When he came to the edge of the town he found a group of men talking excitedly under a lamppost. One said: ‘About eight o’clock it happened, didn’t it?’ The other said: ‘Yes.’ A third said: ‘Ay, mad as a hatter. “Touch me,” he says, “and I’ll shout. I’ll shout you into a fit, the whole blasted police force of you. I’ll shout you mad.” And the inspector says: “Now, Crossley, put your hands up, we’ve got you cornered at last.” “One last chance,” says he. “Go and leave me or I’ll shout you stiff and dead.”’
Richard had stopped to listen. ‘And what happened to Crossley then?’ he said. ‘And what did the woman say?’
‘“For Christ’s sake,” she said to the inspector, “go away or he’ll kill you.”’
‘And did he shout?’
‘He didn’t shout. He screwed up his face for a moment and drew in his breath. A’mighty, I’ve never seen such a ghastly looking face in my life. I had to take three or four brandies afterwards. And the inspector he drops the revolver and it goes off; but nobody hit. Then suddenly a change comes over this man Crossley. He claps his hands to his side and again to his heart, and his face goes smooth and dead again. Then he begins to laugh and dance and cut capers. And the woman stares and can’t believe her eyes and the police lead him off. If he was mad before, he was just harmless dotty now; and they had no trouble with him. He’s been taken off in the ambulance to the Royal West County Asylum.’
So Richard went home to Rachel and told her everything and she told him everything, though there was not much to tell. She had not fallen in love with Charles, she said; she was only teasing Richard and she had never said anything or heard Charles say anything in the least like what he told her; it was part of his dream. She loved him always and only him, for all his faults; which she went through – his stinginess, his talkativeness, his untidiness. Charles and she had eaten a quiet supper, and she did think it had been bad of Richard to rush off without a word of explanation and stay away for three hours like that. Charles might have murdered her. He did start pulling her about a bit, in fun, wanting her to dance with him, and then the knock came on the door, and the inspector shouted: ‘Walter Charles Crossley, in the name of the King, I arrest you for the murder of George Grant, Harry Grant, and Ada Coleman at Sydney, Australia.’ Then Charles had gone absolutely mad. He had pulled out a shoe buckle and said to it: ‘Hold her for me.’ And then he had told the police to go away or he’d shout them dead. After that he made a dreadful face at them and went to pieces altogether. ‘He was rather a nice man; I liked his face so much and feel so sorry for him.’
‘Did you like that story?’ asked Crossley.
‘Yes,’ said I, busy scoring, ‘a Milesian tale of the best. Lucius Apuleius, I congratulate you.’
Crossley turned to me with a troubled face and hands clenched trembling. ‘Every word of it is true,’ he said. ‘Crossley’s soul was cracked in four pieces and I’m a madman. Oh, I don’t blame Richard and Rachel. They are a pleasant, loving pair of fools and I’ve never wished them harm; they often visit me here. In any case, now that my soul lies broken in pieces, my powers are gone. Only one thing remains to me,’ he said, ‘and that is the shout.’
I had been so busy scoring and listening to the story at the same time that I had not noticed the immense bank of black cloud that swam up until it spread across the sun and darkened the whole sky. Warm drops of rain fell: a flash of lightning dazzled us and with it came a smashing clap of thunder.
In a moment all was confusion. Down came a drenching rain, the cricketers dashed for cover, the lunatics began to scream, bellow, and fight. One tall young man, the same B.C. Brown who had once played for Hants, pulled all his clothes off and ran about stark naked. Outside the scoring box an old man with a beard began to pray to the thunder: ‘Bah! Bah! Bah!’
Crossley’s eyes twitched proudly. ‘Yes,’ said he, pointing to the sky, ‘that’s the sort of shout it is; that’s the effect it has; but I can do better than that.’ Then his face fell suddenly and became childishly unhappy and anxious. ‘Oh dear God,’ he said, ‘he’ll shout at me again, Crossley will. He’ll freeze my marrow.’
The rain was rattling on the tin roof so that I could hardly hear him. Another flash, another clap of thunder even louder than the first. ‘But that’s only the second degree,’ he shouted in my ear; ‘it’s the first that kills.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand?’ He smiled foolishly. ‘I’m Richard now, and Crossley will kill me.’
