Homefront Horrors

by Nevins, Jess;

  “Have you ever seen the wind?” I said.

  He laughed. “Well, then, tell me your evidence,” he replied.

  I searched my mind for something that he might regard as evidence. “Men,” I said, “used to believe that the little birds, the finches and the tits, rushed blindly at the lanterns of the light-houses, and dashed themselves to death as a moth will dash itself into the candle. But now they know that the birds only seek a refuge near the light, and that they will rest till dawn on the perches that are built for them.”

  “Quite true,” he agreed. “And what then?”

  “The little birds are prey to the powers of the air when the darkness comes,” I said; “and their only chance of life is to come within the beam of the protecting light. And when they could find no place to rest, they hovered and fluttered until they were weak with the ache of flight, and fell a little into the darkness; then in panic and despair they fled back and overshot their mark.”

  “But gulls . . .” he began.

  “A few,” I interrupted him. “A few, although they also belong to the wild and the darkness. They fall in chasing the little birds who, like us, are a quarry.”

  “A pretty fable,” he said; but I saw that the shadow of a doubt had fallen across him, and when he asked me another question I would not reply . . .

  I took him to the door at ten o’clock that night and made him listen to the revels in the upper air. Below it was almost still and very dark, for the moon was near the new, and the clouds were traveling North in diligent masses that would presently bring rain.

  “Do you hear them?” I asked.

  He shivered slightly, and pretended that the air was cold . . .

  As the nights drew in, I began to hope that he had taken my warning to heart. He did not speak of it, but he took his walks while the sun edged across its brief arc of the sky.

  I took comfort in the thought that some dim sense of vision was still left to him; and one afternoon when the black time was almost come, I walked with him on the cliffs. I meant then to test him; to discover if, indeed, some feeble remnant of sight was yet his.

  The wind had hidden itself that day, but I knew that it lurked in the grey depths that hung on the sea’s horizon. Its outrunners streaked the falling blue of the sky with driven spirits of white cloud; and the long swell of the rising sea cried out with fear as it fled, breaking, to its death.

  I said no word to him, then, of the coming peril. We walked to the cliff’s edge and watched the thousand runnels of foam that laced the blackness of Trescore rock with milk-white threads, as those driven rollers cast themselves against the land and burst moon-high in their last despair.

  We saw the darkness creeping toward us out of the far distance, and then we turned from the sea and I saw how the coming shadow was already quenching the hills. All the earth was hardening itself to await the night.

  “God! What a lonely place!” he said.

  It seemed lonely to him, but I saw the little creeping movements among the black roots of the furze. To me the place seemed overpopulous. Nevertheless I took it as a good sign that he had found a sense of loneliness; it is a sense that often precedes the coming of knowledge . . .

  And when the darkness of winter had come I thought he was safe. He was always back in the house by sunset and he went little to the cliffs. But now and again he would look at me with something of defiance in his face, as if he braced himself to meet an argument.

  I gave him no encouragement to speak. I believed that no knowledge could come to him by that way, that no words of mind could help him. And I was right. But he forced speech upon me. He faced me one afternoon in the depths of the black time. He was stiffened to oppose me.

  “It’s absurd,” he said, “to pretend a kind of superior wisdom. If you can’t give me some reason for this superstition of yours I must go out and test it myself.”

  I knew my own feebleness, and I tried to prevaricate by saying: “I gave you reasons.”

  “They will all bear at least two explanations,” he said.

  “At least wait,” I pleaded. “You are so young.”

  He was a little softened by my weakness but he was resolute. He meant to teach me, to prove that he was right. He lifted his head proudly and smiled.

  “Youth is the age of courage and experiment,” he boasted.

  “Of recklessness and curiosity,” was my amendment.

  “I am going,” he said.

  “You will never come back,” I warned him.

  “But if I do come back,” he said, “will you admit that I am right?”

  I would not accept so foolish a challenge. “Some escape,” I said.

  “I will go every night until you are convinced,” he returned. “Before the winter is over, you shall come with me. I will cure you of your fear.”

  I was angry then; and I turned my back upon him. I heard him go out and made no effort to hinder him. I sat and brooded and consoled myself with the thought that he would surely return at dusk.

