OLD MAN'S BEARD

by H. R. Wakefield

  ‘But what happened to Lord Layton if he was walking beside you?’

  ‘Now, don’t you worry about that, because I’m not going to tell you. And I suppose you’ll have dreams and I’ll get the blame. But you pester so and you’re always reading those horrid ghost books.’

  ‘But tell me, Nurse, why——’

  ‘I shan’t tell you another word. You get on with that drawing of the house while I wake Miss Dolly and take her some Bengers. And don’t kick your toes together. Those shoes have got to last.’

  The Dune

  MR PARSLEY WAS in no sense of the word a gentleman. Certainly not by birth, for his father had been a Turf Accountant in a small cop-conscious way of business, though his mother had been superior intellectually, though inferior morally, to her station in life. She had possessed looks, a temperament, too much ‘sauce’ — in the opinion of her neighbours — a red head and a tendency to sour and pregnant utterance. Born under a different dispensation, she might have played a dominating part in affairs, delicately adjusted her existence to the demands of a posse of exigent lovers — been all women to all men who attracted her socially or emotionally. But all she actually did was to hand down to her only son a hard head, a purely pragmatic philosophy and an indomitable self-reliance. She lived and died fighting.

  Mr Parsley was no gentleman by education, for he had sneered his precocious way through a Board School. Sartorially, he was beneath contempt, for he could often be seen strolling on Wimbledon Common arrayed in a bowler hat, a frock coat and brown boots. He wasn’t even a Nature’s Gentleman, for he drove notoriously hard bargains, spoke disrespectfully of religious bodies, voted Labour, and had attached to his golf-bag a tripodic excrescence which enabled that bag to stand up by itself, so enabling him to dispense with a caddy. He voted Labour for the characteristically realistic reason that he considered the workers should be protected in their unequal combat with employers like himself, an opinion those employees enthusiastically endorsed.

  He developed a sound flair for money-making, and after several tentative and insufficiently remunerative essays, he was persuaded by a brilliant young chemist to manufacture and market a most sweet-smelling and emollient substance for removing Superfluous Hair. This far-sighted youth had been one of the first to realise that there was such a thing as Superfluous Hair; that hair could be superfluous; that such hair obstinately refused to regard itself as superfluous (if there — why not everywhere?), and that it had to be ruthlessly extirpated, in the opinion of females who found the bounty of Nature embarrassing.

  From the painless and decorous destruction of millions of bushels of this hirsute paradox, Mr Parsley arrived at great affluence and a model factory.

  He was a very contented, very common and very competent little fellow; as hard as a brick, as nippy as the devil, who believed implicitly in Number One, and in precious little else.

  He employed a number of girls in his factory, but that was as far as he had ever gone to living a bisexual life. Girls were cheap, if inclined to giggle and look up at him with certain non-factorial freedom when he made his periodic tours of inspection of his highly efficient and compact domain. They were allowed two free tubes of the emollient per month — a piece of payment in kind which they seemed to appreciate highly. Otherwise, women were to Mr Parsley merely pay-envelope recipients, who occasionally so far forgot the claims of commerce as to get married.

  This rather elaborate and expository analysis of Mr Parsley’s origins and state of life is necessary to explain why his curious experience at Porthlech made such a profound impression on him. Porthlech is in North Wales, and he had gone there for his summer holiday because he took his holiday, as he did most other things, alone, and he had heard it had a very good golf links, and that it was easy to pick up matches there. It didn’t turn out to be quite so easy, for when his potential opponents saw the tripodic attachment and discovered his handicap was eighteen, they were inclined to remember important engagements and slink away, but those who accepted his challenge had invariably to pay up at the end of the round, for Mr Parsley was without exception the best eighteen handicap golfer in the world. He worked as hard to win his five bob as he did to make his fifteen thousand a year, and it gave him just as much pleasure to acquire.

  There was another reason for his choice of a Welsh resort. He had been told that when you were in Wales you didn’t do as the Welsh did, but you were done as the Welsh decided to do you. Being pretty good at that sort of thing himself, he accepted the implied challenge. So far, in a fortnight, he had only lost one round to the locals, and that was when he discovered an Australian shilling amongst his small change and failed on five different occasions to pass it on to the village tradesmen. He often took it out of his pocket and examined it closely. It had a mild fascination for him, for he was fully determined to get rid of it somehow before he left the Principality. This became a slight obsession which each rebuff intensified. How should he inveigle someone into giving him twelve British pennies’ worth of some article of commerce for it? ‘The dam’ Tories,’ he thought, ‘always spouting Imperialism. Why don’t they make Aussie bobs legal tender?’ Yet, on the afternoon of his last day in Porthlech it was still in his possession. His hands were sore and he decided to take a walk instead of playing a second round. Porthlech is famous for its great rampart of dunes between the links and the sea, and he decided to explore them. He found it a very tiring promenade, and about five o’clock sat down to rest on one of the highest summits of the range. He took off his hat, mopped his brow, and stared out over the sea. The weather was breaking, a dark army of clouds was mobilising to the south-west, the wind was freshening and the sea rising. There was a feeling of menace in the air. He leaned back and dozed off. Presently he was roused by something flicking past his left leg. He opened his eyes, glanced round and saw that his hat, caught by the rising wind, had been blown into a patch of bent grass just behind him. As he twisted round to secure it, his eye was caught by something which had not been present when he dozed off. It was a figure, a man, seated on the twin peak to his, fifty yards away to the left across a deep sand valley. This person had his elbows on his knees and his head was buried in his hands. He was quite motionless.

