‘Well, how goes it?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, domestically and otherwise.’
‘Oh,’ said Marcus, ‘nothing much. My cook fell into the river, one night, looking for her cat. She dotes on it. The cat I hardly need say, was quite safe in some outhouse, and would never have dreamed of plunging into the river, especially in this cold weather. Happily, Mrs. Landslide’s husband was at hand, and he hauled her out, wet through, but none the worse for her ducking. There was something else,’ he added, unwillingly, ‘but it happened only a fortnight ago, and I don’t much want to talk about it.’
‘Tell me, all the same.’
‘Well—but not well—the gardener’s young daughter, Christine, was riding her bicycle on the main road, coming away from school, and a lorry hit her, and well—she died. Not very nice, was it?’ said Marcus, with a tremor in his voice. ‘They haven’t got over it, of course, and I don’t suppose they ever will. They don’t blame me, I’m glad to say; it was no fault of mine, though I had given the bicycle to Christine as a birthday present.’
His friend considered this.
‘Have you still got that scarab?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if I were you I should get rid of it.’
‘But how? It wouldn’t be enough to sell it, or give it to somebody I disliked. I don’t know much about black magic, but I am sure it involves some kind of ritual.’
‘You’re right,’ said his friend, ‘it does, but there are ways and means.’
‘Such as?’
‘Some method that combines secrecy with publicity. For instance, if you were in a railway carriage—only it must be crowded—’
‘Yes?’
‘And you threw the scarab out of the window without anyone seeing—without anyone seeing—’he repeated—‘then you might break its spell. I know it sounds quite silly and there are other ways. You didn’t steal it, did you?’
‘No, I bought it over the counter, as I told you,’ said Marcus huffily.
‘What a pity. But if you could make someone else steal it—stealing is very important in these matters—that might do as well. Where do you keep it?’
‘Locked up in a drawer. To tell you the truth, I almost never look at it. I’d rather not.’
‘Well, take it out of the drawer, and put it in some prominent place—on the chimney-piece, perhaps—and see what happens.’
Marcus pondered the alternatives. He was even more loath to touch the object than he was to look at it; and what made matters worse, he despised himself for entertaining such ridiculous fancies. However, a seed sown in the subconscious mind is hard to eradicate. Events seemed to have confirmed his friend’s warnings. He unlocked the drawer and, hunching his shoulders with distaste, took the ‘creature’ out. Its embryo whiskers, its wings, if wings they were, folded sleekly and closely on its back, disgusted him; its sinister expression alarmed him; and he went so far as to get a pair of tongs to convey it to the chimney-piece in his study.
No one will want to steal it, he told himself; I only wish they would.
Mrs. Crumble, his daily help, had been several months in his employ. She cleaned and dusted and, if, as rarely happened, she broke something, she nearly always told him—rather as if it were his fault. ‘You leave so many things lying about,’ she complained, ‘it’s a wonder they don’t all get broken.’
‘Never mind about breaking them,’ he said, ‘so long as you keep the pieces. Then we can patch them together, if they’re worth it.’
This she always did, but one morning he noticed a gap on the chimney-piece (for his eyes were trained towards the scarab) and a few minutes later Mrs. Crumble came in with a long face.
‘I’m afraid I’ve broken that insect, sir,’ she said. ‘I was only flicking it with the duster, and it fell off the ledge and broke.’
‘Never mind,’ said Marcus, hardly concealing his relief, and added automatically, ‘Did you keep the pieces?’
‘No, sir, I didn’t. It was that broken that no one could have mended it, so I threw the pieces out. I hope it wasn’t valuable?’
‘Not at all,’ said Marcus.
He was just rearranging the objects on the chimney-piece when Henry, his factotum, came in.
‘I don’t want to tell any tales, sir,’ he said, ‘but I happened to see Mrs. Crumble slip that big beetle into her bag. I only say so because I don’t want you to suspect that I or my wife took it. We would never do such a thing, but I thought it was only fair to us to let you know.’
