The Hurly Burly and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

“Tell me this,” said the poor wretch to a lady helper. “If I get to heaven at last, shall I have a good pair of legs?”

  “Oh yes,” she answered with gay conviction. “You will have a good pair of legs. You will be hale and hearty and clean and you’ll live for ten thousand years.”

  “And,” said the poor shoemaker, cogitating wistfully, “will there be any gals up there?”

  The devout young monk spoke on, hopefully, consolingly, but Febery’s life was ebbing away in dreams of heaths with windmills on them, and green marshes with blue brooks and old wooden bridges; of a day when a small boy rode on a black pony into market with a basket of plums or something, and his father had taken him to a theatre.

  Polly Oliver (1935)

  Olive and Camilla

  THEY HAD LIVED AND TRAVELLED TOGETHER FOR twenty years, and this is a part of their history: not much, but all that matters. Ever since reaching marriageable age they had been together, and so neither had married, though Olive had had her two or three occasions of perilous inducement. Being women, they were critical of each other, inseparably critical; being spinsters, they were huffy, tender, sullen, and demure and had quarrelled with each other ten thousand times in a hundred different places during their “wanderings up and down Europe.” That was the phrase Camilla used in relating their maidenly Odyssey, which had comprised a multitude of sojourns in the pensions of Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and France. They quarrelled in Naples and repented in Rome; exploded in anger at Arles, were embittered at Interlaken, parted for ever at Lake Garda, Taormina, and Bruges; but running water never fouls, they had never really been apart, not anywhere. Olive was like that, and so was her friend; such natures could nowise be changed. Camilla Hobbs, slight and prim, had a tiny tinkling mind that tinkled all day long; she was all things to little nothings. The other, Olive Sharples, the portly one, had a mind like a cuckoo-clock; something came out and cried “Cuckoo” now and again, quite sharply, and was done with it. They were moulded thus, one supposes, by the hand of Providence; it could be neither evaded nor altered, it could not even be mitigated, for in Camilla’s prim mind and manner there was a prim deprecation of Olive’s boorish nature, and for her part Olive resented Camilla’s assumption of a superior disposition. Saving a precious month or two in Olive’s favour they were both now of a sad age, an age when the path of years slopes downwards to a yawning inexplicable gulf.

  “Just fancy!” Camilla said on her forty-fifth birthday—they were at Chamonix then—“We are ninety between us!”

  Olive glowered at her friend, though a couple of months really is nothing. “When I am fifty,” she declared, “I shall kill myself.”

  “But why?” Camilla was so interested.

  “God, I don’t know!” returned Olive.

  Camilla brightly brooded for a few moments. “You’ll find it very hard to commit suicide; it’s not easy, you know, not at all. I’ve heard time and time again that it’s most difficult . . .”

  “Pooh!” snorted Olive.

  “But I tell you! I tell you I knew a cook at Leamington who swallowed ground glass in her porridge, pounds and pounds, and nothing came of it.”

  “Pooh!” Olive was contemptuous. “Never say die.”

  “Well, that’s just what people say who can’t do it!”

  The stream of their companionship was far from being a rill of peaceful water, but it flowed, more and more like a cataract it flowed, and was like to flow on as it had for those twenty years. Otherwise they were friendless! Olive had had enough money to do as she modestly liked, for though she was impulsive her desires were frugal, but Camilla had had nothing except a grandmother. In the beginning of their friendship Olive had carried the penurious Camilla off to Paris, where they mildly studied art and ardently pursued the practice of water-colour painting. Olive, it might be said, transacted doorways and alleys, very shadowy and grim, but otherwise quite nice; and Camilla did streams with bending willow and cow on bank, really sweet. In a year or two Camilla’s grandmother died of dropsy and left her a fortune, much larger than Olive’s, in bank stock, insurance stock, distillery, coal—oh, a mass of money! And when something tragical happened to half of Olive’s property—it was in salt shares or jute shares, such unstable friable material—it became the little fluttering Camilla’s joy to play the fairy godmother in her turn. So there they were in a bondage less sentimental than appeared, but more sentimental than was known.

