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

by Frank Baker

  The Hand possessed me. I tried to read – Rimsky-Korsakov on orchestration. But the words made no sense, and a torrent of chaotic music in my mind made me want to scream. The piano – why wasn’t there a piano? That could have saved me.

  Save me? From what? For I am still alive to tell the tale. But I mean, a piano could have saved me from the inner darkness and rising void which like its sister darkness in the valley outside the cottage walls rose up as though to suffocate me. I did not read or even know the name of Gerard Manley Hopkins in those days; he had hardly emerged upon the literary scene. But now I can quote from him, in illustration of my condition then.

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

  (And this from the poet who died unknown, with none of his verses published, and on his lips the last words, ‘I am so happy.’)

  Yes, the piano would have saved me, or any sound of music. But in particular I would then have played from the Well-Tempered Clavichord, for in Bach I could have found the strength, the consolation, the perfect order without which art and life have no meaning.

  But there was no piano. And as the window panes misted with heat from the oil stove and the driving rain hissed and bubbled down the gutters I could think only of one thing: the box in the window seat. What had stopped me from going straight up to the village and handing it over to the police? Merely the drenching rain? No, it was more than that, or so my sick conscience seemed to tell me. I was afraid to become involved. There would be questions I would not be able to answer. Would my story even be believed – that I had merely stumbled upon the box in the dark? But worse than that, my conscience drove at me the awareness that in some dreadful way I could not explain to myself, I did not want to part with it. As that long black evening drew on to night, and midnight, and past midnight, and still I did not go up to bed, and had by now smoked the last cigarette, I knew that this was the real reason why I had rejected the long walk to the village.

  It had fallen in my path. It was mine. I wanted to keep it.

  I can remember now a moment of wild humour that rose in me, when I spoke aloud, trying to reassure myself. ‘Bloody fool. What is it? Nothing but a Hand in a chocolate box. People are constantly leaving hands in chocolate boxes and dropping them on remote paths in west Cornwall.’ And it was with a laugh of sheer bravado that at last I went to the box, and once again lifted its lid.

  A thought came to me as I looked down. The box was packed with power. I bent down to take a closer look at it. And as I did so, I heard the sound I had subconsciously expected, yet had, at this moment, forgotten about.

  It came from a corner of the room I could not place. Or did it come from the floor, from the tattered oil-stained rush matting before the slab, the rusty slab which had not been lit for so long? Or did it come from inside myself?

  At first, I would not let this sound worry me. I felt calm, as though I were no more than a pawn in a game of chess, and must move as I was moved. So I merely looked and looked down at the Hand. Again, it seemed to have changed. Was it true that nails grow after death? I did not know, but I believe now that they do. And here, certainly, on these dead cold sticks of half curled fingers, the nails were longer, crustier, than they had been the last time I had looked.

  Gnarled, tobacco-stained . . . and now the colour had a purplish-greeny glow. In the centre of the palm I could see a thick black moving spot.

  It was when I saw the spot that the sound stopped. It was the bluebottle. It had settled precisely where it had wanted to settle.

  Not until that moment did I lose control. The next second I was looking through misted eyes at the shattered bits of a cup I had thrown across the room. It had crashed into a mirror on the wall by the door, a small oval mirror framed in an absurd fretsaw design of little crosses. The glass was splintered, and the bits of china scattered over the table. Tea had spilled across a sheet of score paper on which I had written the beginning of a subject – a dribble of quavers.

  That was the moment when I cried out the name of Christ, and snatching up the score papers, tore them in two, and then tore again, and again, and set a match to them, and watched them burn. That was the moment when I threw away the work I had meant to do, the work I was meant to do, and the moment when I consented to evil.

  And then I was calm again. Putting the lid back on the box, I went upstairs to bed. I slept. And that night I was not disturbed by any dreams of music.

  ‘The moment when I consented to evil . . .’

  It is too great a condemnation; I know that. And yet, from that moment I can now see my life as a composer was ended. What threads I have taken up have not been the right ones. And if I compose now, or play now, the sounds are not in good order.

  I must finish this account of something that happened to me so long ago, which I would never have written had it not been for a letter I received recently from an old friend who lives still in that part of Cornwall – a letter I will quote from presently.

  The stormy weather continued well into the following day. But by some intuition I knew it would end before evening, I knew the sun would break through the mass of cloud as the day wore on. I cannot remember now what I did with the earlier part of that day – whether I once opened the box or not. I only remember that at about six o’clock a glow of watery sun suddenly came across the opposite hillside, and again I heard the cuckoo, this time far away, yet not soothing, not on notes of ecstasy. It was to be a clear night. A night when one sees the slip of a new moon. I now had to do what should have been done twenty-four hours earlier, or even before that. I had to go to the village and give up to the police what I had only just found two nights before. I would tell them, I decided, that I had only just found it. For what kind of questions would I be asked if I admitted that I had kept it for nearly two days?

