The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  An old man, bald, with a hare lip, peered at her. She stumblingly asked for the number of Mr. Max Collodi’s room. Number Seven, he told her—on the first floor, stairway to her left.

  She blushed a bit as she walked across the hall, feeling his eyes on her back. As she mounted the stairs, taking care not to trip over the worn carpet where it had escaped from the brass stair-rods, she dabbed at the damp tip of her nose with a small scented handkerchief—Attar of Roses from Boots, at 4/6 the bottle. She prayed to God—and she believed in God—that no one would see her. And no one did—if you except the stucco cherubs that decorated the pillar tops of the Seabank Temperance Hotel.

  She reached Number Seven.

  “O God,” she prayed, “help me, oh help me!”

  She tapped on the door. His voice came through it to her—unmistakeably his voice, the voice she had heard from her seat in the fauteuils of a hundred different Music Halls.

  She repeated her prayer and walked in.

  He was sitting facing her behind a large mahogany table. Even in the dim light she could not mistake him: every line of those handsome features was printed deep on her memory.

  He inclined his head in the brusque, slightly stiff way she knew so well—it was the bow with which he acknowledged applause in the theatre.

  “Dear lady,” he said. “Pray sit down.”

  And she timidly sat down—at the table, facing him. She did not know what to say—what was there to say? To gain time she quickly and nervously glanced round the room. An ordinary room, with flowered wallpaper. There was a high box-spring bed, the striped ticking of it showing beneath the bedcover of lilac damask. There was a wardrobe and a small chest-of-­drawers—and (she noticed, God help her!) a white china chamber pot peeping out from the half-open door of a commode. Lolling grotesquely on a chair to Collodi’s left was the dummy, George: a fantastic figure in that half light with its huge tow head and painted smile.

  She looked quickly back at the ventriloquist. He had not moved—still held his head slightly forward. He was smiling in his chilly professional way. She remembered the woman in front of her at the Old Palace in Fulham—“too handsome, for my liking . . .”

  “Mr. Collodi?” she said, hesitantly. Her voice sounded thin and false—not herself speaking at all, but someone else; someone else in her body, trembling, aching, sick in the stomach.

  “Max Collodi, at your service,” he replied, still smiling.

  And suddenly there swept into her, as she sat there, a terrible, an overwhelming desire. It was a desire she had experienced before, in the Old Palace, when it had seemed that the acrobat was going to fall on top of Bernard—the desire to touch. She wanted to touch Collodi—to touch his hand, his forehead, his blue-tinted jaw. And after those thirty-seven years this craving, gathered and condensed in this one moment, was not possibly to be denied.

  She got up. She stood for a moment staring wildly, breathing in hasty, dry gasps. She walked quickly round the table and touched Collodi on the cheek with her gaunt quivering fingers. Then she screamed—or she made the movements of screaming, though no sound came from her but a terrible dry croak. For Collodi, with the fixed professional smile still on his face, toppled sideways and fell from his chair with a crash to the floor.

  There was one moment of beastly silence and then there was a scream: but not from Julia or the someone else who seemed to have taken possession of her body. No. It came from the chair where George had been lolling grotesquely. Now, as she stared, it was to see George standing up on the chair, his hideous painted face twisted with rage and fear and sorrow. And, as she stared, she realised that at last she had met Max Collodi, the ventriloquist.

  She started to laugh. Sobs of laughter shook her whole angular frame. She stared at the dummy on the floor—the beautiful staring face she had loved so much. And, not fully knowing what she was doing, she gave in to the storm that was wracking her. Screaming terribly, she drove the high heels of her shoes into the padded body and waxen mask of the thing. It still smiled. One of its eyes shot out and rolled across the floor, but it still smiled. And all the time the misshapen being on the chair that was the real Max Collodi, the writer of that bold, assertive hand, the big-headed painted dwarf that had sat on the knee of the thing on the floor, that had spoken in two voices, a fair one and a foul one, working the movements of that handsome mouth and head by means of small pneumatic bulb controls—that misshapen, unlovable creature was weeping. How could he have hoped to get away with it?—he who was, in his own way, as hungry as Julia?

