Like a cork on a shallow stream that has come momentarily to rest in the midst of rippling and conflicting currents, Philip stood motionless, his pondering eyes intent on the young adventurer whom he had at last decoyed into action. A faintly apprehensive, faintly melancholy expression had now crept into his features. The cold detaining fingers he had thrust out of his coat-sleeve fell slackly to his side again. For Dick had already straddled over the thick red plaited cord that dangled between nave and chancel, disclosing as he did so a frayed gaping hole in the canvas of one of his shoes. Their rubber soles made not the faintest sound as he trod lightly over the thick Persian rug and the stone slabs towards the great monument in the further corner, only a few paces from the altar.
It was a monument constructed of many ornate marbles, and these supplied cold couch and canopy for the effigy in alabaster of a worthy knight who, as its inscription declared, had long ago surrendered the joys and sorrows of this world. He reposed, rather uneasily, on his left elbow; his attire, ruff and hose, not less decorative and rococo than the wreathings and carvings, the cherubs and pilasters of his tomb. But like an Oriental bed in a small English bedroom, the tomb was a size or two too large for the church.
Until this moment Philip had not fully realized its loftiness, and how angularly its pinnacles soared up under the roof. Dark and dwarfed against the whiteness of its marble, Dick had now begun to climb. But he had mounted only a few feet from the ground when Philip noticed that the moon had now abandoned the carved ringlets, the rounded cheeks, the upturned sightless face of his angel. Though her pinions and feet were still chequered with its silvering beams, her trump now lifted its mouth into a cold and sullen gloom. An unendurable misgiving had begun to stir in him.
‘The moon’s gone, Dick,’ he whispered across. ‘What’s the good? Come down!’
‘I say,’ came the muffled but elated answer, ‘the ledges are simply thick with dust, and don’t they just cut into the soles of your feet. I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
‘I said,’ repeated Philip, still patiently, ‘come down!’ But he might as well have been pleading with the angel itself. There came no response. ‘Dick, Dick,’ he reiterated, ‘I said, Come down! Oh, I’m going.’ In a sudden fever he pushed his way under the curtain into the vestry and vanished. But it was only a ruse. He came flying back in a few moments as if in utter consternation.
‘Quick, Dick; quick, I say!’ he all but shouted. ‘Come down! There’s someone, something coming. It isn’t a man and it isn’t a woman. Quick! It won’t be a minute before it’s in the church. Oh you silly, silly fool! I tell you there’s someone coming!’ His voice broke away into a sob of bewilderment, rage, apprehension and despair. ‘My God,’ he called, ‘I’ll tell my father of this! You see if I don’t.’
But the snail-slow groping figure, still radiantly lit with the moon’s downcast beams as it continued to scale the monument, was far too much engrossed in its mission to pay any attention to him now, and hardly paused until with a small, black, broken-nailed hand it had securely clasped the angel’s foot. ‘I’m nearly up, Philip,’ he called down at last. ‘Look! Look where I am! I’m even with the gallery now, and can hardly see because of the dazzle. It’s cold and still and awful, but oh, peaceful; and I can see into the moon. The angel’s lovely too, close to, but much, much bigger. Supposing I blow with all my might and the trumpet doesn’t sound? It won’t be my fault, will it? And we will still keep friends, always, won’t we, Philip?’
‘Oh, you fool, you idiot crock fool,’ called Philip hoarsely. ‘Didn’t I tell you, didn’t I tell you, what might come to everybody? … And you believed it! Oh, it was all a story, a lie, a story. Dick, I will give you anything in the world if you will only come down.’
‘I don’t want anything in the world,’ was the dull, stubborn retort. Even as he spoke, the lower dust-dried hand had crept cautiously up to join its fellow, and in a few moments, himself half in and half out of the moonlight, his fingers were clutching the acorn tassels of the cord that bound its convoluted hood to the angel’s head. Philip was now all but past motion or speech. He was shivering from head to foot, and praying inarticulately in his terror, ‘Oh God, make him come down! Oh God, make him come down!’
‘I believe,’ a calm but rapturous voice was declaring, ‘it is hollow, and I think she knows I’m here. You won’t say I was afraid now! Philip, I’d do anything in the world for you.’
