Deliverance

by L. A. G. Strong

  The engine of the train was called Bolitho, and that was a good omen too, a Cornish name to carry him into Cornwall. There was only one other person in the compartment, a farming type of woman with her basket, on her way home from market. Georgie stared with awe and joy as the train made its way delicately out upon the tall, noble, striding bridge across the Tamar, with its vista of scowling dockyards on the one side, and, up-river, woods and mottled hills that rose to the hazy castellated heights of Dartmoor: but they were all too soon across the bridge, and, as the train wound its way past wooded creeks and among small tilted fields, he felt a faint surprise and disappointment that Cornwall should not be more dramatically unlike Devon.

  The farm woman got out at an early station, and Georgie was left alone for the rest of his journey. Trelithrick was by no means impressive at first sight, and did not look as if it would yield much more to later inspection. A narrow, dusty street straggled in a half-hearted way from the station towards a forbidding granite building at the top of a slope. Walking along it—there did not seem to be anywhere else to go—Georgie found, less than half-way up, the establishment he was looking for.

  For so small a town, Burngullow’s was a decidedly large Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Drapers and Outfitters. The outside of the shop had been painted in a curiously dull and depressing shade of green, obviously much faded, with the proprietor’s name in peeling gilt over the doorway. As Georgie arrived, a dismal looking and shabby youth in a green baize apron emerged and started to put up the shutters, punctuating his efforts with an adenoidal sniff.

  Georgie walked into the shop. Directly opposite the door, a middle-aged lady was seated in a high glass cage. Her forehead was wrinkled: and she took not the least notice of Georgie, but seemed to be engaged in mathematical operations of the deepest complexity.

  There was no one else in the shop. Georgie looked about him. Beside a heap of ladies’ bonnets, piled high on a counter, stood a cane bottomed chair. His hat in one hand, the brown paper parcel which comprised his luggage in the other, Georgie went to the chair and sat down to await instructions.

  The place did not look prosperous, even to Georgie’s inexperienced eyes. Past the bonnets hung a row of men’s ready-made suits, with which he could not help favourably comparing his own. They had an odd, square-cut look, and the cloth seemed coarse and stiff. Everything Georgie could see had an old fashioned, countrified air: and there was precious little on the shelves and pegs. The counter beside him had dust in the ridge below its metal rim, and the floor looked as if it hadn’t been swept for a week. Oh well: perhaps, in Cornwall…

  Suddenly a door opened somewhere at the back of the shop, and a smartly dressed young man came in, stopped short, and stared at Georgie. He had a golden moustache, a fresh complexion, and well-oiled hair. His mouth opened and, as he started to speak, Georgie rose to explain.

  “Hullo. Who——”

  “Good afternoon. I’m Bagshawe. I have a letter——”

  The two utterances began together, and broke off. Then the young man laughed, so gaily that, despite his anxiety, Georgie joined in.

  “Of course, of course.” The young man held out his hand for the letter, smiling pleasantly at Georgie. “Stupid of me to forget. You’ve come to join us. Though,” he added, with a disparaging sweep of his hand, “what on earth for, I can’t imagine. Don’t they know? Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “Tell me what, sir?”

  The young man had opened the letter, and was glancing through it. He didn’t reply at once. Then he looked up, and his eyes held Georgie’s in an appraising stare.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you how it was with us?”

  Georgie’s brows rose, sending anxious furrows up into his hair.

  “I understand, sir, that Mr Burngullow is an old friend of Mr Entiknapp—the Warden——”

  “The man who gave you this letter?”

  “Yes, sir. Mr Entiknapp was kind enough to mention me to Mr Burngullow….”

  And Georgie repeated what the warden had told him. The young man continued to look puzzled at first. Then his brow cleared, and before Georgie had finished, he nodded in quick understanding.

  “Oh, some time ago. That explains it.” Seeing that Georgie still looked bewildered, he added, “Mr Burngullow’s very ill. He has been, for six months or more.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir.” A friendly smile prevented Georgie from feeling that he had committed a solecism. “I happen to have been left in charge, the way things are, but—oh well, you’ll find out soon enough. When can you start work?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning. Tonight, if there’s anything you’d like me to do?”

