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

by Frank Baker

  I ran out of his house, before the sister could bring the coffee. But as I slammed his door I heard her speaking angrily to him.

  ‘You fool. Why did you have to tell him?’

  I didn’t wait to hear more. This was yesterday. And now . . . now . . .

  I wish I weren’t alone in this place. I sit here snug and warm with the electric heater on in this little breakfast-room. Both doors, to the hall and to the scullery, are closed. It is October, and I hear the rustle of dead leaves outside on a cold, clear night, without wind. The white rose is dead. I’ve neglected it, I’ve neglected everything.

  I think I’d better light the fire, save electricity. But if I do it’ll mean going to the outhouse to get more coal. Still, if I lit it, and let it die, and saw only ash, white ash like the white rose, I might feel better. I feel, so strangely, my innocence upon me – and what do I mean by that? I mean that I would like to go back to my earliest days, before I knew right from wrong.

  I must get up from this table. I can’t write any more. I think I must light the fire. For I can’t go to bed. It is so lonely in bed.

  I remember something else Mr Knowles said to me. ‘Burn it,’ he said. ‘Burn it.’ And then he added, quietly, ‘If you can.’

  . . . I’ve lit the fire, and been out to get more coal. I have come back. I didn’t bring any coal. The sack was still there, where it was this morning. Rolled up into a kind of ball. I touched it with my foot.

  It was hard.

  IV

  Art Thou Languid?

  They had been in business together for over twenty years, a partnership that was broken, first, by the departure of Mr Hoare to his native town in Yorkshire (in 1941), and, very soon after, by the death of Mr Weary. So, for the last time, the shutters were put up to the music shop on Calverley Hill and the names were almost forgotten, commemorated only by those who knew a little of the inner history of the partners, and by the words themselves – Weary and Hoare – painted in blue and gold letters above the long peeling shutters of the bay windows. Inside the shop the stacks of music, the gramophone records, the busts of famous composers, the Bechstein piano behind the door (by whose means Mr Hoare had liked to interpret the ‘Valse Triste’ of Sibelius) – all these, and even the account books, it is said, remain untouched, in exactly the same position – though in more decaying a condition – as on the day, four years earlier, when Mr Weary was forced to retire, a dying man, to his bed.

  The shop is curiously isolated in a road that leads steeply out of the cathedral town of Wellsborough and has become the resort of the prosperous, who, within our times, built large houses, ornate and complacent, with extensive ornamental gardens. Isolated as much by age as by position: for it knew the days of Queen Anne and was once the post-office of Calverley village. But isolated also for other reasons which the prosperous householders of Calverley Hill do not much care to talk about. Nobody will be found – except perhaps in the cathedral close, where such things are trifled with – to declare it to be haunted. Neither will anyone, returning home at tea-time on a tempestuous afternoon of late autumn, linger to light a cigarette in the padlocked doorway of the shop, or take protection there from a sudden downwash of hail. For the ‘Valse Triste’ is still heard from the piano on the other side of that door where dead leaves, mingled with the tattered leaves of music which have slipped through from the darkened shop, rustle and crackle in the wind.

  The names, ludicrous and full of lassitude, were the natural bonds which united them: the names, a melancholy winter afternoon, a funeral, and a canal barge. In January of 1918, when most people’s energies were at a low ebb, Harold Weary and Lionel Hoare, both natives of Haggerley Ford, a small town in the West Riding, were on fourteen days’ leave from the mud of France. Lionel, then a man of thirty, unmarried, going a little stout, with clear blue eyes and a quick confiding smile, was organist at the parish church. In the trenches, while his comrades showed one another photographs of their girls, Lionel dreamt of his three-manual organ and burnt with desire to feel his fingers curl over the Great Double Trumpet. He was fond of women, but too shy and modest to advance any further with them than a longing smile. During his leave, which he spent with his parents, the vicar of the church died and Lionel played at the funeral. The choir-boys attended, and a handful of men, amongst them Harold Weary, a thin and wistful-looking man, five years younger than Hoare.

