The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  Miller rang me up one evening. He was jocose—I thought at first he had had too much to drink. I accused him of that and he immediately became ponderously and jovially indignant.

  “My dear Spenser,” I heard his reedy voice exclaim, “there can’t be any mistake. I’m not the sort of chap to go about imagining things. I asked you if you wanted a drink and you shook your head. You had a whisky and soda in front of you, half finished.”

  “What time was it?” I asked, irritated by his persistence.

  “Just before closing time—about a quarter to ten. I went in with Jameson. I said to him ‘There’s Spenser’—I remember it distinctly, ’cos he commented that he hadn’t seen you since he’d met you and Margaret at Peter Ellacott’s party last month.”

  I was in no mood to listen to him going on and on. I repeated that I hadn’t been at the Six Bells the night before. He laughed.

  “Nonsense, my dear Aubrey—I can’t be wrong,” he cried. “You’ve been overworking, old man. You must have started playing your wretched piano, then got up by sheer force of habit and slipped out to have one before they closed. What is it they call it?—amnesia . . .”

  I hung up on him finally. And I went thoughtfully over to my writing desk and took up a letter I had had a few days before—from Helen Bannerman, Margaret’s friend. I found the passage I wanted and read it slowly to myself several times.

  “. . . I didn’t know you ever came to this part of the country—I mean, you’ve never even mentioned that you knew my corner of Wiltshire. But there you were, as large as life, coming out of the Post Office. Of course, I pulled up the car immediately and went back, but you must have slipped round the corner and got off in that little two-seater of yours mighty quick—there simply wasn’t a sign of you. I asked the old lass in the shop if a man had been in and she said oh yes, you’d bought some tobacco: and when she said it was an ounce of Honeymead I knew it simply must be you. Besides, you were wearing that ridiculous velvet hat you favour—I couldn’t mistake it. I must say it’s a bit thick for you not to have called—I expect you were fantastically busy as usual, but all the same there are the fundamental courtesies . . .”

  I knew in my heart as I stood there that evening that the day before I received this letter I had been thinking I needed a rest. I had thought that if a few days in the country could have been possible . . . But I knew it was out of the question. I had gone stoically on with my work. As far as I could calculate it, at the time Helen Bannerman must have thought she had seen me, I was in a bus somewhere between Knightsbridge and the Marble Arch. Miller’s talk of amnesia came into my mind. I had a wild notion to try to trace the bus and ask the conductor if he remembered me. But it would have been absurd. And there wasn’t any doubt—I could never have had the time to get down to Wiltshire—I had been at an orchestral rehearsal that very morning of the supposed encounter . . .

  And then—the scene in the Underground. And Miller’s strained, incredulous voice:

  “Spenser—she’s pointing at you! This is fantastic, man—she’s pointing at you! . . .”

  Yes, fantastic. Fantastic as I walked home that night through the empty streets. All about me, it seemed, there were little evil whispering voices. I felt ill—I found myself shivering. Fantastic that I kept glancing over my shoulder, fantastic that I strained my ears to hear other footsteps than my own in the long quiet street. Fantastic, fantastic.

  I mounted the stairs to my flat, slowly, with a year between each step. I was monstrously weary. There was no reality in me—it was all fantastic. The thirty-five years were fantastic, the appalling effort to get anywhere, to do anything, to break away. I saw the weeping boy standing out in the cold, the cairngorm on my aunt’s black dress. I saw my father’s silhouette in the frame of the door, I saw the yellow hair fall over his eyes as we packed his books on that last day. My father and my mother—all over with them now, they were gone. The shadows coming together and drifting apart.

  And as I mounted that dark stairway, I remember, in the few moments that it took me, there came back, suddenly and sweetly and with infinite poignancy, my first small love affair. Irrelevant—fantastically irrelevant. Part of my weariness and the weight of the years and all that was in me over which I had no control . . . I was fifteen—it was before I left Scotland, while I was still at school. Her name was Ellen. We walked—endlessly, with long embarrassed gaps in our conversation. Sometimes, as we walked, I put my arm round her waist—timidly, and after much debate with myself. Once, when we were resting on the grass after a long evening walk, I began to caress her and fondle her. She did not resist and I pulled her gently back until we were lying together, very close, with my arm under her neck. We were quite still and my heart was beating, and I saw, as I looked at her in the twilight, that her eyes were wide open and shining and her lips were parted. And I found myself, I remember, wanting to cry—to put my face against hers and cry, very softly and without passion or effort . . .