  They returned to England for George V’s coronation. In the train from Chamonix a siphon of soda-water that Camilla imported into the carriage—it was an inexplicable thing, that bottle of soda-water, as Olive said after the catastrophe: God alone knew why she had bought it—Camilla’s siphon, what with the jolting of the train and its own gasobility, burst on the rack. Just burst! A handsome young Frenchwoman travelling in their compartment was almost convulsed with mirth, but Olive, sitting just below the bottle, was drenched, she declared, to the midriff. Camilla lightly deprecated the coarseness of the expression. How could she help it if a bottle took it into its head to burst like that! In abrupt savage tones Olive merely repeated that she was soaked to the midriff, and to Camilla’s horror she began to divest herself of some of her clothing. Camilla rushed to the windows, pulled down the blinds, and locked the corridor door. The young Frenchwoman sat smiling while Olive removed her corsets and her wetted linen; Camilla rummaged so feverishly in Olive’s suitcase that the compartment began to look as if arranged for a jumble sale; there were garments and furbelows strewn everywhere. But at last Olive completed her toilet, the train stopped at a station, the young Frenchwoman got out. Later in the day, when they were nearing Paris, Olive’s corsets could not be found.

  “What did you do with them?” Olive asked Camilla.

  “But I don’t think I touched them, Olive. After you took them off I did not see them again. Where do you think you put them? Can’t you remember?”

  She helped Olive unpack the suitcase, but the stays were not there. And she helped Olive to repack.

  “What am I to do?” asked Olive.

  Camilla firmly declared that the young Frenchwoman who had travelled with them in the morning must have stolen them.

  “What for?” asked Olive.

  “Well, what do people steal things for?” There was an air of pellucid reason in Camilla’s question, but Olive was scornful.

  “Corsets!” she exclaimed.

  “I knew a cripple once,” declared Olive, “who stole an ear-trumpet.”

  “That French girl wasn’t a cripple.”

  “No,” said Camilla, “but she was married—at least, she wore a wedding ring. She looked as deep as the sea. I am positive she was up to no good.”

  “Bosh!” said Olive. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “Well, you should not throw your things about as you do.”

  “Soda-water,” snapped Olive, with ferocious dignity, “is no place for a railway carriage.”

  “You mean—?” asked Camilla with the darling sweetness of a maid of twenty.

  “I mean just what I say.”

  “Oh no, you don’t,” purred the triumphant one; and she repeated Olive’s topsy-turvy phrase. “Ha, ha, that’s what you said.”

  “I did not! Camilla, why are you such a liar? You know it annoys me.”

  “But I tell you, Olive—”

  “I did not! It’s absurd. You’re a fool.”

  Well, they got to England and in a few days it began to appear to them as the most lovely country they had ever seen. It was not only that, it was their homeland. Why have we stayed away so long? Why did we not come back before? It was so marvellously much better than anything else in the world, they were sure of that. So much better, too, than their youthful recollection of it, so much improved; and the cleanness! Why did we never come back? Why have we stayed away so long? They did not know; it was astonishing to find your homeland so lovely. Both felt that they could not bear to leave England again; they would settle down and bui
ld a house, it was time; their joint age was ninety! But, alas, it was difficult, it was impossible, to dovetail their idea of a house into one agreeable abode.

  “I want,” said Olive Sharples, “just an English country cottage with a few conveniences. That’s all I can afford and all I want.”

  So she bought an acre of land at the foot of a green hill in the Chilterns and gave orders for the erection of the house of her dreams. Truly it was a charming spot, pasture and park and glebe and spinney and stream, deliciously remote, quite half a mile from any village, and only to be reached by a mere lane. No sooner had her friend made this decision than Camilla too bought land there, half a dozen acres adjoining Olive’s, and began to build the house of her dreams, a roomy house with a loggia and a balcony, planting her land with fruit trees. The two houses were built close together, by the same men, and Camilla could call out greetings to Olive from her bedroom window before Olive was up in the morning, and Olive could hear her—though she did not always reply. Had Olive suffered herself to peer steadily into her secret thoughts in order to discover her present feeling about Camilla, she would have been perplexed; she might even have been ashamed, but for the comfort of old acquaintance such telescopic introspection was denied her. The new cottage brought her felicity, halcyon days; even her bedroom contented her, so small and clean and bare it was. Beyond bed, washing-stand, mirror, and rug there was almost nothing, and yet she felt that if she were not exceedingly careful she would break something. The ceiling was virgin white, the walls the colour of butter, the floor the colour of chocolate. The grate had never had a fire in it; not a shovelful of ashes had ever been taken from it, and, please God—so it seemed to indicate—never would be. But the bed was soft and reposeful. Oh, heavenly sleep!