The naked man was running about brandishing a cricket stump in either hand and screaming: an ugly sight. ‘Bah! Bah! Bah!’ prayed the old man, the rain spouting down his back from his uptilted hat.
‘Nonsense,’ said I, ‘be a man, remember you’re Crossley. You’re a match for a dozen Richards. You played a game and lost, because Richard had the luck; but you still have the shout.’
I was feeling rather mad myself. Then the Asylum doctor rushed into the scoring box, his flannels streaming wet, still wearing pads and batting gloves, his glasses gone; he had heard our voices raised, and tore Crossley’s hands from mine. ‘To your dormitory at once, Crossley!’ he ordered.
‘I’ll not go,’ said Crossley, proud again, ‘you miserable Snake and Apple Pie Man!’
The doctor seized him by his coat and tried to hustle him out.
Crossley flung him off, his eyes blazing with madness. ‘Get out,’ he said, ‘and leave me alone here or I’ll shout. Do you hear? I’ll shout. I’ll kill the whole damn lot of you. I’ll shout the Asylum down. I’ll wither the grass. I’ll shout.’ His face was distorted in terror. A red spot appeared on either cheek bone and spread over his face.
I put my fingers to my ears and ran out of the scoring box. I had run perhaps twenty yards, when an indescribable pang of fire spun me about and left me dazed and numbed. I escaped death somehow; I suppose that I am lucky, like the Richard of the story. But the lightning struck Crossley and the doctor dead.
Crossley’s body was found rigid, the doctor’s was crouched in a corner, his hands to his ears. Nobody could understand this because death had been instantaneous, and the doctor was not a man to stop his ears against thunder.
It makes a rather unsatisfactory end to the story to say that Rachel and Richard were the friends with whom I was staying – Crossley had described them most accurately – but that when I told them that a man called Charles Crossley had been struck at the same time as their friend the doctor, they seemed to take Crossley’s death casually by comparison with his. Richard looked blank; Rachel said: ‘Crossley? I think that was the man who called himself the Australian Illusionist and gave that wonderful conjuring show the other day. He had practically no apparatus but a black silk handkerchief. I liked his face so much. Oh, and Richard didn’t like it at all.’
‘No, I couldn’t stand the way he looked at you all the time,’ Richard said.
Avocado Pears
TOM’S FATHER WAS a respectable chemist in Birmingham, an old-style Christian Socialist, and Tom, who went as day-boy to a local grammar-school and did brilliantly and came up to Oxford with a scholarship and had no friends there except among the serious Labour crowd at Ruskin College, was surprisingly ignorant of certain perverse but familiar facts of life. One day he came to borrow my French dictionary. I asked him what he wanted to look up. ‘Just the name of a fruit,’ he said carelessly. But someone else had borrowed the dictionary. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. Then he told me the story.
‘A month ago I was in Paris for a week-end, and I was wandering about vaguely looking at things the evening I arrived – I had never been in Paris before. I walked steadily in one direction until I came to a very poor quarter – I don’t know where, but it was somewhere in the northern part. The streets were narrow and full of garbage. After a time I came on two policemen: they were busy kicking a man who was lying in the gutter. He had a pretty long wound in his scalp and looked bad; certainly he hadn’t any fight left in him. I ran up and took a flying
kick at the bigger of the policemen, from behind, and sent him sprawling, and then I took a standing kick at the other and sent him sprawling, too. They were lovely kicks; modelled on those long shots at goal by Dorrell of “The Villa”. The policemen saw I was angry so they ran away.
‘I wasn’t wearing a hat – I never do – and wore a muffler round my neck so the man’s friends came up from where they had been hiding in a doorway – they were Communists – and began embracing me and slapping me on the back. When I answered in English they were surprised at first, but said: “Vous êtes bon camarade, tout de même.” They explained that they hadn’t attacked the policemen, because they carried revolvers and generally weren’t afraid to use them. This was all right for me. So we went to a pub and they gave me coffee – I don’t drink, as you know. The brother of the man whom I had rescued came up later. He was a printer’s foreman, he told me, and could talk a little English. He said how grateful he was and offered to show me the sights of Paris. First he took me round the slum parts – my God ! it was a filthy place. It even beat what I saw while I was helping with that survey of housing conditions in Glasgow for the Labour Research Bureau. “Well, now let’s look at the prettier part,” I said. “I’ll find the money.” The printer laughed and said that we must disguise ourselves first as good bourgeois. So I went back to my hotel and changed and met him later over at Montmartre. He was a big hefty fellow and looked magnificent; he had borrowed a dinner jacket from another brother who was a waiter; and for a joke he had put a ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his button-hole to make it look more realistic.
