean the Inquiry, or when Miss Dutton disappeared?’
‘The Inquiry,’ he replied in a muffled fashion, as if a little annoyed at my want of perspicacity. ‘The other was – oh, a month or more before that.’
The catechism was becoming a rather laborious way of extracting a story, but somehow its rudiments had begun to interest me. I had nothing to do. To judge from the look of the street, the quicksilver in the thermometer was still edging exquisitely upwards. I detested the thought of emerging into that oven. So apparently did my companion, unless the mere sound of his voice seemed to him better entertainment than, say, the nearest ‘picture palace’ – where at least one would be out of sight and it would be dark.
‘I should have thought,’ I began again in a voice as unconcerned as I could manage, ‘that living as you do, a stir in the neighbourhood would not much matter, though I agree that the mystery itself must have mattered a good deal more. That of course must have been a great shock to you both.’
‘Ay,’ he said, with a gleam in his eye, ‘but that’s just what you Londoners don’t seem to understand. You have your newspapers and all that. But in most ways you don’t get talked about much. It’s not so in the country. I guarantee you might be living right in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors and yet, if it came to there being anything to keep their tongues wagging, you’d know that your neighbours were talking of you, and what about, for miles around. It gets across – like those black men’s drums one hears about in West Africa. As if the mere shock of the thing wasn’t enough! What I feel about it is that nowadays people don’t seem to show any sympathy, any ordinary feeling with – with those in such circumstances; at least, not country people. Wouldn’t you say yourself,’ he added, with feline rapidity, ‘that if you were reported as missing it would be rough luck if nobody cared?’
‘I don’t quite see what you mean,’ I replied. ‘I thought you said that the disappearance of your friend made a stir in the neighbourhood.’
‘Yes; but they were not thinking so much of her as of the cause of it.’
We exchanged a long glance, but without much addition to my own small fund of information. ‘But surely,’ I ventured, that must depend upon where she was supposed to have disappeared to?’
‘That,’ he replied, ‘they never knew. We couldn’t find out not one iota about it. You’ve no idea’ – he drew his hands down over his face as if to clear away a shadow from his eyes – ‘you’ve no idea. Since she has gone I feel almost some
times as if she can never have been real. There, but not real; if you understand me. I see her; and then the real thing goes again. It never occurred to me, that.’
‘The psychologists would tell us something about that.’
‘The what?’ he asked sharply.
‘Oh, those who profess to explain the workings of the mind. After all, we can’t definitely say whether that teapot there is real – what it is in itself, I mean. And merely to judge from its looks,’ I added, ‘one might hope it was a pure illusion.’
He looked hard at the teapot. ‘Miss Dutton was a very well-preserved woman for her age,’ he said. ‘And when I say “not real”, it’s only in a manner of speaking, I mean. I’ve got her portrait in the newspaper in my pocket-book. That ought to prove her real enough. I never knew any one who was more “all there”, as they say. She was a good friend to me – I have every reason to remember her. She came along of her own free will – just a chance meeting. In Scarborough, as a matter of fact. And she liked the comforts of a home after all those hotels and boarding-houses.’
In the course of these ruminating and mournful remarks – and there was unmistakable ‘feeling’ in his tones – he was rather privily turning over the contents of an old leather pocket-book with an inelastic black band. He drew out a frayed newspaper cutting and put it down on the table beside the teapot.
‘Looking at that, you wouldn’t be in much doubt what Miss Dutton was in herself, now, would you? You’d recognize her,’ he raised his eyes, ‘if she were – if you met her, I mean, in these awful streets? I would myself.’
It was impossible to decide whether this last remark was ironical, triumphant, embittered, or matter-of-fact; so I looked at Miss Dutton. She was evidently a blonde and a well-preserved woman, as my friend had intimated; stoutish, with a plump face, a plump nose, infantile blue eyes, frizzy hair, and she wore (what a few years ago were old-fashioned and are now new-fashioned) long ear-rings.
It was curious what a stabilizing effect the ear-rings produced. They resembled the pole Blondin used to carry as he tripped across his rope over the Niagara Falls. Miss Dutton was looking out of her blurred image with a sort of insouciance, gaiety, ‘charm’, the charm that photographers aim at but rather seldom convey. Destiny, apparently, casts no retrospective shadow. I defy anybody to have found the faintest hint in that aware, vain, commonplace, good-natured face which would suggest Miss Dutton was ever going to be ‘missed’ – missed, I mean, in the sense of becoming indiscoverable. In the other sense her friends would no doubt miss her a good deal. But then boarding-houses and hotels are the resorts rather of acquaintances than of friends.
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 35
