I began to feel uneasy directly I got inside the door. It was natural that the house should be quiet, for the pair of them never had any friends to stay, although the old woman had a sister-in-law living only a few miles away. But I didn’t like the sound of the doctor’s feet, as he came downstairs to meet us. He’d twisted his face into a pious solemnity for our benefit, as though there was something holy about death, even about the death of my friend.
‘He’s conscious,’ he said, ‘but he’s going. There’s nothing I can do. If you want him to die in peace, better let his friend go along up. He’s frightened about something.’
The doctor was right. I could tell that as soon as I bent under the lintel and entered my friend’s room. He was propped up on a pillow, and his eyes were on the door, waiting for me to come. They were very bright and frightened, and his hair lay across his forehead in sticky stripes. I’d never realized before what an ugly fellow he was. He had got sly eyes that looked at you too much out of the corners, but when he was in ordinary health, they held a twinkle that made you forget the slyness. There was something pleasant and brazen in the twinkle, as much as to say, ‘I know I’m sly and ugly. But what does that matter? I’ve got guts.’ It was that twinkle, I think, some women found attractive and stimulating. Now when the twinkle was gone, he looked a rogue and nothing else.
I thought it my duty to cheer him up, so I made a small joke out of the fact that he was alone in bed. He didn’t seem to relish it, and I was beginning to fear that he, too, was taking a religious view of his death, when he told me to sit down, speaking quite sharply.
‘I’m dying,’ he said, talking very fast, ‘and I want to ask you something. That doctor’s no good – he’d think me delirious. I’m frightened, old man. I want to be reassured,’ and then after a long pause, ‘someone with common sense.’ He slipped a little farther down in his bed.
‘I’ve only once been badly ill before,’ he said. ‘That was before you settled here. I wasn’t much more than a boy. People tell me that I was even supposed to be dead. They were carrying me out to burial, when a doctor stopped them just in time.’
I’d heard plenty of cases like that, and I saw no reason why he should want to tell me about it. And then I thought I saw his point. His mother had not been too anxious once before to see if he were properly dead, though I had little doubt that she made a great show of grief – ‘My poor boy. I don’t know what I shall do without him.’ And I’m certain that she believed herself then, as she believed herself now. She wasn’t a murderess. She was only inclined to be premature.
‘Look here, old man,’ I said, and I propped him a little higher on his pillow, ‘you needn’t be frightened. You aren’t going to die, and anyway I’d see that the doctor cut a vein or something before they moved you. But that’s all morbid stuff. Why, I’d stake my shirt that you’ve got plenty more years in front of you. And plenty more girls too,’ I added to make him smile.
‘Can’t you cut out all that?’ he said, and I knew then that he had turned religious. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘if I lived, I wouldn’t touch another girl. I wouldn’t, not one.’
I tried not to smile at that, but it wasn’t easy to keep a straight face. There’s always something a bit funny about a sick man’s morals. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘you needn’t be frightened.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘Old man, when I came round that other time, I thought that I’d been dead. It wasn’t like sleep at all. Or rest in peace. There was someone there all round me, who knew everything. Every girl I’d ever had. Even that young one who hadn’t understood. It was before your time. She lived a mile down the road, where Rachel lives now, but she and her family went away afterwards. Even the money I’d taken from mother. I don’t call that stealing. It’s in the family. I never had a chance to explain. Even the thoughts I’d had. A man can’t help his thoughts.’
‘A nightmare,’ I said.
‘Yes, it must have been a dream, mustn’t it? The sort of dream people do get when they are ill. And I saw what was coming to me too. I can’t bear being hurt. It wasn’t fair. And I wanted to faint and I couldn’t, because I was dead.’
‘In the dream,’ I said. His fear made me nervous. ‘In the dream,’ I said again.
‘Yes, it must have been a dream – mustn’t it? – because I woke up. The curious thing was I felt quite well and strong. I got up and stood in the road, and a little farther down, kicking up the dust, was a small crowd, going off with a man – the doctor who had stopped them burying me.’
