How silly such apprehensions! Even if this had not been a luxurious corridor train, but one of the Victorian sort, mere wooden boxes – and not even a bit of string for poor old half-asleep Mr Gold with his watch-chain to tug at when the fair, slender, silly-looking young Mr Lefroy rose out of his corner! – there couldn’t be danger in a grey, ageing face, pitted with shadows around its gloomy eyes, and so desperately packed with misery. And even a face expressive of an active misery is not so tragic as one on which an habitual misery has become little more than a permanent mask.
She continued to scrutinize him from under her pale vermilion hat, in her long new charmingly cut fur-collar-and-cuffed winter coat, and nothing would ever recall what she was thinking about as she did so. And then she hastily glanced down at the red book.
‘It’s a detective story,’ she said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ uttered the mouth in the dark face, but without the faintest hint of an ‘I told you so’ in its tones. ‘From what I’ve seen of them, they don’t entertain me much. No more than so much chaff. And I shouldn’t have supposed ladies, or anybody else either, could be bothered with them – after the newspapers.’
Lavinia’s eyelids descended a little, and she glanced again at her open page. No, she couldn’t very well attempt to placate him with her anthology. ‘Why, newspapers?’ she retorted, but kept the question that had immediately followed it to herself: That’s not why he is talking, what is he leading up to?
The clumsy head, so thickly thatched with iron-grey hair, had turned aside a little, as if its owner were listening to sounds in the distance. ‘Whatever they say, it’s facts they are about,’ he answered. ‘And I shouldn’t have supposed that anyone could wish for worse.’
‘No,’ said Lavinia brightly, ‘but then you see fiction is not facts; and this is fiction.’ And seldom in her life had she said anything so facilely that she had so instantly wished to recall. When things really matter as little as that it is almost beyond stupidity to put them into words. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘of course, there are just awful things in the newspapers. And, what in some ways is worse I suppose, one doesn’t believe them.’
The squat figure in the corner at this stared moodily on. ‘“Believe”! Between you and me,’ he said, ‘I’ve had my dose too.’ An extraordinary smotheration of messages had spread over his countenance and vanished, and it was with a gulp like that of a barn owl discharging a whole dark night’s hunting relics that he added: ‘There’s a friend of mine on this train. At least there may be. But you’ll understand me’ – and, what Lavinia liked far less than misery, a gleam of fear and cunning had shown in his eyes – ‘I don’t much care to go and see.’
Lavinia listened. ‘Why not?’ she said, and at this instant the sad neutral winter landscape, already scarcely perceptible beneath a thin grey skin of frozen snow and a steadily descending veil of tiny flakes from the heavens above it, was suddenly blotted out. The train lights had come on; and the small cabin in which the two of them sat together had become a cage of radiance. How Lavinia hated too much light. So, too, seemingly did her fellow-passenger. His whole face, not merely his eyes, had shut up – as if he had been electrocuted, as indeed in a mild fashion Lavinia had too. Still, she herself had been wishing for more light.
‘Why not?’ she almost whispered now. ‘If he is a friend?’ And she had not said it, oddly enough, as though the question implied that she herself was not one.
‘Ay,’ said her new acquaintance, ‘I said a friend. You can’t find words sometimes …’
‘Not a friend?’ hinted Lavinia.
The head shook slowly. The eyes lifted a little towards the electric bulb and the furious white of the carriage roof over the racks. ‘No. Not.’ In infinite weariness he drew a thick fudgy hand over his face. ‘I’m afraid of him. And that, my God’s,’ he had muttered almost to himself, ‘the solemn truth.’
PLAYED WITH AND HUMOURED A LITTLE …
How many miles, Lavinia wondered, had they gone ravening on into the night by now? They must be in open English country at any rate – peaceful woods and hills and water, perhaps, and an occasional homestead huddled under the mantling snow. He stirred uneasily, moved his mouth, and spoke again.
‘What I’d ask you to do, young lady, is to go and see.’
‘Go and see!’ Lavinia repeated blankly, incredulously. The abjectness of it all! ‘Me? But… Well, I’m alone, of course. Though that,’ she added quickly, ‘doesn’t really matter. Besides, I don’t know in the least what – what your friend is like.’
