by Whit Burnett
first time he turned toward her with something like gentleness
and said,
"Your mother wouldn't really like such an enormous rabbit.
would she, honey?" And then to the clerk. "You must have a
1
smaller edition around somewhere?"
No one hearing the gentle polite voice could have guessed
what a declaration of independence it' contained. Margaret did
not guess il .
"I want this one, Daddy-please-" She pulled at his sleeve.
"No. I'm sorry, Margaret, but you can't have it."
"You're mean," she said with emphasis. "I hate you," she
said, glaring at him, her face pink with rage. In a moment
there would be tears, screams.
"I hate you too," Dexter Randall heard himself saying quite
cheerfully. As be said it, just as if it had been the magic pllrase
in a fairy tate; he felt a screen slide away, the screen that had
always stood between them, the screen of politeness, the screen
f32
Nineteen Tales of Terror
•
of what he thought he should feel instead of what he did feel.
The relief was so great that he chuckled and then laughed out
loud.
"Honey, let's give up this rabbit altogether," he said, still
chuckling. "You know as well as I do that what your mother
really wants is 'Joy,' the most expensive perfume in the world.
We can get that across the street." Then he felt himself hugging with one arm the stiff resisting little body beside him, and felt it yield. "Let's run, quick, before that clerk gets back here
with middle-sized rabbits."
Margaret was laughing now too, breathless with laughter
and this time they scooted across Fifth Avenue without waiting
for the light, their dissimiliar sizes and length of stride somehow amalgamated into a father and his queer, maddening, beloved little girL
ANGUS WI LSON
TOTENTANZ
TilE NEWS of the Cappers' good fortune first
became generally known at the Master's garden party. It was
surprisingly well received, in view of the number of their ene- .
mies in the University, and for this the unusually fine weather
was largely responsible. In their sub-arctic isolation, cut off
from the main stream of Anglo-Saxon culture and its preferments, sodden with continual mists, pinched by perpetual north-east gales, kept always a little at bay by the natives with
their self-satisfied homeliness and their smugly traditional hospitality, the dons and their wives formed a phalanx against spontaneous gaiety that would have satisfied John Knox himself. But rare though days of sunshine were, they transformed the town as completely as if it had been one of those scenes in
a child's painting book on which you had only to sprinkle water
for the brighter colours to emerge. The Master's lawns, surfeited with rain and mist, lay in flaunting spring green beneath the even deep blue of the July sky. The neat squares of the
eighteenth-century burghers' houses and· the twisted shapes of
the massive grey lochside ruins recovered their designs from
the blurring mists. The clumps of wallflowers, gold and copper,
filling the crevices of the walls, seemed to mock the solemnity
of the covenanting crows that croaked censoriously above them.
The famous pale blue silk of the scholars' gowns flashed like
silver airships beneath the deeper sky. On such a day even the
most mildewed and disappointed of the professors, the most
blue and deadening of their wives felt impulses of generosity,
or at any rate a freedom from bitterness, that allowed them to
rejoice at a fellow prisoner's release. Only the youngest and
most naive research students could be deceived by the sun
into brushing the mould off their own hopes and ideals, but if
others had found a way back to their aims, well, good luck to
(33
1 34 • Nineteen Tales of Terror
them!-in any case the Cappers, especially Mrs. Capper, had
only disturbed the general morass with their futile struggles and
most people would be glad to see them go.
The Master's wife, always so eccentric in her large fringed
cape, said in her deep voice, "It's come just in time. Just in time
that is for Isobel."
"Just in time," squeaked little Miss Thurkill, the assistant
French lecturer, "I should have thought any time was right for
a great legacy like that," and she giggled, really the old woman said such odd, personal things.
"Yes, just in time," repeated the �aster's wife, she prided
herself on understanding human beings and lost no opportunity
of expounding them. "A few months more and she would have
rotted away."
1n the wide opening between the points of his old-fashioned,
high Gladstone collar, the Master's protrusive Adam's apple
wobbled, gulped. In Oxford or Cambridge his wife's eccentricity would have been an assistance; up here, had he not known exactly how to isolate her, it might have been an embarrassment.
"How typical of women," he said in the unctuous but incisive voice that convinced so many business men and bail!ies that they were dealing with a scholar whose head was screwed
on the right way. "How typical of women to consider only the
legacy. Very nice of course, a great help in their new sphere."
