by Hugh Ealpole
After that the narrative is more confused. Wilbraham apparently walked down Knightsbridge and arrived at last somewhere near the Albert Hall. He must have spoken to a number of different people. One man, a politician apparently, was with him for a considerable time, but only because he was so anxious to emphasise his own views about the Government. Another was a journalist, who continued with him for a while because he scented a story for his newspaper. Some people may remember that there was a garbled paragraph about a ‘Religious Army Officer’ in the Daily Record.
He stayed at a cabman’s shelter for a time and drank a cup of coffee and told the little gathering there his news. They took it very calmly. They had met so many queer things in their time that nothing seemed odd to them.
His account becomes clearer again when he found himself a little before dawn in the park and in the company of a woman of the town and a drunken, broken-down pugilist. I saw both these persons afterwards and had some talk with them. The pugilist had only the vaguest sense of what had happened. Wilbraham was a ‘proper old bird’, and had given him half-a-crown to get his breakfast with. They had all slept together under a tree, and he had made some rather voluble protests because the other two would talk so continuously and prevented his sleeping. It was a warm night and the sun had come up behind the tree ‘surprisin’ quick’.
The woman was another story. She was quiet and reserved, dressed in black with a neat little black hat with a green feather in it. She had yellow, fluffy hair, and bright, childish, blue eyes, and a simple, innocent expression. She spoke very softly and almost in a whisper. She spoke of her life quite calmly as though she had been a governess or a waitress at a tea-shop. So far as I could discover, she could see nothing odd in Wilbraham, nor in anything that he had said. She was the one person in all the world who had understood him completely and found nothing out of the way in his talk. Strange when you come to think of it. The one person in the world.
She had liked him at once, she said. ‘I could see that he was kind,’ she added earnestly, as though to her that was the most important thing in all the world. No, his talk had not seemed odd to her. She had believed every word that he had said. Why not? You could not look at him and not believe what he said.
Of course, it was true. And why not? She had known lots of things funnier than that in her sordid life. What was there against it? She had always thought that there was something in what the parsons said, and now she knew it. It had been a great help to her, what the gentleman had told her. Yes, and he had gone to sleep with his head in her lap—and she had stayed awake all night thinking—and he had woken up just in time to see the sunrise. Some sunrise that was, too!
That was a curious little fact, that all three of them, even the battered pugilist, should have been so deeply struck by that sunrise. Wilbraham on the last day of his life, when he hovered between consciousness and unconsciousness, kept recalling it as though it had been a vision.
‘The sun—and the trees suddenly green and bright like glittering swords—and the sky pale like ivory. See, now the sun is rushing up, faster than ever, to take us with him—up, up, leaving the trees like green clouds beneath us—far, far beneath us—’
The woman said it was the finest sunrise she had ever seen; and, at once, when she saw it, she began to think of a policeman. He’d be moving them on, naturally, and what would he say when he found her there with a gentleman of the highest class? Say that she had been robbing him, of course. She wanted to move away, but he insisted on going with her, and they woke up the pugilist, and the three of them moved down the park.
He talked to her all the time about his plans. He was looking dishevelled now, and unshaven and dirty. She suggested that he should go back to his flat. No, he wished to waste no time. Who knew how long he had got? It might be only a day or two. He would go to Covent Garden and talk to the men there.
She was confused as to what happened after that. When they got to the market, the carts were coming in and the men were very busy.
She saw the gentleman speak to one of them very earnestly, but he was very busy and pushed him aside. He spoke to another, who told him to clear out.
Then he jumped on to a box, and almost the last sight she had of him was his standing there in his soiled clothes, a streak of mud on his face, his arms outstretched and crying : ‘It’s true! It’s true! Stop just a moment! You must hear me!’
Someone pushed him off the box. The pugilist rushed in then, cursing them and saying that the man was a gentleman, and had given him half-a-crown, and then some hulking great fellow fought the pugilist and there was a regular mêlée. Wilbraham was in the middle of them, was knocked down and trampled upon. No one meant to hurt him, I think. They all seemed very sorry afterwards.