  Mr Parsley was vaguely irritated by this intrusion and a little suspicious. Why had this individual selected to plant himself on that adjacent knoll when he had the whole long and utterly deserted range of dunes to choose from? It seemed calculated and deliberate. All the same, this intruder seemed completely uninterested in him, though that might be a ruse. Mr Parsley yawned, put his squash hat beneath his chin, lay back and — well, he never quite decided what he did do then. He might have dozed and dreamed, but there were other possibilities. In any case, this is what he remembered to have experienced.

  His idea of the sea — which he had never crossed — had been derived from the advertisements of shipping companies. To him it was an element blue and bland across which a golden pathway ran up to the horizon, and, he supposed, down the other side. And along this gleaming ribbon great ships strolled with leisurely decision. From their funnels dark feathers undulated away down the breeze, slowly diminishing till they were lost in the distance. A churned and milky stir rose from their propellers and flecked the gold with foam. And at the end of the pathway were many exotic and strange harbours where dark boys dived down at the ship’s side — down and down, the outline of their bronze bodies becoming oily, shimmering and shattered. And presently they shot up again to the surface, breathed deeply, showed white teeth in a smiling black face, and held up the coin they had stripped from the sand, an Australian shilling quite possibly, if Mr Parsley had been on the deck. The Seven Seas had seemed to him merely supports for huge, expensive steamers, puffing away to hardly realisable strangeness; bulky, and in no way menacing or formidable fluid highways. A concept as romantic as it was inaccurate, but a considerable tribute to the efficiency of steamship advertisements.

  But during his dream, reverie or whatev
er it was, the water over which he seemed to be gazing suggested very different ideas. It suggested animosity; it seemed frigidly hostile, yet in a way tempting; something which inevitably carried one away and swallowed one up, however fiercely one strove against it. Something which clutched and killed — and yet invited. For what a quick and merciful sleep it granted to those who entrusted themselves to its austere touch! Why not accept that invitation? Why not run down, plunge in, forget, and leave his shell to dawdle up and down its tides? ‘What the devil is the matter with me?’ wondered Mr Parsley. ‘It is as if someone was saying all this for me, and yet these thoughts seem to be mine, though I know they cannot be. I’ll stop it. I’ll think about something else, the usual things I think about.’ He grasped for the Australian shilling, vaguely feeling he wanted a material ally in this struggle for his personality. But there was no money in his pocket. Was the stranger still there? No, he wasn’t, but then neither was the high dune on which he had been sitting! And then he looked to the right and there was a figure lying outstretched on a little summit. He felt dazed and dizzy, as though something passed sharply across his brain, taking with it his thoughts and dragging others in.

  Supposing he did respond to that sea-beckoning, accept its aid in escaping from intolerable pain. She had meant it. She did almost hate him. (All this part of Mr Parsley’s reverie was dominated by the mental picture of a woman, a stranger to him and yet someone he knew terribly well.) He could remember just how she looked when she said, ‘You bore me, do you hear? You always have and always will bore me. I can’t say fairer than that!’ How that look she’d given him had seemed to break him. He hadn’t any money; that was it. (Mr Parsley momentarily rallied to repudiate this libel. He had money, he had £200,000 and an Australian shilling. But which he? Who was he?) She was, he knew, an utterly soulless, mercenary little harpy. It was partly the humiliation of loving so desperately someone so despicable which tortured him. If she were a woman of intelligence and character he could have borne it far better. ‘I can assure you I’m not worthy of a good man’s love.’ She’d meant that to be funny, but it was God’s truth. He wasn’t good and didn’t want to be, but he was a cut above that lovely, indecent obsession. What was it? What was this despicable craving for a tow-headed, scarlet-lipped, contemptible, shallow little pickpocket? An animal without a single animal virtue and every animal vice. And yet — he’d sacrifice anything, anyone, to see her for five minutes. Supposing he found a telegram when he got back to the hotel saying, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’? He’d drive back through the night insanely happy. But he never would get such a message. Never, never, never again! Now couldn’t he realise what she was and save himself! She was a pink-and-white envelope over a system of bones and muscles and fat; a collection of functions brutally mechanical. Whether such a functioning hide ever housed a soul was disputable; to suggest that hers did was a dirty joke. And her brain was such that it merely intensified the essential beastliness of her body. That was what she was, and it meant absolutely nothing to him. Just futile verbiage. Perhaps he was so rotten himself that it was her very vileness he adored. For let him face the fact — he couldn’t live without her. And he would probably never see her again. He couldn’t go back to the hotel and fling himself down on his bed and go all over that hopeless ground again. Over and over and over again. ‘You ought to eat more, sir; won’t you have an egg with your tea?’ . . .

