Same evening. I shouldn’t have begun writing to-day. I had almost won. Now I know I can’t win. It will be with me always, always. Jenny isn’t dead. Her body may be, but she isn’t. I can feel her inside me.
They’re going to come down here. I know it. The papers are full of—questions about the head. They’re saying my evidence isn’t complete, I must know more. Did I see Dennis and Jenny together that night?
They’ll come—here. This one thing above all others I’ve fought to avoid. I could weep . . .
20th May. Evening. It’s over, over! But have I won? Or has she? I said I’d submit, but now that I have, what has happened? She or I? Oh, what magnificent power—reaching on after death—the old mortmain of the feudals! And how can one ever combat it? It’s the one tremendous power, the greatest force in life. There’s nothing one can do—nothing, nothing . . .
They came, of course. I knew they would. All that part of my mind that was working on out of sight knew it. And I couldn’t keep the knowledge at bay—not by gardening. What was her phrase?—“amateur gardening.” Yet it was that one phrase that defeated her in the end. Yes—it defeated her. I’m sure I’ve won. Writing here, quite away from it, I can see that clearly.
Let me go back. I’m quite calm—can afford to be. I’ve risen above the forces of stupidity. I can be quite impartial—even about those few terrible moments . . .
Last night, after I’d eaten, I took my pipe and stick and went out for a walk. It was splendid—a magnificent moon, a few clouds slung low over the horizon. As I went up the little hill that overlooks the cottage I could hear the echoes of my own footsteps in the silence. An owl flew by with big, soft-sweeping wings, and as I stopped to look at it I felt myself—how can I say it?—suddenly secure. Yes—secure. It seemed that nothing could hurt me any more, that I’d risen away and beyond all the grotesque trouble of the past few weeks . . . And then, as I stood there, I became aware of something else. The echoes of my own footsteps were going on! Very softly, behind me, lower down the hill. I looked round. Below me, in the brilliant moonlight, I could see the cottage, the curl of smoke from the chimney, but for the rest—nothing. I listened again. Silence . . .
For several minutes I stood without moving, and then I went on up the hill, still listening. And then, suddenly, it seemed that I was no longer alone. I knew, quite definitely, that someone was walking beside me—a little behind, on the right. It was how she always used to walk . . .
I wasn’t afraid. All the time I was telling myself that the inevitable had happened. My mind was taking its own kind of revenge. It was even pleasurable to stand back, as it were, observing and analyzing a subjective state of mind with another and wiser part of that same mind. No. I wasn’t afraid. Yet I didn’t look round. It seemed—oh, I don’t know. I had a sudden vision of myself looking round and seeing something melodramatic and absurd—something from the cheap ghost-stories. Jenny without a head—all pieced together, but without a head. And it was so fantastic that I laughed—out loud, in the silence of the hillside.
And it seemed that that part of me that was imagining her made her say, quite softly and distinctly—
“Why are you laughing?”
“At you,” I said. “At both of us.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Not any more.” And suddenly I thought of Dennis, and added: “Have you been to Dennis?”
“No. I don’t belong to Dennis.”
“But you do to me?—in spite of everything?”
“I am you.”
And then suddenly the stupidity of that conversation broke completely over me, and I laughed again and stopped walking.
“You know what I am doing now, don’t you?” I said, and was surprised to hear how loud my own voice was. I was almost shouting. “Amateur gardening—do you hear? Amateur gardening! . . .”
I turned round quickly and stared. My gaze fell down to the cottage. The hillside was empty.
No. It doesn’t do. Why should one try to write it down at all? It’s all inadequate. There isn’t any game that’s worth the candle . . . Yet I could write on and on—saying nothing, but getting something down. It’s probably the only reason anyone does anything—for the sake of getting something down.
But where was I? Now that’s it’s over and I’m free I find my thoughts rambling away out of control—a sort of delirium almost. Yes—last night . . .