  “Tomorrow’ll be all right. Or the day after.” As the look of perplexity returned to Georgie’s face, the young man clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be feeling hungry, I expect. If you go upstairs, tea’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  “Thank you. Shall I leave my things where I’m to sleep?”

  “Damned if I know which room it is. Shouldn’t be surprised if you had one to yourself. We—er—there aren’t as many of us as there were.” He turned and pointed. “Up that way. I’ll be after you in a tick.”

  Georgie made for the stairs.

  “I say.”

  Georgie turned. “Yes?”

  “Sending you here. I can’t get over it. Never mind. Go on.”

  Georgie walked up a narrow staircase, trying hard to stifle the feeling of misgiving which was rising in him like heartburn. The young man’s comments had dismayed him. He could not have put it clearly into words, but, as he had stood listening to what the young man said, an impulse made him want to beg him to stop, no matter what was queer or wrong about the place, and pretend that all was well. It was important, terribly important, to Georgie that he should be able to believe that all was well in this, the very first job he had ever faced. Deep in his heart a fear had lurked that, once he was prised away from the safe circle of the Orphanage walls, and out of the protective range of Aunt Butters and Uncle Eddie, things would go wrong. And here was the man in charge of the place, the man who should be best qualified to commend it, lightheartedly saying dangerous, unnerving, incomprehensible things.

  There was no one on the landing. It was dim and smelt of dust. A broken sad looking bead curtain hung over the only window, keeping out most of the light, and the panes behind it were smeared. A stuffed pheasant stood in a posture of unreal alertness which did violence to its nature when alive and its balance in death. Georgie wondered if the taxidermist was to blame, or whether perhaps something had been stood on it and pushed it askew. The only other ornament, apart from a wallpaper covered with things like faded pink cabbages, was a picture showing two ladies in disordered classical draperies having a quarrel. Parts of their skin were showing. Georgie looked away.

  There were two doors. Beyond one, an even narrower staircase wound away upwards. From behind one door came, suddenly, a faint clink of china, and a shuffling sound. Then silence fell once more.

  A horse and van went by in the street, the clop of hooves sounding loud and sharp. Another small succession of china noises came from behind the door, succeeded again by silence.

  Georgie’s misgiving rose to his throat, with a wave of feeling it would have been an irony to call homesickness, but which was just that: a lonely tearful longing for the familiar and the trustworthy: the sense of being deserted in a strange unfriendly land.

  Then, so suddenly as to give him a shock, behind the opposite door a man sneezed, and a girl’s pert voice said “Bless you!” The sounds gave a sharp impression of character: the sneeze weak and undecided, the girl’s voice amused, contemptuous, vulgar, full of vitality. Neither sound was followed up, but the china noises started again behind the other door. There were gurgles as of a tap running, and the shuffling became more definite and purposeful.

  Alarm seized Georgie. At any moment someone might come out of one door or
the other, and find him standing there. What could he do? Or say? They would think he had been listening at keyholes.

  Quickly he skipped back to the top of the stairs, so that he might appear to be just arriving on the landing. Anything was better than to be caught standing weak and irresolute. At the same moment he heard a firm quick step below, and the young man came bounding up the stairs three at a time. A glimpse showed Georgie, even in the gloom, that his fair hair was growing thin on top. Then the young man looked up and saw him.

  “Hullo. Found your room?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh well, never mind. Come in and have tea. Pop your parcel down on that atrocity. And your hat.”

  He pushed open the door facing the stairs, and stood to one side, ushering Georgie in.

  The room was large and light. A table in the middle of it was half covered with a cloth laid at the far end. At it sat a melancholy looking middle-aged man, who seemed to be in a kind of trance. Behind him, a pretty fair-haired girl, her plump figure compressed into a tight black buttoned bodice, stood looking out of the window into the street below.

  She turned as Georgie came in, and gave him a friendly smile. Slamming the door behind him, the young man stood and presented Georgie with a wave of his hand.

