The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  That past of hers . . . Did she realise, do you think, that such lost souls as hers are doomed to fail in everything they touch? She was not a virgin: she had been seduced at the age of eighteen by an elderly Midland business man she never saw again. She had been in love—at one time she had even been engaged (to a young man she had met on a holiday at a sea-side resort). But she never met the object of her love—a lecturer at a church discussion group she had once attended: and her fiancé, after six months’ tergiversation, finally sent back her letters and the gifts she had showered on him, and disappeared. The last she heard of him he was living at Liverpool, having married a showgirl from Manchester. So, through the long years, old Maufry got all her devotion, and the small cripple son of her sister got all her love—her chilly and half-frightened love.

  Once a year this child was sent to London to live with Julia while his mother went to visit her husband’s people in Wales. The spinster curtained off a corner of her room and borrowed a cot from her landlady for the boy to sleep in. She fed him magnificently, took him to cinemas and theatres, bought him toys and books galore. And he, a pale, large-headed child, with eyes like balls of putty, accepted everything unquestioningly. The only reward he ever gave her was a wan, abstracted smile.

  It was late one summer, during one of Bernard’s visits, that the tragic episode of the Glass Eye began. Julia had bought tickets for the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham. She and Bernard sat in the red plush stalls indifferently watching the show. It began with an act by two acrobats, a man and a woman in white tights and spangled pantees. The only thrilling moment was when, at the end, the woman climbed a chromium-plated pole that was balanced on the man’s chin. She slipped and almost fell. Julia, visualising the white-clad figure falling into the stalls—as seemed inevitable, on top of Bernard’s crippled legs—clasped the boy convulsively to her. He looked up at her in surprise, repelled by the smell of camphor from her clothes. She, as the woman on the stage righted herself, felt sweeping over her an immense wave of relief and tenderness. For the rest of the first part of the programme she trembled violently from time to time, looking down at the pale, abstracted boy. If anything should happen to him, while he was in her charge . . . She had an almost uncontrollable longing to touch the boy’s bare, warped knees—only to touch him. She had never touched anyone.

  After the interval there were some ballads by two stout operatic singers, then an eccentric cyclist took the stage, and then came the high spot of the show. It was announced on the programme thus:

  MAX COLLODI

  The Gentleman Ventriloquist

  with his amazing

  Dummy

  ‘GEORGE.’

  The curtain rose, and in a moment Julia forgot everything. She forgot Bernard, she forgot the little room with yellow wallpaper, she forgot Mr. Maufry and the high stool on which she sat in his office. Only one thing in the world existed for her—the figure of Max Collodi.

  As he sat there on the stage with the spotlight on him it was impossible to conceive anything more handsome. His dark hair gleamed, his jaw showed a slight blue shadow. His moustache was exquisitely clipped, his high square shoulders spoke of great strength. His temples were narrow, his eyes deep set, his chin was cleft, his teeth, when he spoke, shone like jewels.

  George, the dummy on his knee, was a grotesque doll about three feet high, with a huge tow head and staring eyes. Its head moved quickly from left to right, its voice was high-pitched and nasal as it answered Max’s questions with clumsy wit. Julia did not notice the act—she did not hear the cross-talk, paid no attention to the pathetic little song that George sang. She was staring at the incredibly handsome young man, watching every suave, slightly stiff movement. When the tab curtains swung together at the end of the act she was still staring, motionless, her blue eyes shining, the end of her long nose slightly and pathetically damp. In that one moment she realised that there could be no other man in all the world for her but Max Collodi. All the empty years, the acres of desolation, had been leading up to this glorious climax.

  As if she were in a dream she took Bernard home. She gave him some hot Ovaltine and put him to bed in the cot behind the curtain. Then she went to bed herself and lay for a long time staring up at the dim ceiling and listening to the night noises. Footsteps echoed through the open window from the street—the slow, measured footsteps of a policeman, the quick patter of a young man going home, from a dance perhaps, the strolling, mingled footsteps of lovers. Now and again, from somewhere inside the house, a board creaked. A mouse scuttled across the floor—shivering slightly she heard it scraping round the gas-ring, at the spot she had spilt some grease earlier in the day. From somewhere beneath her came the resonant snoring of the landlady.