I came home—back to the cottage. The kettle was boiling and I made tea. In some strange way I felt almost light-headed. It seemed I could walk without effort—backwards and forwards in the room a dozen times, enjoying it. I felt that if I wanted to I could jump from wall to wall with the greatest ease—like someone on the moon. I didn’t know what was happening to me—only that I was free, that it didn’t matter any more . . .
How long this mood continued I don’t know. I lost all count of time, didn’t think of looking at the clock. When at last I went up to bed the clouds had come up and covered the moon. I could see only very dimly beneath me the broad shapes of my garden. The lawn to the left, and beyond it the big dark patch I had been digging. Beyond that, to the right, the small bed on which I had been working that day when I seemed to hear Jenny’s voice calling me to tea.
Thinking of her I lit the lamp and, sitting down on the edge of the bed, took her photographs out of my pocket-book. For a long time I sat looking at the heavy smiling lips, the wide nostrils, the exquisite eyes. And that magnificent head was what they were looking for! I tried to picture it as it was at that moment and, as I looked up, saw in the glass that I was smiling. That same smile that I had seen on Dennis’s face during the Fantasie Impromptu . . .
I undressed slowly and with great care. When I got into bed I lay for a moment or two staring up at the ceiling, and then I turned out the light and closed my eyes.
Did I fall asleep? How do I know? It would be as wise to ask, was I asleep on the hillside? All I know is that in the midst of that feeling of light-headedness there came the realisation of a warmth beside me in the bed. How could I fail to recognise it?
“Is that you, Jenny?” I asked softly.
“Yes. Are you surprised?”
“No. Not surprised. Was it you on the hillside?”
I remember clearly every word—every intonation. It seemed important somehow that I should speak distinctly, that I should miss no syllable of her replies.
“Yes,” she said. And then suddenly I seemed to see her lying there—smiling heavily, her red lips slightly parted, her head thrown back and turned towards me.
“I was never anything else but part of you, David,” she said, and I remember nodding.
“I know. I had to force myself not to see you as you really were, ever. That was the one important thing I had to remember all the time.”
She never stopped smiling.
“And did you succeed?”
“No. You were too strong for me.”
“Was I, David?” And the smile deepened. I remember quite distinctly then turning further towards her and allowing myself to smile too.
“I’ve finished with you now, Jenny,” I said. “I’ve had the sign. I know I’m finished with you.”
“Are you sure? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill you.” And I stretched out my hands and got her by the throat. She did not move—only half-closed her eyes and went on smiling. I began to tighten my grip. This was why I had smiled as I looked at her photograph—Dennis’s smile, the smile of wanting to touch finally and irrevocably . . .
Her throat was warm. I could feel the beat of the blood as my fingers sank into the flesh. And suddenly a sort of panic seized me and I released my right hand for something to strike with—the lamp by the bedside, anything. My fingers closed on a smooth, polished handle—the wood-axe, the one I had seized up that day when the lame man came to the cottage. I raised it and struck again and again. She went on smiling.
And suddenly I opened my eyes. It was daylight. From below c
ame the sound of someone hammering on the door. I jumped out of bed and threw on a dressing-gown . . .
On the step stood a plain-clothes detective and two policemen. They said they had a warrant and wanted to search the house. The detective kept looking at me suspiciously. He was pompous and heavy—blown up with a sense of duty.
What did I care? It was different now. They couldn’t touch me. I was beyond them—beyond all the forces of stupidity. What did even my garden matter now? Let them trample over it. I had won—I knew I had won.
They left me with one of the policemen and went over the house. I could hear them in the bedroom discussing Jenny’s photograph. I lit a cigarette and offered one to the policeman, but he refused surlily.
The detective came down and glared at me, then he went out into the garden. In two minutes he was back.
“David Baxter,” he said pompously, in a low, clumsy voice—“the missing head is buried under the chrysanthemums.”
I smiled. Damned fool! One can’t cope with stupidity. They were dahlias.