  The two friends dwelt thus in isolation; there they were, perhaps this was happiness. The isolation was tempered by the usual rural society, a squire who drank, a magistrate who was mad, and a lime-burner whose daughters had been to college and swore like seamen. There was the agreeable Mr. Kippax, a retired fell-monger, in whom Camilla divined a desire to wed somebody—Olive perhaps. He was sixty and played on the violoncello. Often Olive accompanied him on Camilla’s grand piano. Crump, crump, he would go; and primp, primp, Olive would reply. He was a serious man, and once when they were alone he asked Olive why she was always so sad.

  “I don’t know. Am I?”

  “Surely,” he said, grinning, running his fingers through his long grey hair. “Why are you?”

  And Olive thought and thought. “I suppose I want impossible things.”

  “Such as—?” he interrogated.

  “I do not know. I only know that I shall never find them.”

  Then there were the vicarage people, a young vicar with a passionate complexion who had once been an actor and was now something of an invalid, having had a number of his ribs removed for some unpleasant purpose; charming Mrs. Vicar and a tiny baby. Oh, and Mrs. Lassiter, the wife of a sea captain far away on the seas; yet she was content, and so by inference was the sea captain, for he never came home. There was a dearth of colour in her cheeks, it had crowded into her lips, her hair, her eyes. So young, so beautiful, so trite, there was a fragrant imbecility about her.

  Olive and Camilla seldom went out together: the possession of a house is often as much of a judgment as a joy, and as full of ardours as of raptures. Gardens, servants, and tradespeople were not automata that behaved like eight-day clocks, by no means. Olive had an eight-day clock, a small competent little thing; it had to be small to suit her room, but Camilla had three—three eight-day clocks. And on the top of the one in the drawing-room—and really Camilla’s house seemed a positive little mansion, all crystal and mirror and white pillars and soft carpets, but it wasn’t a mansion any more than Olive’s was a cottage—well, on the mantelpiece of the drawing-room, on top of Camilla’s largest eight-day clock, there stood the bronze image of a dear belligerent little lion copied in miniature from a Roman antique. The most adorable creature it was, looking as if it were about to mew, for it was no bigger than a kitten although a grown-up lion with a mane and an expression of annoyance as if it had been insulted by an ox—a toy ox. The sweep of its tail was august; the pads of its feet were beautiful crumpled cushions, with claws (like the hooks of a tiny ship) laid on the cushions. Simply ecstatic with anger, most adorable, and Olive loved it as it raged there on Camilla’s eight-day clock. But clocks are not like servants. No servant would stay there for long, the place was so lonely, they said, dreadful! And in wet weather the surroundings and approach—there was only a green lane, and half a mile of that—were so muddy, dreadful mud; and when the moon was gone everything was steeped in darkness, and that was dreadful too! As neither Camilla nor Olive could mitigate these natural but unpleasing features—they were, of course, the gifts of Providence—the two ladies, Camilla at any rate, suffered from an ever recurrent domestic Hail and Farewell. What, Camilla would inquire, did the servants want? There was the village, barely a mile away; if you climbed the hill you could see it spendidly, a fine meek little village; the woods, the hills, the fields, positively thrust their greenness upon it, bathed it as if in a prism—so that the brown chimney-pots looked red and the yellow ones blue. And the church was new, or so nearly new that you might call it a good second-hand; it was made of brown bricks. Although it had no tower, or even what you might call a belfry, it had got a little square fat chimney over the front gable with a cross of yellow bricks worked into the face of the chimney, while just below that was a bell cupboard stuffed with sparrows’ nests. And there were unusual advantages in the village—watercress, for instance. But Camilla’s servants came and went, only Olive’s Quincy Pugh remained. She was a dark young woman with a white amiable face, amiable curves to her body, the elixir of amiability in her blood, and it was clear to Camilla that she only remained because of Luke Feedy. He was the gardener, chiefly employed by Camilla, but he also undertook the work of Olive’s plot. Unfortunately Olive’s portion was situated immediately under the hill and, fence it how they would, the rabbits always burrowed in and stole Olive’s vegetables. They never seemed to attack Camilla’s more abundant acreage.