‘Quite right, Henry,’ said Marcus.
Three days later Mrs. Crumble’s daughter, a child of twelve, came in and said importantly, ‘Mum isn’t coming today. She’s been took bad. The doctor thinks it’s appendicitis.’
It turned out to be something worse than that, and within a few days Mrs. Crumble was dead.
Marcus was very much upset, and his conscience smote him, for hadn’t he deliberately exposed the scarab as a bait for somebody’s cupidity? Yet he couldn’t help being relieved that the ‘insect’, the ‘beetle’, the ‘creature’, had been safely disposed of, and out of the house. Imagine, therefore, his consternation when, a few days after the funeral, the doorbell rang, with a particularly piercing buzz, and when he opened the door, there was Mrs. Crumble’s daughter standing on the threshold. She was carrying, linked to her finger, a small parcel wrapped in brown paper.
‘Oh, Mr. Foster,’ she said, and stopped. Her eyes became moist, and tears fell from them. ‘Mum told me, when she knew she had to go, to give you this. It’s that beetle creature you had on your mantlepiece, she said. She said she took a fancy to it, and told you that she had broken it, but it wasn’t true, and she did not want to die with a lie on her lips. Almost the last thing she did, before she was taken from us, was to wrap it up. So here it is,’ said the girl, holding out the parcel for Marcus to take.
For once Marcus was able to make up his mind quickly. Never, never would he accept, above all from a dead woman’s hand, a gift which had given his subconscious mind, however misguided it might be, so much anxiety.
‘It was too kind of her to have thought of it,’ he said, handing the parcel back, ‘and too kind of you to have brought it to me. But please, please, keep it. It may be worth something, my dear child, I don’t know; but if it is, or if it isn’t, I shall be more than thankful for you to have it, in memory of your dear mother’s kindness to me.’
The daughter sniffed a little, and reached for the parcel. ‘It’s quite pretty,’ she said, doubtfully, ‘but since you would like us to keep it—’
‘I should like you to keep it,’ said Marcus firmly, ‘and I hope it will bring you good luck.’
Marcus again asked his superstitious friend to stay with him for a weekend. To Marcus’s surprise, for his friend was punctilious in such matters, many days passed before he received an answer. The friend excused himself; he was in Rome, but would be back in a few days. ‘I met several friends of yours,’ he said, ‘and we talked about you.’ He didn’t say he hoped that Marcus would renew the invitation, as he well might have, for they were old friends, but Marcus did at once renew it. At one time he had spent several winters in Rome, and apart from wanting to see his friend, he wanted to gossip about his Roman friends. So he suggested another weekend, in fact two other weekends.
‘You needn’t worry about the scarab,’ he added, ‘I have disposed of it, I’ll tell you how, and the house is now exorcised and purified.’
His friend replied that he was delighted to hear this, but he could only stay over one night, as he had to be back in London on Sunday evening.
Marcus was slightly hurt by this, but reminded himself of the danger of getting touchy as one grew older.
They talked of many things, of their Roman acquaintances, who seemed to have grown more vivid to Marcus with the passing years; then, inevitably, of the ‘occurrences’ at Paradise Paddock.
‘What have you done with that scarab?’
his friend asked.
‘Oh,’ said Marcus negligently, ‘my daily help stole it.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Oh, then she died. It was very, very sad. But she needn’t have stolen it, need she? I didn’t ask her to.’ He still felt guilty.
‘I think you have been lucky,’ said his friend, looking round him and sniffing the air. ‘I think—I think so, Marcus.’
The open door of the study gaped, at an acute angle, on the open door of the dining-room.
‘It’s strange how right you have been,’ said Marcus. ‘I must confess, I didn’t really believe you about the scarab, but then I was brought up in a sceptical atmosphere. My father—’he paused—‘well, he was a rationalist. You half convinced me—but only half. Calamities happen in every house—this isn’t the only one. You know that local people call it The House of Death?’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Well, they do and the reason may be that for two hundred years it has been called Paradise Paddock—the association between Death and Paradise is rather encouraging and beautiful, I think. Out of one, into the other.’
