by Rebecca West
“‘What’s the matter, Lucky Boy?” I says.
‘“I’m going to be an employed man,” he says. “I’m going to be an employed man in my uncle’s ten-cent office with his staff of two men and a yellow dog. I, who’ve had my staff of twenty men and those offices looking over the Battery.”
‘“Baby,” says I, “don’t be silly. It’s going to be grand.”
‘He wouldn’t look at me. He just kept staring up at the ceiling and his eyes weren’t laughing no more.’
‘So I quit fussing with him and I took my clothes off and I put on this peach-coloured nightdress and this negligée that he used to carry about and I went and knelt on his bed.
‘“Let me in,” says I.
‘“Quit that,” he says, and he went on staring at the ceiling.
‘“Don’t be mean,” says I, “because I got a secret for my baby. You ain’t going to be an employed man,” I says. “You’re not going to work in no office; we’re going to have our own farm.”
‘“What do you mean?” says he.
‘“You forget I’ve got my own money,” says I. “I got a hundred and ten thousand dollars in good bonds and we’re going to put some of them in a farm and invest the rest,” I says, “and we ain’t going to think of the stock market again.”
‘He sat up. “What do you mean, you got a hundred and ten thousand?” He says, “You told me last March you got forty-five thousand.”
‘“Well, so I had, so I had,” I says. “But that was March.”
‘“What do you mean, that was March?” says he. And he grabs my wrist. “Has some richer man than me been giving you money?”
‘I could have laughed at that if it hadn’t been for the way he said “a richer man than me”. Oh, the poor kid, the poor kid! I said: “You know darned well I ain’t touched another man since you’ve been with me.”
‘He said: “Then where’d you get the money?”
‘I should have lied, but I thought it better he should have the truth. I says: “I made it on the stock market.”
‘He says: “But how? I never gave you a tip that wasn’t such a failure that the cat would laugh it off. You always told me when you got a tip. You didn’t get none in the last three months that would make all that money.”
‘I said, “You gave me the tips yourself.”
‘He says, “You’re lying.”
‘I says, “I’m telling the truth. I always knew you weren’t cut out to be a rich man. Rich men aren’t like you. They haven’t laughing eyes,” I says, trying to kid him along. “They don’t have a good time over little things the way you do; they don’t hang out of the window feeding birds and hollering because the bushes are coming out green. And about stocks. They don’t hope; they know. They don’t love women the way you love me, nestling up the way you must have to your mammy. They go crazy about them, but they aren’t sweet like you are. They’re mean and ugly with them when they’re through. They quit them like you couldn’t. I’ve been out with some of the richest men that have been in New York for the last fifteen years and I ought to know. They’re all different from you somehow. So when you counted on stocks making you rich, I knew they’d make you poor and I sold them short.”
‘He lay back. I should have known he was feeling badly. Like a fool I went on: “So I made all this money and it’s yours really. We’re going to buy a farm where you say, and we’re going to work and we needn’t work too darned hard, and we can have the grandest time, and maybe we’ll make some money, but it won’t be that way. Baby, take your mammy close and tell her you won’t be too bored living on a farm with her!”
‘He didn’t seem to listen to a thing I was saying. He just stared at me. “You think there’s a kind of rule that I ain’t going to be rich?”
‘“The men that get rich ain’t like you,” I says.
“‘You made all that money by just going against me every time?” he says.
‘“Sure I did, honey,” I says. “But what’s it matter?”
‘“You don’t believe in my luck?” says he.
‘“Not on the stock market,” says I.
‘“Oh, is that so?” he says. “Is that so!”
‘And at that he sits up in his bed and he starts looking down on the floor where our grips were, not paying any attention to me.
‘“Not on the stock market you haven’t got luck,” says I, “but that ain’t the whole of life. Don’t you remember what it was like to have good times on a farm when you was a kid?”
‘He’d found what he was looking for and it was in a grip I hadn’t packed that he’d brought from his apartment.
“Oh, shucks,” he says, fumbling in it, “what’s the good of a man being alive if he ain’t got luck?”