  And all the time, as she lay there, she was thinking of Max Collodi. She could not get his image out of her mind—but she did not want to get his image out of her mind. He was, she reckoned, thirty—thirty-two: only five years younger than she was. What had been his life? Was he (hideous thought—push it under)—was he married? Max Collodi, the Gentleman Ventriloquist . . . A ventriloquist. A man who could throw his voice. A superb accomplishment, it seemed. Thirty-two . . . She, if she took proper care, if she learned to make-up properly, might pass for thirty-five. Was he tall? All the time, on the stage, he had been sitting down—he had not risen even to take his curtain call. But he seemed tall—the broad shoulders vouched for his tallness. Max Collodi . . . A wonderful name—a name full of poetry. Max Collodi. Mrs. Max Collodi. Madame Collodi. Or was it Señora Collodi?

  She heard footsteps mounting the stairs outside. The young man in the flat above had come home. Suppose—suppose she was Señora Collodi? She was lying in the upper room of their villa in Italy—on the outskirts of Rome. Max had been appearing at the theatre. He was coming home, dead tired. It was his footsteps she could hear dragging up the stairs. In another moment the door would open. He would come in. He would get into bed beside her. She would hold him, she would comfort him, she would send him to sleep.

  The footsteps passed and a few moments later she heard the door of the flat above open and shut. She sighed and turned over in bed. Señora Collodi . . .

  Next day, Bernard was due to leave for home. Julia got permission from Mr. Maufry to have the morning off and took him to the station. She hardly noticed him. She kissed him good-bye mechanically, then sent a telegram to her sister to say that he was safely on the train. Then she had lunch—and for the first time in years she did not have it at the A.B.C. She went to a small café opposite the Old Palace Music Hall. There was just the chance, as she sat there, that she might see Max going in or coming out.

  The afternoon passed somehow. Even old Mr. Maufry noticed Julia’s abstraction, but he attributed it to the fact that she had been seeing her nephew off. He himself was not feeling very well those days, so he gave Julia orders to close the office early, set his square hat firmly on his head and went woodenly off to his old-fashioned house out Chiswick way.

  Julia, for her part, locked up the office, hurried home, boiled herself an egg by way of supper and then went out—to the Old Palace Music Hall. There, in a ferment of impatience, she sat through the acrobat act, the eccentric cyclist act, the ballad-­singing act. By the time the indicator showed her that Max Collodi was next on the bill her heart was beating painfully, her hands had grown warm and clammy, her eyes were staring wide.

  “Oh, I’m only a ventriloquist’s doll,”

  sang the ridiculous George—

  “Only a ventriloquist’s doll, that’s all . . .”

  But Julia did not care what George was. It was Max, his master, she was interested in. She stared at the well-groomed, suave, poised figure, smiling so gently and pityingly at George’s bêtises. She noted the small bow that he gave to acknowledge applause, the gentlemanly restraint of him—so wonderfully unlike the exuberance of most Music Hall artistes. Max Collodi . . . Of course—he was made up. It was possible that off stage he didn’t look quite so young. Thi
rty-five, perhaps. Yes—thirty-five . . .

  The curtains swung together. The audience applauded. Julia sat still, entranced. They were applauding him—her Max. The curtains parted again. He was still sitting there, bowing a little and smiling, with the fatuous George grinning oafishly on his knee. Max looked straight ahead. By sheer will-power Julia tried to make him look in her direction—she had read of such things being possible. But perhaps her will was not strong enough. Max continued to look straight ahead, at the audience in general. It was impossible to believe that anyone could be so handsome. A woman in front said so in a loud whisper to her neighbour, and the neighbour replied with a sneer: “Yes—too handsome, if you ask me.” Julia glared at her fiercely. She could have murdered her.

