The Hurly Burly and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

  Mr. Kippax that is—thought Olive. “But isn’t that what Plato’s for?” she asked.

  “I really don’t know what Plato is for, Olive; I have never read Plato; in fact I don’t read him at all; I can’t read him with enjoyment. Poetry, now, is a thing I can enjoy—like a bath—but I can’t talk about it. Can you? I never talk about the things that are precious to me; it’s natural to be reserved and secretive. I don’t blame Maude Lassiter for that; I don’t blame her at all, but she’ll be lucky if she gets out of this with a whole skin: it will only be by the skin of her teeth.”

  “I’d always be content,” Olive said, “if I could have the skin of my teeth for a means of escape.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Camilla, “I’m entirely with you. Oh, yes.”

  Among gardeners Luke Feedy was certainly the pearl. He had come from far away, a man of thirty or thirty-five, without a wife or a home in the world, and now he lodged in the village at Mrs. Thrupcott’s cottage; the thatch of her roof was the colour of shag tobacco; her husband cut your hair in his vegetable garden for twopence a time. Luke was tall and powerful, fair and red. All the gardening was done by him, both Olive’s and Camilla’s, and all the odd and difficult jobs from firewood down to the dynamo for electric light that coughed in Camilla’s shed. Bluff but comely, a pleasant man, a very conversational man, and a very attractable man; the maids were always uncommon friendly to him. And so even was Olive, Camilla observed, for she had actually bought him a gun to keep the rabbits out of the garden. Of course a gun was no use for that—Luke said so—yet, morning or evening, Olive would perambulate with the gun, inside or outside the gardens, while Luke Feedy taught her the use of it, until one October day, when it was drawing on to evening—bang!—Olive had killed a rabbit. Camilla had rushed to her balcony. “What is it?” she cried in alarm, for the gun had not often been fired before and the explosion was terrifying. Fifty yards away, with her back towards her, Olive in short black fur jacket, red skirt, and the Cossack boots she wore, was standing quite still holding the gun across her breast. The gardener stalked towards a bush at the foot of the hill, picked up a limp contorted bundle by its long ears, and brought it back to Olive. She had no hat on, her hair was ruffled, her face had gone white. The gardener held up the rabbit, a small soft thing, dead, but its eyes still stared, and its forefeet drooped in a gesture that seemed to beseech pity. Olive swayed away, the hills began to twirl, the house turned upside down, the gun fell from her hands. “Hullo!” cried Luke Feedy, catching the swooning woman against his shoulder. Camilla saw it all and flew to their aid, but by the time she had got down to the garden Feedy was there too, carrying Olive to her own door. Quincy ran for a glass of water, Camilla petted her, and soon all was well. The gardener stood in the room holding his hat against his chest with both hands. A huge fellow he looked in Olive’s small apartment. He wore breeches and leggings and a grey shirt with the sleeves uprolled, a pleasant comely man, very powerful, his voice seemed to excite a quiver in the air.

  “What a fool I am!” said Olive disgustedly.

  “Oh, no,” commented the gardener. “Oh no, ma’am; it stands to reason—” He turned to go about his business, but said: “I should have a sip o’ brandy now, ma’am, if you’ll excuse me mentioning it.”

  “Cognac!” urged Camilla.

  “Don’t go, Luke,” Olive cried.

  “I’ll fetch that gun in, ma’am, I fancy it’s going to rain.” He stalked away, found his coat and put it on (for it was time to go home), and then he fetched in the gun. Camilla had gone.

  “Take it away, please,” cried Olive. “I never want to see it again. Keep it. Do what you like, it’s yours.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said the imperturbable Feedy. Two small glasses of cognac and a long slim bottle stood upon a table in the alcove. Olive, still a little wan, pushed one towards him.

  “Your very good health, ma’am.” Feedy tipped the thimbleful of brandy into his mouth, closed his lips, pursed them, gazed at the ceiling, and sighed. Olive now switched on the light, for the room was growing dimmer every moment. Then she sat down on the settee that faced the fire. An elegant little settee in black satin with crimson piping. The big man stood by the shut door and stared at the walls; he could not tell whether they were blue or green or grey, but the skirting was white and the fireplace was tiled with white tiles. Old and dark the furniture was, though, and the mirror over the mantel was egg-shaped in a black frame. In the alcove made by the bow window stood the round table on crinkled legs, and the alcove itself was lined with a bench of tawny velvet cushions. Feedy put his empty glass upon the table.