  Gasping, blinded by her tears, Julia turned to run from the room. Her foot trod on something round and hard. She stooped half-wittedly to pick it up, then ran down the corridor, past the stucco cherubs, clutching it in her hand so tightly that it socketed itself in her palm. It was the Glass Eye of the thing on the floor—the Glass Eye that now rests, as a terrible relic, on its black velvet bed on Julia’s mantelpiece.

  * * * *

  Well, that is the story of Julia and Max Collodi. I think of it every time I go to see her in that little flat where everything is just so. And I think of that other story about the Eastern Philosopher. And I wonder, every time I look at the thing on the mantelshelf: Which of my eyes is a Glass One?

  I think of the thirty-seven years—the forty-two years now. I think of the yellow wallpaper and the vanished ships and the white paper hats on the Promenade at Blackpool. I think of the A.B.C. lunches, the volumes of the Tauchnitz Edition, the broad, cold sea with the lights on it. And I think of my friend’s verses:

  O, she thought she was in China

  And a million miles away,

  All among the tall pagodas

  Where the shining geishas play;

  And the mocking-birds were singing,

  And the lanterns burning red,

  And the temple bells were ringing—

  Softly, softly in her head . . .

  There is one more word.

  Max Collodi, the Gentleman Ventriloquist, made no more appearances. There are no notices about him in The Stage.

  But about a year ago I had a letter from a friend of mine who was holidaying in Scotland.

  “Things have been brighter here these past few days,” he wrote. “A small travelling circus has been visiting the district. One of the clowns is a sad-faced, large-headed dwarf, about three feet high. He calls himself Maximilian. I’ve seen him several times walking in the village—a fantastic little figure. He has a beautiful voice, which comes (I don’t know why it should) as a surprise. He has an odd affectation too (it must be an affectation, for he doesn’t do it during his circus act): he wears a black patch over one of his eyes.”

  My friend did not say which eye. Remembering the Eastern tale I have often wondered. Left?—or Right?

  Petronella Pan

  A FANTASY

  Any time I was near Birmingham I always made an occasion to call on my elderly friend Korngold. He was a jeweller—a stout, ruddy, successful man, with a shop near Snow Hill Station and a pleasant villa in a respectable district beyond Aston.

  Korngold was not a married man, and that, I think, was his only tragedy. For he loved children: he loved them with all the weighty, ruddy love of the German-Scottish sentimentalism that was in his blood (his father, a jewel exporter from Bavaria, had married a woman named Flora MacDonald—a descendant, she claimed, of Prince Charlie’s Flora).

  This flood of love in Korngold expressed itself in a curious way. His hobby was to organise and adjudicate baby shows. His custom was to take a hall every now and then, advertise a baby show in the press, then spend a glorious day surrounded by babies white and babies red—screaming babies, laughing babies, fat babies, thin babies: in short—Babies. He gave a prize to what he considered the most beautiful baby, allowed himself to be photographed by the local press holding it in his arms, and then he retired quite blissfully to his shop and villa till the urge came over him to hold another show.

  A strange man Korngold. But I liked him
. He exuded benevolence—it did my jaded heart good to talk to him. It stimulated me to marvel at his naïveté. It is no mean achievement, I have always thought, to love a baby—someone else’s baby, of course. Korngold’s sublimation made a lot of people happy. It oiled the wheels—and God knows, when you look round, the wheels need oiling.

  However, to the anecdote (for this, you must understand, is no more than an anecdote. It has no moral, no meaning):—

  It was three years ago when I last found myself near Birmingham. An old aunt of mine, who lived in Kidderminster, quite suddenly died (thereby reminding us all with a shock that she had been alive), and I was constrained to go to her funeral. When it was all over I boarded a bus for Birmingham, hoping to shake off the clamminess of death with a bout of Korngold’s philanthropy. The old man’s shop was closed, though it was comparatively early on a Saturday morning, so I took a tram through Aston and called at his villa. And there a tired old housekeeper informed me that Korngold was holding a baby show that very day in the Congregational Church Hall along the street.

  Amused at the prospect of attending one of the old man’s love-orgies, I went along to the squat sandstone building. Appropriately enough, on the Wayside Pulpit board outside the Church, were the words: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” I smiled and entered the hall—shaking off, as I went, the sudden recollection I had of the lowering of my aunt’s coffin into the grave (a strange woman, my aunt: it was said in my family that she had been at one time a little rocky in the head—she had had an illusion that she was immortal, she would live for ever . . . however, that is a different story, to be told elsewhere than here).

