That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins’s face. He could not – though he knew how perilous a sound was – he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon the instant, and the next moment he was half-way through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bedclothes.

  Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed; and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed for the rest of the night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he would have been a day before, and the three of them held a very long consultation in the Professor’s room. At the end of it the Colonel left the hotel door carrying a small object between his finger and thumb, which he cast as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it. Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from the back premises of the Globe.

  Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and visitors at the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The Professor was somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of the reputation of a troubled house.

  There is not much question as to what would have happened to Parkins if the Colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have fallen out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done than frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it save the bed-clothes of which it had made itself a body. The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

  There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

  * * *

  1 Mr Rogers was wrong, vide Dombey and Son, Chapter xii.

  MARY POSTGATE

  Rudyard Kipling

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, at the age of forty-two. Born in Bombay, he was brought back to England in 1870. His earliest works include The Jungle Book, Just So Stories and Kim. His son John died in the First World War, leading Kipling to take a role with the Imperial War Graves Commission. He was approached to be Poet Laureate, and to accept a knighthood, but delined both. He died two days before King George V, his ashes buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets’ Corner. The American poet and critic Randall Jarrell observed that “few men have written this many stories of this much merit … very few have written more and better stories.”

  Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was “thoroughly conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.” Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed care she did not exhaust her attendant’s vitality. On the contrary, she gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler’s tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young, and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end, “How interesting!” or “How shocking!” as the case might be, and never again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which “did not dwell on these things.” She was, too, a treasure at domestic accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books, loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector’s or the Doctor’s table at half an hour’s notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting everything would have been swift to resent what they called “patronage”; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss Fowler’s nominee when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and came out of six months” fort-nightly meetings equally respected by all the cliques.

  And when Fate threw Miss Fowler’s nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven, on Miss Fowler’s hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business of education as practiced in private and public schools. She checked printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and House masters, matrons, nurses, and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by calling her “Gatepost,” “Posty,” or “Packthread,” by thumping her between her narrow shoulders or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air at a stiff-necked shamble very like a camel’s. Later on he filled the house with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes and dislikes, and the limitations of “you women,” reducing Mary to tears of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and garments; always his butt and his slave.

  And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in London; when his greeting had changed from “Hullo, Postey, you old beast,” to “Mornin, Packthread” there came a war which, unlike all wars that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As she said to Miss Fowler, it was “most vexatious.” It took the Rector’s son who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the Colonel’s nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs. Grant’s son who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.

  “He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,” said Miss Fowler. So Mary got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of her establishment – two gardeners and an old man, sixty – that those who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape, the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener’s cottage. The cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited scene with Miss Fowler, and took the house-maid with her. Miss Fowler gazetted Nellie, Cheape’s seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant post; Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook with occasional cleaning bouts; and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.

  Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always looked facts in the face, said, “He must have it. The chances are he won’t live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy –”

  Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of machines. He gave Mary such a
chart.

  “And you’d better study it, Postey,” he said. “You’ll be seeing a lot of ’em soon.” So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.

  “You look more or less like a human being,” he said in his new Service voice. “You must have had a brain at some time in your past. What have you done with it? Where’d you keep it? A sheep would know more than you do, Postey. You’re lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can, you dowey old cassowary.”

  “I suppose that’s how your superior officer talks to you?” said Miss Fowler from her chair.

  “But Postey doesn’t mind,” Wynn replied. “Do you, Packthread?”

  “Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you come,” she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.

  In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished “rolling” (whatever that might be) and gone on from a “taxi” to a machine more or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys, alighted on Vegg’s Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler’s bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at the biplane. Mary observed that “it smelt very badly.”

  “Postey, I believe you think with your nose,” said Wynn. “I know you don’t with your mind. Now, what type’s that?”

  “I’ll go and get the chart,” said Mary.

  “You’re hopeless! You haven’t the mental capacity of a white mouse,” he cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.

  “Ah!” said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. “Wait till our Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it’s much safer than in the trenches.”

  “I wonder,” said Miss Fowler. “Tell Cheape to come and tow me home again.”

  “It’s all downhill. I can do it,” said Mary, “if you put the brake on.” She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.

  “Now, be careful you aren’t heated and catch a chill,” said overdressed Miss Fowler.

  “Nothing makes me perspire,” said Mary. As she bumped the chair under the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead. Miss Fowler glanced at her.

  “What do you ever think of, Mary?” she demanded suddenly.

  “Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings – as thick as we can make them.”

  “Yes. But I mean the things that women think about Here you are, more than forty –”

  “Forty-four,” said truthful Mary.

  “Well?”

  “Well?” Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.

  “And you’ve been with me ten years now.”

  “Let’s see,” said Mary. “Wynn was eleven when he came. He’s twenty now, and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.”