  I waited until sunset and he had not come back.

  I went to the window and saw that a dying yellow still shone feebly in the west; and I watched it as I have watched the last flicker of a lantern when a friend makes his way home across the hill.

  Already the horrified clouds were leaping up in terror from the edge of the sea, coming with outflung arms that sprawled across the hollow sky.

  I went into the hall and found my hat; and I stood there in the twilight listening for the sound of a footstep. I could not believe that he would stay on the cliff after the darkness had come. I hesitated and listened while the shadows crept together in the corners of the hall.

  He had taunted me with my cowardice and I knew I must go and seek him. But before I opened the door I waited again and strained my ears so eagerly for the click and shriek of the gate that I created the sound in my own mind. And yet, as I heard it, I knew it for a phantasm.

  At last I went out suddenly and fiercely.

  A gust of wind shook me before I had reached the gate, and the air was full of intimidating sound. I heard the cry of the driven clouds, and the awful shout of the pursuers mingled with the drumming and thudding of the endless companies that hurried across the width of heaven.

  I dared not look up. I clutched my head with my arms, and ran stumbling to the foot of the path that climbs to the height of the undefended cliff.

  I tried to call him, but my voice was caught in the rout of air; my shout was torn from me and dispersed among the atoms of scuttling foam that huddled a moment among the rocks before they leaped to dissolution.

  I stooped to the lee of the singing furze. I dared go no further. Beyond was all riot, where the mad sport took strange shapes of soaring whirlpools and sudden draughts, and wonderful calms that suckingly enticed the unknowing to the cliff’s edge.

  I knew that it would be useless to seek him now. The scream of the gale had mounted unendurably; he could not be still alive up there in the midst of that reeling fury.

  I crept back to the road and the shelter of the cutting, and then I fled to my house.

  For a long hour I sat over the fire seeking some peace of mind. I blamed myself most bitterly that I had not hindered him. I might have given way; have pretended conviction, or, at least, some sympathy with his rash and foolish ignorance. But presently I found consolation in the thought that his fate had always been inevitable. What availed any effort of mine against the unquestionable forces that had pronounced his doom? I listened to the thudding procession that marched through the upper air, and to the shrieking of the spirits that come down to torture and destroy the things of earth; and I knew that no effort of mine could have saved him. . . .

  And when the outer door banged, and I heard his footstep in the hall, I believed that he was appearing to me at the moment of his death; but when he came into the room with shining eyes and bright cheeks, laughing and tossing the hair back from his forehead, I was curiously angry.

  “Where have
you been?” I asked. “I went out to the cliff to find you, and thought you were dead.”

  “You came to the cliffs?” he said.

  “To the foot of the cliff,” I confessed.

  “Ah! You must never go further than that in the black time,” he said.

  “Then you believe me now?” I asked.

  He smiled. “I believe that you would be in danger up there tonight,” he said, “because you believe in the powers of the air, and you are afraid.”

  He stood in the doorway, braced by his struggle with the wind; and his young eyes were glowing with the consciousness of discovery and new knowledge.

  Yet he cannot deny that I showed him the way.

  OLD FAGS

  Stacy Aumonier

  (1877–1928)

  It’s hard to say that someone who died aged 51, having produced six collections of short stories, six novels, and collections of character studies and essays died “too young” or “left too little behind,” but Stacy Aumonier’s death from tuberculosis in 1928 certainly robbed English letters of one of its best short story writers, and we can only wonder what he would have written had he been granted even ten more years of life.

  Born in 1877 to an artistic family, Aumonier began as a painter before marrying in 1907 and switching to stage work, performing his own sketches to considerable local acclaim. In 1915 Aumonier began publishing his short work, and it is in that role, as short story writer, that he gained the most recognition, being praised by Rebecca West, John Galsworthy, and James Hilton, among others. Until his death Aumonier continued to produce high-quality work, ultimately writing 87 short stories for magazines like Argosy, The Strand, and The Saturday Evening Post.

  “Old Fags” shows Aumonier’s typical compassion for the very poor, while at the same time twisting the knife, on all concerned, with an almost dispassionate air.