‘What he’s like? what he’s like?’ The grubby fingers fumbled steadily down from button to button of the thick great-coat. ‘Yes, of course; what he’s like. Why,’ and again the old and pallid face had seemed to contract into a look as stupid as it was cunning, ‘he’s like – just as usual.’
At which for some obscure reason Lavinia felt even less inclined for the expedition. ‘He’s a littleish man,’ continued the other as if he were actually measuring him with his eye and relieved at being on ground so safe; ‘about my size, but thin and skimpy; with a long nose and red – reddish – hair. But gone bald, you must understand. And though a bit younger than I am, getting on. You needn’t be afraid of that.’
Lavinia took another deep breath, glancing up at the heat indicator. The very outrageousness of the invitation seemed to have put it, now, at any rate, past refusal. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘it’s very hot in here.’ As though that might help! ‘But supposing I do find him, what then? Shall I ask him to come in to you? Speak to him? It would be very awkward.’
‘Not awkward a bit,’ he assured her. ‘Far from it. So long as I know where he is. No, I don’t want him in here. Oh no!’ A trace of suspicion that she might showed in his small, restless, burnt-out eyes. ‘All I’m wanting to know is if he is – well, about. You say you read all there is to read in the newspapers. Mind you, I’m talking to you as a friend; no reason not; as you wouldn’t repeat anything to anybody. Why should you? But going back to the newspapers …’ He listened. ‘Blackmail?’
‘You, mean,’ said Lavinia, ‘have I read about that? Blackmail?’ The gutted miserable eyes merely continued to hold her own. ‘Why yes,’ she went on, ‘I have – now and then. And I think,’ a fiery furnace of indignation had suddenly shot open its iron doors in her very soul, like the flare from a railway engine – ‘I think it’s an utterly filthy thing! Almost worse than murder.’
This was scarcely ladylike language, and yet not quite extreme enough apparently for the situation. The stranger in the corner had been not in the least moved by it. The effect on him had merely become little more than a dark concentrated stare. Then he nodded. ‘You’re right there; even if you don’t know what you are talking about. Not likely. Besides, I don’t see why “almost”,’ he added, almost peevishly. ‘And who’s to believe you? Eh?’
Lavinia gave up attempting to find her way through this muddled harangue. ‘You mean – he was? Blackmail? You are afraid of him?’ All seemed much easier now. ‘You think he may be on this train – to pursue you, persecute you, come in here? Well, even at that’ – and in this bold moment she had really felt her company might make all the difference – ‘I should be here too. Yes. Yes, I’ll go: I’ll go now – if it can be of any real help.’
But even as she had leaned forward to rise, her hand resting on the seat, she had added, groping slowly on through the shadowy misgivings that had flocked into her mind, ‘I can’t imagine anything one could have done, almost, that would have justified —’ But she had failed to finish this rash generalization. Thus stooping, she could see more clearly the colourless exhausted face – the face as of a corpse but for its horror and woe. And she had said no more.
And now she had risen, yet nonetheless had paused another instant before plunging beyond him out at the open door. This accomplished, she glanced back over her shoulder with yet another nod of reassurance. But even in this instant he too had risen, and, on tiptoe, w
as clumsily groping with his hand to draw the green lampshade for night-travellers over the carriage light. Well, she could pull it back again when she returned. ‘A little thin man; your height, but thin,’ she whispered over her shoulder, her left hand on the cold brass rail protecting the glass beyond; ‘going bald, with a long nose and what was red hair: is that it?’ How utterly lifeless the description seemed!
‘Ay,’ he said. ‘That’s it; like a weasel.’ With shoulders humped, he was blankly surveying her. ‘But you’ll have to look pretty close for all that.’
