The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  But he saw nobody else, and she stood there waiting. So he looked at her again.

  Only slightly did she seem to detach herself from the prevailing hues of the room. Her complexion seemed as pervaded with white as the carnivals on the walls. Her dress was an indeterminate scrambled-egg of yellow and white, without either intention or design.

  ‘Well, here’s a plain-headed piece of goods,’ was Aubrey Kneller’s first thought.

  But the next moment, ‘Heavens alive!’ he had almost exclaimed out-right. ‘What in the name of goodness has she been doing to her mouth?’

  It was a blear of greasy crimson. It must have taken half a lipstick to do. Dreadful experiment! One would hardly have supposed that the rawest novice could have made such a hash of it! ‘How truly distressing!’ was Aubrey’s first comment.

  But she lifted eyes of the colour of the glass marble one sees in the constricted neck of a soda water bottle, and spoke in a voice that reminded him of something or somebody, though for the life of him he could not remember of what.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

  ‘Good afternoon. May I see the hat in the window?’

  ‘Won’t you sit down, please?’

  She fetched the hat from the window. He asked her to put it on her head. She did so, placing herself before the cheval-glass. Her cropped string-coloured hair made little cheekpieces over her ears, and her thin arms, bare midway between elbow and shoulder, had a pathetic defencelessness as she adjusted that seabird of a hat. Then she turned, the glassy eyes full of apprehension.

  And ‘Execrable, execrable!’ Aubrey Kneller thought to himself; but, being a kind-hearted man, and unwilling to wound the feelings even of such a snippet as this, ‘Charming, charming!’ he murmured. ‘Quite charming – on you –’

  The next moment she had astonished him by saying, in a small timorous voice, ‘It is Mr Kneller, isn’t it?’

  He recovered himself. Ah! So that was why she had peeped at him through the curtain! She had seen his photograph in the papers, and had recognised him!

  ‘Yes, my name is Kneller,’ he confessed.

  ‘Mr Kneller the author?’

  ‘Yes, I am an author.’

  ‘How wonderful!’ she breathed.

  He disclaimed the wonderfulness of it, but for a moment she seemed almost to assert herself.

  ‘Oh, but it is! To sit down and make up people! I can’t imagine how you do it! I can’t think how you begin! How do they come to you? Is it just genius? Are they all people you know? Or what?’

  He laughed a little. ‘So that was why you peeped through the curtains?’

  Once more she was abashed. ‘Oh, it was rude! I’m so sorry! But you’ve no idea how lonely it is in here, with hardly anybody coming in –’

  ‘Do you mean to say you’re here all alone?’ he asked. Less and less did she seem the sort of person to be carrying on an enterprise that depended on a few specialised articles, stiff prices, and salesmanship of a highly intensive order.

  ‘Oh, no! There’s Mathilde. She does the upstairs part. But I look after down here. It’s all my idea. Don’t you like pictures?’

  It was evidently from the pictures that she had got that terrible mess of a mouth. He longed to wipe it clean for her. But for that she might not have been so much amiss. The green and white of the hat did at least repeat those glassy eyes and the pastel white of her matt skin. But those lips – !

  ‘I wonder,’ Aubrey said suddenly, ‘whether I might say something very personal?’

  ‘What?’ she said, frightened again.

  ‘Why have you done that to your lips?’

  He could have bitten his tongue off. Dismay rushed into her face, wildly her eyes sought the glass. He saw her reflection tilted in it, the mouth on which he had remarked a shapeless open smear.

  ‘Oh!’ she wailed. ‘And I did so try!’

  The next moment she had thrown the hat on a chair and had fled through the curtains at the back of the room.

  And with her disappearance it came all at once over Aubrey to wonder what he was doing in that parlour at all. He felt a little confused in his head. He had been walking along Pountney Place. He had crossed the street to look at a hat. And without quite know­ing how it had happened he had found himself in this grey, scented place, saying wounding things to this scrap of a child. Why? What business of his was it what she did with her mouth?