  Weary was one of those emotionally uneasy men, sardonic from self-consciousness, who are naturally the bait of schoolboys. The Vicar’s favourite hymn, ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid?’, sung at the funeral, invited an obvious joke from one of the boys, who, turning round in his stall, indecently bawled the line directly at Harold. Afterwards, in the vestry, another boy came up to him and, with an assumption of innocence, said: ‘Please, sir?’

  ‘Well, what?’ snapped Harold.

  In a kindly voice, distant as a lark, the lad continued: ‘Art thou languid, sir?’

  This was the prearranged signal for all the others to cry, ‘No, he’s weary!’, which they did with great zest, as they tumbled out into the churchyard and the damp mist of an afternoon already threatened by night.

  Lionel Hoare, carefully hanging up his ARCO hood on the peg in his cupboard, laughed and turned to Harold. But Harold was scowling and had obviously not cared for the joke.

  ‘You mustn’t take it so seriously,’ said Lionel.

  ‘But it’s true,’ said Harold. ‘I am weary. I am languid.’

  He spoke with a passion which impressed the other man and even frightened him a little.

  ‘What’s in a name?’ said Lionel. ‘Look at mine! They rag me no end in the Army.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about the Army.’

  But it was in comparing their service experiences that the two men, walking home together along the banks of the canal, came to find something akin to an affection for one another. It wasn’t really affection, nor any common qualities of character, which brought them together. It was the similarity of their circumstances; for both of them were tired and both of them longed to escape.

  Then they saw the barge, a looming shadow floating along the colourless water of the canal, and painted on the stern the word ‘Atlantis’.

  ‘Atlantis,’ said Harold. ‘That’s supposed to be the name of a lost island.’

  ‘Wish we could find it,’ muttered Lionel. He stared straight before him at the towering shoulder of hills which pressed formidably over the canal.

  ‘Maybe we could, you and me,’ said Harold.

  Lionel laughed, that warm chuckle in his throat which came as the sudden hint of a buried personality. ‘Weary and Hoare! That’s good!’ He spluttered with laughter. It seemed to him the craziest thing he had ever imagined – Weary and Hoare landing on Atlantis. But when he stopped laughing he saw Harold’s heavy, brooding eyes turned on him and again he had a sense of fear, an unreasonable fear which curiously thrilled and satisfied him. In that second, silently, a relationship was born and accepted: Harold, the vessel of the imagination, Lionel, the pilot – yet always subservient to the stronger will of the younger man.

  ‘Atlantis is where you make it,’ said Harold.

  ‘What do you mean, old man?’

  But Harold preferred not to explain. To do so would be to admit that secretly, for years, he had written poetry; verses that no magazine editor would glance at, but to the writer his very life’s blood. ‘Can you bear the thought of coming back here to live when the war’s over?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh – I don’t know – not so bad – ’

  But then Harold gripped his arm. The pressure seemed to squeeze out of Lionel that half-acknowledged dread which lay always at the back of his mind – the dread of returning home, the only son of over-loving parents, to resume a life that war had shattered in a way they could never understand. ‘Tell you the truth,
’ he muttered unwillingly, ‘I don’t want the war to end.’

  ‘Yes, you do. But you don’t want to come back here.’

  Smoke from collieries drifted over the canal. In it both men saw the firm outlines of their slain boyhood. But when the smoke cleared they saw only the drab roofs of the small town, incredibly dreary and hopeless.

  ‘I’ve saved a little money,’ began Lionel. ‘I thought . . .’ He hesitated, then he burst out, ‘If I left here, ’twould break up the folks at home.’

  ‘Damn the folks at home! Haven’t they broken up us?’

  ‘You’re not married, I suppose?’

  Harold laughed. ‘Marry – and bring kids into a world like this! No, Mr Hoare, I’m not married, nor ever will be.’

  ‘You got parents?’

