Well, I am not ashamed of it, if it was so. If a thing is, it is. And if that is one’s philosophy in life, one is safe from the sham senseless mob. On again I went between the gorse bushes. And about five in the afternoon came in sight of the house. There it was, just as I remembered it. I went on slowly. ‘Hame, hame, hame, name!’ I took hold of the bars of the gate and stared in at the familiar place. There were red curtains in the dining-room windows; smoke was winding up from the chimney, and an old man was digging in the kitchen garden; I could just see him over the hedge. And while I was standing there, staring like an owl, I heard the cessation of footsteps.
(It’s a very curious example of the senses being disconnected with the Ego, because I am quite convinced I had not actually heard the footsteps themselves.)
I turned round, and there stood a girl, top to toe in scarlet. She stood there, rather slim and pale, looking out gravely at me from under her beaver hat. I can’t for the life of me think who she reminded me of. At last I managed to stutter out some apology, and opened the gate for her. She bowed solemnly and, still looking at me with her bright grave eyes, passed through. The gate swung to after her, and up to the heavens went its old whinnying squeal. And just as I was about to go, she turned towards me with one hand held irresolutely out of her muff, the red sleeve hanging down like the wing of a wounded bird. She frowned a little, raising and lowering her eyebrows (a little trick of hers) and to my intense surprise, spoke to me. Her voice was soft and quick with a lot of notes in it, rather pretty.
‘Pray forgive me,’ she said very nervously, ‘but perhaps, I – are you – perhaps you would like to walk in the garden?’
Consequently, I must needs out with why I was staring in at her gate. Anyone would think that I had never set eyes on a woman before. Still she was rather disconcerting. ‘O, then, pray come in!’ she said. ‘My father would be so very pleased to have you see it all again. I think, you know – it’s very strange – but even when I saw you standing here at the gate as I came up, I recognized you; the stoop, the turn of the head – just a little something in the attitude. But, dear me, how ridiculous this must seem to you. For you have never so much as seen the glimmer of the ghost of me – have you? Dreaming or waking. I wonder. But I know you, and very well too; though it is not quite the same face – wiser, you know; no, not wiser – more experienced. It’s a very long time ago since you lived here.’
She might have been talking to herself; her voice ran on so easily. ‘Thirteen years,’ I said. ‘But how —’
‘Yes, so it is, so it is,’ she answered, ‘exactly thirteen years – thirteen!… My father bought the house, you know.’
‘Then he must have bought it from my – from the executors.’
‘Yes, poor mite; and you not so high then; just up to my waist here, I should think. And long straight hair, and big eyes in a wan face. Oh, I have pitied you sometimes.’ I am not sure that I was overgrateful for her pity. She laughed mysteriously, and knocked at the door. A middle-aged woman in slippers opened to her. She looked quickly at me with pale grey eyes. ‘This is Nicholas, Helen,’ said the Scarlet Lady, and looked back at me again.
‘Is that so, Miss?’ said the woman. She smoothed her sleek hair with the palm of her hand. An abominable person!
‘There, you see!’ “Miss” added to me. ‘I know your name too. You must come in and see my father. And we’ll have tea, please, Helen; Mr Nicholas must taste my honey. The garden, I am afraid, is not nearly so prim and proper as it should be – all waste and sweetness. Thomas is growing old, and the birds come in legions, so of course the fruit is theirs, cherries and strawberries! We haven’t had a dishful for years. But then they sing – the birds, you know – just as you too must have heard them thirteen years ago.’ She rambled on without stopping, as if she had known me all her life; and yet I am sure she was nervous of me because her hands were trembling. She had opened the door of my mother’s little parlour. And instantly a picture flashed in on me of the little room in the old days, with its muslin curtains and its carpet of moss-roses, and its blue silk work-basket, and my mother’s little favourite cane-chair, where she used to sit in the bow-window over her needlework.
But now instead here a gaunt old gentleman sat bolt upright in a stiff wooden chair before an empty grate. Rows of musty folios to duodecimos lined the shelves in the walls; and there was a lame old clock ticking. On one side of the bow-window stood a mouldering bureau, gaping and choke-full of papers.