  When I got into the Church Hall that day three years ago I was, at the same time, amused and slightly frightened. Have you ever seen a horde of babies?—a real horde of them, not only one or two together? A terrible, an awesome sight. Squat bundles of flesh, red and raw-looking, clasped to the bosoms of proud mothers. Babies ranging in age from three months to two years—mothers ranging in age from sixteen to forty. The hall sweated love. What could I—a cynic, a misanthropist, a man too aware of the Worm—what could I do in such an atmosphere but cringe a little and wonder more than ever at people like Barrie and Katherine Mansfield?

  Babies! My God! So many potential saints, murderers, geniuses,­ adulterers. Beethoven was once a baby—his little red bottom was powdered and wrapped in soft nappies (if they did such things in those days). Shakespeare was once a baby, Francesco Cenci was once a baby (I can see that most diabolical of all monsters coo-ing and gurgling and sucking gumlessly at a crust—he who, later in life, had to be scraped with sharp boards he was so horny with disease). Think of Henry VIII at the end of his career: an immense, shapeless thing, so putrid that his courtiers were issued with little nose-clips so that they could approach him. The doors of the palace had to be widened, a special machine had to be constructed to lift the hideous mass from place to place. And think of the same Henry at the beginning of his career—the nurses bending over him and crooning lullabies . . . ! Or think, if you want an image so overwhelming that it hardly bears visualising—think that at probably the same time that most famous of all Babes was lying unconscious beneath the gaze of the Magi, another small bundle was being also wrapped somewhere in swaddling clothes: and possibly a man was saying to a woman—“What shall we call him, dear?”—and she replying: “Let’s call him Judas—that’s a nice name, isn’t it, darling . . .”

  Babies! And in the midst of them, his red face shining with love and exertion, my good, friend Korngold the jeweller. He had in his arms a pair of twins—was beaming at the mother, a huge-bosomed woman with henna-dyed hair. I thought again of my dead aunt—her bleak bluish face staring waxen from the coffin. She also had once been a baby . . .

  As I waited to attract Korngold’s attention I noticed, coming in through a door to my right, a woman with a pram—an extremely old-fashioned pram, it was, high in the carriage and over-ornate in its mouldings. She was an elderly woman—a grandmother, I supposed, rather than a mother; silver-haired, flowingly dressed, proud-looking. But it was not she who attracted my attention: it was the baby she wheeled. I have suggested already that I don’t like babies—they are not beautiful, not in the least bit objectively beautiful. They are red and wrinkled and repulsive. I run away from them—I, the incurable romantic, the man with secret pictures in his heart of Marie Antoinette, Mary of Scotland, Beatrice Cenci and sweet Nellie Gwynn (bitches all, no doubt, if the truth be told). But heavens!—this child in the old-fashioned pram! I forgot everything in looking at it. I forgot where I was. I forgot the yelling red bundles, the dingy Church Hall with its engravings of missionaries round the walls (David Livingstone meeting Stanley—two old wooden babies in kepis, surrounded by natives with tactful loincloths blowing over all the right places). The little face in the pram was the most perfect, the most exquisitely beautiful face I have ever seen. To describe it is impossible. It was something by Botticelli, something by Raphael, something by the incomparable Leonardo. Intolerably beautiful. I couldn’t believe that in that dull hall in that dull town, among those dull dull bundles of red wrinkled flesh, such an angel-thing could be alive. But it was. It was alive, and smiling at me adorably even as I watched it.

  I was brought back to my senses by the ripe booming voice of Korngold.

  “Malpas! My dear Bob Malpas! How wonderful to see you!”

  He was shaking me by the hand, beaming inexorably.

  “Hullo, Heinz,” I murmured. “Was in Kidderminster, burying an aunt of mine—thought I’d run over to see you. I didn’t know you were holding a show, though. I’d better come back when it’s all over. I can amuse myself at a cinema or something this afternoon, then perhaps we can dine this evening.”

  “Of course we’ll dine this evening,” he boomed. “But before we do another thing, we’ll go for a drink right this minute. We’ve just got time before they close. I could do with a drink—it’s hot work in this hall. And I can easily spare a quarter of an hour while my assistants get the little ones classified.”