  ‘Time I was pushing along,’ he muttered to himself.

  She came back very quietly. The pigeon-grey curtains hardly seemed to part to admit her. She stood just within them, in an attitude that made him feel ashamed of himself, so crushed and humble was it. The crimson smear was gone.

  He felt that it was his duty to speak first. He took a step towards her. He was a big man, and felt his bigness the more by the side of her slightness.

  ‘You know my name,’ he said gently. ‘May I ask yours?’

  He understood her to say that it wasn’t quite settled yet.

  ‘I don’t mean your business-name. I see your shop’s new. The reason I ask is that I want to apologise very humbly for hurting your feelings just now.’

  ‘Is it better now?’ she asked faintly.

  Indeed there had been no need to bedaub that mouth with paint. It had its own tender appealing charm, a pale carnation, that did not quite close upon the nacre within. Why would girls always be trying to make themselves something they were not! She was standing at attention for his inspection, so close that he could smell the soap or other preparation with which she had cleansed herself. The string-coloured hair was pushed quite back from her brow.

  ‘And now if you will put the hat on again,’ he said, his eyes on hers, ‘it would give me very great pleasure if you would keep it on.’

  She fell back, as if disbelieving her ears. ‘What? For myself? To keep?’ she gasped.

  ‘If I might be allowed.’

  ‘Oh!’

  The little stir of blood in her cheeks touched him infinitely. Poor little phantom! More likely than not she did not get enough to eat. Most, most likely; for, now that he looked again, those arms in the cut-off sleeves, though frail, were exquisitely boned. Her lines, sketchily drawn and unfilled-out, had a certain witchery . . . which was precisely the reason why he suddenly placed a spindley gilt chair for her. Aubrey was forty-four, old enough to be her father. Anyway, that clove-pink of a mouth was better a little farther away.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said abruptly. ‘Who are your people?’

  She hadn’t any people.

  ‘What, nobody at all?’

  ‘I’m an orphan,’ she sighed.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I – I call myself nearly eighteen.’

  ‘You call yourself! Don’t you know?’

  ‘Please don’t,’ she begged, in a failing voice.

  Poor little brat, he thought compassionately! Who was he, to torture her with questions that she couldn’t answer? The workhouse, no doubt, or the Foundling Hospital steps. Chance-named accord­ing to any matron’s will. Better people than she have not always found their birth-certificates easy to come by. The ignominy of it! If it gave her a moment’s pleasure he was glad he had offered her the green and white hat.

  She began to talk, diffidently, falteringly, every now and again lifting worshipping eyes to him. She talked of that narrow grey-hued parlour in which she spent her days. She talked of the two or three clients who had called, of how so far they had bought nothing, of the people who passed the window. And as she talked an arresting thought fastened itself on Aubrey Kneller.

  It had something to do with her voice. It was a voice he had heard somewhere before. It was the voice of somebody he knew a good deal about. The solution was on the tip of his tongue, but still it eluded him. It was tantalis
ing. He couldn’t let it alone –

  In such cases Aubrey Kneller had a device that frequently, if not always, succeeded. This was to try to forget that he was trying to remember anything at all, to make his mind as complete a blank as he could, and to spell slowly through the alphabet, listeningly, alertly, a letter at a time, with long pauses.

  So, as the girl ran on, with gradually gathering courage, ‘A,’ thought Aubrey Kneller, and paused. Did the thing of which he was in search begin with A? Apparently not.

  ‘B.’ Nothing had come of ‘A.’ What about ‘B’? But he had no better success.

  ‘C.’ Still nothing. (But what a tender little mouth it was now that it was scrubbed!)

  ‘D.’ Aha! Found! Why had he not known at once? Had it not been chiming in his head ever since he had handed the manuscript of his book over the Post Office counter?

  Her voice was the voice of Delia Vane.