  I am trying to remember each move I made that evening. I think it was like this. I would have to return a milk jug and a cream bowl to the farm at the top, and these I put in a haversack. Bread had to be collected from the farm on the way back, where it was left for me twice a week. Probably it was a Saturday night, when, in those days, shops stayed open late. I intended to buy stores for the next few days, and that must have been why I took the haversack.

  The last thing I did was to take the box from the window seat, outside, and there I rested it on a stone hedge, while I put the milk jug and cream bowl into a haversack. I remember that moment well. For the thought came to me (and why did I not follow it up?) that I should bury the Hand; bury it and forget it. Even give it a little funeral service as they did in the superb tale of Maupassant, the tale of the fisherman’s hand that had become gangrenous. Yes. I should have done that. It would have been kinder.

  Instead . . . and it was not until I got to the farm that I realized what I had done. Taking the haversack from my shoulders in order to leave the jug and cream bowl with Mrs Harry I stared at her in a way that must have frightened her.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, in answer to her question. ‘Something I meant to take to the village. That’s all.’

  ‘Tesn’t the end of the world,’ she said.

  No. I agreed. It was not the end of the world. And I went up to the village, did my shopping, and spent the rest of the evening in the King’s Arms. I had left the chocolate box on the stone hedge outside the cottage.

  Why did I not go back for it? And what would have happened had I done so? Would it still have been there, on the stone hedge, in its box where I had left it? Or would only the box have been there, as it was when I returned late that night to the cottage?

  I kept asking these questions, as I have asked them many times in the last fifty years – intermittently, it is true, trying to bury the inexplicable, even to pretend that I had imagined it all, from the beginning, that I had never even found the box in my path. But it cannot be bu
ried, any more than I can now bury the Hand; and now, because of this letter I have had, and because of something else, it has had to be written – written out of me, I hope; written right out of my system.

  I have not made it clear. Would only the box have been there, I have written above, had I gone back for it? By that I mean, when I did return late at night, only the box was there.

  There was nothing inside it.

  At first, as I stared down at the empty box in the light of my torch, and saw only dark brown stains, there was a sense of lightness in me, almost relief. It had gone. Perhaps it had never been there. The whole business the product of a disordered mind. But then I knew this was not so. The hand had been taken away. But who had taken it?

  At what time, I asked myself, had I again met the man I had passed in the dark two nights earlier? At what time had I passed him that evening? And hardly noticed him?

  Yes, it had been a few moments after I left the farm, continuing my walk into the village. An old man, wearing a long shabby grey overcoat that had once been good, an old man with a shuffling walk and furtive expression, an old man who did not show his hands, for they (if two there were) were in his coat pockets. He had passed me with a quick upward glance at me, and he had muttered something I hadn’t heard. I had hurried past, not wanting to admit his presence even into my mind. But he had been walking down in the direction of the valley. And I have never seen him again, I never found out who he was.

  I had spent an almost convivial evening in the King’s Arms. I remember making jokes about hands to the landlord, old Bill Jago he was called. ‘Hands,’ I had said, ‘funny things when you look at them. Think what they can do.’ And he had looked at me a little oddly, wondering what I was talking about, and why I was so closely examining my own two hands laid palm upwards on the bar counter.

  ‘Never thought much about them meself,’ he said.

  ‘Well, do,’ I advised him. ‘Because they’re precious things. If you lost one, then you’d think about it.’

  A crude, macabre joke, which I had enjoyed, perversely relishing the knowledge of what I thought still reposed in the box on the stone hedge. No need to report this matter to the police, I told myself. It had been taken out of my hands . . .

  At first, as I have said, I had this sense of lightness and relief, when I found the empty box, and took it in, and looked again and again at it. Tonight, the cottage was dead silent. The wind had dropped. In the window seat I saw a dead bluebottle. Scattered all over the floor the charred bits of score paper. Then, and not till then, did I begin to feel a dreadful sense of loss. Even if it had been the hand of a killer, I wanted it back.

  As I grow older, and my left hand hardens and becomes more useless so that I begin to drop things from cramped and bloodless fingers even on fine summer mornings, I feel how much easier it could be if I had the Hand safely back in the chocolate box. What would be left of it now? A writhing mess of maggots? But no. That happened a long time ago. Or did it? For here is a part of the letter I had from a friend recently, the letter which made me write of this.

  . . . Things don’t change much in Penwith. Every now and again the odd, unaccountable event, the sort of thing Cornwall belongs to have. For example, the other day half in the stream at the bottom of the Kenidzhak Valley – wasn’t that where you used to live? – the dead body of an old man was found. Nobody here seemed to know anything about him – he had no friends, no relatives. Somebody said, at the inquest, they thought he had once been a church organist. But it was all very vague. What wasn’t vague, however, and what makes the story interesting – for you’ll agree that the dead body of an old unknown person isn’t all that arresting – was the fact that he had only one hand. His left hand had been cut off at the wrist – hacked off pretty crudely, the pathologist said, perhaps with a meat axe . . .

