On the particular night in question, in spite of the candles and the mice and the moon, he badly wanted company. In a moment of pining yet listless jocosity, then, he had merely taken his Aunt Charlotte’s advice. True, the sumptuous, crimson, pleated silk bell-pull, dangling like a serpent with a huge tassel for skull over his Uncle Timothy’s pillow, was a more formidable instrument than the yard or two of frayed green cord in the attic. Yet they shared the same purpose. Many a time must his Uncle Timothy have stretched up a large loose hand in that direction when in need of Soames’s nocturnal ministrations. And now, alas, both master and man were long since gone the way of all flesh. You couldn’t, it appeared, pull bells in your coffin.
But Jimmie was not as yet in his coffin, and as soon as his fingers slipped down from the smooth pull, the problem, in the abstract, as it were, began to fascinate him. With cold froggy hands crossed over his beautiful pucepatterned pyjamas, he lay staring at the crimson tassel till he had actually seen the hidden fangs flickeringly jet out at him.
The effort, then, must have needed some little courage. It might almost have needed a tinge of inspiration. It was in no sense intended as a challenge. He would, in fact, rather remain alone than chance summoning – well, any (once animate) relic of the distant past. But obviously the most practical way of proving – if only to yourself – that you can be content with your own reconnaissances in the very dead of night, was to demonstrate to that self that, even if you should ask for it, assistance would not be forthcoming.
He had been as fantastic as that. At the prolonged, pulsating, faint, distant tintinnabulation he had fallen back on to his pillow with an absurd little quicket of laughter, like that of a naughty boy up to mischief. But instant sobriety followed. Poor sleepers should endeavour to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative. And then, as he lay striving with extraordinary fervour not to listen, but to concentrate his mind on the wardrobe, and to keep his eyes from the door, that door must gently have opened.
It must have opened, and as noiselessly closed again. For a more or less decent-looking young man, seemingly not a day older than himself was now apparent in the room. It might almost be said that he had insinuated himself into the room. But well-trained domestics are accustomed to move their limbs and bodies with a becoming unobtrusiveness. There was also that familiar slight inclination of the apologetic in this young man’s pose, as he stood there solitary in his black, in that terrific blaze of candle-light. And for a sheer solid minute the occupant of the Arabian bed had really stopped thinking.
When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum. And Jimmie’s first rapid and instinctive ‘Who the devil … ?’ had remained inaudible.
In the course of the next few days Jimmie was to become familiar (at least in memory) with the looks of this new young butler or valet. But first impressions are usually the vividest. The dark blue-grey eyes, the high nose, the scarcely perceptible smile, the slight stoop of the shoulders – there was no doubt of it. There was just a flavour, a flicker, there, of resemblance to himself. Not that he himself could ever have cut as respectful and respectable a figure as that. And the smile! – the fellow seemed to be ruminating over a thousand dubious, long-interred secrets, secrets such as one may be a little cautious of digging up even to share with one’s self.
His face turned sidelong on his pillow, and through air as visibly transparent as a sheet of glass, Jimmie had steadily regarded this strange bellanswerer; and the bell-answerer had never so much as stirred his frigid glittering eyes in response. The silence that hung between them produced eventually a peculiar effect on Jimmie. Menials as a general rule should be less emphatic personally. Their unobtrusiveness should surely not emphasize their immanence. It had been Jimmie who was the first to withdraw his eyes, only once more to find them settling as if spellbound on those of his visitor.
Yet, after all, there was nothing to take offence at in the young man’s countenance or attitude. He did not seem even to be thinking-back at the bell-puller; but merely to be awaiting instructions. Yet Jimmie’s heart at once rapidly began to beat again beneath his icy hands. And at last he made a perfectly idiotic response.
Wagging his head on his pillow, he turned abruptly away. ‘It was only to tell you that I shall need nothing more to-night,’ he had said.