  4

  Now up to six months ago Aubrey Kneller had never seen why books should give any trouble to the writers of them. His own never had. His Sir Rolands and Sir Guys had flowed smoothly from his fountain-pen, chivalrous and high-minded knights and baronets all. Indeed, he had been not a little pleased with one of his mots, which was, that if the writing of books was as toilsome a business as all that the presumption was that the writer had mistaken his job.

  But Delia Vane had given him nothing but trouble from the very beginning. The final pangs of book-birth had been extreme. And the outcome of his labour had been, not that insignificant Annie Thomp­son of his first conception, but this other usurper, of whom, though in a sense he was her lord and master, he was secretly afraid.

  And now, in that quiet little parlour in Pountney Place, he had already done several totally unexpected things within the short space of a quarter of an hour. He had so far forgotten himself as to remark on what a perfectly strange young woman chose to do with her mouth. On an unaccountable impulse he had given this young person a hat he had intended for his fiancée. And – he confessed it to his shame – he had been on the very brink of a desultory little tender­ness, in plain words a kiss, that Sir Guy and Sir Roland would never have dreamed of. It was all very bewildering. He hadn’t a notion what had happened.

  For of course that was sheer nonsense about this child’s voice. How could her voice resemble the voice of Delia, who had never possessed a voice? Other fantastic similarities there might be. The girl in the scrambled-egg frock was evidently a sort of Annie Thomp­son, in so far as she had any individuality at all. He had never been able to visualise this intruder very clearly. And Aubrey Kneller had not become a successful author by wasting his time over such unusual speculations.

  Yet nothing comes out of nothing, not even a character in a book. He had not yet forgotten those pangs of the bringing forth of Delia Vane. There had been those quarrelsome scenes between this im­pudent newcomer and his proper heroine, Rosamond. Something had happened that had never happened to Aubrey before. And this shop-assistant’s voice was the very voice of the Delia of his imagining.

  Aubrey was conscious of passing through three distinct stages. The first of these was to tell himself that he was not very well. His book had taken more out of him than he had supposed, and indeed, in mere bulk, it was nearly double the length of any of his former books. A stiff brandy-and-soda would have done him good . . . and at that thought he gave a little jump, for never in his life had he drunk brandy-and-soda at that hour of the afternoon.

  The second stage was that he found himself gazing furtively at the girl’s mouth again. She had sat down in the chair he had placed for her, and he was guiltily aware that he was wishing that he had not placed it quite so far away from his own. She was sitting in an attitude of patient stillness, with her hands folded in her lap. The lids had dropped over the colourless eyes. The light, troubled little sigh that she gave was the living echo of Annie Thompson in the days when she had promised to be good.

  The third phase had a certain slyness about it. Aubrey had thought of a way of bringing those chairs closer together that the tenderest conscience could not have found fault with. Several times, in his books, Sir Guy or Sir Somebody Else had taken forlorn little orphans under their wing, had sheltered and clothed them and had them educated, all in a spirit of purest benevolence. It was as if the lordly mansion should pat the thatched roof of the cottage at the park gates. Honi soit qui mal y pense. As long as Aubrey moved his chair strictly in this spirit –

  But he was not to do so. From somewhere upstairs there came a shrill call.

  ‘Marie-e-e-e!’

  Swiftly the girl sprang to her feet. She spoke in a hurried whisper: ‘It’s only Mathilde – I’ll see what she wants – I shan’t be a minute –’

  She was off, a vanishing sprite of yellow and white.

  With her disappearance Aubrey seemed again to come to himself. He passed his hand over his brow. It all seemed dreamy; he had an idea that he had been mixing up people who had no existence with those who had. What had those figments, Annie Thompson and Delia Vane, to do with his fiancée, Helen Boyd, whom he was to meet at Rumpelmayers’ at four? And what was this about a voice? The only voice he heard was the sound of a neighbouring clock, striking four already.

  He sprang to his feet. If she wasn’t back in a moment he must walk out of the place.

  But he had given her a hat, and hadn’t paid for it.