  “Eleven! And you’ve never told me anything that matters in all that while. Looking back, it seems to me that I’ve done all the talking.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven’t the mind. Let me take your hat.”

  Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped stick on the tiled hall floor. “Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?”

  Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. “No,” she said after consideration. “I don’t imagine I ever should. But I’ve no imagination, I’m afraid.”

  She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o’clock glass of Contrexeville.

  That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn’s flying chariot visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.

  That evening at six o’clock there came an announcement in an official envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to Miss Fowler.

  “I never expected anything else,” said Miss Fowler; “but I’m sorry it happened before he had done anything.”

  The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s a great pity he didn’t die in action after he had killed somebody.”

  “He was killed instantly. That’s one comfort,” Miss Fowler went on.

  “But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once – whatever happens to the tanks,” quoted Mary.

  The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently, “But why can’t we cry, Mary?” and herself replying, “There’s nothing to cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs. Grant’s son did.”

  “And when he died, she came and cried all the morning,” said Miss Fowler. “This only makes me feel tired – terribly tired. Will you help me to bed, please, Mary? – And I think I’d like the hot-water bottle.”

  So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.

  “I believe,” said Miss Fowler suddenly, “that old people and young people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged feel it most.”

  “I expect that’s true,” said Mary, rising. “I’m going to put away the things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?”

  “Certainly not,” said Miss Fowler. “Except, of course, at the funeral. I can’t go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here. What a blessing it didn’t happen at Salisbury!”

  Every one, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world where bodies were in the habit of being despatched by all sorts of conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.

  “You’re Miss Postgate, aren’t you?” said one, “Fowler told me about you. He was a good chap – a first-class fellow – a great loss.”

  “Great loss!” growled his companion. “We’re all awfully sorry.”

  “How high did he fall from?” Mary whispered.

  “Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn’t he? You were up that day, Monkey?”

  “All of that,” the other child replied. “My bar made three thousand, and I wasn’t as high as him by a lot.”

  “Then that’s all right,” said Mary. “Thank you very much.”

  They moved away as Mrs. Grant flung herself weeping on Mary’s flat chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, “I know how it feels! I know how it feels!”

  “But both his parents are dead,” Mary returned, as she fended her off. “Perhaps they’ve all met by now,” she added vaguely as she escaped towards the coach.

  “I’ve thought of that too,” wailed Mrs. Grant; “but then he’ll be practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!”

  Mary faithfully reported every detail of the ceremony to Miss Fowler, who, when she described Mrs. Grant’s outburst, laughed aloud.

  “Oh, how Wynn would have enjoyed it! He was always utterly unreliable at funerals. D’you remember –” And they talked of him again, each piecing out the other’s gaps. “And now,” said Miss Fowler, “we’ll pull up the blinds and we’ll have a general tidy. That always does us good. Have you seen to Wynn’s things?”

  “Everything – since he first came,” said Mary, “He was never destructive – even
with his toys.”

  They faced that neat room.

  “It can’t be natural not to cry,” Mary said at last. “I’m so afraid you’ll have a reaction.”

  “As I told you, we old people slip from under the stroke. It’s you I’m afraid for. Have you cried yet?”

  “I can’t. It only makes me angry with the Germans.”

  “That’s sheer waste of vitality,” said Miss Fowler. “We must live till the war’s finished.” She opened a full wardrobe. “Now, I’ve been thinking things over. This is my plan. All his civilian clothes can be given away – Belgian refugees, and so on.”

  Mary nodded. “Boots, collars, and gloves?”

  “They came back yesterday with his Flying Corps clothes” – Mary pointed to a roll on the little iron bed.

  “Ah, but keep his Service things. Some one may be glad of them later. Do you remember his sizes?”

  “Five feet eight and a half; thirty-six inches round the chest. But he told me he’s just put on an inch and a half. I’ll mark it on a label and tie it on his sleeping-bag.”

  “So that disposes of that,” said Miss Fowler, tapping the palm of one hand with the ringed third finger of the other. “What a waste it all is! We’ll get his old school trunk to-morrow and pack his civilian clothes.”

  “And the rest?” said Mary. “His books and pictures and the games and the toys – and – and the rest?”

  “My plan is to burn every single thing,” said Miss Fowler. “Then we shall know where they are and no one can handle them afterwards. What do you think?”

  “I think that would be much the best,” said Mary. “But there’s such a lot of them.”

  “We’ll burn them in the destructor,” said Miss Fowler.

  This was an open-air furnace for the consumption of refuse; a little circular four-foot tower of pierced brick over an iron grating. Miss Fowler had noticed the design in a gardening journal years ago, and had had it built at the bottom of the garden. It suited her tidy soul, for it saved unsightly rubbish-heaps and the ashes lightened the stiff clay soil.