Homefront Horrors

by Nevins, Jess;

  “I’ll put you back into bed again,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

  “If you’ll promise not to go.”

  “Oh, I won’t go!”

  I picked her up and laid her on the berth, and drew the clothes over her. I put the pillow back under her head. With both her hands she clutched one of mine.

  “Now, then,” I said, “do you happen to have any brandy here?”

  “In a flask in my dressing-bag. It’s been there for years. I don’t know if it’s any good still.”

  She seemed reluctant to let go my hand, and clutched it again eagerly when I brought the brandy. She was quite docile, and drank as I told her. I have not put down half of what she said. She was muttering the whole time. The phrase “into the sea” occurred frequently. All ordinary notions of the relationship of a man and a woman had vanished. I was simply a big brother who was looking after her. That was felt by both of us. We called each other “dear” that night frequently, but there was not a trace of sex-sentimentality between us.

  Gradually she became more quiet, and I was no longer afraid that she would faint. Still holding my hand, she said:

  “Shall I tell you what it was?”

  “Yes, dear, if you like. But you needn’t. It was only a dream, you know.”

  “I don’t think it was a dream. I went to sleep, which I had never expected to do after the thing that Mr. Bartlett told us. I couldn’t have done it, only I argued that you must be right and the rest must be just a coincidence. Then I was awakened by the sound of somebody breathing close by my ear. It got further away, and I switched on the light quickly. He was standing just there—exactly as I described him to you—and he had picked up a pair of nail-scissors. He was opening and shutting them. Then he put them down open, and shook his head. (Look, they’re open now, and I always close them.) And suddenly he lurched over, almost falling, and clutched the wooden edge of the berth. His red hands—they were terribly red, far redder than they used to be—came on to the wood with a slap. ‘Go into the sea, Sheila,’ he whispered. ‘I’m waiting. I want you.’ And after that I don’t know what happened, but suddenly I was hanging on to you, dear. How long was it ago? Was it an hour? It doesn’t matter. I’m safe while you’re here.”

  I released her hands gently. Suddenly the paroxysm of terror returned.

  “You’re not going?” she cried, aghast.

  “Of course not.” I sat down on the couch opposite her. “But what makes you think you’re safe while I’m here?”

  “You’re stronger than he is,” she said.

  She said it as if it were a self-evident fact which did not admit of argument. Certainly, though no doubt unreasonably, it gave me confidence. I felt somehow that he and I were fighting for the woman’s life and soul, and I had got him down. I knew that in some mysterious way I was the stronger.

  “Well,” I said, “the dream that one is awake is a fairly common dream. But what was the thing that Bartlett told you?”

  “He saw him—in blue pyjamas and red slippers. He mentioned the mouth too.”

  “I’m glad you told me that,” I said, and began a few useful inventions. “The man that Bartlett saw was Curwen. We’ve just been talking about it.”

  “Who’s Curwen?”

  “Not a bad chap—an electrical engineer, I believe. As soon as Bartlett mentioned the mole on the cheek and the little black moustache I spotted that it was Curwen.”

  “But he said he had never seen him before.”

  “Nor had he. Curwen’s a bad sailor and has kept to his state-room—in fact, that was his first public appearance. But I saw Curwen when he came on board, and had a talk with him. As soon as Bartlett mentioned the mole, I knew who it was.”

  “Then the colour of the slippers and—”

  “They were merely a coincidence, and a mighty unlucky one for you.”

  “I see,” she said. Her muscles relaxed. She gave a little sigh of relief and sank bank on the pillow. I was glad that I had invented Curwen and the mole.

  I changed the subject now, and began to talk about Liverpool—not so many miles away now. I asked her if she had changed her American money yet. I spoke about the customs, and confessed to some successful smuggling that I had once done. In fact, I talked about anything that might take her mind away from her panic.