  She walked home slowly. On a bill on the hoarding near her house she saw his name in large lettering—“Max Collodi, the Gentleman Ventriloquist, with ‘George’ . . .” She looked hastily about her to see no one was near, then quickly tore away that corner of the bill. In her room she straightened out the crumpled piece of paper and stared at it for a long time before tucking it away between the leaves of one of her favourite books.

  Now I must ask you to believe what may seem to you, a normal human being, the impossible. But remember the thirty-seven desolate years, the long empty hours in that terrible room with its peeling yellow wallpaper and its engravings of long-lost ships. Remember the far-off seduction almost twenty years before, the broken engagement, the square, soulless hat of Mr. Maufry. Remember the solitary meals conjured from that single gas-ring, the cold, unlovely love that had concentrated itself on the distant and unresponsive Bernard. And remember the story of the Eastern philosopher’s Glass Eye. That other Glass Eye—the one that now rests on black velvet on Julia’s mantelshelf—that is all that remains these days of Julia’s affair with Max Collodi. A Glass Eye—a curious, even a terrible relic . . .

  Every night, for the rest of that first week of her passion for Max Collodi, Julia paid her three shillings and sixpence to sit in the fauteuils (as they were called) at the Old Palace Music Hall. She sat with her gaunt fingers picking convulsively at the plush-covered arms of her seat: she sat with her earnest eyes fixed in fascination on the suave spotlighted figure of the ventriloquist: she sat with her long nose twitching, a minute drop of moisture forming always on the red tip of it.

  She found, on the counter of a nearby newsagent’s shop, a little pile of what professional theatricals call hand-outs—postcard-size photographs of celebrities, with quotations from their press notices on them. Some of these featured Collodi, and without hesitation (but with a furtive look round to see that no one was watching) Julia swept half-a-dozen of them into her hand-bag. They showed the ventriloquist sitting with his dummy, George, on his knee. His signature—a large, bold scrawl—was written across the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph. The extracts from the notices were printed in a column on the reverse side of the card:

  “. . . An extremely skilful exponent of the polyphonic art . . .”

  “. . . Mr. Collodi succeeds in convincing us in the course of his exhibition that the term ‘artist,’ so often misapplied these days, can still be used with accuracy to refer to a Music Hall performer . . .”

  “. . . A great, a memorable display . . .”

  Julia took the cards home and placed them, with the torn fragment of the playbill, in her copy of the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff­. She looked at them every night before going to bed. She looked at them every morning before setting off to work.

  At the same newsagent’s she bought, at the end of the week, a copy of The Stage. She knew (from her fiancé in the old days, who had always been interested in theatricals) that show people usually inserted notices in this journal to say what theatres they were appearing in. To her joy, Max Collodi had done this: after his engagement at the Old Palace he was due for a week’s appearance at the Pavilion, Finsbury.

  Every night she travelled across London and paid her three and sixpence to sit in the fauteuils of the Pavilion, Finsbury.

  And the following week, acting as before on the information in The Stage, she paid her three and sixpence at the Hippodrome, Streatham.

  I said I expected you to believe impossible things. This is one of them: the foolish infatuation of an ageing woman of great ugliness for a Music Hall performer . . . Julia was blind. Yet she did not have Glass Eyes. You, perhaps, are the one in the position of the Philosopher in the Eastern tale. She was the beggar—without his wit and acuteness.

  The end of it was when Max Collodi was going on tour (as she was informed by The Stage) Julia gave her employer, Maufry, a week’s notice. She had a small capital, simply invested, accumulated through many years of saving: it was this that, with no thought for the future, she proposed living on while she followed Collodi about the country.

  And she did one other thing. She wrote Collodi a letter.

  I am not able to quote the letter—I don’t know what it said. I know that somewhere in the course of it she asked if she might meet the ventriloquist. And I know that she got a reply, written in the large hand of the signature on the postcard (the hand of an egotist—or a man in need of asserting himself), to say that Mr. Max Collodi was grateful for her praises, but that he never gave interviews.