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Old man,’ he said, ‘suppose it was true. Suppose I had been dead. I believed it then, you know, and so did my mother. But you can’t trust her. I went straight for a couple of years. I thought it might be a sort of second chance. Then things got fogged and somehow . . . It didn’t seem really possible. It’s not possible. Of course it’s not possible. You know it isn’t, don’t you?’
‘Why, no,’ I said. ‘Miracles of that sort don’t happen nowadays. And anyway, they aren’t likely to happen to you, are they? And here of all places under the sun.’
‘It would be so dreadful,’ he said, ‘if it had been true, and I’d got to go through all that again. You don’t know what things were going to happen to me in that dream. And they’d be worse now.’ He stopped and then, after a moment, he added as though he were stating a fact: ‘When one’s dead there’s no unconsciousness any more for ever.’
‘Of course it was a dream,’ I said, and squeezed his hand. He was frightening me with his fancies. I wished that he’d die quickly, so that I could get away from his sly, bloodshot and terrified eyes and see something cheerful and amusing, like the Rachel he had mentioned, who lived a mile down the road.
‘Why,’ I said, ‘if there had been a man about working miracles like that, we should have heard of others, you may be sure. Even poked away in this God-forsaken spot,’ I said.
‘There were some others,’ he said. ‘But the stories only went round among the poor, and they’ll believe anything, won’t they? There were lots of diseased and crippled they said he’d cured. And there was a man, who’d been born blind, and he came and just touched his eyelids and sight came to him. Those were all old wives’ tales, weren’t they?’ he asked me, stammering with fear, and then lying suddenly still and bunched up at the side of the bed.
I began to say, ‘Of course, they were all lies,’ but I stopped, because there was no need. All I could do was to go downstairs and tell his mother to come up and close his eyes. I wouldn’t have touched them for all the money in the world. It was a long time since I thought of that day, ages and ages ago, when I felt a cold touch like spittle on my lids and opening my eyes had seen a man like a tree surrounded by other trees walking away.
1929
THE END OF THE PARTY
PETER MORTON woke with a start to face the first light. Rain tapped against the glass. It was January the fifth.
He looked across a table on which a night-light had guttered into a pool of water, at the other bed. Francis Morton was still asleep, and Peter lay down again with his eyes on his brother. It amused him to imagine it was himself whom he watched, the same hair, the same eyes, the same lips and line of cheek. But the thought palled, and the mind went back to the fact which lent the day importance. It was the fifth of January. He could hardly believe a year had passed since Mrs Henne-Falcon had given her last children’s party.
Francis turned suddenly upon his back and threw an arm across his face, blocking his mouth. Peter’s heart began to beat fast, not with pleasure now but with uneasiness. He sat up and called across the table, ‘Wake up.’ Francis’s shoulders shook and he waved a clenched fist in the air, but his eyes remained closed. To Peter Morton the whole room seemed to darken, and he had the impression of a great bird swooping. He cried again, ‘Wake up,’ and once more there was silver light and the touch of rain on the windows. Francis rubbed his eyes. ‘Did you call out?’ he asked.
‘You are h
aving a bad dream,’ Peter said. Already experience had taught him how far their minds reflected each other. But he was the elder, by a matter of minutes, and that brief extra interval of light, while his brother still struggled in pain and darkness, had given him self-reliance and an instinct of protection towards the other who was afraid of so many things.
‘I dreamed that I was dead,’ Francis said.
‘What was it like?’ Peter asked.
‘I can’t remember,’ Francis said.
‘You dreamed of a big bird.’
‘Did I?’
The two lay silent in bed facing each other, the same green eyes, the same nose tilting at the tip, the same firm lips, and the same premature modelling of the chin. The fifth of January, Peter thought again, his mind drifting idly from the image of cakes to the prizes which might be won. Egg-and-spoon races, spearing apples in basins of water, blind man’s buff.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Francis said suddenly. ‘I suppose Joyce will be there . . . Mabel Warren.’ Hateful to him, the thought of a party shared with those two. They were older than he. Joyce was eleven and Mabel Warren thirteen. The long pigtails swung superciliously to a masculine stride. Their sex humiliated him, as they watched him fumble with his egg, from under lowered scornful lids. And last year . . . he turned his face away from Peter, his cheeks scarlet.