His friend fixed his eye on the open doorway.
‘Should we go for a little walk, do you think? I sleep badly, as you know, and they say, “After dinner, walk a mile”.’
‘A mile is rather a long way,’ said Marcus, ‘but let us take a turn, by all means. Only it will have to be mostly on the pavement—the road, with all this traffic, is really dangerous.’
‘I would like a breath of fresh air,’ his friend said.
They started off, following the pavement. Under the street lamps the traffic roared beside them.
‘Shall we go back now?’ Marcus asked.
His friend turned his head in the direction in which Paradise Paddock presumably lay.
A little onwards lend thy guiding hand
To these dark steps—a little further on,
he quoted, obviously unwilling to return.
They proceeded, and it was then that Marcus’s friend, catching his foot on the kerb, fell headlong. To Marcus’s consternation he didn’t pick himself up, but lay on his back, one leg tucked under him, the other stretched out at an unnatural angle.
Marcus tried to help him to his feet, but he resisted.
Writhing a little, he turned his screwed face towards the street-lamp overhead, which invested it with a yellowish pallor and gasped, between broken breaths, ‘Thank you for only breaking my leg—you might have killed me. Did no one ever tell you you had the Evil Eye?’
ROMAN CHARITY
In some day and age which I won’t try to identify—it might be now—Rudolph Campion was sent to prison. Campion wasn’t his real name; it was a name he had assumed partly because some of his forebears were English, which was then, and still sometimes is, a recommendation, something to put on a passport, or what served him as a passport, for he had more than one. Rudolph Campion, Englishman. He himself could hardly remember what his real name was. It certainly wasn’t English; but then, as now, it was a disadvantage to be stateless, especially for someone who travelled about the world as much as Rudolph Campion did.
Living such a nomadic life, it was surprising that Rudolph was married, and not so much that he was married, as that he still had married ties. His wife had left him, bored with his itinerant life, in one of the countries that he from time to time frequented; she wanted to settle down, she said, and not always be a camp-follower, often living under canvas, whatever the weather. So at some point in his wanderings, not too far from a capital city where such civilization as recent wars had left, still remained, she told him she had had enough, and would seek her fortune in this city; she did not say how.
In her late thirties, she was almost as good-looking as he was; in fact if it hadn’t been for his good looks—bearded, moustachioed, with thinning hair, unkempt and shaggy—a man of today he might have been—she wouldn’t have stuck to him as long as she did. But there were other men with equal physical attractions, who liked a settled life, and a home, and she didn’t despair of finding one.
It took her some time to come to this decision, for had they not been married twenty years? and she, like many women in this and other ways more far-sighted than men, valued a stable personal relationship. This she had enjoyed with Rudolph (Rudy to her, though never rude). He might have strayed; he probably had; but she was not upset by the suspicion of his possible infidelities, when he was out of sight (as he so often was) but not out of mind. He always came back to her, and was as loving as he was loved; and though she didn’t really know, and didn’t much want to know, what his actual business was, although she did know that an element of danger attended it, when they pitched their moving tent a day’s march nearer a destination in this country or in that, his friends, for he had friends or accomplices in many countries, knew that she came first with him. The news of their relationship seemed to precede them: she never had to explain who she was; she was accepted, in whatever society, as belonging to him and he to her; a good-looking and above all, an inseparable couple. The personal vanity, the sense of being esteemed for their own sake, which many people and most women have, was amply satisfied for Trudi by her Rudy—a joke which his friends, who were seldom hers, often made. Never could she remember a time when, however little she had to do with the business in hand, Rudy had pressed her to make herself agreeable to some hard-faced little man, on whose favour, or favours, success depended. She might have yielded, for Rudy left her much alone, and as the Italian proverb says, ‘One gets tired of home-made bread.’