It reeked of mortality. The old boy had reluctantly put down his book and now got up stiffly from his chair when we approached him – a lamp-post of a man, with a large high nose. He bowed absent-eyedly over my hand like a schoolmaster; until I felt I was being carpeted. And on bare boards too!
‘This gentleman has come to look over the house and walk in the garden, Father,’ said Florence. He bowed again. Florence moved her eyebrows up and down, and coughed – another little trick of hers.
‘It is really his house, of course, and we are just barbarians – interlopers. He was the little boy, who came into the world here and who knows every nook and cranny, every cupboard – corner too, I’ll be bound, and the views spread out from every window. Like a picture-book. He says Sesame, and there it is. I found him peeping through the bars of the gate just as he used to peep – ten inches high. So what could I do but behave unladylike-ly, and ask him to come in.’ She went to the window, squeezing in between the bureau and the panels of the wall and turned her back on us, standing quite still. It was curious to see her scarlet in the bare room. The old fellow’s face was like a mask.
‘I shall be happy to be of any service to you, sir,’ he said. ‘The roots of childhood strike very deep. In the first years we learn our whereabouts. I have no doubt the house recalls much to your remembrance. Will you please be quite at liberty here; I think I once had the honour of meeting your mother many…’
‘“Mother!” His mother?’ said the girl whipping round. ‘And this is the first… Oh, tell me… Oh but…’ She eyed me anxiously as if she feared she might have hurt me. ‘Now you must come and see the garden,’ she added, breaking off with a smile, ‘or else night will be catching us up. Will you?’
‘Pray excuse me, sir, if I do not accompany you into the garden,’ said the old gentleman. ‘It is, I fear, but poorly tended. Things are left to grow in their own free way. My daughter prefers it so; and I think I prefer it so too. Please put yourself quite at your ease, and spare us nothing to be of service to you.’ I saw Florence squeeze his hand as she passed.
‘Isn’t it splendid?’ she said. ‘I always told you he’d come —’
‘Fancies, fancies, my dear child,’ said the old fellow vacantly. ‘It is hazardous to put your faith in fancies. Everything passes. Things are what they are in essence; there is no change.’
He said this or some such stuff, standing erect, as if he were some antique philosopher with the gods for audience. And then for the first time I noticed he was a clergyman. A remarkable old man. However eccentric. Real.
‘And now I suppose I must tell you the secret,’ said Florence, as she led me out and bade me wait at the foot of the staircase, while she ran up, singing. And that gave me time to think.
It seemed awfully strange to find myself standing alone in the house again, so acutely familiar, and yet utterly changed. And it was devilish melancholy. I seemed to hear again my mother’s footstep behind me; and when the strange woman – strange to me – came upstairs from the kitchen I fancied for a moment it was her maid, Martha, who used always to be muttering about the house with her feather broom.
Eheu! I have gone through many years and a good deal of experience since those days. And I see life in its true colours. I suppose it’s rather ridiculous to be writing down all this stuff. Still, it seemed even in its own time a kind of epoch or crisis in my life. Besides, this girl was quite different from all my previous experience of her monotonous sex – so whimsical and mysterious, and almost dictatorial to
me. Nor was she a bit pretty, or even beautiful – except her eyes. But after all, in the words of the proverb, beauty is only skin deep. ‘The Lady in Scarlet,’ a Romance in three volumes by a new, original and talented Author!!!
When she came downstairs she had taken off her hat, and her dark hair was drawn back loosely from her forehead, quite plain. There’s a sort of curve about her eyes: it’s difficult to describe, but her face is so much herself; not the least bit like Fanny.
‘Now, come into the garden,’ she said, ‘and I’ll show it thee.’ I remember the ‘thee’ distinctly! So out I went after her into the garden. In an instant I shrunk up into the breeches age. There it was quite unchanged, only a little wilder and greener; cherry and apple and hawthorn, lilac and laburnum; and melting sweet with wallflowers – it was Mother. All herself.
