Madame Jodzka, against the door, frozen, terrified, looked on and listened.
“Are you quite well, Daddy? Sure? I had a dream, but it’s gone now.”
“Splendid. Never better in my life. But better still if I saw you sound asleep. Come now, I’ll blow out this silly night-light, for that’s what woke you up, I’ll be bound.”
He blew it out, he and the child blew it out together, the latter with sleepy laughter that then hushed. And Colonel Masters tiptoed to join Madame Jodzka at the door. “A lot of damned fuss about nothing,” she heard him muttering in that voice, and then, as they closed the door and stood a moment in the darkened passage, he did suddenly an unexpected thing. He took the Polish woman in his arms, held her fiercely to him for a second, kissed her vehemently, and flung her away.
“Bless you and thank you,” he said in a low, angry voice. “You did your best. You made a great fight. But I got what I deserved. I’ve been waiting years for it.” And he was off down the stairs to his own quarters. Half way down he stopped and looked up to where she stood against the rails. “Tell the doctor,” he whispered hoarsely, “that I took a sleeping draught — an overdose.” And he was gone.
And this was, roughly, what she did tell the doctor next morning when a hurried telephone summons brought him to the bed whereon a dead man lay with a swollen, blackened tongue. She told the same tale at the inquest too and an emptied bottle of a powerful sleeping draught supported her. . . .
And Monica, too young to realize grief beyond its trumpery meaning of a selfishly felt loss, never once — oddly enough — referred to the absence of her lovely doll that had comforted so many hours, proved such an intimate companion day and night in a life that held no other playmates. It seemed forgotten, expunged utterly from her memory, as though it had never existed at all. She stared blankly, stupidly, when a doll was mentioned: she preferred her worn-out teddy-bears. The slate of memory, in this particular case, was wiped clean.
“They’re so warm and comfy,” she described her bears, “and they cuddle without tickling. Besides,” she added innocently, “they don’t squeak and try to slip away. . . .”
Thus in the suburbs, where great spaces between the lamps go dead at night, where the moist wind comes whispering through the mournful branches of the silver pines, where nothing happens and people cry “Let’s go to town!” there are occasional stirrings among the dead dry bones that hide behind villa walls. . . .
THE OLIVE
He laughed involuntarily as the olive rolled toward his chair across the shiny parquet floor of the hotel dining-room.
His table in the cavernous salle à manager was apart: he sat alone, a solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled toward him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an unlikely objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating once or twice en route as it plopped along, came to rest finally against his feet.
It settled with an inviting, almost an aggressive, air. And he stooped and picked it up, putting it rather self-consciously, because of the girl from whose table it had come, on the white tablecloth beside his plate.
Then, looking up, he caught her eye, and saw that she, too, was laughing, though not a bit self-consciously. As she helped herself to the hors-d’oeuvre a false move had sent it flying. She watched him pick the olive up and set it beside his plate. Her eyes then suddenly looked away again – at her mother – questioningly.
The incident was closed. But the little oblong, succulent olive lay beside his plate, so that his fingers played with it. He fingered it automatically from time to time until his lonely meal was finished.
When no one was looking he slipped it into his pocket, as though, having taken the trouble to pick it up, this was the very least he could do with it. Heaven alone knows why, but he then took it upstairs with him, setting it on the marble mantelpiece among his field-glasses, tobacco tins, ink-bottles, pipes, and candlestick. At any rate, he kept it – the moist, shiny, lob-sided, juicy little oblong olive. The hotel lounge wearied him; he came to his room after dinner to smoke at his ease, his coat off and his feet on a chair; to read another chapter of Freud, to write a letter or two he didn’t in the least want to write, and then to go to bed at ten o’clock. But this evening the olive kept rolling between him and the thing he read; it rolled between the paragraphs, between the lines; the olive was more vital than the interest of these eternal ‘complexes’ and ‘suppressed desires’.