  I know also that Julia went on writing to Collodi. And that he went on replying. And that, as time passed, he seemed to grow warmer towards her—even friendly. Once—in Bradford—he asked her to send him a photograph: and Julia, with great trepidation, sent him a blurred snapshot taken long ago by her fiancé. She appeared in it sitting on a lawn against a background of fuchsia and veronica bushes—very shy, with her head to one side. A very old snapshot it was—a daylight-exposure print on matt paper. They had said, in those days, that it was the dead-spit of her: the bobbed hair caught up in a bandeau of Japanese silk, the frock with no waist that ended above the knee, the earrings of emerald cut glass—they were all very much a part of Julia at twenty-three. And she sent this snapshot to Max Collodi as a portrait—a dead-spit portrait—of Julia at thirty-seven. Close your left eyes, my friends—look at Julia with the Glass Ones.

  * * * *

  It was at Blackpool that Julia eventually met Max Collodi, in a small hotel in a street off the Promenade—the Seabank Temperance Hotel, Bed and Breakfast 6/6. The meeting was the end of the episode—or the beginning of it.

  It happened in this way.

  Julia, in her letters to Collodi, kept suggesting that they might meet. In the beginning he reiterated his statement that he never gave interviews. But later, as she grew more persistent and he more benevolent, he began to hint that a meeting might be possible. Perhaps it was the dead-spit portrait. Perhaps he wanted to savour the adulation at closer quarters. It was, I think he felt, worth risking. I said at the beginning of this tale that Max Collodi too, in his way, was funny.

  In the letter he finally wrote consenting to a meeting and fixing a time and place, he made, like the true theatrical he was, certain conditions. She was to stay only for five minutes this first time. Later on, perhaps, if she still wanted to go on seeing him, they might arrange longer appointments. And he had (he said) an aversion in real life to strong light, being so much in his professional life under the glare of the limes and the footlights. So the hotel room would be dimly lit. If she did not mind (an arch touch this) being received in a half-lit hotel bedroom by a strange man, with no other chaperone besides his dummy, George, then would she go to the Seabank Temperance Hotel, Mortimer Street, Blackpool, at 10 p.m. on Saturday evening, after his show at the Winter Garden Theatre. And he would be happy to tell her something about himself and to hear, in his turn, something about her.

  You will not want me to go into details about the hour and a half that Julia spent that evening before the mirror in the boarding-house at which she was staying. It was a large mirror with a chipped gilt frame. The quicksilver had come off from the back of it in sporadic, smallpox-like patches, and in one corner the glass was wa
rped, so that you appeared curiously elongated in it, as if El Greco had painted you. Nor will I say anything about the agonies that Julia underwent before she could make up her mind what to wear. Did she, in the end, decide that there was no hope of appearing exactly like the dead-spit snapshot? Did she, with an unadmitted joy, bless Max for arranging the dimly-lighted room and an interview of only five minutes? Did she have qualms that when he had said “if she still wanted to go on seeing him,” he might have meant: “if I still want to go on seeing you”? It is impossible to answer these questions. I only speculate and tell the story.

  At ten minutes to ten Julia was walking to and fro near the Seabank Hotel, waiting for the hour to strike. She was shivering—and not alone from the slight chill of the night. On all sides of her people were enjoying themselves. The town was ablaze with coloured lights, there were a thousand conflicting jazz tunes in the air, from the dance halls, from the piano-accordions and ukuleles of the young men and women who strolled about the Promenade in groups with little white paper hats on their heads that had “Kiss me quick, Charlie” written round the brim. Beyond all these things was the sea, glittering under the lights but cold and detached, no part of the scene at all—the “broad Atlantic” as Julia automatically referred to it, remembering all the books she had read.

  She glanced at her watch. It was two minutes to ten. She pushed open the swing door of the hotel and walked up to the reception desk.