But at this moment, it seemed, the ancient guardians of the sanctity of the edifice had deemed it discreet to intervene. A cock crowed from its perch in the hen-roost at the farm where Rebecca now lay fast asleep. A vast solemn gust of wind evoked from nowhere out of space had swept across the churchyard and in at the open vestry door, powerful enough in its gust to belly out the dark green felt curtain and to add its edge of terror to Philip’s appalled state of mind. ‘Look! Quick! It’s coming. Didn’t I say it was all …’
And this time the small human creature clinging to its goal, a lean skinny arm outstretched above his head, had heard the warning cry. ‘Who? What’s coming?’ he called, faint and far. ‘Oh, it’s lovely up here. I’m alone. I can’t stop now. I’m nearly there.’
‘I say, you are not to, you are not to.’ Philip was all but dancing in helpless fear and fury. ‘It’s wicked! It’s my angel, it’s my trumpet! I hate you! Listen! – I tell you! I command you to come down!’
But his adjurations had become as meaningless as is now the song the Sirens sang.
A rending snap, abrupt as that of a pistol shot, had echoed through the church. The tapering wooden trumpet, never since its first fashioning visited by any other living creature than capricious fly and prowling spider, had splintered off clean from the angel’s grasp. And without a cry, a syllable, either of triumph or despair, Dick had fallen vertically on to the flag-stones beneath, the thud of his small body, and the minute crack as of some exquisitely delicate and brittle vessel exposed to too extreme a tension being followed by a silence soft, and thick, and deep as deep and heavy snow.
The stolid pendulum had resumed its imperturbable thumping again, the fussy vestry clock its protest against such indifference. By any miracle of mercy, could this be only yet another of this intrepid restless little Yorick’s infinite jests? The sharp-nosed crusader continued alabaster-wise to stare into his future. The disgraced angel, breast to lock-crowned head, stood now in shadow as if to hide her shame. Her mute wooden trumpet remained clutched in a lifeless hand … No.
‘Dick! Dick!’ an anguished stuttering voice at last contrived to whisper. ‘I didn’t mean it. On my oath I didn’t mean it. Don’t let me down … Dick, are you dead?’
But since no answer was volunteered, and all courage and enterprise had ebbed into nausea and vertigo, the speaker found himself incapable of venturing nearer, and presently, as thievishly as he had entered it, crept away out into the openness of the churchyard, and so home.
* As printed in BS (1942). First published in Virginia Quarterly Review, October 1936.
A BEGINNING AND OTHER STORIES (1955)
Odd Shop*
A silence, peculiar to itself, seemed to possess the little dark shop in the back street running up from the river – the silence, as it were, of intent listeners. It was suddenly shattered by the muffled ringing of a little verdigrised bell hanging up in the corner, and a chance visitor groping his way down its two wooden steps at once perceived it, became indeed curiously aware of it when the hospitable jangle had fallen into silence.
Nothing happened during the two or three minutes short of one o’clock that followed, leaving practically nothing behind them except the sense of their moments of peace and quiet and vague mystery. He then ventured an apologetic rap on the wooden counter. A few moments afterwards an old man quietly and carefully emitted himself through the glazed and curtained door of the shop parlour. He raised his chin and paused, having scrutinized, as far as his spectacles permitted, his visitor.
‘Good afternoon, sir,�
�� he said. ‘What may I have the pleasure of doing for you?’
‘Good afternoon,’ returned his visitor, who realized he had taken a sudden fancy to the old gentleman. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but as a matter of fact I came to ask my way – to the railway station. I am a stranger here. You haven’t, I see, lit up yet, and I am rather wishing I had brought a torch with me. I have been peering and peering through your little square windows but couldn’t make out – not clearly – what is behind them. Are they cages? Extremely small, surely? For humming birds, I should imagine … There is a thick mist rising.’
SHOPKEEPER: Yes, sir, we lie close to the river here; indeed this street brings you to its strand. I’m sorry you couldn’t see in at the window, and glad that you didn’t stumble on the two wooden steps … You said ‘cages’. In a sense, sir, you guessed rightly; cages they are. And yet, well, not for birds. There is very little trade just now; in fact you are my first customer – visitor, I should say – today. By good fortune I am not dependent on what I sell. By very good fortune, since what little business I used to do has been of late – well, sir, just washed out. As if the river itself had come flowing into the shop and swept me away. I have competitors – rich and powerful ones. And fashions change.
