The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  Hitherto (they told him) they had accepted his books in good faith. He had supplied a saleable article, had built up a magnificent public, and their relations had been of the happiest. But – they must tell Mr Kneller this plainly – had they known beforehand the character of the work he had now foisted on them, like some stinging creature in a posy of flowers, they would never have dreamed of affixing their imprint to it. They could not imagine what had possessed him. And at the word ‘possessed’ Aubrey started a little. It was so very near the truth.

  ‘But hang it all,’ he broke out, ‘what else do you want? Of course a fellow must be possessed by his book! How the devil can he possess it?’

  ‘Those are technicalities with which we have nothing to do, Mr Kneller. We don’t write the book. And it’s hardly too much to say that you’ve let us down grossly and that we have a very heavy load left on our hands.’

  ‘But damn it all, man,’ Aubrey had exploded, ‘the book’s worth all the others put together! No, it isn’t even that – it’s in a class by itself!’

  ‘So are its sales, Mr Kneller. That’s exactly what we’re com­plaining of.’

  ‘St­art the advertising again. Surely the public aren’t all fools! I tell you there’s the stuff of life in that book!’

  ‘We’ve read it,’ was the dry reply.

  ‘Where’s a copy? Let me show you!’

  ‘It’s no good, Mr Kneller. Your other books were a faithful and charming picture, the mirror held up to nature, but this –’

  Aubrey broke into a wild laugh.

  ‘The mirror held up to nature! Are you serious? Haw, haw, haw! Sorry to laugh – haw, haw, haw! – but it’s too comic! Haw, haw, haw, haw! Don’t mind me, but you see I happen to know Archdale – he’s really a fellow called Upwester! And I happen to know Delia too – her real name’s Marie! And as for those tailor’s-dummies you want me to put in, why, I had ’em in, and I turfed them out again! Where do you suppose books come from? Out of a machine, like a gross of cut nails? I tell you they get born, like a woman with a baby, and all you confounded publishers have to do is to tie the knot and let ’em run about on their own!’

  ‘Well, Mr Kneller, you’re entitled to your views, but as this is the last book of your contract you can hardly expect us to renew.’

  ‘Renew!’ cried Aubrey excitedly. ‘Do you think I’d let you renew? Do you think I’ve been through what I have been through for you to hawk my stuff on your coster’s barrow? No, sir! You go on publish­ing as you call it; life and I’ll attend to our end of the show! I know what I know, and I laugh at you! My soul’s my own – “HAW, HAW, HAW, HAW, HAW!” ’

  And with a wave of his hand he strode out of the office and down the stairs.

  He strode straight on to Pountney Place, laughing loudly as he went. Free, free! Or at least he would be free within half an hour from now. For did he not see with translucent clearness what was going to happen? Did he not know, as if it had been shouted in his ears, what Delia was going to tell him! And did he now care the snap of a finger? Not he! Let her marry her peer! He wasn’t a bad sort after all. And she, steeped to her lips in smiling deceit, was a born actress. As Lady Upwester she would probably set the London stage on fire. And Aubrey would go to her debut. He would see her from the gallery, join in the acclam­ations, shout himself hoarse at her triumph. Marry her now? He didn’t want to marry her! Some union more mystic even than that of marriage was between her and him. She was Delia Vane, who had given him, not a few kisses, but this boundless liberty with which he could now move through the world. She was his door, not into a house in Rickmansworth, not into a flat in St James’s, not into a parlour in Pountney Place, but into the heart of life itself! Know yourself, one other person, and the relation between the two, and you have a base-line from which to find the range of anything there is; and did not Aubrey know himself, her, and that relation? Was she not his very Muse? Had she not given him the note of harmonies that would be music in his soul for ever? Oh, she had, she had, and he must run and thank her!

  He turned into Pountney Place. Behind him, past Harrods’ and the Oratory, swept the double main stream of life, east and west, west and east, without ceasing. He walked as if on air, laughing for joy as he went. What a quaint, quakerish, demure little street it was, with its windows so oddly half-commercial and half-domestic! The very furn­i­ture in the windows of its antique shops seemed to have turned its back on the interiors only for a moment, and would turn round again when it saw that there was nobody outside to look at but Aubrey Kneller! Striped sunblinds, flowers in window-boxes, fan­lights, quiet old Hogarth frontages – a novelist might find suggestions in a street like that! That little shop across the way, for example: it had a little whitewashed area, a green-and-white sun­blind with the name

  Mathilde

  in flowing script across it, and a serried row of chimney cowls making ragged the skyline over its coping. On a pedestal in the window stood a single green-and-white hat. He had a fancy he would look at that hat. He had no particular reason for doing so; he just thought he would. He crossed the street. The front door of the shop stood open, but a door just within it on the right was closed. Under a little brass plate that bore the words ‘Please Ring’ was an electric button. But Aubrey had no intention of ringing. He hadn’t the price of a hat such as that in his pocket. Yet he lingered, not passing the shop immediately.

