Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  ‘Yes. You chased him up the cliff, didn’t you – ’

  ‘Yes, yes – ’ He spoke eagerly and came nearer to me. The door behind him blew open suddenly. In the dim light I could see masses of loose sheets of paper on the floor, and many books thrown down in a mass with fallen plaster and laths from the rotten roof. ‘You know what happened then?’

  ‘No. I was only told you chased him up the cliff.’

  ‘Oh, more than that, much more. One night he came up the steps more drunk than usual, waking everybody, bellowing like a bull. Then I went mad, all reason left me. If he could sing and scream and bellow, so could I. If he had long black hair to scream in the wind, so had I. If he had nimble legs to leap like Pegasus up the Green Steps to the drying-ground, so had I. It went into me like poison into my blood, like a man suddenly charged with electricity – at the top, beyond the battery, where the cliff falls sheer down, there I got him. He was singing and swaying on the edge of the cliff as though he weren’t subject to the rules of ordinary people. There was no thought about it. I had him round the waist in a second and over we both went in each other’s arms, locked tight in mid-air. I don’t know how it happened, but he wrestled with me in the air, and got free of me, and went hurtling to the bottom and – or did he, did he? That’s what I never know. Did he float away like a lost angel? I never saw him. He’d gone and I clutched the cliff face and found a foothold and managed to cling there till they came with ropes to drag me up and – the Infirmary comes back to me now, I can see the ward where I lay, I was badly hurt and Stella came, every week she came to see me and said it would be all right, she’d always stay with me, always. But when I got back, and he’d gone for ever, and it was just the two of us, and I told her what I’d done, she only stared at me and called me Robin and said I’d never change for her, whatever happened. She wouldn’t believe me, that I’d killed him. Nobody would listen – ’

  ‘I don’t understand this. Somebody must have known he’d gone? There must have been an inquest or – ’

  ‘Nothing, nothing. Don’t you understand the frightfulness of it? They all said I was him. You see, we were so close, we were so alike, we exactly resembled one another. All the time the three of us lived here, even Stella never noticed me, never tried to draw me out from my silences. Only when he and I were quite alone could I talk to him and him to me. Then, when I’d killed him and came back, she thought I was him, and nothing – until I started to get work and earn a living which he’d never done; and one day some editor wrote and said he wanted to print some of his poems and I wrote back and said that Robin Starling had fallen over the cliff and was dead and that I was his brother and dealing with his affairs. Then Stella began to behave strangely. She said I was mad, that the fall had affected my brain, and that I ought to have medical treatment and – I worked, so hard I worked, and I saw my life’s ambition before me and knew I’d achieve it. But not her; I couldn’t win her. She left me and never came back.’

  ‘Your life’s ambition? What was that?’

  In a corner, by the grate where dead ashes lay with charred paper, was his long stiff broom. Pointing to it, ‘That,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d have to come to it. Each man must fulfil his destiny, you see; that’s how it works. It was prophesied for me, by him, and it’s come true as I knew it must come true. And now – now, though I dread it, I want him back. I want to hear him sing again as he used to, I want to watch his legs flying up the Green Steps to the hill-sides he loved, and I want to follow him. When he comes back, I’ll follow him, yes, I’ll follow him, in a great wind when the tide’s high he’ll come back as he said he would and then – ’ He muttered away into himself and I could no longer hear the words.

  The wind gave a sudden charge at the house and papers rustled along the floor in the darkened inner room. I thought of the wild and happy parties that must have taken place here years ago. I saw the old scavenger bending down to pick up a sheet of yellowed paper. ‘His,’ he muttered. ‘His words. All meaningless. All meaningless.’

  He handed the paper to me and turned his back. Taking a poker he toyed the ashes with it, then crouched on a chair, holding his long hands out to no spark of warmth. Above him on the wall was a great patch of dampness, furry and mildewed, like a map of some fabulous country. Suddenly I knew that I hadn’t a word of consolation to give and I turned back to the door, feeling desperately miserable. I wished I had been ‘him’, that slain self who so tormented him.