Good heavens. The fatuity of it! He wanted, thirsted for, scores upon scores of things. Aladdin’s was the cupidity of a simpleton by comparison. Time, and the past, for instance, and the ability to breathe again as easily as if it were natural – as natural as the processes of digestion. Why, if you were intent only on a little innocent companionship, one or two of those nymphs up there would be far more amusing company than Mrs Thripps. If, that is, apart from yearning to their harps and viols, they could have been persuaded to scrub and sweep. Jimmie wanted no other kind of help. There is a beauty that is but skin-deep.
Altogether it had been a far from satisfactory experience. Jimmie was nettled. His mincing tones echoed on in his mind. They must have suggested that he was unaccustomed to menservants and bell-pulls and opulent surroundings. And the fellow had instantly taken him at his word. A solemn little rather agreeable and unservile inclination of the not unfriendly head – and he was gone.
And there was Jimmie, absolutely exhausted, coughing his lungs out, and entirely incapable of concluding whether the new butler was a creature of actuality or of dream. Well, well, well: that was nothing new. That’s just how things do take one in one’s weak moments, in the dead of night. Nevertheless, the experience had apparently proved sedative. He had slept like an infant.
The morning found him vivacious with curiosity. He had paused to make only an exceedingly negligent toilet before beginning his usual wanderings about the house. Calm cold daylight reflection may dismiss almost any nocturnal experience as a dream, if, at any rate, one’s temperature in the night hours is habitually above the norm. But Jimmie could not, or would not, absolutely make up his mind. So clear a picture had his visitant imprinted on his memory that he even found himself (just like a specialist sounding a patient in search of the secret ravages of phthisis) – he had even found himself stealthily tapping over the basement walls – as if in search of a concealed pantry! A foolish proceeding if one has not the least desire in the world to attract the attention of one’s neighbours.
Having at length satisfied himself in a rather confused fashion that whatever understudy of Soames might share the house with him in the small hours, he must be a butler of the migratory order, Jimmie then began experimenting with the bells. Mounted on a kitchen chair, cornice brush in hand, he had been surprised by Mrs Thripps, in her quiet boots, as he stood gently knocking one by one the full eighteen of the long, greened, crooked jingle row which hung open-mouthed above the immense dresser.
She had caught him in the act, and Jimmie had once more exercised his customary glib presence of mind.
‘They ought to be hung in a scale, you know. Oughtn’t they, Mrs Thripps? Then we could have “Home, sweet Home!” and a hunting up and a hunting down, grandsires and treble bobs, and a grand maximus, even on week days. And if we were in danger of any kind of fire – which you will never be, we could ring them backwards. Couldn’t we, Mrs Thripps? Not that there’s much quality in them – no medieval monkish tone or timbre in them. They’re a bit mouldy, too, and one can’t tell t’other from which. Not like St Faiths’s! One would recognize that old clanker in one’s shroud, wouldn’t one, Mrs Thripps? Has it ever occurred to you that the first campanologist’s real intention was not so much to call the congregation, as to summon – well – what the congregation’s after?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Mrs Thripps had agreed, her watery grey eyes fixed largely on the elevated young man. ‘But it don’t matter which of them you ring; I’ll answer hany – at least while I’m in the house. I don’t thin
k, sir, you rest your mind enough. My own boy, now; he’s in the Navy …’
But with one graceful flourish Jimmie had run his long-handled brush clean east to west along the clanging row. ‘You mustn’t,’ he shouted, ‘you shouldn’t. Once aboard the lugger, they are free! It’s you mothers …’ He gently shook his peculiar wand at the flat-looking little old woman. ‘No, Mrs Thripps; what I’m after is he who is here, here! couchant, perdu, laired, in these same subterranean vaults when you and I are snug in our nightcaps. A most nice-spoken young man! Not in the Navy, Mrs Thripps!’
And before the old lady had had time to seize any one of these seductive threads of conversation, Jimmie had flashed his usual brilliant smile or grimace at her, and soon afterwards sallied out of the house to purchase a further gross or two of candles.
Gently and furtively pushing across the counter half a sovereign – not as a douceur, but merely as from friend to friend – he had similarly smiled back at the secretive-looking old assistant in the staid West End family-grocer’s.