‘We went to a show called La Revue Ultra-Nue, and it was; I don’t care for that sort of thing so we didn’t stay there long. Then he took me to see a fashionable brothel. His sister was the concierge there, so there was no gate-money to pay and we had some champagne with the women who happened to be disengaged; the printer explained that I was not a customer but a serious young man studying social conditions. The women were all Communists, so we got on well together; they were quite simple about their profession: “Il faut vivre,” they said, shrugging, and one of them who was an Italian – I talk a little Italian, you know – told me what their ambitions were. They would save up for five or six years until they had put by quite a decent sum and could retire. It was a house frequented by Americans, and Madame la Propriétaire, though a Royalist, was a decent sort, and didn’t take too high a percentage of their earnings. So when they had put by so-and-so many francs – It came to about £500 I reckoned – they would advertise for a husband in the matrimonial papers: “Jeune Fille Avec Tâche Désire Mari Affectueux,” and be sure to find a good one. “Avec Tâche” means “slightly soiled”. “And after all,” said the Italian girl, “this is the best possible school to learn ‘comment plaire à son mari.’ Men are all the same.”
‘Then we went to a wrestling match, and there were two enormously fat practically naked men rolling about on the floor. They were carefully greased, so that they couldn’t get a decent hold on each other, but at last one did and began slowly breaking the other fellow’s arm. I couldn’t bear to wait for the crack! so we went out. The filthy look on the faces of the young bloods who were watching !
‘After that we watched the crowd coming out of the Opéra, and the printer spat and muttered Assassins! There was one absolute caricature-group of four men with opera-hats, monocles and canes and I said: “Let’s follow them.” So we followed them to a swell restaurant; it was a dreadful place, all plush and mirrors and salon pictures of nymphs and satyrs. We sat in a corner and the printer ordered oysters and said something to the waiter: it was a Communist password or something because when I paid for the oysters with a twenty-franc note, I got twenty francs change.
‘Well, we sat there and I watched the four comics out of the corner of my eye while the printer told me all the ins and outs of Communism. Apparently he was an important official of the Party; I had noticed that his friends, though they called him Comrade, made it a sort of title. I wish I could have understood it all. He got excited and talked too fast. He told me he had been foreman of a munitions works during the war and sabotaged output for two or three years until he had been caught; then he had to disappear quickly into one of the Apache quarters of Paris where army-deserters lived in a sort of fortress, and the police didn’t dare round them up because they knew that they had bombs and rifles and even machine-guns. At least, that’s what I made out of the story.
‘While we were talking I saw a chap about my own age – no, he was a bit younger, say about nineteen – looking in at the food in the window. He was a good-looking kid, but he seemed hungry. I was listening to the printer who had his back to the window, and waiting for him to finish the story: then I thought I’d invite the kid in to give him a meal. Well, I was surprised. The oldest-looking of the four comics, a fattish fellow with a falsetto voice, saw the kid, dashed out of the door and came back, pulling him in. He made him sit down at their table and called to the waiter to lay a place for him. The waiter laid a place, trying not to look furious, but I could see that he was: he was digging the fingers of his disengaged hand into the palm. The kid looked embarrassed but happy at the idea of something to eat. So this fattish fellow put him at his ease by introducing him. It was about an hour after the opera and these comics were half-tight. As he called their names in turn they pulled themselves up unsteadily, and said in a nasty sneering sort of voice: “À votre service, monsieur.” One was the Count of something and another the Marquis of something else, and the third was the nephew of the Minister of War. The fat fellow was the editor of one of the chief Royalist papers.