  “Do have some more; help yourself,” said Olive, and Luke refilled the glass and drank again amid silence. Olive did not face him—she was staring into the fire—but she could feel his immense presence. There was an aroma, something of earth, something of man, about him, strange and exciting. A shower of rain dashed at the windows.

  “You had better sit down until the rain stops.” Olive poked a tall hassock to the fireplace with her foot, and Luke, squatting upon it, his huge boots covering quite a large piece of the rug there, twirled the half-empty glass between his finger and thumb.

  “Last time I drunk brandy,” he mused, “was with a lady in her room, just this way.”

  Olive could stare at him now.

  “She was mad,” he explained.

  “Oh,” said Olive, as if disappointed.

  “She’s dead now,” continued Luke, sipping.

  Olive, without uttering a word, seemed to encourage his reminiscence.

  “A Yorkshire lady she was, used to live in the manor house, near where I was then; a lonely place. Her brother had bought it because it was lonely, and sent her there to keep her quiet because she had been crossed in love, as they say, and took to drink for the sorrow of it; rich family, bankers, Croxton the name, if you ever heard of them?”

  Olive, lolling back and sipping brandy, shook her head.

  “A middling-size lady, about forty-five she was, but very nice to look at—you’d never think she was daft—and used to live at the big house with only a lot of servants and a butler in charge of her, name of Scrivens. None of her family ever came near her, nobody ever came to visit her. There was a big motor-car and they kept some horses, but she always liked to be tramping about alone; everybody knew her, poor daft thing, and called her Miss Mary, ’stead of by her surname, Croxton, a rich family; bankers they were. Quite daft. One morning I was going to my work—I was faggoting then in Hanging Copse—and I’d got my bill-hook, my axe, and my saw in a bag on my back, when I see Miss Mary coming down the road towards me. ’Twas a bright spring morning and cold ’cause ’twas rather early; a rare wind on, and blew sharp enough to shave you; it blew the very pigeons out the trees, but she’d got neither jacket or hat and her hair was wild. ‘Good morning, miss,’ I said, and she said: ‘Good morning,’ and stopped. So I stopped, too; I didn’t quite know what to be at, so I said: ‘Do you know where you are going?’”

  “Look here,” interrupted Olive, glancing vacantly around the room. “It’s still raining; light your pipe.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Luke began to prepare his pipe. “‘Do you know where you’re going?’ I asked her, ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve lost my way; where am I?’ and she put”—Luke paused to strike a match and ignite the tobacco—“Put her arm in my arm and said: ‘Take me home.’ ‘You’re walking away from home,’ I said, so she turned back with me and we started off to her home. Two miles away or more it was. ‘It is kind of you,’ she says, and she kept on chattering as if we were two cousins, you might say. ‘You ought to be more careful and have your jacket on,’ I said to her. ‘I didn’t think, I can’t help it,’ she says; ‘it’s the time o’ love; as soon as the elder leaf is as big as a mouse’s ear I want to be blown about the world,’ she says. Of course she was thinking to find someone as she’d lost. She dropped a few tears. ‘You must take care of yourself these rough mornings,’ I sai
d, ‘or you’ll be catching the inflammation.’ Then we come to a public-house, The Bank of England’s the name of it, and Miss Mary asks me if we could get some refreshment there. ‘That you can’t,’ I said (’cause I knew about her drinking), ‘it’s shut,’ so on we went as far as Bernard’s Bridge. She had to stop a few minutes there to look over in the river, all very blue and crimped with the wind; and there was a boat-house there, and a new boat cocked upside down on some trestles on the landing, and a chap laying on his back blowing in the boat with a pair of bellows. Well, on we goes, and presently she pulls out her purse. ‘I’m putting you to a lot of trouble,’ she says. ‘Not at all, miss,’ I said, but she give me a sovereign, then and there, she give me a sovereign.”

  Olive was staring at the man’s hands; the garden soil was chalky, and his hands were covered with fine milky dust that left the skin smooth and the markings very plain.

  “I didn’t want to take the money, ma’am, but I had to, of course; her being such a grand lady it wasn’t my place to refuse.”

  Olive had heard of such munificence before; the invariable outcome, the denouement of Feedy’s stories, the crown, the peak, the apex of them all was that somebody, at some point or other, gave him a sovereign. Neither more nor less. Never anything else. Olive thought it unusual for so many people . . .