The Little House
I hate money. I don’t hate it for itself, but for what it does to people. Perhaps I have grown into this attitude because I have been working for fifteen years as an insurance agent. In this business things are valuated in terms of money that never ought to be valuated so. Maybe I am over-sentimental—people have always told me I am sentimental and expect far too much of folk. Well, that may be no more than something in my blood: I am a Scotsman—of Highland extraction originally. (The Campbells of Argyll were my forebears, but of course many of them—my family among them—migrated to the Lowlands at the time of the Lorn Wars, when Montrose’s men sacked Inverary—so thank Heaven at any rate that my immediate ancestors were not concerned in the Massacre of Glencoe!)
However, that is by the way. I soon had much of the sentiment (perhaps sensibility is a better word?)—I soon had it knocked forcibly out of me when I went into the insurance business. To begin with, in that world you have tables—long lists—of terms in which, in a sense, your Company is preparing to lay wagers on the probable length of a man’s life! Your Company, so to speak, bets a man so much that he will not lose a leg or an eye in an accident, or that his house will not burn down, or that he will not run over an old lady in his motor car. Perhaps the Company loses the bet (though not very often), and in this case it assesses the value in money of the said loss of leg, and pays up after the necessary forms have been filled in. So you can see that after a time you get into a way of thinking that it is not very human. A cynical point of view.
The first time this attitude began really to upset me was when I was working at the counter of our Head Office in the days before I went on the road as an agent. It was my job to interview people who called, and to help them to fill in proposal and claim forms. I remember a ruddy-faced pleasant-looking man came in one day. He was laden down with doctors’ certificates and so on. He was a stone-worker, and his employer was insured under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, indemnifying him against injury or sickness among his employees. This man who came in had silicosis, and so was entitled, under his master’s policy, to a weekly allowance from my Company. I paid him the money—something like 35/– it was, and thereafter every week he came in and filled up his form. Gradually the ruddiness left his cheeks—he began to look frail, all eaten away. Eventually he could hardly walk through the big revolving door—and his thin white hand, as he signed the form I filled up for him, used to tremble and shiver. Then one day he did not come at all: his wife came instead—a little sweet-faced woman, very quiet. For a few weeks she continued to come in, then suddenly one day she was dressed in black, and her face seemed even paler than usual. She collected the last payment. We took the file away, stamped it “Closed,” and put it in a box. And that was the end of that—I never saw her again.
The idea distressed me: the whole implication that the man’s life was a kind of commodity, you see. It had an assessed value—in terms of hard cash. I didn’t like it at all.
So there—that was how I felt. That was how I came to begin to hate money. But the illustration I want to give you of the way the desire for money twists people’s whole attitude to things has nothing really to do with insurance—at least, not directly. I am not a writing man, you know, but only an ordinary individual putting down some random thoughts; and so I have been rambling through an introduction instead of driving straight to the point. However, in a sense it is all relevant.
Ugh! When I think of this business of the Little House I want to run away and hide my head! However—it may not affect you that way: it’s all a question of point of view.
Let me begin, then, by telling you that all this happened a number of years ago. I, being a Scotsman (and therefore calculated to be able to deal with other Scotsmen better than a Sassenach could), had been transferred by my Company to the job of travelling agent in the Fife and Forfar districts. I liked the work, I must say—it was good to get about and see the country. I was kept fairly busy too, and since there was a commission percentage on most of my work (and I being on the point of getting married and so needing money), I welcomed this fact most heartily.
I don’t know if you know the little town of Monteviot? It’s a small seaside resort on the East coast of Scotland not far from Dundee. Rather quiet at most times of the year, but suddenly busy during the Dundee holiday week, when all at once it fills up with hundreds of workers from the City, all intent on having a good time. There are few attractions beyond some golf links and a long expanse of lovely sands for the children, with the big icy breakers of the North Sea rolling continually over them. But it is a place to go—it’s the seaside.
