The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Everything,’ I said.

  We returned through the squares of Hanbridge and by Trafalgar Road to Stirling’s house at Bleakridge. And everywhere in the deepening twilight I could see the urchins, often hatless and sometimes scarcely shod, scudding over the lamp-reflecting mire with sheets of wavy green, and above the noises of traffic I could hear the shrill outcry: ‘Signal. Football Edition. Football Edition. Signal.’ The world was being informed of the might of Jos Myatt, and of the averting of disaster from Knype, and of the results of over a hundred other matches – not counting Rugby.

  V

  During the course of the evening, when Stirling had thoroughly accustomed himself to the state of being in sole charge of an expert from the British Museum, London, and the high walls round his more private soul had yielded to my timid but constant attacks, we grew fairly intimate. And in particular the doctor proved to me that his reputation for persuasive raciness with patients was well founded. Yet up to the time of dessert I might have been justified in supposing that that much-praised ‘manner’ in a sick-room was nothing but a provincial legend. Such may be the influence of a quite inoffensive and shy Londoner in the country. At half-past ten, Titus being already asleep for the night in an arm-chair, we sat at ease over the fire in the study telling each other stories. We had dealt with the arts, and with medicine; now we were dealing with life, in those aspects of it which cause men to laugh and women uneasily to wonder. Once or twice we had mentioned the Brindleys. The hour for their arrival was come. But being deeply comfortable and content where I was, I felt no impatience. Then there was a tap on the window.

  ‘That’s Bobbie!’ said Stirling, rising slowly from his chair. ‘He won’t refuse whisky, even if you do. I’d better get another bottle.’

  The tap was repeated peevishly.

  ‘I’m coming, laddie!’ Stirling protested.

  He slippered out through the hall and through the surgery to the side door, I following, and Titus sneezing and snuffing in the rear.

  ‘I say, mester,’ said a heavy voice as the doctor opened the door. It was not Brindley, but Jos Myatt. Unable to locate the bell-push in the dark, he had characteristically attacked the sole illuminated window. He demanded, or he commanded, very curtly, that the doctor should go up instantly to the Foaming Quart at Toft End.

  Stirling hesitated a moment.

  ‘All right, my man,’ said he, calmly.

  ‘Now?’ the heavy, suspicious voice on the door-step insisted.

  ‘I’ll be there before ye if ye don’t sprint, man. I’ll run up in the car.’ Stirling shut the door. I heard footsteps on the gravel path outside.

  ‘Ye heard?’ said he to me. ‘And what am I to do with ye?’

  ‘I’ll go with you, of course,’ I answered.

  ‘I may be kept up there a while.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said roisterously. ‘It’s a pub and I’m a traveller.’

  Stirling’s household was in bed and his assistant gone home. While he and Titus got out the car I wrote a line for the Brindleys: ‘Gone with doctor to see patient at Toft End. Don’t wait up. – A. L.’ This we pushed under Brindley’s front door on our way forth. Very soon we were vibrating up a steep street on the first speed of the car, and the yellow reflections of distant furnaces began to shine over house roofs below us. It was exhilaratingly cold, a clear and frosty night, tonic, bracing after the enclosed warmth of the study. I was joyous, but silently. We had quitted the kingdom of the god Pan; we were in Lucina’s realm, its consequence, where there is no laughter. We were on a mission.

  ‘I didn’t expect this,’ said Stirling.

  ‘No?’ I said. ‘But seeing that he fetched you this morning—’

  ‘Oh! That was only in order to be sure, for himself. His sister was there, in charge. Seemed very capable. Knew all about everything. Until ye get to the high social status of a clerk or a draper’s assistant people seem to manage to have their children without professional assistance.’

  ‘Then do you think there’s anything wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d not be surprised.’

  He changed to the second speed as the car topped the first bluff. We said no more. The night and the mission solemnized us. And gradually, as we rose towards the purple skies, the Five Towns wrote themselves out in fire on the irregular plain below.