  I felt myself being led out of the hall. My thoughts were still confused by the vision of the lovely baby in the old-fashioned pram. It seemed to me incredible that Korngold should be standing so close to it and not be in an ecstasy over its beauty. There was no doubt that it, of all babies there, was the only possible prize-winner. Yet he—that baby-fancier, that expert—hardly so much as glanced in the exquisite creature’s direction. No: I am wrong—he did glance, hastily and almost, I thought, slightly embarrassedly. He glanced at the baby and then at the elderly lady. And he gave her a wry quick nod before he turned away with me and took me by the arm out of the hall.

  I went with him in a daze, the vision of that small perfect face taking its place in my heart along with Marie Antoinette, Mary of Scotland, Beatrice Cenci and sweet Nellie Gwynn. And ousting them, what’s more—ousting even the vision of that other face that was haunting me that day: the blue, transparent face of my dead aunt—she who had thought she would live for ever.

  Well, I told you. I told you I was a cynic—a man too aware of the Worm . . .

  I did not stay to have dinner with Korngold that evening. It was all too much for me somehow. There are some things I can’t stand—not big things—very few big things disturb me. But small things—fantastic things.

  I honestly think I was a little bit mad as I travelled back in the train and watched the low Midland country-side go slipping past in the twilight. Quietly, even pleasantly mad. A kind of mild droolling—an innocence and a foolishness, I am sure, was on my face for my fellow-passengers to see. I should, perhaps, have leaned forward in my seat and said to them, in a restrained and dignified way:

  “I have just buried an aunt in Kidderminster, friends. Have you ever been to Kidderminster? Famous, they tell me, for carpets. Heigh-ho. They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. The owl, did I say? To-whoo, to-whoo! My aunt was a curious woman—she used
to say she would live for ever . . .”

  I wrote, I remember, a poem in that train, letting it run through my mind to the rhythm of the carriage. It expressed the rare, thin insanity I felt. I called it A Mad Song, and the recurring burthen of it ran like this:

  Thou’rt mad, thou’rt mad,

  Old straw-i’-the hair—

  My breeches are torn

  And my bum is all bare . . .

  . . . And then, simultaneously with the poem, there would run through my mind the conversation I had with Korngold as we drank our ale that day in the little pub across from the Congregational Hall. Even while he spoke, I remember, the vision of that beautiful baby’s face was before my eyes. As I raised the tankard to my lips it shone out from the frothy surface of the ale—the way the faces do from the tea in the old Chinese legends. It shone out even while that monster of benevolence—he, Korngold, with no trace of cynicism in his German-Scottish heart—boomed out the text of the wise old Teacher:

  “Vanity of vanities—all is vanity and a striving after wind . . .”

  “Perhaps,” he said quietly, in answer to my question, after he had done laughing (it proves that he was no cynic, that he could laugh at it all)—“perhaps I’d better put it up to you in the form of a story. A once-upon-a-time tale—and you can apply it exactly as you want to. Of course, I can’t give that baby the prize—after the first time it would be fantastic, ridiculous. Let me see—I’m now fifty-six—no, fifty-seven. And I began adjudicating at baby shows almost thirty years ago. So you see—however: better to tell you the other way. The story. The once-upon-a-time tale.”

  He drained his glass and ordered another drink for us both. I, with the mystery of his refusal to give the prize to that lovely baby running all through me and commanding my attention, waited impatiently for him to continue.

  “There was, then,” he said, “a woman. You must picture her as a very beautiful woman.” (I had a composite vision suddenly of Marie and Mary and Beatrice and Nellie). “But vain—inordinately vain.” (Bitches all, I remembered, if truth be told). “In course of time she married. She married a very clever man—a biological research chemist. She grew big with child and was delivered of an exquisite babe—the inheritor of her good looks. And behold, all the pride she had hitherto felt in her own beauty she now felt in the beauty of her child. People said they had never seen a lovelier baby, and the woman thrilled as ecstatically as she ever had at a personal compliment. One day she read an announcement of a baby show. She entered her little daughter for it—she was then, I fancy, one year old—and naturally she won first prize: there was plainly no other child to compare with this cherubic one. A little intoxicated by her outstanding success (for the judge had been wildly eulogistic), the woman kept her eyes open for announcements of other baby shows about the country. And the next six months she spent in travelling all over England in a sort of delirium, winning prize after prize. It became, with her, an obsession. It was almost, so to speak, her trade.”