by Sarban
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you,’ I said. ‘If it were so, how could it be truth?’
‘Yes. How could it be? You see the difficulty for someone who tries to look at life in a rational and scientific way. Well, I will tell you what happened in as objective a way as I can, though some of it must be only guesses and impressions. I must say, though, that I have never been aware of any spontaneous generation of impressions, intuitions and what-not in myself. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life experienced any sort of delusion or any feeling or state of mind for which I wasn’t able to find a natural and reasonable explanation. In that, I suppose, I was quite the opposite of my sister Shirley.
‘If what I’m going to tell you hadn’t happened I dare say the name of Shirley Dalman would have been quite well known to you. That, at any rate, was the critics’ opinion. They were saying fifteen years ago that she was one of the most promising of our younger dancers. Now, of course, everybody has forgotten her.
‘We were not very much together in our childhood, though there was only a couple of years between us. Most of the time Shirley was in London, training for the ballet and living with our Aunt Eva, who took charge of us after our mother died, while I was at school in Exeter.
‘Our father died when I was nineteen, and Shirley seventeen. I came up to London University soon after that and lived with Shirley and Aunt Eva. Our Aunt’s health was poor—she had a weak heart—and, in my second year at the University she decided to leave London, which she found too tiring for her, and go and live with a younger Aunt of ours in Jersey.
‘Shirley and I found very comfortable lodgings in a house in Dulwich, and for a year or eighteen months we lived together on the best of terms. We shared a sitting-room and we had our meals together when we both happened to be in for a meal, but we did not share each other’s lives. She had her own circle of friends belonging to the dancing school and the ballet company, and I had my friends in the University. Our circles didn’t intersect. We were both very busy and both had little leisure or desire for amusements outside our work.
‘I, perhaps, knew slightly more about what Shirley was doing than she did about my work, because I used to go to see her dance sometimes; and then Shirley was talkative and lively and full of enthusiasm and would rattle away in the evenings to me about all the theatre gossip, about music, choreography, costumes and decor, of which I knew next to nothing, and about personalities in the ballet whom I didn’t know at all.
‘She was entirely serious about her art. It had been her whole life since she was ten or eleven. With all her vivacity, quick changes of mood and utterly illogical and unreasoning attitude to most ideas and problems of life, when it came to dancing there was nothing in the slightest degree frivolous or slap-dash about her. Dancing was the one important and serious thing in life, and she allowed nothing to distract her from it. I stress that because the police, of course, tried to find a love affair at the bottom of it all. I’m as certain as I can be that there wasn’t one. I should have known, you see. Two sisters living with each other can’t hide such things. And if Shirley had been having an affair she wouldn’t have wanted to hide it. I convinced the police of that, in the end.
‘She was just turned twenty when the trouble began. One afternoon early in the New Year—the 8th of January—fifteen years ago, Shirley came home from the theatre after a rehearsal and while we were having our tea she took a letter out of her bag and gave it me to read. She was in high spirits. She had had some flattering notices in the papers and this letter from a young worshipper was a pleasing bit of incense.
‘I thought the letter both pathetic and slightly unpleasant. It was written on ruled paper from a cheap writing pad and the handwriting was round and rather uncertain. The name at the bottom was Ellen Guyatt, and she said she was fifteen and she was crippled.
‘It seemed to me a precocious production, the writing of a clever adolescent who’s read more than she can digest. I can’t remember the exact words, of course, but the gist of it was that Ellen had seen photos of Shirley (she addressed her as Miss Dalman, respectfully enough) and had fallen bitterly in love with her from her pictures. I remember the word ‘bitterly’. It seemed a childish clumsiness of style at first sight, and then, when I read the letter to the end, it seemed appropriate. The colours were laid on too crudely and too thick. Ellen, it seemed, had been a cripple from birth. She lived with her widowed mother. They were poor and her mother never took her out. The only happiness she had was in weaving stories for herself about what she would do if she could walk. Most of all she dreamed of dancing, and when she had seen Shirley’s picture in the paper she knew that Shirley embodied all her dreams. But Shirley was a real person and must be as much more beautiful than her picture as the picture was than anything Ellen could imagine for herself. Ellen had wept with longing to see her dance, but she knew she never could. She could never leave her little room, never know anything but dreams and pictures, never know the ecstasy of seeing the living Miss Dalman dance. Still, she would love her from her picture till she died.