What that meant Lavinia was not to realize for the time being, and already she was on her way. How many carriages? she wondered, as, shaken and clutching, she groped steadily on. And what would she say to the guard or ticket-man if she met him? Oh, yes, of course – she was looking for the restaurant car. The attendant himself would be round later. It was lucky – for both of them – herself and her new acquaintance – that their train was an extra. Five passengers packed in on each side of a compartment, and possibly two or three standing in it would have been a rather too richly diversified assortment for her errand! On she went, covertly glancing. An old lady, a pale young man with a velvet collar to his coat, and what looked like a brewer, asleep; two sailors with bundles and a bunch of mistletoe, and a man in spectacles, reading; three assorted school-girls with hard black straw hats and pigtails, jawing like monkeys, and an aunt, possibly, with the Spectator. And so on and on, from compartment to compartment, and, over the swaying little metal bridges between them from carriage on to carnage, Lavinia forged her way – and without reward. There was not a vestige of a fellow-creature who was not merely skimpy or ageing or long-nosed or rufous or semi-hairless or vulturous – (how vividly now she could see the ‘filthy’ phantom!) – but all these together. Such unifications, please heaven, must be pretty rare even in this densely populated world.
It had not been quite so easy to venture through the restaurant car, even though it was already dotted with would-be eaters. But Lavinia, as her partner in their little business would have agreed, and even Charles, too, though he much preferred feminine qualities in his womenkind – Lavinia was rather pestered at times by her sense of duty. She had said she would search the train, and search it she did, omitting only the guard’s van, of whose inmate she caught but one intimidating glimpse, as he stood surveying his miscellaneous holiday freight – from dead hares and turkeys to wooden horses, from wads of newspapers to a weeping Sealyham and what appeared to be a cage of love-birds. Blackmailers there might be, whirling along with her over these wheels this Christmas Eve, but the one she was after was not apparent.
TILL IT FALLS ASLEEP …
And so she returned at last to her compartment again, shaken, but safe and triumphant, bringing tidings of comfort and joy, and yet somehow astonished to find her patron still there in his corner. Was it mere fancy, or did he actually look less raddled and anxious, smoother, more his own man? She had hardly time to tell, for at sight of her he had at once all but jumped in his seat, and had shouted up at her in a whisper as it were, ‘Oh, it’s you? And did you?’
The sheer intensity of the question, when it was nothing after all but a horrible something between two human beings, however extreme, that was at issue, was appalling. Still, he had not exaggerated. If ‘newspaper facts’ give you only the faintest hint of the signification of certain words, writers of detective stories give you even less. She knew now – as if the retching flavour of the hot black draught was all over her mouth – what blackmail actually meant. And with a gesture not in the least intended to resemble that of a tombstone angel in Parian marble, she had flung up her hand, withdrawn the green silk shade from the lamp, and had given her answer: ‘I did. So far as he is concerned, you are safe. There’s not a sign of him. Not at least in the front part of the train; and the back? – well, I gathered from you, that isn’t so. Anyhow, he’s not there. Unless, of course, he has hidden himself under the turkeys in the guard’s van!’ With this she had almost beamed on her Levite; but the little jest fell flat. Good Samaritans apparently should keep only to wine and oil. He merely blinked at her.
‘Hiding,’ he echoed, in a muffled, peevish voice. ‘And who’s to tell, I’d like to know, that he isn’t? He can!’
At this she was refreshed by a positive jet of righteous indignation. ‘Well,’ she said, as she sat down again, ‘if I had asked you to do the same thing for me, to search, as I have, for – for a disagreeable acquaintance, because I was …Well, I might at least have said, Thank you.’
He stared stupidly on as if now incapable of following her. ‘What I mean is,’ he said, ‘you can’t tell; not with that kind. And the closer you wait and watch, the more … It’s snowing now, isn’t it – hard?’
Good heavens, would the creature never be satisfied? Why couldn’t he have looked for himself? She petulantly flung down her window and peered out through the cold rushing air into the night. At first it was impossible to see anything through the whirling flakes and the blaze of the train, but in a moment a stealthy hand behind her had drawn the sage-green shade over the lamp again. And presently with the aid of a faint gibbous moon above the clouds of the night, Lavinia discerned a landscape as still and miraculous as that of a dream – vague undulations, wooded hollows, smooth-scooped fallowland and meadow, utterly calm, numbing, swooning to its cold Christmas slumbers beneath the multitudinous bewildering whispered lully of the snow. ‘Yes,’ she called back to him over her shoulder, ‘Hard.’ She drew up the window again. ‘We shall have a white Christmas.’