  ‘They’re dead. I live with an old aunt.’

  ‘What job had you got, lad, before the war?’

  ‘Behind the counter at Henderson’s, the tailor.’

  ‘He’d have you back, I suppose?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go.’

  ‘I was a clerk in Spalding’s, the steel people. They told all our chaps they were keeping jobs open for them.’

  ‘A man who can play the organ like you – what do you want to be a clerk for, Mr Hoare?’

  ‘You can’t live on music.’

  ‘You could. You could sell music. That’s something we both know about, something we could do.’

  Lionel chuckled. ‘Weary and Hoare – it sounds so damn’ silly.’

  ‘Depends how you look at it. To me it sounds right, like bacon and eggs, or chalk and cheese.’

  He looked at Lionel and wondered what it was that had attracted him to the older man and drawn the suggestion from him. Was it a certain cherubic innocence about him, which flattered his own sleeping paternal instinct?

  Then Lionel looked over his shoulder along the misty canal where the darkening winter day had already turned to night. He shivered. ‘Let’s get home. It’s dreary here.’

  ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ said Harold.

  ‘Funny you should say that. When I was a kid about eight I heard somebody scream here one night. I’ll never forget it. Never found out who it was. But I always used to believe it was a ghost.’

  ‘And you’re still frightened of ghosts? Is that it?’ Harold spoke urgently. He felt as though he must protect Lionel.

  ‘Oh no, of course not. Don’t believe in such things now. Come along. I want my tea.’ Lionel went ahead along the towing-path, Harold following him, picking his steps carefully through the black mud. Occasionally Lionel turned his head to make sure that the other man was following. He was always there, a few inches behind.

  In the evening Harold, reading Swinburne while his aunt knitted a comforter, saw in the vibrant words of the poet the bland, warm and slightly mischievous face of Lionel Hoare. A sense of power exalted him. For the first time in his life he felt that he had found another human being whom he could command. Sitting there, his eyes upon the book, he willed Lionel to throw in his lot with him. He did not want the music shop. He wanted, as a cat wants, something to play with, some toy which could occupy the long bleak days ahead. He began to love the older man, as an artist loves the work he is making.

  Lionel, at that moment trying a new piece on the piano in his parents’ sitting-room, stopped suddenly and went to the hall for his hat and coat. ‘Going out a bit,’ he said to his parents.

  ‘Ay, lad. Enjoy yersel’.’ His father smiled.

  ‘What was that music, lad?’ asked his mother.

  ‘Valse Triste,’ said Lionel, ‘by Sibelius.’

  ‘And triste it is,’ said his father.

  ‘Your Dad likes to air his French,’ said his mother. They began to chaff one another good-humouredly. Lionel, leaving the house and climbing the narrow cobbled hill towards Harold’s aunt’s house, longed for a wife who would chaff him. He had always liked being teased.

  The two men spent that evening, and almost every other evening of their leave, in the saloon bar of the Goat and Thistle. It was with a drugged sense of inevitability that they discussed ways and means for their project, Lionel – the business mind of the two – working out figures on slips of paper and comparing the advantages of one town over another.

  On the last night of their leave, Lionel said, ‘Are we really going to do this, Harold?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Why? Doesn’t it strike you as queer?’

  Harold looked at Lionel’s honest, bewildered face. ‘If you back out on this,’ he muttered, ‘I’ll kill myself. And then I’ll haunt you.’

  Again the intensity, the note of hysteria, frightened and fascinated Lionel. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he said. ‘Why should I back out? Provided we find the right premises, I’m with you.’

  ‘To Weary and Hoare,’ said Harold, raising his glass.

  ‘Two damn’ tired old soldiers,’ echoed Lionel.

  Both of them knew that in trying to escape from the circumstances of their world they had fettered their lives to one another. They were neither happy nor unhappy; yet happier than they had been before their meeting, happier in a dulled condition of irresponsibility. For they had resigned themselves to the mythical will of fate, that tyrant which lies in the hearts of all men and, once obeyed, becomes the master.