‘I suppose actresses and dancers get hundreds of such letters and I dare say this was no sillier than many another. I never had much patience with adolescent soppiness of that sort, but there was just a touch of genuine poignancy in this effusion: the girl was crippled.
‘Shirley’s manner when she gave me the letter had been more mocking than anything: the language was a bit too lush even for her. But she read it through again and became very contrite about having made fun of it. I shouldn’t wonder if she had skipped the part where Ellen said she was crippled when she first read it. Now she was all tenderness and pity for the child.
‘She jumped up and rummaged in a drawer for some photos of herself and picked out half a dozen studio portraits she had had done at different times.
‘ “Poor kid!” she said. “She must have seen the picture in the Sphere last week. It was a rotten one. Help me to pick which of these she’d like best.”
‘She sat down there and then and wrote back to the child, sending her a couple of her studio pictures. She asked me to read her out the address from the child’s letter which she had left lying among the tea things. It was Number Fourteen, Old Mill Lane, Clapham Park.
‘Shirley remarked that it was an uncommon name, Guyatt. I had thought so too. It did not look English to me.
‘Within a few days Shirley had a letter back from the girl. It was full of effusive gratitude and adoration; but the wistfulness seemed to me a little too self-conscious. Ellen Guyatt could certainly write well for her age: too well, in fact, because she gave the impression of straining after effect. The self-pity was too evident.
‘Of course Shirley told me I was being catty and cruel when I remarked on that. I don’t know. Perhaps I was. Cripples do develop morbid and disagreeable traits. It needs a warm and generous nature to ignore them.
‘I didn’t suppose that Shirley would keep up her correspondence with Ellen Guyatt very long. She was usually lazy about writing letters. But, to my surprise she answered every one of Ellen’s—and she used to get one every three or four days. It was really no business of mine, of course, but I couldn’t help saying something about its being wrong to encourage the child only to make her more miserable in the end by dropping her suddenly and flat.
‘ “Oh but I shan’t!” Shirley said. “I really do mean to do something for her if I can. I think her letters are very moving, really —and she’s only a kid, of course, but she’s so sensitive and—and—what do I mean?—profound.”
‘I told her not to be silly.
‘ “You wouldn’t understand, of course,” she said. “But it’s really rather wonderful the way she understands what dancing means, what the joy of doing something perfectly with your body is. And yet she’s never even seen dancing.”
‘I wondered what on earth Shirley thought she could do for the girl. It wasn’t at all improbable that all sorts of situations out of Victorian novelettes occurred to her quite
seriously: Shirley sending an ambulance or something to fetch the girl to the theatre to give her the treat of her life, and Shirley dancing the principal role and then smiling to the box where Ellen was while the whole house rose and cheered; or Shirley, having soared to sudden fame, paying the fees of a brilliant specialist who would miraculously cure Ellen.
‘I asked her what she meant by doing something.
‘She said quite frankly that she had no idea.
‘ “There isn’t very much that I can do. But I might think of something after I’ve seen her. After all, unless she can’t possibly be moved there ought to be some way of getting her to the theatre, if its only to a rehearsal.”
‘ “So you’re going to see her,” I said. “I didn’t know that. You’ll have your work cut out later on, you know, if you pay personal visits to all your fans.”
‘ “Oh don’t affect to be so stupid,” she said. “Any other fan can pay a bob and see me and the whole company from the gods whenever they like. Anyway, I haven’t got any fans yet except Ellen. I’m not so conceited as you think I am. I tell you there’s something in this kid and I like her.”
‘She was quite right to be irritated with me. It was silly of me to object to her going to see the girl without knowing why I did object. I said I was sorry, and, of course, Shirley then was even sorrier for quarrelling with me.
‘ “Why don’t you come with me?” she asked. “I’m going on Sunday afternoon.”
‘I think Shirley must have felt a little embarrassed at going to see the child when it came to the point. That’s why she asked me to go with her. I went perhaps out of a feeling that Shirley might make less of a fool of herself if I was there.
‘It was a cold and rainy afternoon, I remember, with that part of South London looking its drabbest and most deserted. Neither of us knew the district; we took a taxi at Clapham Common and found that it was only a short drive from there. I gather you don’t know Old Mill Lane yourself? Charles says there’s been a good deal of new building there in the last few years, but fifteen years ago it was a quiet, narrow old lane that looked as if it belonged to an old-fashioned provincial town rather than to a London borough. It was even cobbled in parts; most of the houses were hidden behind high brick walls and the trees of their gardens overhung the lane.
‘Number Fourteen had a double wooden carriage gate with a wicket in it. The paint had pretty well disappeared from the wood and the wall on either side was bulging in an unsafe-looking way. The little gate was unlocked, so we went in without pulling the bell. The garden was full of overgrown laurels and rhododendrons and the earth under them was dank, black and filmed with moss. There was a short drive, which had not had any attention for many years, and then the front of a small late-Georgian house with a pillared porch. Over the boundary wall on the north side I could see the upper windows of a similar house. That one seemed to be empty.
‘Number Fourteen was in a poor state of repair, very grimy with the stucco fallen off in patches and the windows badly in need of cleaning. Still, it was not quite the sort of house I had expected from Ellen’s letters. I had rather pictured her and her mother living in two rooms in a terrace house in one of those newer streets that have never been anything but cheap and drab.
‘There was an old-fashioned bell handle, which I pulled. The door was opened at once by a woman in black. She looked at us blankly, or rather forbiddingly, as if we had come collecting or trying to sell something; but Shirley gave her her most winning smile and said: “I’m Shirley Dalman. I’ve come to see Ellen. You’re Ellen’s mother, aren’t you?”
‘Shirley was always completely self-possessed with strangers —an accomplishment, I suppose, that came from practising the art of pleasing audiences professionally.
‘The woman said, “Yes, I’m Mrs Guyatt. Won’t you come in?”
‘Her voice was as melancholy as her appearance, and I noticed the slight foreign accent at once. She was a tall, bony woman of about fifty, I suppose, with a long, sallow face, high cheekbones and deeply sunken black eyes; she had black hair, turning grey, which was piled in an untidy mass on the top of her head and more or less held up by a big tortoise-shell comb. She was wearing a black silk dress with a high collar and tight wrist-bands which reminded me of a photograph of our Aunt Eva taken in the 1890s, and she had several strings of jet beads hanging loose and making a slight clicking sound when she moved.
‘She took us across a small hall into a drawing-room which was as much a Victorian survival as she herself, stuffy; over-crowded and overheated, even though the day was cold. There may have been nothing among all the collection of plush and horsehair furniture, bamboo stands, stiffly posed photographs and pictures of stags and drooping ladies in classical costumes that spoke particularly and precisely of funerals, but the whole place seemed to be waiting to receive some stodgy collection of distant relations in shabby black who would stand about trying to avoid talking to each other while waiting to hear the undertaker’s men come downstairs. I say there was nothing specific, but in reality, I suppose, two things, besides Mrs Guyatt herself, were enough to suggest the idea of dingy mourning: the green blinds of the two windows were drawn only a third of the way up, and several of the photographs representing a middle-aged man with a moustache and side-whiskers had bows of black ribbon across the corners.
‘Shirley, I’m sure, felt the impression more strongly than I did. She stared round and then, when the woman went out, looked at me and said in an appalled whisper:
‘ “My god! No wonder the kid’s unhappy. It’s like a morgue.”
‘The fire, at any rate, was burning cheerfully. In spite of feeling already somewhat too hot, I went and stood near it. Shirley picked her way nervously through the little tables and what-nots and sat on the piano-stool tapping on the covered keyboard and wishing, I thought—or at least hoped—that she had never come.
‘I imagined that we should be taken to see the child lying in bed, and supposed that her mother had gone to make her ready to receive visitors, but when she came back into the drawing-room she held the door open and the child herself followed her in.
‘Ellen came in very slowly. She halted just inside the door, leaning on a little crutch. She saw me first, realised at a glance that I was not her idol and then turned her head quickly to look at Shirley. She drew in a breath so deep it sounded like a sob.
‘Mrs Guyatt spoke to me in the same dull, hopeless tone: “It’s one of her bad days, but she wouldn’t stay in bed.”
‘Ellen looked small for her age, but her face was far older than fifteen. It was apparently her right leg that was afflicted: it was enclosed in a heavy iron brace attached to a thick-soled boot. But her whole scrawny little body was bent and twisted; one shoulder was higher than the other and her back was hunched. She was dressed in a black velvet frock that seemed too long for her, though not long enough to conceal all of the ugly contraption on her leg.
‘She had eyes for nothing but my sister, and while she stood gazing in rapt wonder at Shirley, I believed I saw her as she was, with her naïve, child nature not overlaid by any affectation or attempt to play the grown-up invalid.
‘Her eyes were black and they were truly child’s eyes, clear and eager. All her other features seemed to carry the marks of experience or suffering. Her complexion was dull and unhealthy; her black hair was straight and lifeless, her nose long and thin, her mouth was wide with thin lips drawn down at the corners; her cheeks sunken and her chin sharp and prominent. Her sound limbs were very thin and her hands were long and as bony as a bird’s claws.
‘I don’t think anyone who’s honest with herself could deny being repelled by deformity. But usually, with civilised people, pity is excited so quickly that it eclipses the more primitive feeling almost at once; and then, of course, one’s ashamed to admit the repulsion to oneself. I felt all three emotions when I looked at Ellen. Shirley, I imagine, only admitted to herself that she felt compassion.
‘Mrs Guyatt made us some fo
rmal little speech about it being so kind of us to take an interest in her girl and it being such happiness for Ellen to meet a famous young lady from the theatre. Shirley didn’t pay much attention. She really handled the girl very well; she was tender, cheerful and easy, finding at once a level on which she and Ellen could talk naturally without any suggestion of condescension. Ellen, for her part, responded by behaving without any of the affectation and pretentiousness that had jarred on me so in her letters.
‘She sat on the edge of a chair, supporting herself partly against its arms and partly on her crutch, and chatted happily away to Shirley while her mother brought in a tea-tray. Ellen had apparently learned all the technical jargon of the ballet, she knew the names of all the people in Shirley’s company, every ballet they had put on and the roles they had all had. But she was interested in more than the dancers: she began asking questions about the routine and training of the ballet school, the basic steps and movements and then more advanced matters of choreography. Shirley could talk about dancing intelligently; she was soon well away on the theory of the ballet. I had never heard her talk with such authority and I knew at once why I had not: I had never shown a tithe of the interest and comprehension that was patent in Ellen’s face.
‘Mrs Guyatt made conversation with me while keeping all the time a covert watch on Ellen. She was a depressing creature. She never smiled the whole time we were there; the phrases she used about our kindness in coming to see Ellen sounded as hollow as a tomb. It was difficult, without firing direct questions at her, to get at the facts of their existence behind that dreary show of shabby gentility. They were obviously not well off; Mrs Guyatt’s hands were roughened by housework and neither she nor Ellen looked as if she got enough to eat.
‘Indirectly, through the drizzle of banalities that went on between us and through her meagre answers to the few questions I managed to put in, I learned what I thought were the main outlines of their story.