‘And I saw he was clean crazy and wouldn’t hear sense. His eyes were kind of old and he didn’t look like a kid any more. And I felt such a fool in my peach-coloured nightdress and this fool negligée and I turned around and chucked myself down on my own bed and howled. Until I heard – what I did. God, how I hoped for the first minute that it was me he had shot!’
And at that she wept more terribly than I had thought a human being could weep, throwing her soft beauty, whose irrelevant promise of pleasure was somehow a mockery of her own grief, from side to side of the narrow bed. I found no words to comfort her, for, though doubtless there are words to comfort the womenfolk of gamblers, I doubt if they are to be spoken on this earth. There are explanations of our sorrows which seem to be strictly reserved for the hereafter.
Then it was, as the morning stood bright to meet us over the California mountains, that my husband chose to come in, rubbing his hands and otherwise comporting himself with the air of unqualified satisfaction which doctors are apt to exhibit in the face of return from the jaws of death, with what often seems to less biased minds insufficient reason.
‘Well,’ he said to Mrs Martin Vesey, ‘that young man of yours is going to pull through after all.’
She looked more than ever like a chorus-girl after the most debased kind of party that ever led to a patrol wagon. But she clasped her hands as if in prayer.
‘Yes,’ my husband went on, ‘the bullet’s missed his lung by a miracle and the haemorrhage is drying up nicely.’
‘Can I go along to him now?’
‘You can look at him. He’s sleeping.’
‘I’d like to look at him.’
She jumped out of bed and made for the door. But on the way a thought struck her, and looking up at my husband she muttered in an embarrassed way as if she were proposing a half-shameful compromise with a monster that she knew in the end would devour her:
‘Make him feel that’s good luck – about his lung.… He wants to think he has good luck.’
Ruby
This, another of Rebecca West’s ‘American’ short stories, appeared in the New Yorker – to which she had been a contributor since the 1920s – of 20 April 1940.
Usually I am repelled by those of my sex who have been often and greatly loved. My complaint against them is that they are so extremely disagreeable. So far as I can see, when a man wants a rose-wreathed companion for his hours of ease he chooses a female plainly embittered by disappointment because she was not born an alligator or one of those medieval harpies who used to haunt battlefields and rob the dead or dying, jobs in which she could have exercised her really distinctive qualities. I know of only one exception: Ruby.
Some might wonder at my choice, for Ruby, though once beautiful, now weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. Her hair, which used to be golden and wreathed by night with diamonds, now grows thin and white from a pink scalp. During the last thirty years she has dropped through destiny like a stone. Her first marriage was celebrated in the Chapel Royal in London, with Queen Alexandra signing the register. Her last husband held a minor position in connection with the Six-Day Bicycle Race. All her life she has lost and wasted what ought to be preserved. Invariably she has turned her back on the amiable and honourable man who woul
d have meant lifelong security and has gone off with another who was undistinguishable in his morals and manners from a gorilla. She has specialized in such negligences as letting her insurance run out and leaving all her jewels in a taxi the next day. Once she managed to get mixed up in a narcotics case, and frequently, after a certain hour, she has to speak through a bubble of alcohol. Even so, she is a remarkable woman. She has been given the power of miraculous healing, and she deserves it.
I saw her use that power not long after I first met her. I knew her through a friend of mine whom she refused to marry, since he was solvent and would not have beaten her. One night in Paris I returned to my hotel after the theatre, and when I went to claim my key I found her standing beside me. We greeted each other, but soon her eye slid past me to the night clerk, a fat and sallow Frenchman.
‘You’re in pain,’ she said, and when he had told her that he was suffering from a gastric ulcer, she went on, ‘I can always tell a hundred yards off if somebody’s in pain, even if I’ve got my back to them. And if you let me touch you, I’ll take away the pain. I can always do that. I can always stop people feeling pain.’ It sounded as credible as a chorus-girl’s boast that in a previous incarnation she had been an Egyptian princess.
We retired to a kind of pantry, where, with some sleepy waiters staring at us, Ruby slid her hands six times down the stripes of his old-fashioned French shirt and the pain left him. In no time his face changed from tallow to flesh and hers became lined and grey. When he put on his coat he was laughing with relief.