He died two days after being brought into the nursing-home. He was very happy just before he died, pressed my hand, and asked me to look after the girl.
‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ were his last words to me, ‘that it should be true after all?’
As to Truth, who knows? Truth is a large order. This is true as far as Wilbraham goes, every word of it. Beyond that? Well, it must be jolly to be so happy as Wilbraham was.
The Tiger
LITTLE HOMER BROWN had one night, after too luxurious a supper, a nasty dream. He dreamed that he was in a jungle. He was lost in a thick dark mass of bush that seemed to rise like a forest with green spikes on every side of him. He walked with naked feet on pointed grass sharp as razor blades, and then he saw shining at him out of the dark mass two burning eyes. Petrified with something more than terror, as one is in dreams, he stood there waiting for the tiger to spring. As the tiger sprang he woke up.
The only thing about this dream was that in the morning he remembered it. He never remembered his dreams, which was a pity, because they were in general pleasant ones, and he had not much romance in his actual waking life. It seemed that he forgot the pleasant ones and remembered the nightmares, which was perhaps characteristic of him because he was of the sort that worries over little troubles and forgets too quickly the larger delights.
He remembered his tiger for three days at least. He told his sister, who kept house for him, and several of his more intimate friends about it. They wisely cautioned him against eating steak just before going to bed. The trouble with him was, as he thought about it, that he was convinced in his heart that there was more in the tiger than steak. He had all his life been afraid of the future, that something would spring out at him one day and eat him up. He was a man small of stature, sentimental of nature, and likely to catch colds. But, like many another Englishman, he was brave enough before the things which he could see. He had so little imagination in general that the things which he could see were the only things about which he did worry. But again, like many Englishmen, he had one thin stream of imagination running underground deep in his subconscious life. He had been aware of the dark steady flow of it on certain occasions—once when as a child he had been taken to the pantomime and all the houses in Dick Whittington’s London had rocked before the inebriated cook; once in an animal shop in Edgware Road when he had seen a sad monkey stare at him from behind the window; once when he had proposed marriage to a lady friend and had been rejected, and once when a motorcar in which he was riding had killed a black Cocker spaniel.
On such occasions he had seen visions. It was as though the earth had opened up beneath his feet and he had realised that he was walking on a kind of hot pie crust over an underworld of energetic little demons. But for the most part he forgot these revelations and lived quietly enough with his tall, bony sister in a neat little house in Wimbledon, pursuing every morning his successful little insurance job somewhere in the bowels of the city.
And he forgot the tiger.
It was this insurance business that sent him one day to New York. Quite an adventure for him. Phoebe, his sister, who was as kind as she was tiresome, and, though he didn’t know it, absolutely necessary to his existence, was disturbed at his going
alone. She would have liked greatly to accompany him and hinted at this; but he sniffed at his coming freedom and would not have had her with him for anything. Nevertheless, when he found himself quite alone on the gigantic liner his heart failed him. He discovered that he had lived so long with his particular cronies that he had quite forgotten how to make new acquaintances. He was afraid to play cards lest he should lose his money, he couldn’t dance, and for reading he had a kind of shyness as though by giving himself away to a book he was endangering some mysterious part of his morality. So he walked up and down the deck a great deal, very proudly holding his head up and daring any stranger to speak to him, but secretly hoping that some stranger might.
In New York, however, he was not lonely. That warmth and eagerness of hospitality which always astonishes every Englishman and sends him racing through strangely conflicting moods of suspicion, pride and, although he tries not to show it, sentimentality—these caught little Homer Brown by the throat and caused him to think that after all he must be a very fine fellow indeed.
He started with a room at the Brevoort, but this was a little remote for his business, and in a very short while he was staying with a Mr and Mrs Moody in West Sixty-ninth Street.