‘No, I didn’t suppose you could remember me. One alters. One ages. One deals elsewhere. But anyhow, a Happy New Year to you – if the next ever comes, you know.’
‘You see, sir,’ the straight-aproned old man had retorted with equal confidentiality, ‘it is not so much the alterations. They are what you might call un-cir-cum-ventible, sir. It’s the stream, sir. Behind the counter here, we are like rocks in it. But even if I can’t for the moment put a thought to your face – though it’s already stirring in me in a manner of speaking, I shall in the future, sir. You may rely upon that. And the same, sir, to you; and many of them, I’m sure.’
Somehow or other Jimmie’s vanity had been mollified by this pleasing little ceremoniousness; and that even before he had smiled yet once again at the saffron young lady in the Pay Box.
‘The truth is, my dear,’ he had assured himself, as he once more ascended into the dingy porch, ‘the truth is when once you begin to tamper, you won’t know where you are. You won’t, really.’
And that night he had lain soberly on, in a peculiar state of physical quiescence and self-satisfaction, his dark bright eyes wandering from nymph to nymph, his hands folded over his breast under the bedclothes, his heart persisting in its usual habits. Nevertheless, the fountain of his thoughts had continued softly to plash on its worn basin. With ears a-cock, he had frankly enjoyed inhaling the parched, spent, brilliant air.
And when his fingers had at last manifested the faintest possible itch to experiment once more with the bell-pull, he had slipped out of bed, and hastily searching through a little privy case of his uncle’s bedside books, had presently slipped back again, armed with a fat little copy of The Mysteries of Paris, in its original French.
The next day a horrible lassitude descended upon him. For the better part of an hour he had stood staring out of the drawing-room window into the London street. At last, with a yawn that was almost a groan, and with an absurdly disproportionate effort, he turned himself about. Heavily hung the gilded chandeliers in the long vista of the room; heavily gloomed the gilded furniture. Scarcely distinguishable in the obscurity of the further wall stood watching him from a mirror what might have appeared to be the shadowy reflection of himself. With a still, yet extreme aversion he kept his eyes fixed on this distant nonentity, hardly realizing his own fantastic resolve that if he did catch the least, faint independent movement there, he would give Soames Junior a caustic piece of his mind …
He must have been abominably fast asleep for hours when, a night or two afterwards, he had suddenly awakened, sweat streaming along his body, his mouth stretched to a long narrow O, and his right hand clutching the bell-rope, as might a drowning man at a straw.
The room was adrowse with light. All was still. The flitting horrors between dream and wake in his mind were already thinning into air. Through their transparency he looked out once more on the substantial, the familiar. His breath came heavily, like puffs of wind over a stormy sea, and yet a profound peace and tranquillity was swathing him in. The relaxed mouth was now faintly smiling. Not a sound, not the feeblest, distant unintended tinkling was trembling up from the abyss. And for a moment or two the young man refrained even from turning his head at the soundless opening and closing of the door.
He lay fully conscious that he was not alone; that quiet eyes had him steadily in regard. But, like rats, his wits were beginning to busy themselves again. Sheer relief from the terrors of sleep, shame of his extremity and weakness, a festering sense of humiliation – yes, he must save his face at all costs. He must put this preposterous spying valet in his place. Oddly enough, too, out of the deeps a peculiar little vision of recollection had inexplicably obtruded itself into consciousness. It would be a witticism of the first water.
‘They are dreadfully out of season, you know,’ he began murmuring affectedly into the hush, ‘dreadfully. But what I’m really pining for is a bunch of primroses … A primrose by the river’s brim … must be a little conservative.’ His voice was once more trailing off into a maudlin drowsiness. With an effort he roused himself, and now with an extremely sharp twist of his head, he turned to confront his visitor.
But the room was already vacant, the door ajar, and Jimmie’s lids were on the point of closing again, sliding down over his tired eyes like leaden shutters which no power on earth could hinder or restrain, when at the faintest far whisper of sound they swept back suddenly – and almost incredibly wide – to drink in all they could of the spectacle of a small odd-looking child who at that moment had embodied herself in the doorway.