  Then I said:

  “If you will give me about ten seconds start now, so that I can get back to my own room, you might ring for your stewardess to come and take care of you. It will mean an extra tip for her, and she won’t mind.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I ought not to keep you any longer. Indeed, it is very kind of you to have helped me and to have stayed so long. I’ll never forget it. But even now I daren’t be alone for a moment. Will you wait until she’s actually here?”

  I was not ready for that.

  “Well,” I said hesitatingly.

  “Of course,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it. I can’t keep you. You’ve had no sleep at all. And yet if you go, he’ll—Oh, what am I to do? What am I to do?”

  I was afraid she would begin to cry.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I can stay for another hour or two easily enough.”

  She was full of gratitude. She told me to throw the things off the end of the couch so that I could lie at full length. I dozed for a while, but I do not think she slept at all. She was wide awake when I opened my eyes. I talked to her for a little, and found her much reassured and calmed. People were beginning to move about. It was necessary for me to go immediately if I was not to be seen.

  She agreed at once. When I shook hands with her, and told her to try for an hour’s sleep, she kissed my hand fervently in a childish sort of way. Frightened people behave rather like children.

  I was not seen as I came from her room. The luck was with me. It is just possible that on the other side of the ship, a steward saw me enter my own room in evening clothes at a little after five. If he did, it did not matter.

  * * *

  I have had the most grateful and kindly letters from her and from her new husband—the cheery and handsome man who met her at Liverpool. In her letter she speaks of her “awful nightmare, that even now it seems sometimes as if it must have been real.” She has sent me a cigarette case that I am afraid I cannot use publicly. A gold cigarette-case with a diamond push-button would give a wrong impression of my income, and the inscription inside might easily be misunderstood. But I like to have it.

  Thanks to my innocent mendacity, she has a theory which covers the whole ground. But I myself have no theory at all. I know this—that I might travel to New York by that same boat to-morrow, and that I am waiting three days for another.

  I have suppressed the name of the boat, and I think I have said nothing by which she could be identified. I do not want to spoil business. Besides, it may be funk and superstition that convinces me that on every trip she carries a passenger whose name is not on the list. But, for all that, I am quite convinced!

  THE LIQUEUR GLASS

  Phyllis Bottome

  (1884–1963)

  Posterity is cruel. Once the most famous of all the writers in this anthology, Bottome is now the most obscure. But in her time she regularly appeared on the best-sellers’ lists, and was famous to the degree that the arrival of a ship carrying the corrected proofs for her new novel merited mention in The New York Times. Deservedly so, as “The Liqueur Glass” shows, for Bottome was a talented, insightful writer, even if she was ultimately ahead of her time in a number of regards.

  She wrote under her birth name, publishing her first novel (of thirty-three) when she was only twenty, and produced continuously throughout her life. During the early years of World War One she lived in London as a part of the same literary circle as Ezra Pound and May Sinclair, and her short stories appeared in the better sorts of English fiction magazines, like The Red Magazine, The Century Magazine, and The Smart Set. Married at thirty-three to a man she’d known for thirteen years, she and her n
ew husband moved to Vienna. He became a diplomat and ultimately the MI6 Head of Station for Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. She met Alfred Adler, underwent analysis, and became a friend of his and a proponent of his work, ultimately writing a biography of Adler in 1939. In 1924 she opened a school in Austria designed to teach languages and apply psychology and educational theory to the benefit of students and nations. One of her prized pupils, who always remembered her fondly, was Ian Fleming.

  She became most famous for two novels: Private Worlds (1934), which she hoped would raise public awareness about mental illness, filmed in 1935 with Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert; and The Mortal Storm (1937), about the rising threat of Hitler and the Nazis to European Jews. The Mortal Storm was a best-seller in both the U.K. and the U. S., and was filmed in 1940 with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. It was the first Hollywood film to mention Hitler by name and was an influential piece of anti-German propaganda. It also earned her the label “premature anti-fascist,” something the openly political Bottome embraced. Most of her works were progressive and feminist, with ideological aims beyond mere entertainment, and Bottome was successful as few men or women of her time were in combining politics and entertainment.