Sometimes I nearly detest Ruby.
She seems to me that stock figure of bad fiction, the golden-hearted courtesan. Then she reminds me of a candle softening and bending in the heat, of grease that cannot keep itself to itself. But sooner or later I see that she is uniquely good, that she performs an act of charity which others cannot achieve.
Quite a lot of people will bestow on us wise, prudent, long-term kindness. Very few have a quick, instinctive, assuaging reaction to our first cry of pain. Most people hold back; they do not know what to say, they tell us that we are exaggerating or that it is our own fault – which may be true but does nothing to salve the first, worst prick of agony. That is where Ruby showed genius. She rushed at the sufferer, not to criticize but to give pity, pity compounded to the perfect formula for each individual case. For proof of this I would bring forward the Hindu fortune-teller at Brighton. We had both gone there to convalesce after influenza, and one day we lunched and went to a cinema and afterward had tea in a department store.
We were on our way to an elevator when she stopped in front of a little booth that had been run up in a corner and said, in a voice suddenly girlish with hope, ‘Oh, a fortune-teller!’ A minute later I, too, had become interested in Mr Chandra Bil Bose, the Eastern mystic, who, as a notice announced, was willing to draw aside the veil of fate for all who would pay him two shillings and sixpence.
The front of his booth was plastered with letters and telegrams which the casual passer-by might have taken for testimonials to his psychic powers, but which were not. There wasn’t one word pinned up on the boards which could have been interpreted as a recommendation of Mr Bose, except a letter in which a lady tersely declared that in consequence of what he had told her she had decided to return to her husband; even that might have been an incident in Mr Bose’s love life. Most of the telegrams were bare requests for appointments. One was definitely irrelevant to all psychic matters, being a promise to reserve him a third-floor bedroom at the usual terms. Another was openly hostile, saying, ‘PLEASE DO NOT COME DO NOT WANT YOU ON ANY ACCOUNT.’
The letters were not more satisfactory as tributes. The Aga Khan, the Duke of Kent, and several other public figures acknowledged good wishes, and some showed ill feeling under their reiteration. His Highness the Maharajah of Indore had been maddened into a final letter that thanked Mr Bose but regretted that he could not imagine any manner in which Mr Bose’s services could be of the slightest use to him and begged that the correspondence might be closed. We both burst out laughing.
‘You go first,’ said Ruby, ‘I’m laughing so.’ Once I got inside the booth there was no more laughter. Mr Bose was one of the most pathetic creatures I have ever seen. He was a very ugly, small, thin Hindu, no longer young, and his teeth were stained red with betel nut. He wore a grubby white turban and a worn summer suit of a grey that made a displeasing contrast with his brown skin. He was shivering from cold, and perhaps a touch of fever, and certainly some recent personal humiliation and sorrow. He was clammy with failure. I am sure the telegrams and letters on the board outside gave an accurate account of how the world had treated him.
‘Me, I am an Indian,’ he said, quite unnecessarily. ‘I know all the wisdom of the East. Put out your hands on the table, please.’ He stared past me as if he saw a picture of his troubles painted on the wall, and then compelled himself back to his palmistry.
‘Your husband – your husband – your husband is a big, fair clergyman,’ he pronounced, and when I made a dissenting murmur he cried desperately, ‘What, is he not a big, fair clergyman?’ I saw that he believed, in the face of all experience, that he had psychic gifts, and so I agreed that it was all as he said and accepted a bogus and very dreary destiny from his hands. While he jabbered, shaking and shuddering, I wrote it all down in my notebook. ‘And these are your lucky days: fourthmarchthirdapril seventhmaydonothingjunejulyaugust andseptemberseventhoctobereleventhnovemberseventeenthdecember restjanuaryandfebruary – and please go, lady, please go at once, and I will see your friend.’ As a St Bernard I was a failure. I couldn’t think what to do to comfort the little man.