  THE BOYS CALLED him “Old Fags,” and the reason was not hard to seek. He occupied a room in a block of tenements off Lisson Grove, bearing the somewhat grandiloquent title of Bolingbroke Buildings and, conspicuous among the many doubtful callings that occupied his time, was one in which he issued forth with a deplorable old canvas sack, which, after a day’s peregrination along the gutters, he would manage to partly fill with cigar and cigarette ends. The exact means by which he managed to convert this patently gathered garbage into the wherewithal to support his disreputable body, nobody took the trouble to inquire; nor was there any further interest aroused by the disposal of the contents of the same sack when he returned with the gleanings of dustbins, distributed thoughtfully at intervals along certain thoroughfares by a maternal Borough Council.

  No one had ever penetrated to the inside of his room, but the general opinion in Bolingbroke Buildings was that he managed to live in a state of comfortable filth. And Mrs. Read, who lived in the room opposite Number 477 with her four children, was of the opinion that “Old Fags ’ad ’oarded up a bit.” He certainly was never behind with the payment of the weekly three and sixpence that entitled him to the sole enjoyment of Number 475; and when the door was opened, among the curious blend of odours that issued forth, that of onions and other luxuries of this sort was undeniable. Nevertheless, he was not a popular figure in the Buildings; many, in fact, looked upon him as a social blot on the Bolingbroke escutcheon. The inhabitants were mostly labourers and their wives, charwomen and lady helps, dressmakers’ assistants, and mechanics. There was a vague, tentative effort among a great body of them to be a little respectable, and among some, even to be clean. No such uncomfortable considerations hampered the movements of “Old Fags.” He was frankly and ostentatiously a social derelict. He had no pride and no shame. He shuffled out in the morning, his blotchy face covered with dirt and black hair, his threadbare green clothes tattered and in ranges, the toes all too visible through his forlorn-looking boots. He was rather a large man with a fat, flabby person, and a shiny face that was over-affable and bleary through a too constant attention to the gin bottle.

  He had a habit of ceaseless talk. He talked and chuckled to himself all the time; he talked to every one he met in an undercurrent of jeering affability. Sometimes he would retire to his room with a gin bottle for days together and then—the walls at Bolingbroke Buildings are not very thick—he would be heard to talk and chuckle and snore alternately, until the percolating atmosphere of stewed onions heralded the fact that “Old Fags” was shortly on the war-path again.

  He would meet Mrs. Read with her children on the stairs and would mutter: “Oh! Here we are again! All these dear little children. Been out for a walk, eh? Oh! These dear little children!” and he would pat one of them gaily on the head. And Mrs. Read would say: “’Ere, you, keep your filthy ’ands off my kids, you dirty swine, or I’ll catch you a swipe over the mouth!” And “Old Fags” would shuffle off muttering: “Oh, dear; oh, dear; these dear little children! Oh, dear; oh, dear.” And the boys would call after him and even throw orange peel and other things at him, but nothing seemed to disturb the serenity of “Old Fags.” Even when young Charlie Good threw a dead mouse, that hit him on the chin, he only said: “Oh, these Boys! These BOYS!”

  Quarrels, noise and bad odours were the prevailing characteristics of Bolingbroke Buildings, and “Old Fags,” though contributing in some degree to the latter quality, rode serenely through the other two in spite of multiform aggression. The penetrating intensity of his onion stew had driven two lodgers already from Number 476, and was again a source of aggravation to the present holders, old Mrs. Birdle and her daughter, Minnie.

  Minnie Birdle was what was known as a “tweeny” at a house in Hyde Park Square, but she lived at home. Her mistress—to whom she had never spoken, being engaged by the Housekeeper—was Mrs. Bastien-Melland, a lady who owned a valuable collection of little dogs. These little dogs somehow gave Minnie an unfathomable sense of respectability. She loved to talk about them. She told Mrs. Read that her mistress paid “’undreds and ’undreds of pahnds for each of them.” They were taken out every day by a groom on two leads of five—ten highly groomed, bustling, yapping, snapping, vicious little luxuries. Some had won prizes at Dog Shows, and two men were engaged for the sole purpose of ministering to their creative comforts.