‘He ordered oysters for the kid, and the kid obviously didn’t want oysters: he wanted a big lump of meat and potatoes and cabbage and things. He ate the oysters in an awkward sort of way, trying not to look hungry: but first he ate the little bits of brown bread and butter that they serve with them. Then he wiped his mouth and thanked them. The fat fellow and the nephew of the War Minister were talking in Italian about the kid; I couldn’t make it out at all. It seemed quite mad to me. They got all soppy and talked about his beautiful eyes, and how strong his body was; they might have been a couple of grandmothers discussing their soldier grandson just going off with the draft for his military service. The Marquis and the Count were not interested in the kid. They were talking about women’s breasts, very seriously and intensely, as though they were in the corset business. They were making drawings on the table-cloth with the Count’s gold pencil; they had tried the Marquis’s fountain-pen first, but the ink ran too much.
‘The waiter passed and slipped a piece of paper into the printer’s hand. He read it, crumpled it up and stuffed it into his shoe. Then he stopped his story about that morning’s fight – I didn’t tell you that this was the first of May – in which he had half-killed one Royalist by hitting him on the head with another Royalist, because the Royalists had tried to spoil their parade, and began to pay attention to the other table.
‘The kid, having had his oysters, wanted to excuse himself, say goodnight and go off – probably to sleep in the Bois. He looked as though he needed sleep. But the fat fellow whom they called “Mon cher Grégoire” wouldn’t let him. He said that the little angel, meaning the kid, must have some dessert. I ought to have mentioned that they had already given him two or three glasses of old brandy and the kid was feeling a bit dizzy, by the look of him. The way he had eaten the brown bread and butter, he can’t have had much in his stomach to begin with. Mon cher Grégoire and the nephew of the War Minister had now changed places with the other two and were sitting next to the kid and gently detaining him, holding his arms in a sickly affectionate sort of way.
‘Grégoire called the waiter; the waiter looked angrier than ever, but obviously didn’t want to lose his job by refusing to do what he was told. Grégoire asked him what fruit he had, and he said: “Every sort, sir.” “Good,” said Grégoire, “and now what angel’s food would my little Cupid like to eat?” (The printe
r translated this for me; I didn’t recognize the word cupidon.) Would he have Guava or Persimmon or Pampelmousse? The kid shook his head.
‘“Alors une pêche?”
‘“Merci, monsieur!”
‘“Alors, ananas?”
‘“Merci, merci, monsieur!”
‘“Alors, une poire d’Avocado?”
‘“Merci, merci, monsieur.”
‘The kid was almost in tears with embarrassment, gratitude mixed with a rising shame, even fear. The nephew of the War Minister had laid his sleek yellow head on the kid’s shoulder, and was quoting a bit of Racine or something. Grégoire filled the kid’s glass again, and said with some impatience that Monsieur Pierre – Pierre was the kid’s name – was remarkably fastidious about his dessert. He went on with the list of fruits – mandarins and medlars and mangoes and God knows what. Then the nephew got hold of Pierre’s hand and began admiring it, what strong, firm fingers, what a slender wrist and actually picked it up and began kissing it. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. He was probably the drunkest of the four. The Count and the Marquis were still discussing breasts, but in a very inconsequential way. Grégoire wasn’t so drunk, though.
‘Well, at last the kid shouted out in a hysterical but somehow proud way: “JE SUIS OUVRIER! AU DIABLE AVEC VOS POIRES D’AVOCADO!” He tried to get up, but couldn’t, because the nephew was clawing on to him and kissing his neck. But Grégoire did not seem in the least put out; he turned to the waiter and said: “Alors, garçon. De la merde pour ce monsieur.” Well, at that the printer picked up a carafe of water, and, walking over to Grégoire, broke it over his head. Then he detached the nephew, and jerked him backward on the floor, and grabbing the kid, pulled him out. He got him into a taxi that happened to pass, and off they went at full speed. The waiter had pretended to stop us, but had allowed me to push him over with a bang against a door. As soon as he saw the kid and the printer safe in the taxi he began to blow a police whistle. But, of course, the taxi got away. I had thrown a loaf of bread at the Marquis, which hit him on the cheek, and that made me feel good. As it happened, I had only a few hundred yards to walk to my hotel, so I escaped all right.
Complete Short Stories Page 4