  “Miss Etherington—this is Mr Bagshawe, who has come to join us, the dear God knows why. Mr Bagshawe—Miss Fanny Etherington.”

  “Don’t mind what he says,” Miss Etherington told Georgie, holding out a plump pink hand, and added, “How do you do.”

  To his deep mortification, Georgie lost his voice. “How do you do,” he managed to get out, in a faint, gargling croak, and felt his ears redden. Miss Etherington, not unused to such reactions from the young and susceptible, put his confusion down to the effect of her charms and favoured him with a sympathetic smile. He saw with a shock that she had bad teeth.

  “It’s no good, Bagshawe,” the young man said. “You’ve come too late. Miss Etherington is leaving us. To-night. This is positively her last appearance. Isn’t it, Fanny dear?”

  “Positively,” the young lady agreed, with a flutter of her lashes.

  “She is leaving us for brighter scenes of endeavour. She doesn’t feel that this establishment—or this muck-heap of a town—offers scope for her talents. So it’s no good losing your heart to her, Bagshawe.”

  “Sauce,” observed Miss Etherington, patting her yellow hair, which was piled up tier upon tier into a structure like a cornflour blancmange. “Where’s the tea?”

  “All in good time. All in good time.” He turned to the embarrassed Georgie. “She thinks of nothing but her food. Hence that lovely figure, at which I see you giving admiring glances.”

  “I—I——” Crimson, Georgie opened his mouth to disclaim the charge. The young man looked at him reprovingly.

  “Come, come, Bagshawe. Don’t be ungallant. You aren’t going to tell us you don’t admire her figure?”

  In an anguish of embarrassment, Georgie stood speechless. Whatever he said now must put him in the wrong. Before he could blunder further, Miss Etherington came to his rescue.

  “You shut up, Frank Caunter,” she exclaimed inelegantly. “Too good an opinion of yourself, that’s what you have.”

  Mr Caunter turned up his eyes.

  “Dear God. And I was only trying to please.”

  He winked at Georgie, who was beginning to come out in a sweat. Nothing in all his life had prepared him for such talk, for such a situation. It oppressed him like a weight upon his body. Then, suddenly, Mr Caunter remembered the middle-aged man at the table, who had been sitting oblivious of these exchanges.

  “Well, well. Where are my manners? Bagshawe; let me introduce you to our colleague Mr Manchester. Mr Manchester: Mr Bagshawe, who has come to—ah—share our labours.”

  Mr Manchester, who had started convulsively when spoken to, turned and regarded Georgie from pale blue miserable eyes. He was thin and frail-looking. Even his beard seemed ill-nourished and loth to grow. His stringy neck rose from a stiff celluloid collar three sizes too big for it.

  For an instant, as his lips widened into a mechanical smile, he seemed to rouse himself and acknowledge Georgie’s existence. Then his face settled back into its look of pale hopelessness. His eyes filmed over again. ‘“Poor Mr Manchester. He wants his tea,” Miss Etherington murmured, as if in explanation. “We all want our tea.”

  “I don’t. No one could want the meals we get here. We may need them, to keep body and soul together. But no one could want them.”

  At that moment the door opened, and a young and slovenly maid scuttled in carrying something under a battered dishcover. She plunked it hastily down on the table, as if the dish were painfully hot to her rubbed red hands, and scurried out again, to reappear almost immediately with two chipped vegetable dishes.

  A third entrance brought a large black teapot and a Garibaldi jug on a flowered tin tray. The girl—she was little more than a child—then stood still, her head tilted backwards, anxiously surveying the table to see if there was anything she had forgotten. She breathed noisily. Her nose needed a handkerchief. Just as Georgie noticed this last detail, she noticed it herself, and wiped her nose perfunctorily on the back of her hand. Miss Etherington’s shapely nose wrinkled in distaste.

  “All right, Lizzie,” Mr Caunter said goodnaturedly. “If we want anything, we’ll call.”

  The maid gave him a dim, hunted glance, sniffed, then turned and scuttled out. Mr Caunter raised his brows apologetically at Georgie, and lifted the dishcover.