  Close beside their houses there was a public footway, but seldom used, leading up into the hills. Solemn steep hills they were, covered with long fawn-hued grass that was never cropped or grazed, and dotted with thousands of pert little juniper bushes, very dark, and a few whitebeam trees whose foliage when tossed by the wind shook on the hillside like bushes of entangled stars. Half-way up the hill path was a bulging bank that tempted climbers to rest, and here, all unknown to Camilla, Olive caused an iron bench to be fixed so that tired persons could recline in comfort and view the grand country that rolled away before them. Even at midsummer it was cool on that height, just as in winter it took the sunbeams warmly. The air roving through the long fawn-hued grass had a soft caressing movement. Darkly green at the foot of the hill began the trees and hedges that diminished in the pastoral infinity of the vale, farther and farther yet, so very far and wide. At times Olive would sit on her iron bench in clear sunlight and watch a shower swilling over half a dozen towns while beyond them, seen through the inundating curtain, very remote indeed lay the last hills of all, brightly glowing and contented. Often Olive would climb to her high seat and bask in the delight, but soon Camilla discovered that the bench was the public gift of Olive. Thereupon lower down the hill Camilla caused a splendid ornate bench of teak with a foot-rest to be installed in a jolly nook surrounded by tall juniper bushes like cypresses, and she planted three or four trailing roses thereby. Whenever Camilla had visitors she would take them up the hill to sit on her splendid bench; even Olive’s visitors preferred Camilla’s bench and remarked upon its superior charm. So much more handsome it was, and yet Olive could not bear to sit there at all, never alone. And soon she gave up going even to the iron one.

  Thus they lived in their rather solitary houses, supporting the infirmities of the domestic spirit by
mutual commiseration, and coming to date occasions by the names of those servants—Georgina, Rose, Elizabeth, Sue—whoever happened to be with them when such and such an event occurred. These were not remarkable in any way. The name of Emma Tooting, for instance, only recalled a catastrophe to the parrot. One day she had actually shut the cockatoo—it was a stupid bird, always like a parson nosing about in places where it was not wanted—she had accidentally shut the cockatoo in the oven. The fire had not long been lit, the oven was not hot, Emma Tooting was brushing it out, the cockatoo was watching. Emma Tooting was called away for a few moments by the baker in the yard, came back, saw the door open, slammed it to with her foot, pulled out blower, went upstairs to make bed, came down later to make fire, heard most horrible noises in kitchen, couldn’t tell where, didn’t know they came from the oven, thought it was the devil, swooned straight away—and the cockatoo was baked. The whole thing completely unnerved Emma Tooting and she gave notice. Such a good cook, too. Mrs. Lassiter and the lime-burner—that was a mysterious business—were thought to have been imprudent in Minnie Hopplecock’s time; at any rate, suspicion was giddily engendered then.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” Camilla had declared, “if they were all the way, myself. Of course, I don’t know, but it would not surprise me one bit. You see, we’ve only instinct to go upon, suspicion, but what else has anyone ever to go upon in such matters? She is so deep, she’s deep as the sea; and as for men—! No, I’ve only my intuitions, but they are sufficient, otherwise what is the use of an intuition? And what is the good of shutting your eyes to the plain facts of life?”

  “But why him?” inquired Olive brusquely.

  “I suspect him, Olive.” Camilla, calmly adjusting a hair-slide, peered at her yellow carpet, which had a design in it, a hundred times repeated, of a spool of cord in red and a shuttlecock in blue. “I suspect him, just as I suspect the man who quotes Plato to me.”