  In the midsummer of that tired year Lionel was wounded in the thigh. The wound was not serious, though for the rest of his life he was to endure the discomfort of a right leg that would succumb, an easy victim, to the insidious dampness of the south-west wind.

  He was sent to a country mansion, near Wellsborough, which had been adapted as a hospital. After some weeks, when he was again able to walk, he came daily to enjoy the many mediaeval charms of the cathedral city.

  Later, he knew that these were the happiest weeks of his life. Wellsborough was exactly the kind of town, so mild and mellow, so much of a contrast to Haggerley Ford, which could give him the benison he needed. Under its influence he ripened like an apple that had been in danger of withering. He got to know the cathedral organist and often sat with him in the loft, though he never ventured to play, for he was too out of practice; his weak leg made it impossible for him to use the pedals, and he was too modest to speak to his host – a benign Cambridge doctor – of his own considerable skill. He would, after Evensong, take tea in a fifteenth-century café which had once been part of a monastic house. From his window seat, misted by the idle August sun, he would watch the grave central towers of the cathedral and the rooks, those reincarnated religious of cathedral towns, about their noisy business in the high elms. Always for tea he had a boiled egg, brown bread-and-butter, and a slice of plain, home-made cake. And he fell in love – not for the first time, but this time more courageously and with more hope of success, for his healthy smiling face and his honoured hospital blue made an appeal to the pretty waitress, called Ilona, who daily served him.

  One afternoon, the early-closing day, he took her for a walk and they sat by the banks of the river, watching other lovers in punts and dinghies. He put his arm round her waist. ‘You don’t mind!’ he asked. No, she didn’t mind, of course she didn’t, she thought he was sweet. He walked back under the lime-trees, silently holding her hand, so blissfully happy that he could not speak. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said, as he mounted his bus. She nodded and waved to him.

  But next day Ilona’s mother was ill and she was not at the café. He thought of asking for her address and calling on her; but it seemed, he thought, a forward thing to do. Instead, after tea, he wandered some way up Calverley Hill, intending to pick up his bus at the top. And so he found the shuttered shop, high on the slopes of a valley, with its long narrow orchard tapering down behind it and its door plastered by a notice which announced the sale of this highly desirable peri
od premises.

  He knew at once – and at once he saw the music displayed in the windows, he heard the sound of a piano from inside, he saw – with heart-breaking clarity – Ilona pegging up clothes in the orchard. But then he saw, in place of the words ‘Williams and Son, Drapers’ above the windows, the fateful names ‘Weary and Hoare’. And Ilona, cheerfully carrying her basket of clothes to the orchard, faded out.

  The two were incompatible, that was obvious. But the shop, and this view of the luscious valley with its mother cathedral in the meadows – this was his. He inquired next from the agent. More money was needed than he had saved. He was not the sort of man to consider a loan, it did not even enter his mind. Neither did he ever seriously consider that in wiring to Harold Weary and keeping faith with their bargain he was cutting Ilona forever out of his life. Somewhere, he vaguely believed, a place must be found for her.

  For the next two days, waiting a reply from Harold, he did not go to the café. Was it perhaps possible, he asked himself, that Harold no longer wanted to go on with their plan? He had heard nothing from him since the early spring when a postcard reached him in France, which had read: ‘Don’t forget our contract. I’m keeping my eyes open for a place.’ This was from a hospital in the Midlands. Lionel had replied, but no further letter had come. For all Lionel knew, Harold might be dead. ‘But I’d know,’ muttered Lionel, ‘I’m sure I’d know if he were dead.’ And he wondered vaguely why he was so certain of that.

  Then a telegram came. Invalided out. Book room. Coming tomorrow.

  Lionel met him and was shocked at his haggard face and shrunken stoop. But Harold did not want to talk of his illness. He immediately agreed that the shop would do. That was all he said.

  ‘It’ll do.’