‘What’s the matter?’ Peter asked.
‘Oh, nothing. I don’t think I’m well. I’ve got a cold. I oughtn’t to go to the party.’ Peter was puzzled. ‘But Francis, is it a bad cold?’
‘It will be a bad cold if I go to the party. Perhaps I shall die.’
‘Then you mustn’t go,’ Peter said, prepared to solve all difficulties with one plain sentence, and Francis let his nerves relax, ready to leave everything to Peter. But though he was grateful he did not turn his face towards his brother. His cheeks still bore the badge of a shameful memory, of the game of hide and seek last year in the darkened house, and of how he had screamed when Mabel Warren put her hand suddenly upon his arm. He had not heard her coming. Girls were like that. Their shoes never squeaked. No boards whined under the tread. They slunk like cats on padded claws.
When the nurse came in with hot water Francis lay tranquil leaving everything to Peter. Peter said, ‘Nurse, Francis has got a cold.’
The tall starched woman laid the towels across the cans and said, without turning, ‘The washing won’t be back till tomorrow. You must lend him some of your handkerchiefs.’
‘But, Nurse,’ Peter asked, ‘hadn’t he better stay in bed?’
‘We’ll take him for a good walk this morning,’ the nurse said. ‘Wind’ll blow away the germs. Get up now, both of you,’ and she closed the door behind her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Peter said. ‘Why don’t you just stay in bed? I’ll tell mother you felt too ill to get up.’ But rebellion against destiny was not in Francis’s power. If he stayed in bed they would come up and tap his chest and put a thermometer in his mouth and look at his tongue, and they would discover he was malingering. It was true he felt ill, a sick empty sensation in his stomach and a rapidly beating heart, but he knew the cause was only fear, fear of the party, fear of being made to hide by himself in the dark, uncompanioned by Peter and with no nightlight to make a blessed breach.
‘No, I’ll get up,’ he said, and then with sudden desperation, ‘But I won’t go to Mrs Henne-Falcon’s party. I swear on the Bible I won’t.’ Now surely all would be well, he thought. God would not allow him to break so solemn an oath. He would show him a way. There was all the morning before him and all the afternoon until four o’clock. No need to worry when the grass was still crisp with the early frost. Anything might happen. He might cut himself or break his leg or really catch a bad cold. God would manage somehow.
He had such confidence in God that when at breakfast his mother said, ‘I hear you have a cold, Francis,’ he made light of it. ‘We should have heard more about it,’ his mother said with irony, ‘if there was not a party this evening,’ and Francis smiled, amazed and daunted by her ignorance of him. His happiness would have lasted longer if, out for a walk that morning, he had not met Joyce. He was alone with his nurse, for Peter had leave to finish a rabbit-hutch in the woodshed. If Peter had been there he would have cared less; the nurse was Peter’s nurse also, but now it was as though she were employed only for his sake, because he could not be trusted to go for a walk alone. Joyce was only two years older and she was by herself.
She came striding towards them, pigtails flapping. She glanced scornfully at Francis and spoke with ostentation to the nurse. ‘Hello, Nurse. Are you bringing Francis to the party this evening? Mabel and I are coming.’ And she was off again down the street in the direction of Mabel Warren’s home, consciously alone and self-sufficient in the long empty road. ‘Such a nice girl,’ the nurse said. But Francis was silent, feeling again the jump-jump of his heart, realizing how soon the hour of the party would arrive. God had done nothing for him, and the minutes flew.
They flew too quickly to plan any evasion, or even to prepare his heart for the coming ordeal. Panic nearly overcame him when, all unready, he found himself standing on the doorstep, with coat-collar turned up against a cold wind, and the nurse’s electric torch making a short trail through the darkness. Behind him were the lights of the hall and the sound of a servant laying the table for dinner, which his mother and father would eat alone. He was nearly overcome by the desire to run back into the house and call out to his mother that he would not go to the party, that he dared not go. They could not make him go. He could almost hear himself saying those final words, breaking down for ever the barrier of ignorance which saved his mind from his parents’ knowledge. ‘I’m afraid of going. I won’t go. I daren’t go. They’ll make me hide in the dark, and I’m afraid of the dark. I’ll scream and scream and scream.’ He could see the expression of amazement on his mother’s face, and then the cold confidence of a grown-up’s retort.