  “For he is like to something I remember,

  A great while since, a long long time ago . . .”

  We go. Somehow we go. And with us goes always that other silent Passenger.

  I reached the top of the stairs. I felt in my pocket for the latch-key as I went along the corridor. And then I stood still, my hand outstretched to the door.

  Softly, from inside my flat, there came to my ears the sound of a piano. Not my piano—the sound of an old piano: but the music was Chopin—the Fantasia on which I was, in those days, so seriously working.

  I remember I smiled wryly—I was tired, monumentally tired. I opened the door and switched on the light. There was no fear in me—only an infinite resignation. I knew what I would see—I knew, without hatred, that the old enemy was there—that from now on there could be no peace between us.

  He was sitting at my piano—for a moment shadowy as he played. But he rose when I entered, and the music stopped. He advanced, smiling a little. He was, unmistakably, as I had supposed him to be. Dark, thin, and with narrow temples—it was what they call “a sensitive face . . .”

  Nowadays i have none of that bland, elated remoteness. Not any more. There’s only a quiet rage nowadays—I know what has to be done. Too much has happened, you see—there’s been too much to fight against. Too monstrous an accumulation of sheer things. At every turn I’ve been defeated—defeated over my music, my friends, defeated over Margaret. And defeated hopelessly as I stood in the November frost sniffing the air, with the shrill screams of the children in my ears and the sagging, hideous effigy aflame before me.

  I realise suddenly, as I write, that I am speaking as if it were all over and a hundred years gone by. And it was only a few days ago. And it is not all over—not yet—not quite . . .

  I looked over at my piano—the Winged Victory. I look up at the portrait of Chopin and think of him, haunted too, in his cell at Valdemosa. I look at the Blake engravings—the book of Job. “Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward,” I remember.

  It had been too much of an effort, too great a struggle. I wonder—has my disease been that I have had too deep a grudge?—that I haven’t fitted in?—have been, in secret, a chronic enemy of society? But what the hell! It’s been a matter of keeping going—of being out of things and fighting to get in them again and keep in them. The only thing you have is yourself, and there you are, just you yourself, and not one other thing caring a damn. It hasn’t been circumstances—one rises above circumstances. You just stand there—it’s like being God. And suddenly you have a sort of terror, because there isn’t anything to show. In the old days, when I was beginning, I used to walk along the Strand or Oxford Street and look at the people and think: Not one of you knows about me—not one of you knows what it was like emptying out that closet-bucket or standing with my fingers frozen in the darkness outside the house. But that was me—and this is me . . . And I could have gone and smashed their heads in with an axe, because I wanted them to know about me . . .

  It all tie
s up. I stretch out my hand—to find a matchbox, to grope in a fog, to open a door. It all ties up.

  And you, I suppose, would put me in a text-book. You would have a label on my forehead. You would have me on a statistic sheet, with the size of my collar, the shape of my brow, the state of my digestion. You would want a cause. You always want a cause—you want a cause for war, a cause for peace, a cause for unemployment, a cause for juvenile delinquency and the spread of venereal disease. But what’s a cause?—and where does it begin or end?. . .

  All I know is that there are people and things and there’s movement. I don’t believe there’s direction—there’s only movement. And I’m a person and I’ve had to go on being a person.

  “The sparks fly upward . . .” I think of that sagging figure nailed to the crosspiece—and only I with any notion of what was behind the leering mask.