The truth was that he kept seeing the eyes of the laughing girl beyond the bouncing olive. She had smiled at him in such a natural, spontaneous, friendly way before her mother’s glance had checked her – a smile, he felt, that might lead to acquaintance on the morrow.
He wondered! A thrill of possible adventure ran through him.
She was a merry-looking sort of girl, with a happy, halfroguish face that seemed on the look-out for somebody to play with. Her mother, like most of the people in the big hotel, was an invalid; the girl, a dutiful and patient daughter. They had arrived that very day, apparently.
A laugh is a revealing thing, he thought as he fell asleep to dream of a lob-sided olive rolling consciously toward him, and of a girl’s eyes that watched its awkward movements, then looked up into his own and laughed. In his dream the olive had been deliberately and cleverly dispatched upon its uncertain journey. It was a message.
He did not know, of course, that the mother, chiding her daughter’s awkwardness, had muttered:
‘There you are again, child! True to your name, you never see an olive without doing something queer and odd with it!’
A youngish man, whose knowledge of chemistry, including invisible inks and suchlike mysteries, had proved so valuable to the Censor’s Department that for five years he had overworked without a holiday, the Italian Riviera had attracted him, and he had come out for a two months’ rest. It was his first visit. Sun, mimosa, blue seas and brilliant skies had tempted him; exchange made a pound worth forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy shillings. He found the place lovely, but somewhat untenanted.
He stayed on, however, caught by the sunshine and the good exchange, also without the physical energy to discover a better, livelier place. He went for walks among the olive-groves; he sat beside the sea and palms; he visited shops and bought things he did not want because the exchange made them seem cheap; he paid immense ‘extras’ in his weekly bill, then chuckled as he reduced them to shillings and found that a few pence covered them; he lay with a book for hours among the olive- groves.
The olive-groves! His daily life could not escape the olive- groves; to olive-groves, sooner or later, his walks, his expeditions, his meanderings by the sea, his shopping – all led him to these ubiquitous olive-groves.
If he bought a picture postcard to send home, there was sure to be an olive-grove in one corner of it. The whole place was smothered with olive-groves, the people owed their incomes and existence to these irrepressible trees. The villages among the hills swam roof-deep in them. They swarmed even in the hote1 gardens.
The guide-books praised them as persistently as the residents brought them, sooner or later, into every conversation. They grew lyrical over them:
‘And how do you like our olive-trees? Ah, you think them pretty. At first, most people are disappointed. They grow on one.’
‘They do,’ he agreed.
‘I’m glad you appreciate them. I find them the embodiment of grace. And when the wind lifts the underleaves across a whole mountain slope – why, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? One realises the meaning of “olive-green.”‘
‘One does.’ He sighed. ‘But, all the same, I should like to get one to eat – an olive, I mean.’
‘Ah,’ to eat, yes. That’s not so easy. You see, the crop is...’
‘Exactly,’ he interrupted impatiently, weary of the habitual and evasive explanations. ‘But I should like to taste the fruit. I should like to enjoy one.’
For, after a stay of six weeks, he had never once seen a
n olive on the table, in the shops, nor even on the street barrows at the market-place. He had never tasted one. No one sold olives, though olive-trees were a drug in the place; no one bought them, no one asked for them; it seemed that no one wanted them. The trees, when he looked closely, were thick with a dark little berry that seemed more like a sour sloe than the succulent, delicious, spicy fruit associated with its name.
Men climbed the trunks, everywhere shaking the laden branches and hitting them with long bamboo poles to knock the fruit off, while women and children, squatting on their haunches, spent laborious hours filling baskets underneath, then loading mules and donkeys with their daily ‘catch’. But an olive to eat was unobtainable. He had never cared for olives, but now he craved with all his soul to feel his teeth in one.
‘Ach! But it is the Spanish olive that you eat,’ explained the head waiter, a German ‘from Basel’. ‘These are for oil only.’ After which he disliked the olive more than ever – until that night when he saw the first eatable specimen rolling across the shiny parquet floor, propelled toward him by the careless hand of a pretty girl, who then looked up into his eyes and smiled.