She seemed to have not the least intention of returning the compliment. Her whole gaze, from out of her fair flaxen-pigtailed face, was fixed on the coarse blue-banded kitchen bowl which she was carrying with extreme care and caution in her two narrow hands. The idiots down below had evidently filled it too full of water, for the pale wide-petalled flowers and thick crinkled leaves it contained were floating buoyantly nid-nod to and fro as she moved – pushing on each slippered foot in turn in front of the other, her whole mind concentrated on her task.
A plain child, but extraordinarily fair, as fair as the primroses themselves in the congregation of candle-light that motionlessly flooded the room – a narrow-chested long-chinned little creature who had evidently outgrown her strength. Jimmie was well accustomed to take things as they come; and his brief sojourn in his uncle’s house in his present state of health had already enlarged the confines of the term ‘thing’. Anyhow, she was a relief from the valet.
He found himself, then, watching this new visitor without the least trace of astonishment or even of surprise. And as his dark eyes coursed over the child, he simply couldn’t decide whether she most closely ‘took after’ Soames Junior or Mrs Thripps. All he could positively assure himself of was just the look, ‘the family likeness’. And that in itself was a queerish coincidence, since whatever your views might be regarding Soames Junior, Mrs Thripps was real enough – as real, at any rate, as her scrubbing-brush and her wholesome evil-smelling soap.
As a matter of fact, Jimmie was taking a very tight hold of himself. His mind might fancifully be compared to a quiet green swarming valley between steep rock-bound hills in which a violent battle was proceeding – standards and horsemen and smoke and terror and violence – but no sound.
Deep down somewhere he really wanted to be ‘nice’ to the child. She meant no ill; she was a demure far-away harmless-looking creature. Ages ago … On the other hand he wished to heaven they would leave him alone. They were pestering him. He knew perfectly well how far he was gone, and bitterly resented this renewed interference. And if there was one thing he detested, it was being made to look silly – ‘I hope you are trying to be a good little boy? … You have not been talking to the servants?’ That kind of thing.
It was, therefore, with mixed feelings and with a tinge of shame-facedness that he heard his own sneering, toneless voice insinuate itself into the silence; ‘And what, missikins, c
an I do for you? … What, you will understand; not How?’ The sneer had degenerated into a snarl. The child at this had not perceptibly faltered. Her face had seemed to lengthen a little, but that might have been due solely to her efforts to deliver her bowl without spilling its contents. Indeed she actually succeeded in so doing, almost before Jimmie had time to withdraw abruptly from the little gilt-railed table on which she deposited the clumsy pot. Frock, pigtail, red hands – she seemed to be as ‘real’ a fellow creature as you might wish to see. But Jimmie stared quizzically on. Unfortunately primroses have no scent, so that he could not call on his nose to bear witness to his eyes. And the congested conflict in the green valley was still proceeding.
The child had paused. Her hands hung down now as if they were accustomed to service; and her pale blue eyes were fixed on his face in that exasperating manner which suggests that the owner of them is otherwise engaged. Not that she was looking through him. Even the sharpest of his ‘female friends’ had never been able to boast of that little accomplishment. She was looking into him; and as if he occupied time rather than space. Or was she, sneered that weary inward voice again, was she merely waiting for a tip?
‘Look here,’ said Jimmie, dexterously raising himself to his elbow on the immense lace-fringed pillow, ‘it’s all very well; you have managed things quite admirably, considering your age and the season, and so on. But I didn’t ask for primroses, I asked for violets. That’s a very old trick – very old trick.’
For one further instant, dark and fair, crafty and simpleton face communed, each with each. But the smile on the one had fainted into a profound childlike contemplation. And then, so swift and imperceptible had been his visitant’s envanishment out of the room, that the very space she had occupied seemed to remain for a while outlined in the air – a nebulous shell of vacancy. She must, apparently, have glided backwards through the doorway, for Jimmie had assuredly not been conscious of the remotest glimpse of her pigtail from behind.
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 21