  I heard of him again—I saw him again. For these four years I have seen him and heard him. He has walked beside me quietly in the darkness. He has sat with me here in my room, he has silently pulled at my sleeve at significant moments. I have been aware of him with me at the piano on concert platforms. As I fluffed my music, half-weeping, I have heard his voice whisper in my ear: “John Spenser—pianist . . .” I have, on the point of saying something, looked up—to find him silently regarding me, the quiet and damnable smile on his lips: and my words have remained unsaid. He has gone in my place—he has done, in a hellishly logical way, the things I have secretly wanted to do: and, having done them, has destroyed them utterly for me forever.

  I have hated him till I have sobbed my hatred out loud—yet I have, at the height of the agony, looked up for him, expected him: and have secretly rejoiced at finding him.

  For me, now, there is nothing left in the wake of his destruction. Peer goes home from his adventures. The sun shines on an empty house.

  I know what has to be done. An evening’s writing, for the sake of getting it all down somehow, and then—I know what has to be done. On the desk before me—my father’s desk—the razor is ready. It too, when it is open, is a small Winged Victory . . .

  THE GREAT GROMBOOLIAN PLAIN

  How long ago since I met Margaret? A month?—ten years?—yesterday?

  In actual fact, I find, looking at my diary, it was on the 15th of May, 19—, six years ago. It was at Mrs. Wheeler’s house—Rosalind Wheeler, the first friend I had when I came to London. I had met Margaret’s father before, of course—we had done some concerts together, and a half a dozen broadcasts. A taciturn, elegant man, I found him, but a fine artist.

  Mrs. Wheeler was giving us tea in her house at Notting Hill. She was, in a mild and harmless way, something of a lion hunter. She introduced people by telling you immediately what they did. “This is Mr. So-and-So, Aubrey. He writes, you know. Aubrey is Aubrey Spenser, the pianist, Mr. So-and-So—I am sure you two will have a lot to talk to each other about . . .”

  Introduced like that, there never was anything to talk about. Conversation at Rosalind’s tea-parties was as dull as anything Letchworth or Welwyn ever produced. But that never mattered—Rosalind had more than enough to say for all her guests.

  “This is Margaret du Parc, Aubrey,” said Rosalind. “She plays the violin—like her father. Or do you professional musicians prefer to say fiddle? I never know. Anyway, dears, you two are bound to have lots to say to each other, so I’ll leave you to it. I see that dear Sylvia Ellacott has arrived—Peter’s sister. She sculpts, you know . . .”

  Margaret and I smiled wanly at each other. We went out into the garden and sat down in a couple of deck-chairs. Behind her, I remember, was a fuchsia bush, the little artificial-looking flowers bobbing up and down in the slight breeze.

  Within six months we were engaged to be married. Rosalind was delighted—to think that it was she who had brought us together! It was at her house we had met! At one of her parties!

  “I knew you had lots to say to each other,” she cried. “I remember distinctly saying so when I first introduced you . . .”

  Now Margaret is no more than a photograph of the de Laszlo painting of her on the wall of my room. There is no bitterness about it—as I said, when I started writing, I can hardly remember. Only the facts. Perhaps (and in admitting this to myself I may, subtly, be touching the very keynote of this whole fantastic thing)—perhaps there was, secretly, from the beginning, a reluctance—a knowledge that between us there never could be anything satisfactory and permanent. It was an elaborate and lovely pretence—a conceit, in the old Elizabethan sense. It was another way of being successful: Spenser, the shivering boy in the cold, the illegitimate son of a drunken Scottish dominie and a servant girl—and the fiancé of the daughter of Georges du Parc, the violinist­.

  Yes, I knew that all the time, I suppose—or I tell myself I did. I don’t know—I don’t know anything at all any more. Like the expanding book-cases in the advertisements—it’s all always complete but never completed . . .

  We went one summer to St. Ives for a month—Georges, Margaret, myself and Helen Bannerman. We had a house just outside the town, overlooking the smaller of the two bays. To reach the shops you had to go through a labyrinth of small cobbled streets with crooked houses, some with nets hung out to dry on the sills. The weather was windy and beautiful most of the time, with enormous clouds lolloping over the sky like huge Dr. Johnson wigs and a pale green sea (to quote Helen) like a slightly naughty lady coquettishly pulling back the white frills of her petticoats from shining tawny legs. It was like holidaying in a water-colour exhibition, again as Helen said.