  At the door, ‘I know he’ll come back to you one day,’ I said; and felt that it was true.

  Then I went outside, closed the door, and walked inch by inch up the slippery steps to the hill-side where the pure moon had soared through a gap in the black clouds. The wind was easing off a little. The night was fresh and the salt of the sea strong in my nostrils. I read the lines on the bit of paper he’d given me.

  ‘Landlocked in this sandpride of westfallen moonflowers

  I (in my archery) to you before wisdom its windows

  Swings follywards, turn with the splint of the stinging finger.’

  It made no sense, but it was strangely contemporary. I could see by the freshness of the ink that it had only recently been written. But the writing was of an old man.

  He is still living, still the village scavenger, and never a word have I had with him from that day, and never shall I. I am tormented whenever I see him; and yet there is a strange feeling of certainty within me about him, as though I knew that he would find the way up the steps and follow, as he wished to follow, that once-hated, bitterly-resented truer self of his whom he killed years ago. When I see him I know that because of the great division in him the great union is already achieved. He is a poet who has had to work out fatally in his own nature the disintegration of our times. Like the Poet, the Scavenger is lifted outside the laws of men. One by one his own words go into the dust-cart to be burnt in the waste land behind the village. The smoke of those words rises and drifts over the roofs to the sea. And the lines that he wrote which moved me as a boy prophesy for him the destiny he desires.

  II

  My Lady Sweet, Arise

  Miss Polly Ponsonby lived in a small yellow-bricked cottage in Baker’s Lane, a narrow, wooded, little hill winding down by the side of a recreation park in Sydenham. It had been her father’s house, and after his death, just before the war, she had inherited it. He had been a chiropodist who, in his spare time, played the flute, Polly accompanying him on the piano. They had always been very fond of music, a fact which Mrs Ponsonby, who had died when Polly was a girl of ten, had resented. For she had had no ear for music and was tormented daily when Polly began to learn the violin, then to take singing lessons from Dr Murdoch, the organist at the parish church. Mrs Ponsonby had no use for that sort of thing. Polly and her father were secretly happier when she passed away, leaving them to hours of peaceful music-making on long winter nights after Mr Ponsonby returned from his consulting room in Sydenham High Street.

  After Mr Ponsonby’s death, Polly, then aged forty-seven, decided it was wrong to live alone. So she took lodgers, usually young men or women who had business in the City and were out all day.

  One of these lodgers, Barley Merton, an actress working in repertory at the Sydenham Hippodrome, became a close friend of Polly’s. She was ‘such a lady,’ often talking of her family in the country, and her young brother Ryland (known as ‘Rye’) who did something very important in the West End – Polly never knew what. And Barley liked old Polly, so there was a pleasant friendly atmosphere in the cottage.

  Polly was a grotesque to look at. There could be no two opinions as to that. She knew it herself. A pink and very wrinkled face, a mass of thin grey hair, a small, stout body, and abnormally large flat feet (which her father had ignored, for he had always refused to bring his professional skill to the service of his family – a defect in an otherwise excellent man) these were presented to the
world in clothes which looked as though they were the spoils of a succession of jumble-sales. Moreover, she never seemed to be able to dress for the time of year. In summer she might suddenly dig out an old grey fox fur and a check tweed overcoat hanging like a sack round her lumpy figure; in winter she might venture to the park wearing a flowered cotton frock and a floppy straw hat.

  ‘Really, Miss Ponsonby, you take the giddy biscuit,’ Barley said one evening, sipping her Ovaltine on her return from the theatre. ‘Who but you would think of sporting white silk gloves on the foulest December day?’

  Polly smiled. When she smiled her eyes – small and dark brown – seemed to disappear. Barley often wondered how one knew that Miss Ponsonby was smiling. But there couldn’t be any mistake about it.