  He was about to call when she appeared; and oh, how very much more she was in the picture now! For she had changed her frock. She was dressed for the street, in shabby black, with a dusty black velvet tam dragged over the cheek-pieces of her hair. Merely a little milliner’s run-about, like a thousand others, sent out with a parcel and her ’bus fare in her pocket! He had her placed – yes, even to the parcel, for she crossed to the carton with the tissue-paper, put the lid on it, and began to tie the package with a narrow green-and-white band that she spun from a wooden reel.

  Then once again the sound of her voice gave him that secret thrill.

  ‘What did I do with my gloves?’

  ‘Are these they?’

  ‘Oh, thank you . . . I’m ready now.’

  Observe, she did not say, ‘I’ve got to go out; will you pay for the hat now or leave an address?’ She merely announced that she was ready, as if he had called for the purpose of taking her out. And Aubrey Kneller, known novelist, was in some sort a public man. Not that it really mattered, of course. Still, to be seen in broad daylight in the company of a midinette with a bandbox over her arm – that apparently was her innocent idea –

  ‘I must be getting along, too,’ he said, he hoped not too pointedly.

  She must have been extremely sensitive. Immediately there hap­pened the same thing that had happened when he had commented on the overpainted mouth. She winced. She shivered forlornly. She seemed to become sizes smaller.

  And could he, with that other piteous ‘Oh!’ still in his memory, say to her, ‘I mustn’t be seen with you; it’s one thing to be on the point of kissing you in a private room, but I shall have to cut you in the street; perhaps I’ll look in another day and kiss you when nobody can see us?’

  He couldn’t. He heard the passing of a taxi. He stepped to the door and hailed it with his stick.

  ‘Which way are you going? Can I drop you anywhere?’ he said.

  Half a minute later they were speeding along Pountney Place, with the bandbox between them, half on her knees, half on his.

  5

  Helen Boyd waited in Rumpelmayers’ with her Academy catalogue on her knee. She was not sorry to sit down, for, besides the Aca­demy, she had done several miles of shopping, and the mile in London and the mile over the mountains at home were not the same thing. Neither was she impatient. It was quite amusing sitting there, watching the people who came in, went out or passed up and down St James’s Street. He was late, but she
was sure he had said Rumpelmayers’ at four, and even if there had been a mistake there was always the flat in King Street, not three minutes’ walk away.

  She was not in the least embarrassed that the young man who also waited in the outer shop apparently found the view in her direction as pleasant as that in any other. She was quite capable of going up to him and saying, ‘Do you mind turning your chair so that it faces another way?’ So her cool, interested eyes continued to look past the cakes and candied fruits in the window, the young man continued to look at her, and Aubrey Kneller continued to be late.

  She thought her engagement to Aubrey such an excellent thing for Aubrey himself. She was the practical one; he had to have the artistic temperament. His temperament reminded Helen of a muslin bag, through which he strained things, and out came the most extra­ordinary results. He had strained Helen herself that way, and out had come a Rosamond or a Margaret or a Phyllis. And of course she managed him. When he came to stay with them in the country she had everything just-so for him – sprayed the roses in her prettiest frock (but didn’t tell him that she used some­body’s soapy bath-water for the purpose), wore her prettiest shoes for him (and said nothing about her sloshy old gum-boots that hung upside-down in the potting-shed with hay in the toes of them to dry). He made quite a lot of money by his trade, and Helen, at twenty-six, was some years past thinking that money didn’t matter, even in love.

  The pertinacity of the young man was getting more amusing every moment. He was trying to – what was the expression? – to ‘get off’ with her. How funny men were! So single in their aims! He was doing his utmost to make her look at him! He had a vacant, likeable sort of face, dissipated perhaps, but with the right sort of come-from. She didn’t think she would tell Aubrey what this young man was trying to do. He was inclined to take such things a little fussily. He himself seemed to have a blind spot as far as women were concerned, and his attitude to them never gave Helen a moment’s anxiety. A little lacking in devil? That didn’t matter. Helen would find devil enough for two.