  The consciousness of working in a house which furnished such an exhibition of festive cultivation brought into sharp relief the degrading social condition of her next-room neighbour. Minnie hated “Old Fags” with a bitter hatred. She even wrote to a firm of lawyers, who represented some remote landlord, and complained of the dirty habits of the old drunken wretch next door. But she never received any answer to her complaint. It was known that “Old Fags” had lived there for seven years and paid his rent regularly. Moreover, on one critical occasion, Mrs. Read, who had periods of rheumatic gout and could not work, had got into hopeless financial straits, having reached the very limit of her borrowing capacity, and being three weeks in arrears with her rent, “Old Fags” had come over and had insisted on lending her fifteen shillings! Mrs. Read eventually paid it back, and the knowledge of the transaction further accentuated her animosity toward him.

  One day “Old Fags” was returning from his dubious round and was passing through Hyde Park Square with his canvas bag slung over his back, when he ran into the cortège of little dogs under the control of Meads, the groom.

  “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” muttered “Old Fags” to himself. “What dear little dogs! H’m! What dear little dogs!”

  A minute later Minnie Birdle ran up the area steps and gave Meads a bright smile. “Good-night, Mr. Meads,” she said.

  Mr. Meads looked at her and said: “Ullo! You off?”

  “Yes!” she answered.

  “Oh, well,” he said, “good-night! Be good!” They both sniggered, and Minnie hurried down the street. Before she reached Lisson Grove “Old Fags” had caught her up.

  “I say,” he said, getting into her stride, “what dear little dogs those are! Oh, dear! What dear little dogs!”

  Minnie turned, and
when she saw him her face flushed, and she said: “Oh, you go to Hell!” with which unladylike expression she darted across the road and was lost to sight.

  “Oh, these women!” said “Old Fags” to himself, “these WOMEN!”

  It often happened, thereafter, that “Old Fags’” business carried him in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park Square, and he ran into the little dogs. One day he even ventured to address Meads and to congratulate him on the beauty of his canine protégées, an attention that elicited a very unsympathetic response; a response, in fact, that amounted to being told to “clear off.”

  The incident of “Old Fags” running into this society was entirely accidental. It was due, in part, to the fact that the way lay through there to a tract of land in Paddington that “Old Fags” seemed to find peculiarly attractive. It was a neglected strip of ground by the railway, that butted one end into a canal. It would have made quite a good siding, but that it seemed somehow to have been overlooked by the Railway Company, and to have become a dumping ground for tins and old refuse from the houses in the neighbourhood of Harrow Road. “Old Fags” would spend hours there alone with his canvas bag.

  When the winter came on there was a great wave of what the papers would call economic unrest. There were strikes in three great industries, a political upheaval, and a severe tightening of the Money Market. All of these misfortunes reacted on Bolingbroke Buildings. The dwellers became even more impecunious, and consequently more quarrelsome, more noisy and more malodorous. Rents were all in arrears, ejections were the order of the day, and borrowing became a tradition rather than an actuality. Want and hunger brooded over the dejected Buildings. But still “Old Fags” came and went, carrying his shameless gin and permeating the passages with his onion stews.

  Old Mrs. Birdle became bedridden and the support of Room Number 476 fell on the shoulders of Minnie. The wages of a “tweeny” are not excessive, and the way in which she managed to support herself and her invalid mother must have excited the wonder of the other dwellers in the building, if they had not had more pressing affairs of their own to wonder about. Minnie was a short, sallow little thing with a rather full figure, and heavy grey eyes that somehow conveyed a sense of sleeping passion. She had a certain instinct for dress, a knack of putting some trinket in the right place, and of always being neat. Mrs. Bastien-Melland had one day asked who she was. On being informed, her curiosity did not prompt her to push the matter further, and she did not speak to her; but the incident gave Minnie a better standing in the domestic household at Hyde Park Square. It was probably this attention that caused Meads, the head dog groom, to cast an eye in her direction. It is certain that he did so, and, moreover, on a certain Thursday evening had taken her to a Cinema performance in the Edgware Road. Such attention naturally gave rise to discussion; and, alas, to jealousy; for there was an under house maid, and even a Lady’s maid, who were not impervious to the attentions of the good-looking groom.