Mr and Mrs Moody were very quiet Americans. Mrs Moody was so quiet that you had to listen very carefully if you wanted to hear what she had to say. Mr Moody was stout and broad-shouldered, but oddly timorous for a Mid-Westerner. You would think, to look at him, that he would defy the world, but as a matter of simple fact he couldn’t defy a living thing. Englishmen are much more sentimental than Americans, but they are not, of course, so demonstrative. Little Homer conceived slowly a passion for the large, hearty and gentle Mr Moody, and Mr Moody, having been brought up in the usual American creed that ten American men were worth only one American woman, was surprised that anybody should pay him much attention. And before Homer Brown returned to England these two had formed a greater friendship than they knew.
Homer Brown was delighted with New York. He loved to feel that every minute of the day was important and it didn’t matter to what you were hurrying so long as you hurried. The noise around him excited him as a small rather lonely child is excited at a large children’s party where everyone shouts and sings for no especial reason.
At home in Wimbledon he always went to bed at ten o’clock. In New York he found that he could be up till three or four in the morning and not feel at all tired the next day. At least, this was so for the three weeks that his business kept him in New York. It is true that he slept on the boat returning to England for three days and nights almost without a break. The sad thing was that, back in London again, he found himself unsettled. He missed the noise, the hurry, the cold sharp air, the sense of rise and fall as though he were sailing on an invigorating sea of waves and buildings, and he missed very much indeed the warmth of pleasure with which people had treated him. No one in London said that they were delighted to meet you, but only, ‘Hello, old man. Haven’t seen you about lately.’ No lady in London told him to his face that he was too amusing for anything or that it had been just lovely being with him. And then, oddly, he missed the large Mr Moody. He had never missed a man’s company before. He wrote him a rather affectionate letter, but received no answer. American men have time only for business letters.
And so it happened that he was very quick in manoeuvring to send himself back to New York again. He was amazed at his own eagerness when one fine spring day he found himself once more plunging through the Atlantic, straining his eyes towards the Statue of Liberty. His first acute disappointment on arrival this time was to find that the Moodys were in Colorado. Mrs Moody had not been well, and, as Homer knew, the slightest wish on her part was immediate law to Mr Moody. He had a sentimental feeling that he would like to be near their street, so he found two rooms in one of the West Sixties, rather high up, and out of his window he could see on the left a huge building crashing to the ground and on the right another structure slowly climbing to the sky. Although the Moodys were away, he was not, of course, alone in New York. He had a whole circle of acquaintances, and almost every evening he went to a party, bathed in the splendid glamour like a tired business man having a holiday at the seaside. The summer came and he did not return to England, and he did not leave New York. The Moodys were still away, and quite suddenly one hot summer’s night he discovered himself to be alone. He sat in front of his open window looking at the pale purple-misted sky, listening to the hooting of the taxis, to the clanging electric hammer, to the wriggling, rasping clatter of the Elevated, and to the flashing of strange adventurous discovery; he had no invitation for that evening and nearly all his friends were away. What should he do? He would just walk out and take the air and let adventure have its own way.
When he had walked for a while he discovered that it is a very strange thing to be alone in New York. He had never been alone there before. He was standing in Fifth Avenue somewhere about Forty-fourth Street when he realised that he couldn’t make up his mind to cross the street. He looked down the shining length of that wonderful avenue, saw the packs of motor-cars and omnibuses held like animals in leash, knew that he must cross now if ever, and his legs refused to move. The lights changed and the cars swept down, and as they passed him they seemed to him to toss their heads and lick their lips as though they would say, ‘We should like to find you in our path—toss you in the air and then ride over you. One day we shall lure you forward.’ I have already said that in the main he had very little imagination, but once and again something stirred it, and it was the gleaming mass of those fiery eyes that held him now prisoner to the pavement. He pretended to himself that he was lingering there admiring the beautiful evening and watching the stars come out along the river of sky which ran between the high cliffs of the buildings. But it was not so. He was frightened. He didn’t move because he didn’t dare to move. New York was suddenly hostile and dangerous. Guarded by his friends, he had felt until now that the City was benignant and especially gratified that he should be there. The City was benignant no longer. He turned away, his heart beating, and after a while found himself in Broadway. Here was a lovely land—like the fairy play of one’s childhood, scattered with silver and golden fruit. He admired the lighted signs, the cascade of silver that poured out of the purple fountain, the great flowers of amethyst and rose that unfolded in the middle of the sky and then faded tremblingly away, the strange figures of dancing men that hung on ropes of crimson fire, turned somersaults, and vanished into thin air. And he loved with a strange trembling passion the building that soared into peaks of silver light far, far above the town. The only fairy palace ever seen by him in actual truth.