CUSTOMER: The whole world has changed in these last few years including ‘the sun’. The general aim, and scale … Might I look at one of the little – er – cages?
SHOPKEEPER: By all means, sir.
CUSTOMER: Thank you. What minute and exquisite workmanship! Charming. Is it of wood? Ivory? Metal? Tortoise-shell? Empty, anyhow.
SHOPKEEPER: No, sir, not exactly empty. I choose colour and material according to the kind. Put it to your ear, sir, if I may be so bold, and merely press your finger – very lightly – on the minute knob at the corner. And – listen.
CUSTOMER: Remarkable! A sound like someone rasping on a rough surface with a fingernail. But shriller; more musical.
SHOPKEEPER: There is a good deal of rasping on rough surfaces, nowadays. Fingers scratching their way out. But no, what you hear is only the call and possibly colloquy of a house cricket. Less frequent than it used to be, when the small country bakers’ shops used to do their own bread-baking – and the Sunday pies and legs of mutton. A strange, simple, little sound; though not so simple as it seems. It is a nocturnal hymn, a love call. Poets, musicians, make love tunes, love songs. Most human beings talk their love – another kind of tune, sir. The cricket apparently rubs his thighs together, and the noise sounds out small, rough, shrill, even sonorous in the silence of midnight. I should explain, sir, that this is a Sound shop. I deal, I mean, solely in sounds; but chiefly in minute sounds. Those little heeded, little listened to. Here is another, if you will press the knob.
CUSTOMER: Thank you. I can guess this one. A small child tapping very softly with her knuckle at her doll’s-house door, I should think. (He mimics.) ‘Come in, come in, come in!’
SHOPKEEPER: Not precisely, sir. That is the knocking of the death-watch beetle. Another love call, or summons to its mate. With its head, sir; though as it happens it knocks elsewhere at times – at the listener’s heart. No, I am not suggesting that these trifles of mine are of any particular use. They are intended rather for what delight they may give – to the possessor. And this not merely for what they are in themselves, but for the states of mind which at different times they may evoke. An air on a fiddle may at one moment have less than little influence on us, and at another may be almost unendurably pathetic and moving.
CUSTOMER: You said just now that the cricket’s chirrup was a simple sound. This beats even that. But why ‘not so simple as it seems’? I think those were the words you used.
SHOPKEEPER: I mean, as I have said, sir, that it is not so much what a sound is in itself, or even what causes it, that matters. But its effects. What it does to the listener. The tapping of the beetle first reminded you of a solitary child in a nursery, knocking and knocking to be let in to its own imagination, to its own profound fancy of its own small world of the doll’s house. When you knew it for what it actually was, I warrant you saw quite a different picture, sir. Some definite tragic memory, perhaps – a pure superstition, of course. Each minute effect on the ear has evoked, one might almost say, a minute panorama – or an extensive one, for that matter. A complete complicated little network of memories, perhaps. Isn’t that so? That was what I had in mind … I have a little box here containing three successive chords of music – powerful and possibly pregnant ones, from an opera by Wagner. But I wager it won’t awaken more effective or deeper memories than the beetle. It isn’t merely size that counts. Not just bare-faced noisy magnitude … Gracious me, sir, this mist will soon be fog! Have you far to go? Now, sir, try this one. Two compartments, you will notice. First the little yellow knob. (The customer takes the box and puts it to his ear. A stare of astonishment transfigures his face.) Ah ha! I thought that might startle us a little. No mistaking that one, sir?
CUSTOMER: My poor skull is fairly ringing. It sounds as if all the witches in hell were screaming to an obbligato from the old Father of Lies himself. Belial, Beelzebub and all the rest of them.
SHOPKEEPER: No, sir, purely terrestrial. Merely a gale on the coast of Wales, near the great cathedral of St David’s, sir. Wind, wave, foam, sea-birds, shingle. A complex, but still a simple sound. We have very faint and slight notions, sir, of the lower regions – in spite of John Milton’s help. I agree that a little closer listening might detect in the box the crash of some poor wretched bark and its inmates flung into the darkness of eternity on the starless rocks of night. But … Now sir, the other button, the green one.