  “The Liqueur Glass,” which originally appeared in The Smart Set’s March 1915 issue, is one of Bottome’s earliest stories, written while she and her future husband were still only corresponding. It shows, perhaps, some of the attitudes of a 1910s feminist toward traditional marriage. Fortunately for Bottome, her own marriage was much healthier than the Watkins’, and she was never required to contemplate the actions Mrs. Watkins takes here.

  MRS. HENRY WATKINS loved going to church. She could not have told you why she loved it. It had perhaps less to do with religious motives than most people’s reasons for attending divine service; and she took no interest in other peoples’ clothes.

  She gazed long and fixedly at the stained glass window in which St. Peter, in a loose magenta blouse, was lading salmon-colored sardines out of a grass-green sea; but she did not really see St. Peter or notice his sleight-of-hand preoccupation with the fish. She was simply having a nice, quiet time.

  She always sat where she could most easily escape seeing the back of Henry Watkins’s head. She had never liked the back of his head and twenty years’ married life had only deepened her distaste for it.

  Hetty and Paul sat between her and their father, and once or twice it had occurred to Mrs. Watkins as strange that she should owe the life of these two beloved beings to the man she hated.

  It was no use pretending at this time of the day that she didn’t hate Henry Watkins. She hated him with all the slow, quiet force of a slow, quiet nature.

  She had hated him for some time before she discovered that she no longer loved him.

  Mrs. Watkins took a long time before she arrived at the recognition of a new truth; she would go on provisionally for years with a worn-out platitude, but when she once dropped it, she never returned to pick it up again; and she acted upon her discoveries.

  The choir began to sing “O God. Our Help in Ages Past.” Mrs. Watkins disliked this hymn; and she had never found God much of a help. She thought the verse that compared men’s lives to the flight of leaves was nonsense. Nobody could imagine Henry Watkins flying like a leaf.

  The first lesson was more attractive. Mrs. Watkins enjoyed Jael’s reception of Sisera. “She brought him butter in a lordly dish,” boomed the curate. Henry Watkins ate a lot of butter, though he insisted, from motives of economy, upon its being Danish. Sisera, worn out with battle, slumbered. Jael took up the nail and carried out with efficiency and dispatch her inhospitable deed. Mrs. Watkins thought the nails in those days must have been larger than they are now and probably a lot sharper at the end.

  The curate cleared his throat a little over the story; it seemed to him to savor of brutality.

  “Why tarry the wheels of his chariot?” cried Sisera’s mother.

  Mrs. Watkins leaned back in her seat and smiled. Sisera was done for, his mother would never hear the sound of those returning chariot wheels.

  Jael had permanently recouped herself for the butter.

  A little later on the vicar swept out of his stall and up to the pulpit covered by the prolonged “Amen” of the accompanying hymn. Henry looked at his watch and shut it with a click. Then his hard blue eyes closed suddenly—he had no eyelashes. Mrs. Watkins folded her hands in her lap and fixed her attention upon St. Peter.

  This was her nice, quiet time, and she spent it in considering how she could most easily kill Henry Watkins.

  She was not in the least touched by the sight of her wedding ring. Her marriage had been an accident, one of those accidents that happened frequently twenty years ago, and which happen, though more seldom, now. An unhappy blunder of ignorance, inexperience, and family pressure.

  She had liked making Henry Watkins jump, and her mother had explained to her that the tendency to jump on Henry’s part was an ardent, manly love, and that her own amused contemplation of the performance was deep womanly inclination.

  It was then that Mrs. Watkins urged that she did not like the back of Henry’s head. She had been told that it was immodest to notice it. His means were excellent and her own parents were poor. Twenty years ago Mrs. Watkins had known very little about life, and what she did know she was tempted to enjoy. She knew a good deal about it now, and she had long ago outgrown the temptation to enjoy it.

  Still, that in itself wouldn’t have given her any idea of killing her husband. She was a just woman and she knew that her husband had not invented the universe; if he had, she thought it would have been more unpleasant still.