There was a trace of bitterness, for his own wife's fortune, so
important when they had started, had vanished through his unfortunate investments. "But Capper's London Chair is the important thing. A new chair, too, Professor of the History of Technics and Art. Here, of course, we've come to accept so
many of Capper's ideas into our everyday thoughts, as a result
of his immense powers of persuasion and . . . and his great enthusiasm"-he paused, staring eagle-like beneath his bushy white eyebrows, the scholar who was judge of men-"that we
forget how revolutionary some of them are." He had indeed the
v.aguest conception of anything that his subordinates thought,
an administrator has to keep above detail. "No doubt there'll be
fireworks, but I venture to suggest that Capper's youth and
energy will win the day, don't you agree with me, Todhurst?"
Mr. Todhurst's white suet pudding face tufted with sandy
hair was unimpressed. He was a great deal younger than Capper and still determined to remember what a backwater he was stranded in. "Capper's noot so young," he said, ostentatiously
Yorkshire. "Maybe they'll have heard it all before, and happen
they'll tell him so too."
But the Master was conveniently able to ignore Todhurst,
for red-faced Sir George was approaching, the wealthiest,
Totentanz • 1 36
most influential business man o n the University Board. A tough
and rough diamond with his Glaswegian accent and his powerful whiskied breath, Sir George was nevertheless impressed by the size of the legacy. "Five hundred thousand pounds." He
gave a whistle. "That's no so bad a swn. Though, mind you,
this Government of robbers'll be taking a tidy part of it away
in taxation. But still I'm glad for the sake of his missus." Perhaps, he thought, Mrs. Capper would help in getting Margaret presented at Court. How little he knew lsobel Capper, his wife
would not have made the mistake . .
"And this magnificent appointment coming al<?ng at the
same time," said the Master.
"Aye," said Sir George, he did not
understand that so well,
"there's no doubt Capper's a smart young chap." Perhaps, he
thought, the Board has been a bit slow, the Master was getting
on and they might need a level-headed warm young fellow.
"Oh, there they are," squeaked Miss Thurkill excitedly. "I
must say Isobel certainly looks . . . " But she could find no words
to describe lsobel's appearance, it was really so very outree.
Nothing could have fitted Isobel Capper's combination of
chic and Liberty artiness better than the ultra-smart dressinggown effect of her New Look dress, the floating flimsiness of her little flowered hat. Her long stride was increased with excitement, even her thin white face had relaxed its tenseness and her amber eyes sparkled with triumph. Against the broad pink
and black stripes of her elaborate, bustled dress, her red hair
clashed like fire. She was a little impatient with the tail-end of
an episode that she was glad to close, her mind was crowded
with schemes, but still this victory parade, though petty and
provincial, would be a pleasant start to a new life. Brian, too,
looked nearer twenty than forty, most of his hard, · boyish
charm, his emphasized friendliness and sincerity had returned
with the prospect of his new appointment. He tossed his brown
curly hair back from his forehead as, loose-limbed, athletic, he
leaped a deck chair to speak to Sir George. "Hope so very much
to see something of you and Lady Maclean if all those company
meetings permit." Before the Master he stood erect, serious, a
little abashed. "So impossible to speak adequately of what I
shall carry away from here . . . " There was no doubt that Brian
was quite himself again. His even white teeth gleamed as he
smiled at the Master's wife. To her he presented himself almost
with a wink as the professional charmer, because after all she
was not a woman you could fool. "The awful thing is that my
first thought about it is for all the fun we're going to have."
Witl.l Todhurst he shared their contempt for the backwater.
"Not going to say I wish you'd got the appointment, because I
don't. Besides kunstgeschichte, old manl you and I know what
136
Nineteen Tales ol Terror
•
a bloody fraud the whole thing is. Not that I don't intend to
make something useful out of it all and that's exactly why I've
got to pick your brains before I go South." It was really amazing, Isobel thought, how the news had revived him-alive, so terribly keen and yet modest withal, and behind everything
steady as a rock, a young chap of forty, in fact, who would go
far.
Her own method was far more direct, she had never shared
her husband's spontaneous sense of salesmanship, at times even
found it nauseating. There was no need to bother about these
people any more and she did not intend to do so. "Silly to say
we shall meet again, Sir George," she told him, before he
could get round to asking. "It's only in the bonny North that
the arts are conducted on purely business lines." Todhurst, like
all the other junior dons, she ignored. "You must be so happy,"
said Jessie Colquhoun, the poetess of the lochs. "I shan't be
quite happy," Isobel replied, "until we've crossed the Border."
"Of course we shall lose touch," she said to the Master's wife,
"but I'm not so pleased as you think I am." And really, she
thought, if the old woman's eccentricity had not been quite so
provincial and frowsty it might have been possible to invite her
to London. Her especial venom was reserved for the Master
himself. "Dear Mrs. Capper," he intoned. "What a tremendous
loss you will be to us, and Capper, too, the ablest man on the
Faculty." "I wonder what you'll say to the Board when they
wake up to their loss, as I'm sure they will," replied Isabel. "It'll
take a lot of explaining."