  As he lingered, he faintly heard, from somewhere at the back of the premises, and apparently upstairs, a woman’s voice that called some apprentice or junior assistant.

  ‘Marie-e-e-e!’ the voice died away on the air . . .

  The Cigarette Case

  ‘A cigarette, Loder?’ I said, offering my case. For the moment Loder was not smoking; for long enough he had not been talking.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied, taking not only the cigarette, but the case also. The others went on talking; Loder became silent again; but I noticed that he kept my cigarette case in his hand, and looked at it from time to time with an interest that neither its design nor its costliness seemed to explain. Presently I caught his eye.

  ‘A pretty case,’ he remarked, putting it down on the table. ‘I once had one exactly like it.’

  I answered that they were in every shop window.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, putting aside any question of rarity . . . ‘I lost mine.’

  ‘Oh? . . . ’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, that’s all right – I got it back again – don’t be afraid I’m going to claim yours. But the way I lost it – found it – the whole thing – was rather curious. I’ve never been able to explain it. I wonder if you could?’

  I answered that I certainly couldn’t till I’d heard it, whereupon Loder, taking up the silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked, began.

  ‘This happened in Provence, when I was about as old as Marsham there – and every bit as romantic. I was there with Carroll – you remember poor old Carroll and what a blade of a boy he was – as romantic as four Marshams rolled into one. (Excuse me, Marsham, won’t you? It’s a romantic tale, you see, or at least the setting is.) . . . We were in Provence, Carroll and I; twenty-four or thereabouts; romantic, as I say; and – and this happened.

  ‘And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things, you must understand, the things that do happen when you’re twenty-four. If it hadn’t been Provence, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose, nearly, if not quite as good; but this was Provence, that smells (as you might say) of twenty-four as it smells of argelasse and wild lavender and broom . . .

  ‘We’d had the dickens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks – had started somewhere in the Ardèche and tramped south through the vines and almonds and olives – Montélimar, Orange, Avignon, and a fortnight at that blanched skeleton of a town, Les Baux. We’d nothing to do, and had gone just where we liked, or rather just where Car
roll had liked; and Carroll had had the De Bello Gallico in his pocket, and had had a notion, I fancy, of taking in the whole ground of the Roman conquest – I remember he lugged me off to some place or other, Pourrières I believe its name was, because – I forget how many thousands – were killed in a river-bed there, and they stove in the water-casks so that if the men wanted water they’d have to go forward and fight for it. And then we’d gone on to Arles, where Carroll had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black velvet in her hair, and after that Tarascon, Nîmes, and so on, the usual round – I won’t bother you with that. In a word, we’d had two months of it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, sing­ing Magali and the Qué Cantes, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provençal so that he could read the stuff in the Journal des Félibriges that he’d never have looked at if it had been in English . . .

  ‘Well, we got to Darbisson. We’d run across some young chap or other – Rangon his name was – who was a vine-planter in those parts, and Rangon had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his mother, if we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So as we might as well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and went. This would be in June or early in July. All day we walked across a plain of vines, past hurdles of wattled cannes and great wind-screens of velvety cypresses, sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north side of ’em, for the mistral was having its three-days’ revel, and it whistled and roared through the cannes till scores of yards of ’em at a time were bowed nearly to the earth. A roaring day it was, I remember . . . But the wind fell a little late in the afternoon, and we were poring over what it had left of our Ordnance Survey – like fools, we’d got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones – when Rangon himself found us, coming out to meet us in a very badly turned-out trap. He drove us back himself, through Darbisson, to the house, a mile and a half beyond it, where he lived with his mother.

  ‘He spoke no English, Rangon didn’t, though of course, both French and Provençal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a Franco-Provençal dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names of things in the patois – I beg its pardon, the language – though there’s a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this Félibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frédéric Mistral is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he’s had put up for himself in the graveyard at Maillanne. If the language has got to go, well, it’s got to go, I suppose; and while I personally don’t want to give it a kick, I rather sympathise with the Government. Those jaunts of a Sunday out to Les Baux, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal fire and a fellow spouting O blanche Vénus d’Arles – they’re well enough, and compare favourably with our Bank Holidays and Sunday League picnics, but . . . but that’s nothing to do with my tale after all . . . So he drove on, and by the time we got to Rangon’s house Carroll had learned the greater part of Magali . . .

  ‘As you, no doubt, know, it’s a restricted sort of life in some respects that a young vigneron lives in those parts, and it was as we reached the house that Rangon remembered something – or he might have been trying to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provençal. It seemed that his mother was away from home for some days – apologies of the most profound, of course; our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at us a bit later . . . We expressed our polite regrets, naturally; but I didn’t quite see at first what difference it made. I only began to see when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back to Darbisson for dinner. It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her establish­ment also, and she’d left her son with nobody to look after him except an old man we’d seen in the yard mending one of these double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse’s back and drive between the rows of vines . . . Rangon explained all this as we stood in the hall drinking an apéritif – a hall crowded with oak furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor. He had also, it seemed, to ask us to be so infinitely obliging as to excuse him for one hour after dinner – our postcard had come unexpectedly, he said, and already he had made an appointment with his agent about the vendange for the coming autumn . . . We begged him, of course, not to allow us to interfere with his business in the slightest degree. He thanked us a thousand times.