CUSTOMER: Lovely! Like molten precious stones. As if you could turn dew into music. Water, of course; falling into – well, I wouldn’t like to guess the depth of the well. An astonishing sense of solitude too. As of some incredibly old garden. The mists of daybreak and the silence of morning before the song of the bird. Fascinating.
SHOPKEEPER: Well, well, sir. You would hardly believe it, but I spent over a week, a very happy one too, of twelve-hour working-days, on that one specimen. And yet, one wouldn’t have to look very far to find the Well you mention. It is not at the world’s end. The sound itself is merely that of mllk dripping drop by drop from a teaspoon into a tea-cup. Completely domesticated! – but how the mind roves! That’s what I mean by simple, sir. Now, if you please, this. This needs particularly close attention.
CUSTOMER: I hear nothing. Yes, yes I do. A remote rustling. As of a ghost, I should imagine – approaching some unfortunate listener – not a child, I hope – down a long corridor. ‘Like one who on a lonely road …’
SHOPKEEPER: No, sir, at least a league too far again. That is nothing less commonplace or more natural than the whisper an evening primrose makes when its petals – first gradually, then, as if its very being had so decided – unfurl in the cool of the evening, exposing their riches to the prowling moths. That one yonder needs perhaps a closer attention; if, I mean, we leave it as Nature ordained. It enshrines the first stirrings of hoar-frost, its crystals gathering on a blade of grass. And these are the tiny brandishings of the antennae of a group of ants clustered in converse around their queen … But I am detaining you. Still, here, sir – I feel sure it will interest you – is what I should call – well, it is different from the rest. And it costs me many a laborious day. I won’t mention names, sir, since it is a matter of extreme privacy. It cost a friend of mine his son. My friend refused what he wanted of him, and his son left him. Left him. The little black knob, if you please.
CUSTOMER: Yes, yes, I hear it. Very curious. Words. Stubborn, yet wavering. Tragic.
(He repeats what he hears in a low, cold, small, unfaltering voice.) No, no, it can’t be done. It can’t be done. No, no, not even for him. It can’t be done. Not even for him. It can’t, it can’t be done.
SHOPKEEPER: I would not part from that one for love or money. Not that a sale is likely. As I say, I have few visitors even, quite apa
rt from customers, nowadays.
CUSTOMER: Who was talking in that last one? Some old Jezebel, I should think. Some Fairy Devil-Mother.
SHOPKEEPER: No, sir. It is many years old. It was the voice of conscience. And yet I am still a little uncertain that it wasn’t the voice of what they call the ego, sir. The self far within us. I cannot say. As you see, there are many others. Quite common things, every one: even if not very familiar. But I mustn’t be keeping you. Turn to the right as you leave this shop, take the first turning on the left, the third to the right, and you will find the station in a cul-de-sac down the third turning yet again to your right. No, sir, I am not allowed to sell at this hour. The shutters should have been up an hour ago. Against the law, sir. I do little more now than open and shut by habit. But it would be a pleasure to me if you would kindly accept this, merely as a little remembrance of this evening. This one is the voice of advancing age, sir; hardly articulate. Yes, there is the knob.
CUSTOMER: No – nothing. Yes, I detect a voice, but – it’s too far away: only a murmur; no distinguishable syllables.
SHOPKEEPER: I fancied that might be the case. I myself am accustomed to it. And yet – well it goes like this.
(He speaks in faint, yet clear and sorrowful tones.) Snow, dust, motes of light, falling time, time ever falling. Remember, yes, remember. Oh, yes, remember. Yes, remember.
CUSTOMER: (A little bitterly.) That’s all very well! But I should have supposed rather than ‘remember’, look ahead. Do you ever listen – in?
SHOPKEEPER: Bless you, sir, I am years behind the times: behind my times, too. But yet I might say that I am always listening in. But not yet, please God, to what they call ‘voices’. Indeed, I have hardly a moment now to spare from a last little job which I fear I shall never finish, a night job too. I am endeavouring, quite between ourselves, if I may venture, to distinguish and to capture the music of the spheres. Very old-fashioned. The morning stars. But alas, with no success. Not yet … Thank you, sir. I haven’t tied the string tightly, and perhaps it would be advisable to carry the little parcel, not to put it into the pocket. Good-night, sir, and many thanks.
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 54