‘There, Mr Nicholas,’ she said brightly, leaning forward an instant, ‘have we been fickle? Do you remember?’ And then her face was all grave again. ‘How am I to excuse myself,’ she continued, ‘I am ashamed to think of it. Up at the window there, looking out over the tree-tops, I saw it all in a flash. And I was utterly ashamed. I don’t know what you must think of me, but whatever it is, it is true; still, if you have the heart of the little boy whose face I know so well, you will easily forgive me. For, don’t you see, living here alone day by day, and day by day, one learns to conduct one’s self as if one were only and always in one’s own company. With other people of course you must be in their company, and … there, think it in your own words. At any rate… Well?’
I mumbled that it was very kind of her and all that, and that ‘I was much obliged to Mr…’
‘Our name is Lindsay,’ she broke in quickly. ‘I forgot. My father has no curacy or anything of that kind here. We just live on together…’
‘He is very fortunate to have such a companion,’ I said, and nearly bit my tongue off. I can’t help saying silly things to women. Her frown went away, she closed her lips, and looked almost distressed. She shook herself, and all the ring had gone out of her voice.
‘Well, as I was coming downstairs, that was not in the least what I wanted to say. Yet somehow or other I have to explain myself, and this is the only way. This picture. I don’t want now to show it you in the least; not now. But after we had moved into the house, we found a litter of old papers in one of my father’s cupboards. And this was among them. I stole it. I hate showing it to you – it is like betraying a friend. But still I must do so, and please if you wouldn’t mind, will you give it me back quickly?’
After all this beating about the bush she put into my hand a little pencil drawing of a child framed in an oval of ebony. And underneath it was written in my old infantile scrawl, ‘This is me, Nicholas.’ Of course I remembered it instantly. It was the little drawing Mother made of me years ago. I remember her standing me by the copper coal-scuttle in her little parlour, and afterwards sitting me on her knee and telling me what to write and guiding my hand. I can almost feel the heat of the fire on my bare legs, and my tongue anxiously protruded while I scrawled. I told her that it was my mother’s drawing. ‘She used to play with me sometimes,’ I said.
‘Poor mite,’ she said, smiling in her old way. ‘And have you been happy since? Oh, what a fool I am to be asking such questions. Well, anyhow, now you know why I – liked to see you – and it accounts for my pitiful familiarity – my ignorance – does it?’
I stumbled over some remark, repeating, ‘kindness, pleasure’, and so on.
‘Ah,’ she said, and took the picture from me. ‘Dreams! Other people are not like me – and there’s no conceit in that! I cannot talk to you, Mr Nicholas; you’re listening with all your manners on. And I have forgotten the few I ever had. Well; we must go in.’ She hesitated in the porch, half smiling, yet frowning. ‘Have you ever said to yourself when anything vividly happens – or you see anything sharply —’ She jerked her hand towards the garden. ‘This I shall remember always; just as it is. And when the remembrance comes – well, it isn’t quite what one expected. Come in, Mr Nicholas; I don’t know, and will never ask your surname. “This is you, Nicholas”; that is all.’
We took tea in what, I suppose, is the drawing-room (our dining-room) very old fashioned and rather shabby. All the house is drab and silent. Mr L. sat in an old leather armchair, his knees at an acute angle. And ever and again, his eyes would melt out of reverie, and he would make a remark. He seemed to be at pains to be good company, and to be always forgetting his good intentions. He munched, like an old mare, and sipped five cups of tea, and his nose was beaked between his eyes. So on the whole I felt devilish de trop. It was a mutes’ tea-party for me. Florence hardly spoke at all. She seemed to have been exhausted with talking, although her eyes were still smouldering. So we stolidly sat on, with an occasional supping noise from Mr Lindsay, and the whistling of the birds in the garden. By and by, to my intense relief, Mr L. put down his cup for the last time, and sat with his hands on his knees.
‘I doubt, sir,’ he said presently, as if my very thoughts had been audible, ‘I doubt if this house was ever so quiet in your childhood. We are hermits. And solitude attenuates the rumour of the world. But I hope you will pay us another visit some day. We do not order ourselves much by formality, as you perceive, but you will be welcome.’ It was evidently a hint for me to be gone; and I jumped at the opportunity. So I thanked him again for his courtesy, and shook him by the hand. He stood up stiff as a lamp-post and seemed to gaze down out of his vacant blue eyes like a caged bird.