  This is the reason why I have had to write the story, for which I will never be able to give any explanation. Nor do I really want to. Thomas Mann wrote a masterpiece, Death in Venice. My ‘death in Venice’ it seems to me, happened in youth, a very long time ago. Of course I have made some use of my musical talent. I am well known as a critic; people read me in the papers – I have even dealt not inadequately with contemporary electronic music and come to terms with people like Stockhausen.

  And sometimes I play the piano. Not well. Passably. To amuse myself. When I had my friend’s letter I went to an old chest in which for years I have kept papers, music, books, press cuttings, photographs. I knew I still had it. And there it was. The chocolate box.

  I look at it now as I write. Why did I keep it? I never put anything in it, and I suppose I kept it only as evidence of something that did really happen. What shall I use it for now? Or shall I at last burn it?

  There is still a faint brown stain in it. And as I put the lid back and look again at the picture of George V and think of my mother and how she loved these particular chocolates, I hear something in the room. It is a humming, a buzzing, coming and going.

  I do not think it will ever stop, this noise. It is always in my ears.

  VI

  Quintin Claribel

  From his earliest infancy, Quintin Claribel had fallen victim to two tyrants: words, and his own tongue. The tongue was very ready to express in words thoughts that should have stayed in his mind, or sometimes thoughts that had never been in his mind until the words planted them there. The words themselves were sweeter tyrants, acknowledged and revered; it mattered not to the child what a word meant; had it a pleasant sound it demanded, sooner or later, the service of his tongue. Such words as ‘orphrey, balm, tiercel, sponge, incest, loosestrife, vaseline’ – these were music to his ears at even such an early age as eight.

  Perhaps Miss Bond, who once told him that Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky ‘meant nothing,’ was partly responsible; according to Quintin she was certainly responsible for his ultimate punishment. This lady, a firm character who always believed in saying what you meant – who, in fact, treated words merely as weights in the scales of wisdom – was his governess. The unique history of Quintin Claribel does undoubtedly begin in the schoolroom at Hassocks where daily he sat picking up stale crumbs of Miss Bond’s scholarship.

  ‘Have you,’ she might ask, ‘mastered the first declension yet, Quintin?’

  She would not look at him as she asked the question. With her right forefinger she would trace designs in her left palm as though, in those lines of fate and head and heart she read, not her own future, but her pupil’s. It was a trick that fascinated Quintin. Watching her, he would forget to answer, until again she would speak, her head still bent over the cupped palm, but the voice keener now, the words clipped shorter.

  Then, hurriedly, he would reply: ‘Oh yes, Miss Bond! Oh yes! I’ve learnt it.’

  ‘Then repeat it!’ And suddenly with this command, both Miss Bond’s hands would come down slap on the desk and he would find himself gazing emptily at her rounded owl-like face.

  ‘Mensa, mensa – ’ Here Quintin might stammeringly pause.

  ‘You have not mastered it!’ Miss Bond would cry, almost with pleasure it seemed to Quintin. ‘Why did you say that you had?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it, Miss Bond. I meant to say that I was just in the middle of learning it.’

  ‘Would it not be better to say what you mean?’

  Quintin could find no response to that. And because he was so often trapped by his governess, he came gradually to hate her. She was, for one thing, so ugly; so frighteningly like an owl. He was sure she hooted in the night and devoured mice in the small hours. Like an owl, the inscrutable face was expressionless. She knew everything; and he felt he would never know anything.

  One bright frosty morning in early January, Quintin found it even more difficult than usual to keep his mind upon his studies. Miss Bond was standing with her back to the fire, pointing with a long
rod to the position of Australia on the globe. Quintin was cold; Miss Bond looked very warm. If, the child wondered, he were to hold out his hands and warm them in front of her, would she take the hint and move a little?

  His seat was near the window. His eyes strayed to the frosted walnut tree and beyond, to the park where, over a thin crust of snow, shaggy cattle moved. The pond would be frozen. Surely it was idle to sit here and consider Australia on such a morning, when a new pair of skates reposed on the shelf in his bedroom cupboard?

  She was speaking.

  ‘Be so good as to tell me, Quintin, what do we mainly import from Australia?’

  He heard the question, asked for a second time, and in his mind a swarm of words buzzed. Cotton, wool, coal, tea, coffee, candles, rice, copal, gum? Making a supreme effort, Quintin sought to clutch on to one of these words, hoping it would rescue him from this slough of uncertainty. ‘Copal’ was the word that seemed most likely, since he did not know what copal was, and invariably the right answer turned out to be only the prelude to further questions equally unanswerable. Quintin, if he understood nothing else, understood Miss Bond’s technique. Were ‘copal’ to be the required word, she would at once pounce on him: ‘And what is copal, may I ask?’ Perhaps, then, it was wiser to grasp another word from his mental list. ‘Tea’ for example. But something told him that tea was not Australian; it was Chinese. Should he fling himself boldly into battle and announce that he knew what came from China? But his distaste for the word ‘tea’ (could it be called a word at all?) overcame this impulse.