  ‘It’s the artist in me.’ Polly spoke with quiet modesty. ‘Mr Ponsonby was just the same. I really don’t notice trivial things like weather, dear. I think clothes are there to serve our impulses. When I got up this morning, goody-goody! I said, white silk gloves today, my lady. Surely you, Miss Merton, being such an artist yourself, understand the call?’

  Barley, whose impulses led to an excessive number of honey-coloured curls, and who had a way of pirouetting through puddles in very high heels, nodded thoughtfully. ‘Of course, people of a certain class can do what they like and it’s always right. Dad, for example, eats peas with a spoon – just to show that he hasn’t any use for all this gentility humbug. You and me are much of a muchness, Miss Ponsonby.’

  ‘Except, my dear, in the matter of looks,’ Polly murmured sadly.

  ‘Oh, what are looks? Of course, in my profession, they do count, you can’t get away from that. But in your case – ’ Barley stopped suddenly, feeling she might hurt Miss Ponsonby.

  ‘What were you going to say, dear?’

  ‘Well, to tell you God’s truth, I was thinking of that performance of Hiawatha by the Sydenham Choral Society you gave me a ticket for. Funny pack of guys, aren’t they? But mind you, they can sing, that’s what matters.’

  ‘I think, dear Miss Merton, that musicians, developing as they do so acutely the sense of sound, often possess a very vague sense of sight. I expect that is why I look so garish myself – and I do, of course, I know I do. But there we are. You are meant to be seen – and I am meant to be heard.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t get far if they couldn’t hear me.’

  ‘Of course, my dear. But a pretty face and a pleasing figure is what chiefly matters on the stage. And you do not go to a musical performance to look at the performers; you go to listen.’

  ‘Well, it takes all sorts, as they say. Human beings are funnier than apes. If I didn’t think so, I’d go crackers. If it weren’t for my brother Rye sending me nylons every so often, and some decent chocolates, and you looking after me as you do here, I think I’d chuck everything up.’

  ‘Oh, but why, dear, why? You’re so brilliant.’

  ‘Not me. A lousy actress, stuck in a bloody rep in this backwater.’

  ‘I have never regarded Sydenham as a backwater.’

  ‘Oh well, you were born and bred here. And music’s different somehow. You float away on it and forget yourself. Same with me when I’m actually on. Every time I get my call I feel as though I’m sprouting a pair of wings.’

  Miss Ponsonby was suddenly silent. Barley thought that a rich blush had suffused her wrinkled features.

  ‘If you know what I mean,’ she continued. ‘You know that thing you sing sometimes – “O for the wings of a dove?” Don’t you ever feel like that? When I go on the stage I feel as though I never want to come off, whatever part I’m playing. It’s easier on the stage.’ Still Miss Ponsonby was silent.

  When Barley went up to bed presently she heard the sound of the violin downstairs. Miss Ponsonby was playing ‘Hark, hark the lark’. She played it over and over again, and then tried it on the piano, singing it in her pure and limpid boy-like voice. It touched Barley. But after a time she got tired of it. ‘Why can’t the old geezer go to bed?’ she muttered, turning over and over and trying to blot out the sound by burying her face in the pillow.

  Not long after this, Polly took to going to the Spiritualist Church at the bottom end of Baker’s Lane. Although she had for years been a communicant at the parish church, she had often admitted to Barley that the services never quite gave her the satisfaction she needed. Then it came out, in conversation, that shortly before the end of his life, Mr Ponsonby had also fallen for spiritualism. This was because he had dreamt one night that a client with six toes on one foot (two of them permanently crossed) would call upon him; and the next day it had happened. Old Ponsonby had never been quite the same man after that. ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth’ he had muttered over his evening baked-beans-on-toast; and a few days later had ambled self-consciously off to the little red-brick building, with the green slate roof, which he had previously so despised.