  Suddenly Mr Parsley was himself again. He rubbed his eyes and looked about him. ‘Hullo, that chap was running down the sand. What for?’ Without quite knowing why, Mr Parsley started to run down after him. Good God! He’d gone into the sea with all his clothes on! When Mr Parsley reached the water’s edge he hesitated, for he couldn’t swim and he was wearing a new pair of grey flannel trousers. Also, it was rough. And then he saw a pair of arms flung up for a moment above the surge, so he began to wade gingerly in. It was bitterly cold, and a wave bursting against his navel soused him from head to foot. So he staggered back to dry land. ‘That chap must be drowned by now, and getting wet like that is bad for a man of my age,’ he thought. ‘I’d better run for help, run fast to keep my circulation going.’ He trotted back, setting his course by the peak on which he had been sitting.

  On the way he retrieved his hat and the Australian shilling, which he found lying beside it. ‘Good Lord! Running through this deep sand takes it out of me. Got my heart to think about. No one could say I ought to have done more, could they?’ After all, he couldn’t swim; he was most convincingly and heroically soaked, and he could say he’d gone right in and been nearly drowned. Thank God! there were the golf links and level ground. The links were deserted, and he met no one till he encountered a group of local larrikins at the bottom of the steep hill which ran past the castle to the hotel. He shouted to them as he ran by, ‘There’s a man in the sea. Go for help. He went in straight past the twelfth green.’ They stared at him and then burst out laughing. ‘They don’t understand English,’ he thought, ‘but what stupid oafs they are. I’d like to have the sacking of them.’

  When he reached the hotel he found the landlord weeding his flower-beds. ‘Mr Gribble,’ he panted, ‘a chap ran down into the sea. I went in after him and nearly got drowned.’

  ‘Is that so, sir?’ said the landlord, startled, and then his expression swiftly changed. ‘I’d forgotten the date,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said, ‘you go right up and have a hot bath. I’ll send a hot whisky up to your room.’

  Mr Parsley stared at him in amazement. ‘But——’ he began again.

  The landlord interrupted him. ‘It’s all right, sir, you take my word for it. I’ll tell you about it when you’ve changed.’

  Mr Parsley began to shiver, and in a hopelessly confused state of mind allowed himself to be ushered upstairs. Three-quarters of an hour later he was sipping shudderingly that vilest of all concoctions composed of whisky, hot water, lemon and sugar, when the landlord came up to his room.

  ‘The fact is, sir,’ said his host, ‘a chap was drowned there, but that was ten years ago, before I came here. A young fellow staying here went into the sea. As a matter of fact, there is no proof that he did — he just disappeared, and his body was never recovered. But a couple of years after a visitor saw much the same thing as I take it you saw, which seemed to show that he had drowned himself.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mr Parsley.

  ‘Well, sir, it certainly is a funny sort of evidence. A caddy saw the same thing a year or two after, and he got a wetting too. And that’s just all about it. It seems to happen only if there’s just one person about, for a crowd of fellows used to go down on the right day — today that is — sir, and stand on the beach, but they never saw anything.’

  ‘You mean I saw a ghost?’ asked Mr Parsley.

  ‘I suppose that’s about it.’

  ‘But I don’t believe in them!’

  ‘Well, sir, if you still believe you saw a real person, go back there and look at the place, where you think you saw him sitting. If you sit on sand you leave marks, you make a hole or two and muck the sand about. See if there’s anything like that on the top of that dune.’

  ‘I certainly shan’t do that,’ said Mr Parsley. ‘I’ve no wish to see the place again. Tell me; as I came through the village a group of young louts laughed at me when I said someone was in the sea. Did they understand what I was saying?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ replied the landlord. ‘I’m English, like you, sir, though I like the Welsh all right. I’ve no complaints. But that’s their idea of a joke. They wouldn’t go alone to that dune on September 10th in the evening for any amount of money, but it makes ’em laugh to think of you getting a wetting for nothing.’

  ‘I’d make ’em laugh if I got ’em in my works,’ replied Mr Parsley, venomously.

  ‘They’re a funny lot,’ said the landlord, ‘they believe there’s a lot of small men living in the mountains, sort of dwarfs, who chase you and do you in if you’re alone.’

 
; ‘I’d give ’em dwarfs!’ said Mr Parsley. ‘I’d chase ’em!’

  ‘You don’t think you’ve caught a chill?’ asked the landlord.

  ‘No, I’m O.K. Did they find out why this chap went into the sea?’

  ‘No, sir, not so far as I know, but it’s usually money or a woman.’

  ‘Not enough money or too much woman?’

  ‘Or a bit of both,’ replied the landlord.

  Mr Parsley found it difficult to get to sleep that night. He was just dropping off when all that he had experienced during that reverie on the dune seemed to loom up like a great wave and burst over his memory, and all within a few seconds he understood that agony, and all about that woman, and why men felt like that, and he realized what death was like and why it was sometimes desired.