  “Where is Zennor?” I remember Margaret asking, about a week after our arrival. “Is it far away?”

  “Not very,” said Helen. “ ‘A limb of a walk,’ according to Mrs. Tregerthen—but she has very short limbs. Three or four miles I should say.”

  “I’d like to go there. That’s where D. H. Lawrence had his cottage, you know. People are very unexpected, aren’t they,” she added. “One would have thought of something more luscious than Cornwall for Lawrence. I wonder if anyone reads him nowadays?—all that talk about Dark Gods of the Loins . . .”

  “I think he was really rather a dreadful man,” said Helen with a mock shudder.

  “I’m not so sure about Cornwall,” I remember I said slowly at this point. “I think it was Lawrence’s country—the country of his whole generation and attitude. You can see it in his face. Any picture of Lawrence is just like a map of Cornwall. That was his spirit too—rather arid.”

  “Arid?” smiled Margaret. “Well, that’s a new one at least. I should have thought arid was the last epithet one could apply to Lawrence.”

  “Yes, the last,” I said. “After all the rest, the last. Arid.”

  Margaret looked at me curiously.

  “Anyway,” she said with a little laugh, “we can walk over to Zennor someday and have a look at it. Apparently there’s an inn called The Tinner’s Arms where he lived for a bit. Think of it—The Tinner’s Arms! It takes all the romance away.”

  “Lawrence would soon have put it back,” I said drily. “He spent his life putting the romance back over things like The Tinner’s Arms . . .”

  No, the holiday was not a success. I was depressed by the Cornish landscape—the low dry fields with their stone dykes, the bare hills, the derelict towers of the old tin mines. Only the sea I loved—I would sit for hours simply staring at the vast bulk of the water, its magnificent blue, the pure white of the fretting foam. I used to long for a storm—an immense, violent storm, so that I could run out on the rocks and be buffeted by the wind and bathed by the lashing spray. Sometimes, in the evenings, I stood in the garden of our house with Margaret, watching the slow sunsets—the dead, smoky disc sinking behind the horizon and then the changing and fading pastels, mauve and pale green merging to purple . . . and I would debate whether I should tell her, in those uncomfortable silences that fell between us, about the figure I was aware of all the time at my elbow.

  I knew what he wa
nted: I knew, as a small hard fact, what he would make me do. But it was always a matter of putting things off. Impossible not to linger. Because, after all—

  No, never mind. It all ties up. One stretches out a hand . . .

  “She has gone to the great Gromboolian Plain,

  And we probably never shall meet again . . .”

  Strange. I feel a little light-headed. Beyond it all. Facts—it reduces itself to facts. I could make, almost, a catalogue of facts. Speculation is no longer possible. I no longer think in terms of things like amnesia. How should I explain it? How should I care if he is subjective or objective? You who classify, who label—that must be your task.

  It is your task to say:

  (1) A woman on an Underground platform has an hallucination that she sees a man throwing himself under a train. It is possible that she was in some sort of telepathic sympathy with the mind of the subject, John Aubrey Spenser.

  (2) A man Miller imagines that he sees the subject (John Aubrey Spenser, aforementioned) in a public house, whereas the subject was, to his own certain knowledge, somewhere else altogether at that established time.

  (3) A woman Bannerman supposes that she sees the subject one hundred and fifty miles from where, at that alleged moment, he is. The possibility again of some sort of telepathic sympathy between Bannerman and the panel, causing the former—an other­wise healthy and balanced woman—to experience a subjective hallucination (see Dunkelhaus on Hallucinations, Appendix II, p. 649) . . .

  (4) The panel Spenser—a neurotic type—has the constant sense of another self controlling him and motivating him. The hallucination is so powerful that he contends that this other self has a fleshy and objective existence. He even contends that he has touched this Other Self—he has, he says, had his hands (his strong-fingered pianist’s hands) round the throat of this Other Self: he has, while the Other Self smiled most damnably strangled him in this way to death, thereafter causing the body to be burned . . .

  (5) The panel, Spenser, erstwhile pianist, is therefore mad . . .