  Henry’s idea of marriage was very direct; he knew that he had done his wife an enormous favor. She was penniless and he had the money; she was to come to him for every penny and all she had was his as a matter of course. She could do him no favors, she had no rights, and her preferences were silly.

  It had occurred to Mrs. Watkins in one awful moment of early resentment that she would rather be bought by a great many men than by one. There would be more variety, and some of them, at least, wouldn’t be like Henry.

  Then her children came; she aged very rapidly. Nothing is so bad for the personal appearance as the complete abrogation of self-respect. Henry continually threw her birthdays in her teeth. “A woman of your age,” he would say with deep contempt.

  He was a man of favorite phrases. Mrs. Watkins was not constitutionally averse to repetition, but the repetition of a phrase that means to hurt can be curiously unpleasant. Still, as her mother had pointed out to her long years ago, you can get used to the unpleasant.

  She never complained, and her father and mother were gratefully conscious of how soon she had settled down.

  But there was a strange fallacy that lingered deep in Mrs. Watkins’s heart.

  She had given up her rights as a woman, since presumably her marriage necessitated the sacrifice. But she believed that she would be allowed the rights of a mother. This, of course, was where she made her mistake.

  Henry Watkins meant to be master in his own house. The house was his own, so was his wife, so were his children.

  There is no division of property where there is one master. This was a great religious truth to Henry, so that when his son displeased him he thrashed him, and when his daughter got in his way he bullied her.

  Mrs. Watkins disputed this right not once but many times, till she found the results were worse for the children. Then she dropped her opposition. Henry Watkins saw that she had learnt her lesson. It taught the children a lesson, too; they saw that it made no difference what mother said to father.

  Nothing happened to alter either her attitude or Henry’s.

  They went to the same church twice every Sunday, except when it rained; and they ate roast beef afterwards.

  In spite of Henry, Hetty had grown into a charming, sympathetic, slightly nervous young woman, and in spite of Henry, Paul had become a clever, highly stru
ng, regrettably artistic young man.

  But if Henry couldn’t help their temperaments he could put his foot down about their future.

  Paul should go into the bank and learn to be a man. (By learning to be a man, Henry meant learning to care more for money than for anything else); and Hetty should receive no assistance toward marrying an impecunious young architect to whom she had taken a fancy.

  Hetty could do as she chose; she could marry Henry’s old friend Baddeley, who had a decent income, or she could stay at home and pretend to be ill; but she certainly shouldn’t throw herself away on a young fool who hadn’t the means (rather fortunately, as it happened) to support her.

  Henry looked at his watch; the sermon had already lasted twenty minutes.

  Mrs. Watkins went over once more in her mind how she had better do it. “And now to God the Father,” said the vicar. The sermon had lasted twenty-seven minutes, and Henry meant to point it out to the vicar in the vestry. “Oh, what the joy and the glory must be!” sang the choir. “And if I am hanged,” said Mrs. Watkins to herself, “they’ll get the money just the same. I shall try not to be, because it would be so upsetting for them, poor young things; still it’s wonderful what you can get over when you’re young.”

  “Keep the beef hot!” whispered Henry, as he set off for the vestry.

  At lunch Henry made Hetty cry and leave the room.

  Paul flashed out in his sister’s defense. “You’re unbearable, sir—why can’t you leave us alone?”

  His mother strangely interposed.

  “Never mind, Paul,” she said. “Let father have his own way.”

  Paul looked at her in astonishment, and Henry was extremely annoyed. He was perfectly capable of taking his own way without his wife’s interference, and he told her so.

  It was the cook’s evening out, and the house parlor-maid—a flighty creature—was upstairs in her room, trimming a new hat. There was no one downstairs in the kitchen after supper.

  Paul went out to smoke in the garden, and Hetty had gone to finish her tears in her own room. That was something Mrs. Watkins hadn’t got; but she needed no place for finishing her tears, because she had never yet begun them. She did not see the use of tears.