  “Mutton,” he said, in a voice of doom. “Boiled mutton.”

  He picked up the carving knife, which had a hideously wrinkled horn handle, and stropped it briskly on another knife. Miss Etherington frowned irritably.

  “Stop it, Frank. You’re setting my teeth on edge.”

  “For the last time, my dear. For the very last time.”

  “Yes, thank God.”

  Mr Caunter began to carve, skilfully.

  “Ungracious,” he said, without looking up. “Still, you may as well get full value from your last hour in the service of this—this—words fail me.”

  “That’s a change, I must say,” Miss Etherington observed.

  “I could find words, but they would not be suited to your shell-like ears.”

  “Sauce.”

  “Or to our new friend Bagshawe’s.”

  Suddenly Mr Manchester cleared his throat.

  “Burngullow’s was very well thought of,” he informed the air around him. “It had a very high reputation. Very high. People were most anxious to take service here.”

  His voice, which had started drily up like a flurry of dead leaves, tailed away and became still as if the breath had failed it. Mr Caunter and Miss Etherington stared at him in astonishment. Their expression suggested that, if Balaam’s ass had spoken, it could hardly have caused more surprise.

  Mr Caunter recovered first. He had already helped the lady, and now passed his helping to Mr Manchester.

  “Yes, well, I’m afraid, nowadays”—he straightened up, and pointed dramatically with the carving knife. “Ichabod.”

  Mr Manchester blinked. “I—I beg your pardon.”

  “Oh, get on,” Miss Etherington said. “Leave the poor man alone.”

  The rebuke seemed uncalled for, and Mr Caunter made a face at Georgie as if inviting him to say so. But Georgie had his own difficulties. How could they talk about Mr Manchester as if he wasn’t there? What must he be feeling? Wouldn’t he be offended, and think that Georgie was siding with them? Above all things Georgie was anxious not to give offence. He asked only to be taught the rules, so that he might keep them.

  But what were the rules in a place like this? How could one possibly stand in well with people who behaved in so extraordinary, so unprecedented a fashion?

  The arrival of his plate, with a generous portion of mutton, made a fortunate diversion.

  “Greens? Potato?”

  Miss Etheringt
on pushed the dishes towards him. Her smile was wholly friendly. Out of his perplexity Georgie smiled back, murmured thickly “Thank you” and grew red once more.

  The meal went on for several minutes in silence, broken only by a disparaging remark of Mr Caunter about the age of the ewe he supposed had provided the mutton. The word flicked Georgie across the heart. It reminded him cruelly of his Aunt Butters, who with the years had grown nearer and nearer to her nickname. In a flash of anguished clearness, he saw the little room, the hearth, the mantelpiece, its carvings flung into relief by the flickering of the fire; and the contrast between that dearly known refuge and this desert peopled with strange faces so tightened his throat that the mouthful he was trying to swallow felt like a tennis ball. What had he done, to be torn away from safety and kindliness, and plunged in this far, unknown, chilly place?

  The tightness in his throat became a pain. Tears were stinging at the back of his eyes. Fearing disgrace, he looked down at his plate, and crammed another forkful of food into his mouth. This, in an unlikely way, delivered him. He began to cough and choke, and at once Mr Caunter and Miss Etherington came to his rescue, one clapping him on the back, the other pouring him out a glass of water.

  “Better?”

  Through a haze of tears, now blessedly legitimized, Georgie smiled back at her and gasped his thanks.

  “The—the pepper——”

  “Small blame to you,” Mr Caunter said easily, sitting down again. “Anything to take away the taste of this muck. Salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar—you’ll find them your best friends as long as you’re with us. Fanny here favours vinegar—don’t you, dear? I’ve told her it’s bad for that peach bloom complexion, but she won’t listen to me.”

  “That’s quite enough from you, Frank Caunter.”

  “And now she’s leaving us. What will we do?”

  “Fat lot you care who comes. Or goes.”

  “She’s unjust to me, Bagshawe. She’s no heart.”