As it happened I had some important business calls in and around Monteviot, and, on this particular occasion I am writing about, I had to go there for at least two days, in order to get through all this work I had. Unfortunately it was the time of the Dundee Fair Week—the town, normally full of available hotels and boarding-houses, would be crammed to overflowing. I would, I decided, as I motored along the flat coast road, be lucky if I got accommodation at all.
A few miles from the town, as I was motoring calmly along admiring the scenery, my car suddenly jerked, coughed stupidly and then chugged to a standstill. I got out and heaved the bonnet up. Nothing serious, I could see—some carburetor trouble I could easily repair. So I got out my tools and my little motor repair manual (I always carried one—in a travelling job like mine you never knew what sort of trouble you were liable to encounter), and calmly and determinedly set to work.
I mention this accident for only one reason: it held up my progress and made it inevitable that I arrived in Monteviot just on dusk—a time, Heaven knows, when all the boarding-houses were likely to be full to the attics. I felt very down-hearted indeed as I drove along the esplanade road. It was a beautiful night, with the tide far out and the mauve sky reflecting exquisitely from the hundreds of yards of damp flat sand. But I had no eye for such things. I was looking not out to sea, but inland—scanning the To Let signs.
I put my car in a garage and set off on a systematic perambulation. I tried one or two of the better-known hotels, but the proprietors only laughed in my face. “Man,” they said, “dae ye no’ ken? It’s Fair Week. There’s folk in the baths, folk on the landings—there’s folk even in the coal cellars. Ye’ll be lucky if ye find a set-down the nicht.”
I cursed my luck and set off on my wanderings again. I tried the boarding-houses, but there they were even more ribald at the idea of giving me accommodation than the hotel people had been. I fell into a mood of hopelessness and despair and started thinking in terms of getting my car out of the garage again, parking it in some quiet corner of the beach, and somehow curling myself up in it to spend the night. But this idea I was far from relishing: I had a big deal to pull off rather early the next morning, and felt that it was important to get a full night’s rest on a bed.
I found myself finally in a small, rather squalid street on the Nort
h side of the town. Right at the end of it, standing isolatedly in a tiny withered garden, and surrounded by a fence all ramshackle and, in patches, decayed, was a small detached villa with a Rooms sign in the front window. As a last resort I pushed open the creaking gate and went up the path.
The door was opened by a sour, acrimonious man in shirt-sleeves.
“Good evening,” I said. “I wonder—have you any accommodation? Anything—it doesn’t matter what it is.”
He looked at me surlily.
“We’re full up,” he grunted.
“Oh surely there’s something,” I said, in my most wheedling tones. “Even if it’s only an old sofa on a landing.”
“Not an inch,” he replied.
I was on the point of retiring when a thin drooping woman made her appearance at the end of the corridor behind him.
“What is it, Cecil?” she called, in a shrill, querulous voice. “Who is it? What does he want?”
(The idea of the man’s name being Cecil struck me as grotesque. He was so sour, so yellow in the face—so utterly misanthropic.)
“It’s a man for a bed,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve told him we’re full.”
She shuffled along the corridor till she stood beside him. Then she peered at me closely out of small, hard, red-rimmed eyes.
“Aye, we’re full,” she grunted at last. “It’s Fair Week. Ye were daft to leave it so late.”
“I couldn’t help it,” I said. “I’m here on business—I’m not with the Fair folk, worse luck. Could you not find me some corner?—I’m dead beat with looking for a bed.”
She shook her head slowly and was, I thought, on the point of refusing point blank. But suddenly a queer, greedy, cunning look came into her eyes.
“How much were you thinking of paying?” she said.
“Oh—anything reasonable. What’s your usual charge?”
She peered at me again. Then she took her husband’s arm and led him back into the passage a little way. She leaned close to him and whispered with a kind of dry, horrid earnestness. He puckered up his eyes and shook his head. But she went on and on at him, and eventually I could see that he was conceding to whatever plan she was putting forward.
The Other Passenger Page 17