Florence showed me to the door. ‘There,’ she said as she opened it, ‘it is growing dusk. I am afraid we have detained you. Have I?’
‘Really, no,’ I said, ‘I cannot tell you how grateful I am. Fancy to have come to an empty house, or to have found it all —’ ‘Well, it would not have been faithless,’ she said, ‘it would never have been that. We love its silence and solitude; or rather we do not feel them. We are egoists. Our fancies bewitch our eyes… That is my garden,’ she looked far away over the dusky heath, dark and boundless to the shining of the stars. ‘And will you come again, do you think? Dear me, how hard it is to get used to all the conventions. Good-bye, Mr Nicholas. And I shall keep your picture, and – unless you do come again with your real self on your arm – shall forget you. How still the night is! It is almost as if someone were listening…’
Here endeth the first chapter. And once again I am in my own sweet company, thank Jupiter.
It’s the dolefullest household I ever was in. She had no genuine interest in me, I think. She scarcely gave me an opportunity to speak; she harped so incessantly on the drawing – rather childish, I thought. But so is she, with not a symptom of savoir faire. Yet her face is old. She must be at least nineteen or so. I could read that face like a book one moment, and then she frowned or something, and I was all wrong. Her faintest smile changes it; now and then it is almost as if she were beautiful. I was miserably awkward in her company, not at all myself. She must think me absurdly green. There’s some skeleton in the old father’s cupboard, I’ll wager. A broken love affair, perhaps. Anyhow, I loathe tea-parties. Why can’t people speak out as God made them?
As I look back I realize that she did not even shake hands with me – seemed almost to avoid doing so. I shouldn’t think she really takes the slightest interest in me; she’s an egoist. And here I am, wasting all this time (not to mention weeks of diary-space) scribbling rubbish. I shall give up trying to analyse every little thing I do or think. I don’t suppose Shakespeare or Napoleon did. The real thing is to forget one’s self and live for others. How much wiser is a man than his tongue! – Wrote to Uncle Robert. Marvellously starry night.
April 29th. Went to concert with ‘Madame’ and Fanny. Madame is good-humoured enough, but otherwise a more or less meaningless mixture of frivolity, sententiousness and Scandal. It seemed as if I had not seen F. for weeks. I said nothing about my visit.
April 30th. Dreamed again of the old house. It was sunny, and the d
oor opened, and old L. came out into the garden – half encircled in a nimbus!! Henceforward I shall keep an account of my dreams, I think. Man dreams probably all the time he is asleep; because thinking is to be, and we can’t become nothing, or we should remain so. Took a constitutional in the afternoon, met G.M. A little Frenchiness is a dangerous thing. Mrs Giles interred at 3.30.
May 1st. May-day. Awoke with, and in, a fit of the miserables. Wet. Read some of that affected minx, Addison. He has no more essential knowledge of human nature than a fly! Have a good mind to write and thank F.L. for my visit. They were very civil, considering. Young, young man, beware!
May 3rd. Learn to control thy thoughts lest thy thoughts learn to control thee!
May 5th. Went for a walk with Fanny. She never once ceased chattering about her sister’s forthcoming wedding; a heathen custom; and we brag about our civilization, forsooth! It’s no better than any other primitive rite, and so are Funerals. Bury me in an apple-barrel at the cross-roads! say I. It’s more real and human, at any rate, than crapulous coachmen and crocodile tears. Fanny asked me why I was ‘different’. She does not understand that a man may have more than one side to his character and nature. I am not a machine, although I may some day be a husband.
May 6th. Went down again this morning. It seemed as if the caravans of Spring were camping on the heath. There was a kind of immense warm stillness, a haze of sunshine – and all dazzlingly green. And almost the first person I encountered was F.L. herself.
She was sitting on a little knoll of turf, her face turned away from me. And though all her finery was gone, yet I recognized her instantly. I walked quickly over the turf, but though I scarcely made a sound she heard me and turned quickly. By the brightness of her eyes I fancied for a moment she had been crying. But I think she looks best in black. All women do. She put out her hand, looking at me; and something in the gesture, or in her expression, reminded me strangely of Mother. I made some silly remark about it’s not being a red-letter day.
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 71