  ‘That’s Hanbridge Town Hall,’ said Stirling, pointing to the right. ‘And that’s Bursley Town Hall,’ he said, pointing to the left. And there were many other beacons, dominating the jewelled street-lines that faded on the horizon into golden-tinted smoke.

  The road was never quite free of houses. After occurring but sparsely for half a mile, they thickened into a village – the suburb of Bursley called Toft End. I saw a moving red light in front of us. It was the reverse of Myatt’s bicycle lantern. The car stopped near the dark façade of the inn, of which two yellow windows gleamed. Stirling, under Myatt’s shouted guidance, backed into an obscure yard under cover. The engine ceased to throb.

  ‘Friend of mine,’ he introduced me to Myatt. ‘By the way, Loring, pass me my bag, will you? Mustn’t forget that.’ Then he extinguished the acetylene lamps, and there was no light in the yard except the ray of the bicycle lantern which Myatt held in his hand. We groped towards the house. Strange, every step that I take in the Five Towns seems to have the genuine quality of an adventure!

  VI

  In five minutes I was of no account in the scheme of things at Toft End, and I began to wonder why I had come. Stirling, my sole protector, had vanished up the dark stairs of the house, following a stout, youngish woman in a white apron, who bore a candle. Jos Myatt, behind, said to me: ‘Happen you’d better go in there, mester,’ pointing to a half-open door at the foot of the stairs. I went into a little room at the rear of the bar-parlour. A good fire burned in a small old-fashioned grate, but there was no other light. The inn was closed to customers, it being past eleven o’clock. On a bare table I perceived a candle, and ventured to put a match to it. I then saw almost exactly such a room as one would expect to find at the rear of the bar-parlour of an inn on the outskirts of an industrial town. It appeared to serve the double purpose of a living-room and of a retreat for favoured customers. The table was evidently one at which men drank. On a shelf was a row of bottles, more or less empty, bearing names famous in newspaper advertisements and in the House of Lords. The dozen chairs suggested an acute bodily discomfort such as would only be tolerated by a sitter all of whose sensory faculties were centred in his palate. On a broken chair in a corner was an insecure pile of books. A smaller table was covered with a chequered cloth on which were a few plates. Along one wall, under the window, ran a pitch-pine sofa upholstered with a stuff slightly dissimilar from that on the table. The mattress of the sofa was uneven and its surface wrinkled, and old newspapers and pieces of brown paper had been stowed away between it and the framework. The chief article of furniture was an effective walnut bookcase, the glass doors of which were curtained with red cloth. The window, wider than it was high, was also curtained with red cloth. The walls, papered in a saffron tint, bore framed advertisements and a few photographs of self-conscious persons. The ceiling was as obscure as heaven; the floor tiled, with a list rug in front of the steel fender.

  I put my overcoat on the sofa, picked up the candle and glanced at the books in the corner: Lavater’s indestructible work, a paper-covered Whitaker, the Licensed Victuallers’ Almanac, Johnny Ludlow, the illustrated catalogue of the Exhibition of 1856, Cruden’s Concordance, and seven or eight volumes of Knight’s Penny Encyclopædia. While I was poring on these titles I heard movements overhead – previously there had been no sound whatever – and with guilty haste I restored the candle to the table and placed myself negligently in front of the fire.

  ‘Now don’t let me see ye up here any more till I fetch ye!’ said a woman’s distant voice – not crossly, but firmly. And then, crossly: ‘Be off with ye now!’

  Reluctant boots on the stai
rs! Jos Myatt entered to me. He did not speak at first; nor did I. He avoided my glance. He was still wearing the cut-away coat with the line of mud up the back. I took out my watch, not for the sake of information, but from mere nervousness, and the sight of the watch reminded me that it would be prudent to wind it up.

  ‘Better not forget that,’ I said, winding it.

  ‘Ay!’ said he, gloomily. ‘It’s a tip.’ And he wound up his watch; a large, thick, golden one.

  This watch-winding established a basis of intercourse between us.

  ‘I hope everything is going on all right,’ I murmured.

  ‘What dun ye say?’ he asked.

  ‘I say I hope everything is going on all right,’ I repeated louder, and jerked my head in the direction of the stairs, to indicate the place from which he had come.

  ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, as if surprised. ‘Now what’ll ye have, mester?’ He stood waiting. ‘It’s my call to-night.’

  I explained to him that I never took alcohol. It was not quite true, but it was as true as most general propositions are.

  ‘Neither me!’ he said shortly, after a pause.

  ‘You’re a teetotaller too?’ I showed a little involuntary astonishment.

  He put forward his chin.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said confidentially and scornfully. It was precisely as if he had said: ‘Do you think that anybody but a born ass would not be a teetotaller, in my position?’

  I sat down on a chair.

  ‘Take th’ squab, mester,’ he said, pointing to the sofa. I took it.

  He picked up the candle; then dropped it, and lighted a lamp which was on the mantelpiece between his vases of blue glass. His movements were very slow, hesitating and clumsy. Blowing out the candle, which smoked for a long time, he went with the lamp to the bookcase. As the key of the bookcase was in his right pocket and the lamp in his right hand he had to change the lamp, cautiously, from hand to hand. When he opened the cupboard I saw a rich gleam of silver from every shelf of it except the lowest, and I could distinguish the forms of ceremonial cups with pedestals and immense handles.

  ‘I suppose these are your pots?’ I said.

  ‘Ay!’

  He displayed to me the fruits of his manifold victories. I could see him straining along endless cinder-paths and highroads under hot suns, his great knees going up and down like treadles amid the plaudits and howls of vast populations. And all that now remained of that glory was these debased and vicious shapes, magnificently useless, grossly ugly, with their inscriptions lost in a mess of flourishes.

  ‘Ay!’ he said again, when I had fingered the last of them.

  ‘A very fine show indeed!’ I said, resuming the sofa.

  He took a penny bottle of ink and a pen out of the bookcase, and also, from the lowest shelf, a bag of money and a long narrow account book. Then he sat down at the table and commenced accountancy. It was clear that he regarded his task as formidable and complex. To see him reckoning the coins, manipulating the pen, splashing the ink, scratching the page; to hear him whispering consecutive numbers aloud, and muttering mysterious anathemas against the untamable naughtiness of figures – all this was painful, and with the painfulness of a simple exercise rendered difficult by inaptitude and incompetence. I wanted to jump up and cry to him: ‘Get out of the way, man, and let me do it for you! I can do it while you are wiping hairs from your pen on your sleeve.’ I was sorry for him because he was ridiculous – and even more grotesque than ridiculous. I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud, kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers, or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, ‘Good old Jos!’ I felt that if he must repose his existence ought to have been so contrived that he could repose in impassive and senseless dignity, like a mountain watching the flight of time. The conception of him tracing symbols in a ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious fitness … What, this precious and terrific organism, this slave with a specialty – whom distant towns had once been anxious to buy at the prodigious figure of five hundred pounds – obliged to sit in a mean chamber and wait silently while the woman of his choice encountered the supreme peril! And he would ‘soon be past football!’ He was ‘thirty-four if a day!’ It was the verge of senility! He was no longer worth five hundred pounds. Perhaps even now this jointed merchandise was only worth two hundred pounds! And ‘they’ – the shadowy directors, who could not kick a ball fifty feet and who would probably turn sick if they broke a leg – ‘they’ paid him four pounds a week for being the hero of a quarter of a million of people! He was the chief magnet to draw fifteen thousand sixpences and shillings of a Saturday afternoon into a company’s cash box, and here he sat splitting his head over fewer sixpences and shillings than would fill a half-pint pot! Jos, you ought in justice to have been José, with a thin red necktie down your breast (instead of a line of mud up your back), and embroidered breeches on those miraculous legs, and an income of a quarter of a million pesetas, and the languishing acquiescence of innumerable mantillas. Every moment you were getting older and stiffer; every moment was bringing nearer the moment when young men would reply curtly to their doddering elders: ‘Jos Myatt – who was ’e?’