He was convinced that Eve, similarly, had rolled the apple. toward Adam across the emerald sward of the first garden in the world. The dull, accumulated resentment he had come to feel, subconsciously perhaps, against an elusive fruit was changed in the twinkling of an eye into a source of joy, a symbol of romance.
* * * * * * *
He slept usually like the dead. It must have been something very real that made him open his eyes and sit up in bed alertly. There was a noise against his door. He listened. The room was still quite dark. It was early morning. The noise was not repeated.
‘Who’s there?’ he asked in a sleepy whisper. ‘What is it?’ The noise came again. Someone was scratching on the door. No, it was somebody tapping.
‘What d’you want?’ he demanded in a louder voice. ‘Come in,’ he added, wondering sleepily whether he was presentable. Either the hote1 was on fire or the porter was waking the wrong person for some sunrise expedition.
Nothing happened. Wide awake now, he turned the switch on, but no light flooded the room. The electricians, he remembered with a curse, were out on strike. He fumbled for the matches, and as he did so a voice in the corridor became distinctly audible. It was just outside his door.
‘Aren’t you ready?’ he heard. ‘You sleep for ever.’
And the voice, although, never having heard it before, he could not have recognised., belonged, he knew suddenly, to the girl who had let the olive fall. In an instant he was out of bed. He lit a candle.
‘I’m coming,’ he called softly, as he slipped rapidly into some clothes. ‘I’m sorry I’ve kept you. I shan’t be a minute.’
‘Be quick then!’ he heard, while the candle-fame slowly grew, and he found his garments. Less than three minutes later he opened the door and, candle in hand, peered into the dark passage.
‘Blow it out!’ came a peremptory whisper. He obeyed, but not quick enough. A pair of red lips emerged from the shadows. There was a puff, and the candle was extinguished. ‘I’ve got my reputation to consider. We mustn’t be seen, of course!’
The face vanished in the darkness, but he had recognised it – the shining skin, the bright, glancing eyes. The sweet breath touched his cheek. The candlestick was taken from him by a swift, deft movement. He heard it knock the wainscoting as it was set down. He went out into a pitch-black corridor, where a soft hand seized his own and led him – by a back-door, it seemed – out into the open air of the hillside immediately behind the hotel.
He saw the stars. The morning was cool and fragrant, the sharp air waked him, and the last vestiges of sleep went flying. He had been drowsy and confused, had obeyed the summons without thinking. He now realised suddenly that he was engaged in an act of madness.
The girl, dressed in some flimsy material thrown loosely about her head and body, stood a few feet away, looking, he thought, like some figure called out of dreams and slumber of a forgotten world, out of legend almost. He saw her evening shoes peep out; he divined an evening dress beneath the gauzy covering. The light wind blew it close against her figure. He thought of a nymph.
‘I say – but haven’t you been to bed?’ he asked stupidly.
He had meant to expostulate, to apologize for his foolish rashness, to scold and say they must go back at once. Instead, this sentence came. He guessed she had been sitting up all night. He stood still a second, staring in mute admiration, his eyes full of bewildered question.
‘Watching the stars,’ she met his thought with a happy laugh. ‘Orion has touched the horizon. I came for you at once. We’ve got just four hours!’ The voice, the smile, the eyes, the reference to Orion, swept him off his feet. Something in him broke loose and flew wildly, recklessly to the stars.
‘Let us be off!’ he cried, ‘before the Bear tilts down. Already Alcyone begins to fade. I’m ready. Come!’
She laughed. The wind blew the gauze aside to show two ivory-white limbs. She caught his hand again, and they scampered together up the steep hillside toward the woods. Soon the big hotel, the villas, the white houses of the little town where natives and visitors still lay soundly sleeping, were out of sight. The farther sky came down to meet them. The stars were paling, but no sign of actual dawn was yet visible. The freshness stung their cheeks. Slowly, the heavens grew lighter, the east turned rose, the outline of the trees defined themselves, there was a stirring of the silvery-green leaves. They were among olive-groves – but the spirits of the trees were dancing. Far below them, a pool of deep colour, they saw the ancient sea. They saw the tiny specks of distant fishing-boats. The sailors were singing to the dawn, and birds among the mimosa of the hanging gardens answered them.
Pausing a moment at length beneath a gaunt old tree, whose struggle to leave the clinging earth had tortured its great writhing arms and trunk, they took their breath, gazing at one another with eyes full of happy dreams.
‘You understood so quickly,’ said the girl, ‘my little message. I knew by your eyes and ears you would.’ And she first tweaked his ears with two slender fingers mischievously, then laid he soft palm with a momentary light pressure on both eyes.
‘You’re half-and-half, at any rate,’ she went on looking him up and down for a swift instant of appraisement, ‘if you’re not altogether.’ The laughter showed her white, even little teeth.
‘You know how to play, and that’s something,’ she added. Then, as if to herself, ‘You’ll be altogether before I’ve done with you.’
‘Shall I?’ he stammered, afraid to look at her.
Puzzled, some spirit of compromise still lingering in him, he knew not what she meant; he knew only that the current of life flowed increasingly through his veins, but that her eyes confused him.
‘I’m longing for it,’ he added. ‘How wonderfully you did it! They roll so awkwardly –—’
‘Oh, that!’ She peered at him through a wisp of hair. ‘You’ve kept it, I hope.’
‘Rather. It’s on my mantelpiece –—’
‘You’re sure you haven’t eaten it?’ and she made a delicious mimicry with her red lips, so that he saw the tip of a small, pointed tongue.
‘I shall keep it,’ he swore, ‘as long as these arms have life in them,’ and he seized her just as she was crouching to escape, and covered her with kisses.
‘I knew you longed to play,’ she panted, when he released her. ‘Still, it was sweet of you to pick it up before another got it.’
‘Another!’ he exclaimed.
‘The gods decide. It’s a lob-sided thing, remember. It can’t roll straight.’ She looked oddly mischievous, elusive.
He stared at her.
‘If it had rolled elsewhere – and another had picked it up – — ?’
he began.
‘I should be with that other now!’ And this time she was off and away before he could prevent her, and the sound of her silvery laughter moc
ked him among the olive-trees beyond. He was up and after her in a second, following her slim whiteness in and out of the old-world grove, as she flitted lightly, her hair flying in the wind, her figure flashing like a ray of sunlight or the race of foaming water – till at last he caught her and drew her down upon his knees, and kissed her wildly, forgetting who and where and what he was.
‘Hark!’ she whispered breathlessly, one arm close about his neck. ‘I hear their footsteps. Listen! It is the pipe!’
‘The pipe – — ! ‘ he repeated, conscious of a tiny but delicious shudder.
For a sudden chill ran through him as she said it. He gazed at her. Her hair fell loose about her cheeks, flushed and rosy with his hot kisses. Her eyes were bright and wild for all their softness. Her face, turned sideways to him as she listened, wore an extraordinary look that for an instant made his blood run cold. He saw the parted lips, the small white teeth, the slim neck of ivory, the young bosom panting from his tempestuous embrace. Of an unearthly loveliness and brightness she seemed to him, yet with this strange, remote expression that touched his soul with sudden terror.
Her face turned slowly.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered. He sprang to his feet without waiting for her answer.
He was young and agile; strong, too, with that quick response of muscle they have who keep their bodies well; but he was no match for her. Her speed and agility outclassed his own with ease. She leaped. Before he had moved one leg forward toward escape, she was clinging with soft, supple arms and limbs about him, so that he could not free himself, and as her weight bore him downward to the ground her lips found his own and kissed them into silence. She lay buried again in his embrace, her hair across his eyes, her heart against his heart, and he forgot his question, forgot his little fear, forgot the very world he knew....
‘They come, they come,’ she cried gaily. ‘The Dawn is here. Are you ready?’
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 568