No, in their twenty years together he had never, so to speak, pushed her into a corner, never made her feel that she was just an adjunct, a useful business-asset, but otherwise rather a drag. Perhaps he hardly could have, for she couldn’t enter a room without making her beauty felt.
All this she realized; but as the rain dripped through the canvas of the tent—they didn’t always live in a tent, but between times they had to when they were on the run—she said to her daughter who shared two-thirds of the tent with her, the other third being curtained off for sleeping-quarters, and other masculine requirements. Rudy didn’t seem to mind the dripping rain.
‘Angela, I think I shall have to make a change. I’m very proud of your father, but this sort of life doesn’t suit me. It may be all right for a man, but I’m getting too old for it. And now that you’re engaged to be married—’
‘I was married yesterday, Mother, but you were so busy with one thing and another, I didn’t like to tell you.’
The mother and daughter turned to each other on their dampening beds.
‘You didn’t like to tell me?’
‘No, I thought it was kinder not to.’
‘Speak lower, he might hear you,’ Trudi began to whisper.
‘Oh no, he sleeps like a log. But I know I’m a responsibility to you in the odd life he makes you lead, so when Jacko asked me to marry him—’
‘Jacko?’
‘Yes, you’ve seen him several times. Well, I said yes.’
‘Jacko?’
‘Yes, he’s got a job as a courier, and we like each other. I mightn’t have done it, but I knew it was a strain for you, living with Father, in these conditions, and with me in tow. I didn’t know that you were going to take the step of leaving him—but I would have married Jacko even if I had known you had—.’
‘Jacko?’
‘Yes, he’s a nice fellow, a reliable sort.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Oh yes, quite sure. He’s not a substitute for Father, whom I’ve always loved, just as you have, and shall always love. But I can’t do anything for him, any more than you can. He’s a lone wolf, and picks up his living wherever he can find it. I don’t think we need feel sorry for him—he’ll always fall on his feet. But I shall always keep in touch with him, as no doubt you will, and if ever he gets into a jam—’
‘I shall hear what he says, I shall hear what he says,’ said her mother.
‘At any rate he will have you to fall back on.’
‘Yes, always.’
‘Jacko or no Jacko?’
‘Yes, Father will always mean more to me than anyone. And to you, Mother?’
‘I’m not quite so sure. Twenty years is a long time. I’ll tell him tomorrow.’
They listened to the dropping of the rain, a soothing sound, before they too dropped off.
So next day Rudy learned that in a very short time he was to be wife-less and daughter-less.
In those days, as in these, political prisoners were not always well-treated and if they fell into the wrong hands—and there were a good many wrong hands to fall into, no matter whom they might be working for—their lot was not likely to be a happy one. It was a risk of Rudy’s trade—his international trade—and he was prepared to accept it, just as any man who engages in one of the many sports and occupations which involve risk to life and limb, is prepared to accept it. Indeed, it was no doubt the risk attached to his present job, whatever it was, that made him choose it; he wouldn’t have been happy in a humdrum occupation where no danger lurked. No thrill, no wondering if he would just turn the corner, no spice of life.
And so far it had worked quite well. There had been anxious moments when he was glad to have his car outside; moments when his command of languages (he had been brought up to know three) suddenly failed him; moments when some suspicious looking stranger followed him to the door, and asked for his address. He would give an address, an imaginary address, and within an hour or two he and Trudi would be far away, pitching their tent; and Angela would be with them. The tent was in the boot of the car, and they had brought pitching it to a fine art; in half an hour or so it would be ready and soon afterwards a delicious meal would be ready, too; for Rudy was a big man and a hungry and a thirsty man; leading the life he did, with much strain on his nervous and physical constitution, he couldn’t go without sustenance for long. Both his wife and his daughter enjoyed seeing him tuck into his food and swallowing down a bottle of wine. There was another bottle for them, too, if his mission had been successful. What matter if they were on the run? Being on the run brings appetite and thirst.
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 86