  The putting away of the ledger, the ink, the pen and the money was as exasperating as their taking out had been. Then Jos, always too large for the room, crossed the tiled floor and mended the fire. A poker was more suited to his capacity than a pen. He glanced about him, uncertain and anxious, and then crept to the door near the foot of the stairs and listened. There was no sound; and that was curious. The woman who was bringing into the world the hero’s child made no cry that reached us below. Once or twice I had heard muffled movements not quite overhead – somewhere above – but naught else. The doctor and Jos’s sister seemed to have retired into a sinister and dangerous mystery. I could not dispel from my mind pictures of what they were watching and what they were doing. The vast, cruel, fumbling clumsiness of Nature, her lack of majesty in crises that ought to be majestic, her incurable indignity, disgusted me, aroused my disdain. I wanted, as a philosopher of all the cultures, to feel that the present was indeed a majestic crisis, to be so esteemed by a superior man. I could not. Though the crisis possibly intimidated me somewhat, yet, on behalf of Jos Myatt, I was ashamed of it. This may be reprehensible, but it is true.

  He sat down by the fire and looked at the fire. I could not attempt to carry on a conversation with him, and to avoid the necessity for any talk at all, I extended myself on the sofa and averted my face, wondering once again why I had accompanied the doctor to Toft End. The doctor was now in another, an inaccessible world. I dozed, and from my doze I was roused by Jos Myatt going to the door on the stairs.

  ‘Jos,’ said a voice. ‘It’s a girl.’

  Then a silence.

  I admit there was a flutter in my heart. Another soul, another formed and unchangeable temperament, tumbled into the world! Whence? Whither? … As for the quality of majesty – yes, if silver trumpets had announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment could not have been more majestic in its sadness. I say ‘sadness’, which is the inevitable and sole effect of these eternal and banal questions, ‘Whence? Whither?’

  ‘Is her bad?’ Jos whispered.

  ‘Her’s pretty bad,’ said the voice, but cheerily. ‘Bring me up another scuttle o’ coal.’

  When he returned to the parlour, after being again dismissed, I said to him:

  ‘Well, I congratulate you.’

  ‘I thank ye!’ he said, and sat down. Presently I could hear him muttering to himself, mildly: ‘Hell! Hell! Hell!’

  I thought: ‘Stirling will not be very long now, and we can depart home.’ I looked at my watch. It
was a quarter to two. But Stirling did not appear, nor was there any message from him or sign. I had to submit to the predicament. As a faint chilliness from the window affected my back I drew my overcoat up to my shoulders as a counterpane. Through a gap between the red curtains of the window I could see a star blazing. It passed behind the curtain with disconcerting rapidity. The universe was swinging and whirling as usual.

  VII

  Sounds of knocking disturbed me. In the few seconds that elapsed before I could realize just where I was and why I was there, the summoning knocks were repeated. The early sun was shining through the red blind. I sat up and straightened my hair, involuntarily composing my attitude so that nobody who might enter the room should imagine that I had been other than patiently wide-awake all night. The second door of the parlour – that leading to the bar-room of the Foaming Quart – was open, and I could see the bar itself, with shelves rising behind it and the upright handles of a beer-engine at one end. Someone whom I could not see was evidently unbolting and unlocking the principal entrance to the inn. Then I heard the scraping of a creaky portal on the floor.

  ‘Well, Jos lad!’

  It was the voice of the little man, Charlie, who had spoken with Myatt on the football field.

  ‘Come in quick, Charlie. It’s cowd,’ said the voice of Jos Myatt, gloomily.

  ‘Ay! Cowd it is, lad! It’s above three mile as I’ve walked, and thou knows it, Jos. Give us a quartern o’ gin.’

  The door grated again and a bolt was drawn.

  The two men passed together behind the bar, and so within my vision. Charlie had a grey muffler round his neck; his hands were far in his pockets and seemed to be at strain, as though trying to prevent his upper and his lower garments from flying apart. Jos Myatt was extremely dishevelled. In the little man’s demeanour towards the big one there was now none of the self-conscious pride in the mere fact of acquaintance that I had noticed on the field. Clearly the two were intimate friends, perhaps relatives. While Jos was dispensing the gin, Charlie said, in a low tone: