by Sarban
‘I heard nothing from her, in fact, for about three weeks, though I wrote her two more notes in that time; but I heard something of her.
‘One day in a snack-bar near the Strand that Shirley and I used sometimes to go to I ran across a girl from the ballet whom I’d met once or twice before with Shirley. It soon turned out that the girl knew that Shirley had lodgings on her own, in some squalid hovel in Clapham, as she put it. She couldn’t think why Shirley gave up Miss Willis’s, though she supposed, she said, with an air of carefully putting things in the most tactful way, that it wasn’t everybody who could make a success of sharing lodgings, even with a sister. She hadn’t been to Shirley’s digs in Clapham—hadn’t been asked. She saw Shirley, of course, regularly at the practice class. The company was going on tour in the summer, but there was nothing doing for her, or for Shirley. Everyone was surprised that Shirley hadn’t been given a place in the touring corps de ballet.
‘She began to talk to me then, in a disjointed and allusive sort of way, about Shirley being something of a disappointment to someone or other—the manager or the choreographer, perhaps. She referred to several men and women by their Christian names, and I didn’t know who was who among them, but I gathered they were the people whose opinions mattered to aspiring dancers and they were disappointed in Shirley.
‘I tried to find out more precisely what was the matter, but my acquaintance was at such elaborate pains to impress on me that she personally thought they were wrong and that Shirley was just as good as ever, only just a bit tired, perhaps, or worried about something, and all this was so mixed up with ballet jargon and Christian names that I really never gathered what the trouble was before the girl looked at her watch and rushed away.
‘I went home more worried than ever. Of course I could see what was happening. In the first place, the unhealthy atmosphere of that house would be affecting Shirley’s health, and the slightest decline of fitness tells at once on a dancer’s performance. Shirley was probably getting chronic indigestion from Mrs Guyatt’s cooking. But far worse, I knew, Mrs Guyatt had got her tangled up in her preposterous Harburianism. Heaven knew what ridiculous and wicked doctrines the creature was planting in her head. If Shirley had been completely empty-headed I shouldn’t have worried, but she wasn’t. She had brains, but no critical sense. Too much imagination and too little common sense. If she had been as feather-brained as the few of her dancing friends that I knew she would never have got herself mixed up with the Guyatts, of course.
‘Mrs Guyatt had plenty of interest in converting Shirley, apart from that avid, proselytising zeal that such abased bigots always have: if she could get Shirley into their absurd congregation she would be the surer of keeping her a lodger. In fact, she might wheedle the whole of her allowance out of her, one way or another, for contributions to the cause, and that sort of thing. The creature was flabby and sluggish-looking enough, but she was predatory for all that.
‘Nor was I sure that it would be only Shirley’s money that the pair would want. They would want to do something to her. I didn’t know what, but it would ruin her career.
‘I wrote to Shirley again and told her I had met the girl in the snack bar, without saying anything about our conversation. But I got no reply to that note either.
‘My finals were coming on in a few days. I had already begun to think about the Long Vacation. I had vaguely discussed with a friend of mine at the University the idea of going and staying at a small place in Argyllshire for a couple of weeks. I now made up my mind definitely about it and decided I would do my utmost to get Shirley to go with us. Later in the summer our Aunts were coming over and taking us back with them to Jersey, but it was necessary to get Shirley away now at the earliest possible moment. I arranged it with my friend, and we planned to set off for Argyllshire in the week following my last paper. So, two days before the exams began, I went over, in the evening, to Number Fourteen to see Shirley.
‘I suppose the place looked its best on a fine summer evening, but it was a poor, shabby best, and there was something even more stifling about that high-walled garden all choked with evergreens than there had been on the drizzling winter afternoon when I first saw it. The blinds of all the windows were down, as usual; that everlasting funeral was still going on.
‘Indeed, when I went up to the door, the suggestion was even stronger. Someone inside the house—Mrs Guyatt, I suppose—was chanting some dreary psalm; gabbling, perhaps might have been a truer description than chanting. It might have been some uncouth music of her native country, but muffled as it was, and coming to me only in spasms, it sounded like a lugubrious liturgy.
‘I tugged at the bell-pull and heard the bell jangle inside, but nothing happened for a long time. Only, after a while, the chanting stopped. I waited and then pulled again. At length the door was unbolted and opened a few inches. I saw Mrs Guyatt’s pasty face and her hostile black eyes through the crack.
‘She recognised me without showing any welcome and grudgingly opened the door a bit wider and let me into the hall.
‘ “Miss Dalman’s out,” she said, and stood watching me.
‘I asked when she would be back.
‘ “Not till late, she said. Ten o’clock about.”
‘I had not moved out of the doorway, so that she could not shut the door and there was therefore sufficient light thrown into the darkened place to see her features by. Her expression was different, her attitude was different from anything I had seen in her before. You could never have imagined Mrs Guyatt looking cheerful in any circumstances, but now there was something—not cheerfulness, certainly—but more like interest or suppressed excitement in her looks and behaviour. The flabby hopelessness had nearly all disappeared and something keener, a kind of wary expectancy had worked its way to the surface.
‘If I could have felt charitably towards Mrs Guyatt at all, I suppose I should have thought; poor thing, Shirley’s board and lodging is being a help to her. But there was a defensive promptness about the way she said “Miss Dalman’s out” before I had even asked if she was in. She knew I’d come to get Shirley away if I could, and she was going to do her best to stop me.
‘I said I would come back later. It was important.
‘Then, before I went out again, I asked, a bit cattily, perhaps, “And how’s poor Ellen today? I suppose you haven’t changed your mind about taking her to a specialist now, have you?”
‘She did not answer at once, but let her eyes rove all round the dark hall; then she gave me an unpleasant little smile and said. “Thank you for asking. She’s having treatment now. She’s improving wonderfully, thank you.”
‘The reply, as much as the unexpected smile, or smirk, so took the wind out of my sails that before I could think of anything else to say she had edged me through the door and was shutting it in my face.
‘I did not want to go all the way home and back again, but I was determined to see Shirley that night. I went into a cinema somewhere near Clapham Common to pass the time until ten o’clock.
‘What the woman had said kept appearing to me in different lights. In one way it was perfectly simple and it was a reproach to me for my prejudice against her and her daughter and my lack of charity. It’s true that she had talked that first day as though she had a religious objection to medical treatment—but that might have been just despair or ignorance, or even pride to conceal the fact that she was too poor to go to an expensive specialist. She might not have known about the assistance or the free treatment the child could get at the hospitals. After all they were strangers and Mrs Guyatt said she never spoke to anyone beyond what was absolutely necessary in buying her groceries and so forth. Now, with the money Shirley was paying her she could afford to consult someone; or, for that matter, Shirley could have told her what to do to get free treatment.
‘If Ellen really was benefiting from treatment, that in itself would account for the change in Mrs Guyatt. It would be exciting enough in all conscience to think that the child had
a chance of walking properly after all those years. And what a triumph for Shirley’s insight and generosity if it was true. But the darker side of it would keep obtruding. For one thing, judging from the admittedly little I had seen of Ellen’s deformity, I did not believe it would respond to treatment—not in anything like so short a time, anyway. I didn’t believe any doctor—unless it was some unscrupulous quack—would have raised her hopes so soon.
‘In any case, it was really nothing to do with Shirley and me. Worthy of pity or not, those people were bad for my sister and I was going to get her away from them. It had really become a battle for Shirley’s body now, I felt.
‘It must have been well after ten when I got back to Number Fourteen again, nearer eleven, perhaps, because it was pretty well dark: quite dark, in fact, in the shadow of those high laurels.
‘There was not a chink of light showing from any of the windows, upstairs or down. I pulled the bell, but there was no answer. I waited and listened, and I knew they weren’t all asleep because, somewhere, very muffled and low, the same sort of liturgical chant was going on that I had heard earlier in the evening. I dragged the bell-pull down once more and waited a long time. I could not hear the chanting any more, but still nobody came.
‘Thinking that Mrs Guyatt might possibly be in the kitchen, I groped my way round to the side of the house. There I saw a bleak, diffuse light coming from somewhere on the ground floor and lighting up the evergreens and a sort of framework of thin spars. I pushed through the shrubs as far as I could, but they grew so thick that I could not get close to the window. However, I was close enough to see that the framework was that of the big aviary built outside Ellen’s room. I could hear the disturbed movements of the doves, alarmed by my approach.
‘There was obviously no way round to the kitchen door on that side, and yet I felt impelled to get closer, if I could, and have a look into that room. I wormed my way through the bushes to my left and finally managed to get within a yard or two of the bird cage wire, squarely in front of one of the two windows, and, I suppose, six or seven yards from it, for the aviary must have been about twelve or fifteen feet broad. My view of the inside of Ellen’s room was therefore restricted. It was enough, nevertheless, to show me something very queer indeed.
‘To the right of my view was the black-draped dressing-table, looking more like an altar than ever now that it was cleared of its vases and bowls. The big silver candlesticks remained; the candles in them were lit and that was the only light in the room. Everything else appeared to have been removed from the dressing-table except the row of little, round, grinning objects on the shelf.
‘Shirley was kneeling in front of the dressing-table. She was wearing her nightdress—that was really the first thing I saw when I looked in, it gleamed so white against the black drapings. She was kneeling in a peculiar way, with her body resting slackly against the front of the dressing-table and her face turned away from the window. In her right hand, which was towards the window, she held something that I could not make out for a while: some soft, shapeless object of a pale, creamy fawn colour. Then her arm and hand moved slightly and a part of the object fell limply over her fingers, and I realised that it was a bird, a dead bird—a turtle-dove like those in the aviary.
‘Of the rest of the room I don’t suppose I could have seen very much. I have a memory of a confusion of queerly shaped shadows; of the candlelight picking out here and there some shiny thing among the jumble of dried plants and skins and barbaric dresses and weapons that festooned the wall; and I remember particularly, just above and beyond the altar, one of those shrivelled, reptilian things, strangely lit from below, squirming out from a nest of darkness and casting a monstrous shadow upwards.
‘I was so astonished and alarmed to see Shirley like that—my first thought was that she had fainted there—that I did not realise that there was someone else in the room with her. There must have been, though I could not see who it was. I could hear, very indistinctly, a voice droning or intoning something in a low monotone, as if reading something from a book without pauses or inflections.
‘When I did realise that, I guessed the true reason for Shirley’s posture, for the candlelight and for the draping of the dressing-table like an altar. The Guyatts had got Shirley to take part in one of their religious services—a service that revealed all the hole-and-corner nastiness that I had suspected in their Harburianism. Making Shirley hold a dead dove in her hand was a particularly disgusting touch.
‘I was opening my mouth to shout to Shirley—I was so revolted and indignant at her lending herself to their practices—but then I thought it would not really help if I gave her such occasion to accuse me of sneaking round and spying on her. I went back to the front door, not caring how much noise I made among the bushes, and wrenched at the bell-pull again and again. I was determined to get in now, even if I had to make enough commotion to bring a policeman on the scene.
‘There was no doubt that they could hear the jangling bell, but evidently they were not going to answer until they had finished their service. However, I went on ringing and only stopped when at last the hall light was switched on and I heard the bolts being drawn inside the door. Shirley opened it. She was in her dressing-gown and she looked sleepy and very cross.
‘ “Oh, it’s you, is it,” she said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing making a row like that at this time of night. I was in bed.”
‘ “Were you?” I said, and said it in a tone meaning as plainly as could be, Oh no you weren’t. “I thought I saw a light downstairs.”
‘ “Well I was just going to bed anyway,” she said sulkily.
‘ “Weren’t you expecting me?” I asked her. “I called earlier.”
‘ “No, I wasn’t,” she said. “I thought you’d come again tomorrow at a reasonable hour.”
‘She switched on the drawing-room light and we went in there and sat down. She looked at me crossly. I was shocked to see how tired and moody she was. Not looking physically ill, but dejected and exhausted, like someone who has made some tremendous physical effort and failed their objective.
‘ “Well,” she said. “What do you want? Is anything wrong?”
‘I spoke indignantly. “Only this, that you might have let me know where you were and how you were. I’ve written you three or four notes and you haven’t taken the trouble to answer one of them.”
‘ “You knew where I was,” she said.
‘ “I guessed anyway,” I said. I tried not to speak sharply. “Look here, Shirley,” I went on, “it’s nothing to me, of course, where you choose to get lodgings, but I don’t think you’re doing your friends a good turn, if that’s your idea, but you must think about yourself. I heard you weren’t well. That’s why I came. And I can see you aren’t well.”
‘ “Who told you I wasn’t?” she asked.
‘I told her what her friend had said to me.
‘ “Oh, that idiot!” she said. “They’re all a lot of gossiping fools. Why can’t they mind their own business? I told them I didn’t want to go on the tour. Now they’re starting a lot of malicious gossip about my getting stale or something, are they?”
‘Her voice rose, shakily. She worked herself up until she was trembling with anger. It was the second time that I had seen her lose control of her nerves. She never behaved like that before she knew the Guyatts.
‘ “Stale?” she exclaimed. “They’re saying she needs a rest, poor thing, are they? My god! If they only knew. Let them think what they like. They can kick me out, if they want to. I’m not going to spend myself on the brainless, insipid stuff that Cecil strings together. I’ve learned what I can use my dancing for, now. I’ve got someone to dance for!”
‘I didn’t quite know what she meant, but after what I had seen through the window I could guess. I expostulated with her. “But surely to goodness you’re not neglecting your real work for the sake of dancing here to amuse Ellen. It’s preposterous!”
‘She made an impat
ient gesture and retorted, “You can’t understand!”
‘The scorn she put into the words was wounding. I tried, in spite of my rising anger, to reason with her. She would hear nothing I had to say about the Guyatts.
‘I then told her about our plans for going to Argyllshire and asked her to come with us. She refused flatly. I tried every sort of persuasion; I went into the costs, I offered to pay her fare if she was too hard up—though she ought not to have been; I said everything I could think of to make her change her mind. But she would not budge.
‘ “I can’t go and I won’t go, and that’s that,” she said.
‘I was tired and I was at the limit of my patience with her.
‘ “You’re a fool, Shirley,” I said, and I spoke in real anger. “You’re behaving ridiculously and you’re behaving badly. I don’t know what sort of nasty tom-foolery these people have got you involved in, but I can make a pretty good guess and I warn you, it’s dangerous. I’ve said all I can say. I didn’t want to have to upset Aunt Eva by telling her, but after all she is still legally responsible for you and it’s my duty to let her know how you’re throwing everything away that she’s done for you.”
‘She flared out at me. “Tell who the devil you like. Nobody’s responsible for me. I shall do what I like. Now leave me alone. Go on! Leave me alone. I don’t want to see you again!”
‘She jumped up and marched out to the front door and threw it open, holding it wide for me to go through. Angry as I was I noticed a difference in her walk. Before she had never moved except with a controlled and fluid grace; now she stumped woodenly with stiff jerks of her legs and arms.
‘I was heart-sick at the quarrel and the change in her, but I saw the hopelessness of attempting anything more that night. I went home and before I went to bed I wrote a long, desperate letter to Aunt Eva.