And yet the Master's wife was quite right, it was only just in
time for both of them. Brian had begun to slip back badly in the
last few years. His smile, the very centre of his charm, had
grown too mechanical, gum recession was giving him an equine
look. His self-satisfaction which had once made him so friendly
to all-useful and useless alike-had begun to appear as heavy
indifference. When he had first come North he had danced like
a shadow-boxer from one group to another, making the powerful heady with praise, giving to the embittered a cherished moment of flattery, yet never committing himself; engaging all hearts by his youthful belief in Utopia, so much more acceptable because he was obviously so fundamentally sound. But with the years his smiling sincerity had begun to change to dogmatism; he could afford his own views and often they were not interesting, occasionally very dull. Younger colleagues annoyed
him, he knew that they thought him out of date. Though be
still wanted al"';'ays to be liked, he had remained "a young man"
too long to have any technique for charming the really young.
Faced by their contempt he was often rude and sulky. The long
apprenticeship in pleasing-the endless years of scholarships
Totentanz • 131
and examinations, of being the outstanding student of the year
-were now too far behind to guard him from the warping atmosphere of the town. Commonwealths and Harmsworths were becoming remote memories, the Dulwich trams of his
schooldays, the laurel bushes of his suburban childhood were
closer to him now than the dreams and ambitions of Harvard,
Oxford and McGill. Had the chair come a year later he would
probably have refused it. He had been such a success at thirtythree, it would have been easy to forget that at forty he was no longer an infant phenomenon.
If Brian had been rescued from the waters of Lethe in the
nick of time, Isobel had been torn from the flames of hell. Her
hatred of the University and the heat of her ambition had begun to burn her from within, until the strained, white face with cheekbones almost bursting through the skin and the over-intense eyes recalled some witch in death agonies. It did not take long for the superiority of her wit and taste to cease to bother a
world in which they were unintelligible, depression and a lack of
audience soon gave her irony a "governessy" flavour, until at
last the legend of Mrs. Capper's sharp tongue had begun to
bore her as much as others. The gold and white satin, the
wooden Negro page of her Regency room had begun to fret
her nerves with their shabbiness, yet it seemed pointless to furnish anew, even if she could have afforded it, for a world she so much despised. She made less and less pretence of reading or
listening to music, and yet for months she would hardly stir
outside. Everything that might have been successful in a more
sophisticated society was misunderstood here : her intellectual
Anglicanism was regarded as dowdy churchgoing, her beloved
Caravaggio was confused with Greuze, her Purcell enthusiasm
thought to be a hangover from the time when the "Beggar's
Opera," was all the rage; she would have done far better, been
thought more daring with Medici, van Goghs and some records
of the Bolero. She had come to watch all Brian's habits with
horror, his little provincial don's sarcasms, his tobacco-jarred,
golfey homeliness, h
is habit of pointing with his pipe and saying: "Now hold on a minute. I want to examine this average man or woman of yours more carefully"; or "Anarchism, now
that's a very interesting word, but are we quite sure we know
what it means?" She became steadily more afraid of "going
to pieces," knew herself to be toppling on the edge of a neurotic
apathy from which she would never recover.
It was not surprising therefore that as she said good-bye for
the third time to old Professor Green, who was so absentminded, she blessed the waves that had sucked Aunt Gladys down in a confusion of flannel petticoats and straggling grey
hair, or the realistic sailor who had cut Uncle Joseph's bony
138
Nineteen tales of Terror
•
fingers from the side of an _overloade� _ lifeboat .. She ?'as �ic�,
rich enough to realize her wildest ambitiOns; bes1de th1s Bnan s
professorship seemed of little importance. And yet in �sobel's
growing schemes it had its place, for she had determmed to
storm London and she was quite shrewd enough to realize that
she would never take that citadel by force of cash alone, far
better to enter by the academic gate she knew so well.
By January six months of thick white mists and driving rain
had finally dissipated the faint traces of July's charity, and
with them all interest in the Cappers' fortunes. The Master's
wife, dragged along by her two French bulldogs, was fighting
her way through Aidan's arch against a battery of hail when
she all but collided with Miss Thurkill returning from lunch at
the British Restaurant. She would have passed on with a nod
but Miss Thurkill's red fox-terrier nose was quivering with
news.
"The Cappers' good fortune seems to have been quite a sell,"
she yelped. "They've got that great house of her uncle's on
their hands."
"From all I hear about London conditions Pentonville prison
would be a prize these days," boomed the Master's wife.
"Oh, but that isn't all. It's quite grisly," giggled Miss Thurkill. "They've got to have the bodies in the house for ever and ever. It's part of the conditions of the will."