But the old man in the corner made no reply. He was merely shuddering in his thick coat at the cold of the air, had drawn up its wide collar, and seemed to be composing himself to sleep. And whether or not it was due perhaps to this glimpse of the flying night or to some inward misgiving that had hitherto been only lurking in the back of her mind, a vague gnawing anxiety had taken possession of her. Misery, fear, blackmail, yes. But what else? She too was shivering a little. She drew her chin closer into the fur of her coat, pulled down the pretty narrow veil from her hat, and opened her book again.
‘When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child …’
No, it was impossible to concentrate. Her eyes roved to and fro over the print, but with no result. As for her detective story, she had never seen a book that looked less inviting. So for a few moments she closed her eyes; partly because it was soothing to do so, and partly because it is hardly fair to scrutinize even happy faces when their owners are taking no care of them – are asleep. But the lids continued to flicker; she was confused; and presently she opened them again – to shut them no more. Her neighbour was not asleep. Even in this dim light it was plain that he was merely pretending to be. Eyes of themselves shut not so tightly as that. Nor was he even at rest. Far from it; again and again there came an involuntary jerk of head or hand, as of a puppet gifted with life; or his whole body swayed suddenly to one side, even against the gentle swing of the carriage on its wheels. Once in a low, thick, whining voice he began talking as if he were hotly pleading or arguing with someone – or with himself, and then sank again into silence.
And as she covertly watched him, fascinated as if by the contortions of some animal unaware of human company, there came into her mind the recollection that on her coming back into the compartment again, something had been wrong with it – different. There are layers of observation, and on occasion some trophy of a lower one may rise to the surface of consciousness, long after, as if unnoticed, it has sunk out of sight. Something was changed. What? Her eyes roved in vain over floor, seat, walls and roof. What – what – what? Why, yes, of course – of course. The rack over the old man’s head was empty now. The dank-looking shapeless roped-up carpetbag was gone. She craned round, peered up into the other corner: nothing there either. Her lips closed firmly, almost primly for one comparatively young. She was clenching her teeth, too, for the merest intuition had assured her that the bag
was not under either seat. Anything in, or even beyond, reason; but she hated being deceived. If this poor horrible terrified creature had wanted to dispose of his bag, and of its contents, what necessity had there been with such stupid cunning to send her off on a wild goose chase in search of someone who he knew perfectly well was not on the train? What gratitude there, might she ask! And why …?
And as she sat emptily looking, vainly pondering, there sounded from a distance a clangour of opening and shutting doors, and a voice calling, though she could detect no individual words. It was the ticket-collector, no doubt, or, better still, the dining-car attendant. His invitation would be like manna in the wilderness, though at sound of it her fellow-passenger, as motionless as a cat, had merely opened his eyes to stare – as if staring could be of any help.
A plaintive wailing, as of some lost banshee, from the engine followed. The rhythm of sound and motion of which she had become almost oblivious was now changing its pattern. The train was slackening up, though there was no sign of any station. The signal must be against them. The distant slamming ceased. Motionlessly she continued to gaze out through her obscuring veil at her fellow-passenger, who in exquisite deliberation had now turned to look at her, with a long, peering, intent scrutiny. Whereupon, as if satisfied, his eyes had wandered up to the rack above his head, and then – for there was an inch or two between the soles of his shoes and the floor of the carriage – he had slid down, and with turned head still in watch of her, was by noiseless fractions of an inch drawing further and further open the carriage door.
The train had jarred to a standstill; and a dead silence had followed. Not a sound – not even the crowing of Gabriel’s cock from the country fields. An intolerable foreboding and something little short of terror had taken possession of Lavinia, a terror perhaps not wholly her own. The last anguished look on that engrossed awful face had filled her also with an overwhelming compassion. In life’s journey, she knew a little where she was going to. But what fate was awaiting this old man in the dark solitudes of the snow beyond the window? He too had once been a child, and, like herself, had come to this moment pace by pace. Who – what – might he be meeting out there – and without one word of farewell? She, too, an enemy? – who had at least tried to be a friend.
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 39