Ruby, however, knew what was needed. When I put my eye to the curtain to see why she was so long, it was the Hindu’s hands that lay palm upward on the table, his eyes that swam in cosy, hypnotized credulity, while Ruby’s forefinger hovered and indicated, and her voice spoke out of a cloud of mystical assurance. ‘Now, that’s a lucky line, a very lucky line, and you see it makes a turn just here. That’s not just yet. Not for a day or two. You said you were leaving Brighton on Monday, didn’t you? I’m glad of that. It isn’t a good place for you, doesn’t fit in with your stars. But once you get out of here, there’s luck waiting for you, a lot of luck.’
Nobody in the world but Ruby would have thought of that.
They That Sit in Darkness
This story appeared in The Fothergill Omnibus, 1931, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1931.
George Manisty had a fine head, and so his father had had before him; pale, shining grey eyes which long vision made look at once blind and all-seeing, fine brown hair dusted with gold which seemed blown back from his high white forehead, a mouth which even when he felt most completely at repose was compressed as if under discipline by pain, a pointed chin which, because of this long vision, he carried high and thrust out so that he had an air of fastidiously disdaining the world. As he was chronically tubercular, his tall body was very thin and his skin glazed with a luminous pallor; and he was racked by temperatures which took him up to peaks where he sparkled and crackled with what was surely more than human vitality, and dropped him down into abysses where he lay spent and panting, virtue having gone out of him. So it had been with his father. They were alike even to the long blue-white fingers, so supple that they could all or each be pressed back till the nails lay against the sparse flesh of the wrist. And they were alike in trade. Each earned his living by communing with the dead.
It followed therefore that George Manisty had never known any but those who communed with the dead, or who desired to do so. His home had always been a villa in South London, the last of a road which a speculative builder had long ago led out to the open fields in an orgy of unjustified faith in the fecundity of Londoners. It was very quiet. Long grasses grew in the ruts outside its gates, and four out of the nine neighbouring houses lacked a tenant. It was also very dark. The round butt of a steep hill, blackened with clumps of gorse, stopped the afternoon sun; and as
if that were not enough the builders had encumbered all the ground-floor rooms with verandahs, and had brought the slated eaves low over the upper-storey windows. Yet it was not quiet and dark enough for the Manistys. It was their habit to sit in the basement, very often with the shutters fastened to keep out the nearly imperceptible noises of this limbo between town and country.
There was a breakfast-room down there which they used during the hours the daily servant was there. When the winter mornings were dark she would ask, ‘Shan’t I bring in a candle?’ but Francis Manisty always shook his head, and when Momma had been well enough to get up she used to exclaim in pious horror, ‘Snakes and ladders, no!’ There was too much of this light, so damaging to their special talents, lying about uncageable in the open streets. They had no need of it for reading the papers, for that they never did; the deeds of the living had no interest for them. But they chattered perpetually of the deeds of the dead, and a world where these were the ghostly small-talk. ‘Met Jenkinson in the Underground coming home. He’s going to Cardiff next week, so I told him all that I was telling you about that old woman whose father called his horse Bucephalus and goes all gooey if you fetch the old man up and get him talking about it. And when I told him I was going to York he spilt quite a lot. It seems there’s a chap up there called Sprott whose wife died when he was at the war – here, George, you listen to this …’ and George listened, for probably there would be a sharp question when he got in from school in the late afternoon, ‘Now, George, what was I telling you this morning about a chap named Sprott? And where did he live?’
For they would still be talking about the dead, though by that time they would have moved into the kitchen to do it. It was nice there. Mother would be sitting at the table, at her elbow the bottle out of which she had to drink so often because her heart was bad, and she would be looking warm and mellow and pretty. In the house she wore her hair in fat brown sausage-curls tumbling over her shoulders, just as she had been wearing it when she and her pop, Ira Wickett, the celebrated medium of Palmyra, New York, who had learnt to make raps from the Fox Sisters themselves, had found the young English conjurer sick of a fever in a Pittsburg hotel. Since the glow from the kitchen-range and the gas-jet disguised the puffiness under her eyes and made an agreeable flush of the bluish venous smears on her cheeks, and her bulky body was obscured by the shadows of a big basket-chair, she might still have been a young woman of rich beauty.