He stood staring at these things and was pushed about by the hurrying crowds. He bore them no malice. They, too, were the sharers of this marvellous fairyland. And then, withdrawing his eyes from the heights, it seemed to him for the first time that the faces on every side of him were pale and unhappy and apprehensive. The laughter appeared to him loud and false. The haste had something of panic in it. Shrill bells rang through the air. Everyone scattered and pressed against everyone else. The fire-engines came clanging down the street, and it was as though he felt the ground rock under his feet.
He thought that he would go into some show, and after a while he pushed through some doors, paid his money at the box-office for he knew not what, and was conducted by a girl, who looked at him with a sad and weary indifference, into his place. He had been to the theatre on many occasions before with his friends and they had always been jolly together, or he had fancied that they had. He had never noticed before that many of the American theatres have no music in the intervals between the acts, nor had he realised how sadly American audiences sit, as though they were waiting for some calamity to occur. He looked on the row of faces that stretched out beyond him to the wall, and they all seemed to him grave, preoccupied, and weary. Again, apprehensive. He had often abused in London the chattering, foolish chocolate-munching sibilants of th
e theatre crowd, but he would have liked them to be with him tonight. The play was strange and odd, and for his Wimbledon propriety extremely indecent. It was concerned with ladies of easy virtue in China who were imprisoned in small gilt cages, and there was a woman with a white Chinese face who terrified him.
As the play proceeded it became for him more and more a bad dream, as though it were his dream and all the people watching it were all his creation. So strange a hold did this gain upon him that during the third act he was largely occupied with wondering what would happen to the audience when he woke up; what would become of them when he stretched his arms and, yawning, found them all vanishing into smoke as he looked around on the familiar things in his Wimbledon bedroom. The last act of the play presented an exotic situation in which a mother finds that she has unwittingly killed her own daughter. This seemed to little Homer the climax of his bad dream, and, just as one always wakes up from a nightmare when the final crash arrives, so now Homer got up and walked out although the play was not quite finished.
He hoped that his bad dream was over, but it was not. It seemed to continue with him as he walked through the plunging lights and shadows that played over Broadway. The faces now on every side of him were white and strained; everyone was feeling the heat of the night, and a large silver fountain in the middle of the sky that was for ever spilling its water among the stars which it stridently outshone accentuated Homer’s thirst so desperately that he went into a drug store and drank a strange sickly concoction of pineapple, ice-cream, and soda water.
After that afternoon he never seemed quite to wake from his dream again. He received a letter from his sister urging him to come home. It appeared that for once they were enjoying a beautiful summer in England. It was neither too hot nor too cold. But as he read her letter he had a strange, aching vision of the dark cool lanes, the lap of the sea heard very faintly from across the fields, the sudden dip of the hills and the cottages, of the small villages nestling to the stream, roses and carnations everywhere. Of course he ought to go home. There was nothing to keep him here now. There had been nothing really to keep him this time at all. None of his friends was in New York, the weather would soon be appalling. It was not very comfortable in his lodgings, and he had always a strange little headache that ran like an odd tune, a little distorted, always through his head. Of course he ought to go home. But he could not. And he could not because he was held in this odd dreaming condition. Could he but wake up he would take the next boat back. Perhaps he would wake up tomorrow.