  ‘ “But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us,” he said, “a wine surfin – one of my wines – you shall see – ”

  ‘Then he showed us round his place – I forget how many hundreds of acres of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and casks and the huge barrel they call the thunderbolt – and about seven o’clock we walked back to Darbisson to dinner, carrying our wine with us. I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place, and our gaillard of a host – he was a straight-backed, well-set-up chap, with rather fine eyes – did us on the whole pretty well. His wine certainly was good stuff, and set our tongues going . . .

  ‘A moment ago I said a fellow like Rangon leads a restricted sort of life in those parts. I saw this more clearly as dinner went on. We dined by an open window, from which we could see the stream with the planks across it where the women washed clothes during the day and assembled in the evening for gossip. There were a dozen or so of them there as we dined, laughing and chatting in low tones – they all seemed pretty – it was quickly falling dusk – all the girls are pretty then, and are quite conscious of it – you know, Marsham. Behind them, at the end of the street, one of these great cypress wind-screens showed black against the sky, a ragged edge something like the line the needle draws on a rainfall chart; and you could only tell whether they were men or women under the plantains by their voices rippling and chattering and suddenly a deeper note . . . Once I heard a muffled scuffle and a sound like a kiss . . . It was then that Rangon’s little trouble came out . . .

  ‘It seemed that he didn’t know any girls – wasn’t allowed to know any girls. The girls of the village were pretty enough, but you see how it was – he’d a position to keep up – appearances to maintain – couldn’t be familiar during the year with the girls who gathered his grapes for him in the autumn . . . And as soon as Carroll gave him a chance, he began to ask us questions, about England, English girls, the liberty they had, and so on.

  ‘Of course, we couldn’t tell him much he hadn’t heard already, but that made no difference; he could stand any amount of that, our strapping young vigneron; and he asked us questions by the dozen, that we both tried to answer at once. And his delight and envy! . . . What! in England did the young men see the young women of their own class without restraint – the sisters of their friends même – even at the house? Was it permitted that they drank tea with them in the afternoon, or went without invitation to pass the soirée? . . . He had all the later Prévosts in his room, he told us (I don’t doubt he had the earlier ones also); Prévost and the Disestablishment between them must be playing the mischief with the convent system of education for young girls; and our young man was – what d’you call it? – “Co-ed” – co-educationalist – by Jove, yes! . . . He seemed to marvel that we should have left a country so blessed as England to visit his dusty, wild-lavender-smelling, girl-less Provence . . . You don’t know half your luck, Marsham . . .

  ‘Well, we talked after this fashion – we’d left the dining-room of the restaurant and had planted ourselves on a bench outside with Rangon between us – when Rangon suddenly looked at his watch and said it was time he was off to see this agent of his. Would we take a walk, he asked us, and meet him again there? he said . . . But as his agent lived in the direction of his
own home, we said we’d meet him at the house in an hour or so. Off he went, envying every Englishman who stepped, I don’t doubt . . . I told you how old – how young – we were . . . Heigho! . . .

  ‘Well, off goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched our­selves, and took a walk. We walked a mile or so, until it began to get pretty dark, and then turned; and it was as we came into the black­ness of one of these cypress hedges that the thing I’m telling you of happened. The hedge took a sharp turn at that point; as we came round the angle we saw a couple of women’s figures hardly more than twenty yards ahead – don’t know how they got there so suddenly, I’m sure; and that same moment I found my foot on something small and white and glimmering on the grass.

  ‘I picked it up. It was a handkerchief – a woman’s – embroidered –

  ‘The two figures ahead of us were walking in our direction; there was every probability that the handkerchief belonged to one of them; so we stepped out . . .

  ‘At my “Pardon, madame” and lifted hat one of the figures turned her head; then, to my surprise, she spoke in English – cultivated English. I held out the handkerchief. It belonged to the elder lady of the two, the one who had spoken, a very gentle-voiced old lady, older by very many years than her companion. She took the handkerchief and thanked me . . .

  ‘Somebody – Sterne, isn’t it? – says that Englishmen don’t travel to see Englishmen. I don’t know whether he’d stand to that in the case of Englishwomen; Carroll and I didn’t . . . We were walking rather slowly along, four abreast across the road; we asked permission to introduce ourselves, did so, and received some name in return which, strangely enough, I’ve entirely forgotten – I only remember that the ladies were aunt and niece, and lived at Darbisson. They shook their heads when I mentioned M. Rangon’s name and said we were visiting him. They didn’t know him . . .