‘Don’t be silly. You must go. We’ve accepted Mrs Henne-Falcon’s invitation.’ But they couldn’t make him go; hesitating on the doorstep while the nurse’s feet crunched across the frost-covered grass to the gate, he knew that. He would answer: ‘You can say I’m ill. I won’t go. I’m afraid of the dark.’ And his mother: ‘Don’t be silly. You know there’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark.’ But he knew the falsity of that reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it. But they couldn’t make him go to the party. ‘I’ll scream. I’ll scream.’
‘Francis, come along.’ He heard the nurse’s voice across the dimly phosphorescent lawn and saw the yellow circle of her torch wheel from tree to shrub. ‘I’m coming,’ he called with despair; he couldn’t bring himself to lay bare his last secrets and end reserve between his mother and himself, for there was still in the last resort a further appeal possible to Mrs Henne-Falcon. He comforted himself with that, as he advanced steadily across the hall, very small, towards her enormous bulk. His heart beat unevenly, but he had control now over his voice, as he said with meticulous accent, ‘Good evening, Mrs Henne-Falcon. It was very good of you to ask me to your party.’ With his strained face lifted towards the curve of her breasts, and his polite set speech, he was like an old withered man. As a twin he was in many ways an only child. To address Peter was to speak to his own image in a mirror, an image a little altered by a flaw in the glass, so as to throw back less a likeness of what he was than of what he wished to be, what he would be without his unreasoning fear of darkness, footsteps of strangers, the flight of bats in dusk-filled gardens.
‘Sweet child,’ said Mrs Henne-Falcon absent-mindedly, before, with a wave of her arms, as though the children were a flock of chickens, she whirled them into her set programme of entertainments: egg-and-spoon races, three-legged races, the spearing of apples, games which held for Francis nothing worse than humiliation. And in the frequent intervals when nothing was required of him and he coul
d stand alone in corners as far removed as possible from Mabel Warren’s scornful gaze, he was able to plan how he might avoid the approaching terror of the dark. He knew there was nothing to fear until after tea, and not until he was sitting down in a pool of yellow radiance cast by the ten candles on Colin Henne-Falcon’s birthday cake did he become fully conscious of the imminence of what he feared. He heard Joyce’s high voice down the table, ‘After tea we are going to play hide and seek in the dark.’
‘Oh, no,’ Peter said, watching Francis’s troubled face, ‘don’t let’s. We play that every year.’
‘But it’s in the programme,’ cried Mabel Warren. ‘I saw it myself. I looked over Mrs Henne-Falcon’s shoulder. Five o’clock tea. A quarter to six to half past, hide and seek in the dark. It’s all written down in the programme.’
Peter did not argue, for if hide and seek had been inserted in Mrs Henne-Falcon’s programme, nothing which he could say would avert it. He asked for another piece of birthday cake and sipped his tea slowly. Perhaps it might be possible to delay the game for a quarter of an hour, allow Francis at least a few extra minutes to form a plan, but even in that Peter failed, for children were already leaving the table in twos and threes. It was his third failure, and again he saw a great bird darken his brother’s face with its wings. But he upbraided himself silently for his folly, and finished his cake encouraged by the memory of that adult refrain, ‘There’s nothing to fear in the dark.’ The last to leave the table, the brothers came together to the hall to meet the mustering and impatient eyes of Mrs Henne-Falcon.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘we will play hide and seek in the dark.’
Peter watched his brother and saw the lips tighten. Francis, he knew, had feared this moment from the beginning of the party, had tried to meet it with courage and had abandoned the attempt. He must have prayed for cunning to evade the game, which was now welcomed with cries of excitement by all the other children. ‘Oh, do let’s.’ ‘We must pick sides.’ ‘Is any of the house out of bounds?’ ‘Where shall home be?’
Twenty-One Stories Page 20