  Polly would never accompany him to this haunt of spirit-rappers, and always shied off the subject whenever he brought it up. He stopped going to Church to the dismay of the vicar, for Mr Ponsonby had been a sidesman, and would occasionally consent to sing in the choir if the anthem had a suitable solo for him. It caused an unhappy rift between Polly and her father; but she never attempted to make him change his mind, neither did he seek to convert her to his new religion. Only once, after the first delicate arguments, did he refer to whatever it was that went on down the lane. (It was always referred to as ‘Down the Lane’.) That was when he said, casually, one rainy night on his return:

  ‘Your mother spoke tonight.’

  Polly had naturally been startled, even scared. But she hid this. ‘What did she say?’ she asked.

  Mr Ponsonby thought a long time before replying. Then, ‘Only, that there was no dratted music where she’d gone.’

  He looked at his wife’s picture on the sideboard. It stood in an intricately carved silver frame and showed Amelia Ponsonby in the full richness of womanhood, aged thirty-five, with large silky eyelashes, a mount of hair like a finely turned loaf, and a generous bosom which Mr Ponsonby dreamt of more frequently than his daughter could have guessed. It was the one thing he had really liked about his wife.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he had said after studying her picture for a long time, ‘that your mother wasn’t right to hate music. It gets you nowhere.’

  This had made Polly flush with anger. ‘On the contrary, it gets you everywhere,’ she snapped. ‘And I didn’t think I’d live to hear you say such things, Father. Spiritualism has ruined you.’

  It had been a painful moment. Never was the subject mentioned again, and Mr Ponsonby went less frequently down the lane, spending more of his time in the Talma Tavern where he would play darts. Musical evenings became rare, to Polly’s great sorrow.

  That was all many years ago. The war had passed since then, bringing severe tests of Polly’s Faith. She had continued to go to Church, to sing and play the piano and the violin, sometimes with a friend or two in the Choral Society, more often alone. Flying bombs only brought out an inherent courage in her. Nothing would make her move to the country, she said. If God meant her to die here, let Him take her in His own way. She even got rather doggedly fond of the ‘doodlebugs’ after the first week or so. At least, she said, they were in good company with the fowls of the air; she didn’t mean this, but it gave her strength to carry on.

  She never quite knew why she suddenly, and so long after, fell for her father’s religion; but it had certainly grown upon her after the talk with Barley, when she had played ‘Hark, hark the lark’ downstairs in the gaslight while Barley tried to sleep. For several days following this talk, she would find herself repeating, in her mind, over and over again the alluring phrase: My lady sweet, arise.

  And then one day, she did a thing she rarely did; she looked in a mirror. Good Heavens! How plain s
he was! Far plainer than even she had supposed. It dawned upon her that her mother must have resented this atrociously plain, even ugly little girl; for Mrs Ponsonby had had the flaunting majesty of a gipsy and the lips of a courtesan.

  ‘Oh dear, how very ugly,’ sighed Polly.

  And then, in order to comfort herself, began to sing. There was no doubt about that, anyway. The sound that issued from those dry thin lips was divinely beautiful; and she knew it. If only, she thought, I could give one concert. At the Wigmore Hall. Or even one of the Sunday night concerts at the Capitol Cinema in Sydenham. But it would never do. With a face like that she could never go before the public. All that Barley had said about the ugliness of the singers in the Choral Society came back to her. It was true. A hideous lot. But the compensations were great.

  Going round with the vacuum cleaner, she sang all the time. Once, lifting a chair away from the crowded carpet, she felt a strange little pain in her breast as she touched a high note. She was not singing any known melody; but carolling spontaneously, without words and sometimes indulging, with an impious sense of abandon, in a trill. She had to stop and sit on the sofa and clutch a cushion, the pain in her breast was so acute. It seemed to grow worse when she was not singing; and yet to sing any more was an effort. Forcing herself to do so, she commenced to warble fitfully. The pain left her. For the rest of the morning, as she went about her housework, she sang the whole time.