  “—and I says: ‘I’m very pleased, miss, to be a help to anyone in trouble.’ ‘That’s most good of you,’ she said to me. ‘That’s most good of you; it’s the time of year I must go about the world, or I’d die,’ she says. By and by we come to the manor house and we marched arm in arm right up to the front door and I rong the bell. I was just turning away to leave her there, but she laid hold of my arm again. ‘I want you to stop,’ she says, ‘you’ve been so kind to me.’ It was a bright fresh morning, and I rong the bell. ‘I want you to stop,’ she says. Then the butler opened the door. ‘Scrivens,’ she says, ‘this man has been very kind to me; give him a sovereign, will you.’ Scrivens looked very straight at me, but I gave him as good as he sent, and the lady stepped into the hall. I had to follow her. ‘Come in,’ she says, and there was I in the dining-room, while Scrivens nipped off somewhere to get the money. Well, I had to set down on a chair while she popped out at another door. I hadn’t hardly set down when in she come again with a lighted candle in one hand and a silver teapot in the other. She held the teapot up and says: ‘Have some?’ and then she got two little cups and saucers out of a chiffonier and set them on the table and filled them out of the silver teapot. ‘There you are,’ she says, and she up with her cup and dronk it right off. I couldn’t see no milk and no sugar and I was a bit flabbergasted, but I takes a swig—and what do you think? It was brandy, just raw brandy; nearly made the tears come out of my eyes, ’specially that first cup. All of a sudden she dropped on a sofy and went straight off to sleep, and there was I left with that candle burning on the table in broad daylight. Course I blew it out, and the butler came in and gave me the other sovereign, and I went off to my work. Rare good-hearted lady, ma’am. Pity,” sighed the gardener. He sat hunched on the hassock, staring into the fire, and puffing smoke. There was attraction in the lines of his figure squatting beside her hearth, a sort of huge power. Olive wondered if she might sketch him some time, but she had not sketched for years now. He said that the rain had stopped, and got up to go. Glancing at the window Olive saw it was quite dark; the panes were crowded on the outside with moths trying to get in to the light.

  “What a lot of mawths there be!” said Luke.

  Olive went to the window to watch them. Swarms of fat brown furry moths with large heads pattered and fluttered silently about the shut panes, forming themselves into a kind of curtain on the black window. Now and then one of their eyes would catch a reflection from the light and it would burn with a fiery crimson glow.

  “Good night, ma’am,” the gardener said, taking the gun away with him. Outside, he picked up the dead rabbit and put it in his pocket. Olive drew the curtains; she did not like the moths’ eyes, they were demons’ eyes, and they filled her with melancholy. She took the tall brandy bottle from the table and went to replace it in a cabinet. In the cabinet she saw her little silver teapot, a silver teapot on a silver tray with a bowl and a jug. Something impelled her to fill the teapot from the long slim bottle. She poured out a cup and drank it quickly. Another. Then she switched out the light, stumbled to the couch, and fell upon it, laughing stupidly and kicking her heels with playful fury.

  That was the beginning of Olive’s graceless decline, her pitiable lapse into intemperance. Camilla one May evening had trotted across to Olive’s cottage; afterwards she could recall every detail of that tiniest of journeys; rain had fallen and left a sort of crisp humidity in the gloomy air; on the pathway to Olive’s door she nearly stepped on a large hairy caterpillar solemnly confronting a sleek nude slug. That lovely tree by Olive’s door was desolated, she remembered; the blossoms had fallen from the flowering cherry tree so wonderfully bloomed; its virginal bridal had left only a litter and a breath of despair. And then inside Olive’s hall was the absurd old blunderbuss hanging on a strap, its barrel so large that you could slip an egg into it. Camilla fluttered into her friend’s drawing-room. “Olive could you lend me your gridiron?” And there was Olive lounging on the settee simply incredibly drunk! In daylight! It was about six o’clock of a May day. And Olive was so indecently jovial that Camilla, smitten with grief, burst into tears and rushed away home again.

  She came back of course; she never ceased coming back, hour by hour, day after day; never would she leave Olive alone to her wretched debauches. Camilla was drenched with compunction, filled with divine energy; until she had dragged Olive from her trough, had taken her to live with her again under her own cherishing wings, she would have no rest. But Olive was not always tipsy, and though moved by Camilla’s solicitude, she refused to budge, or “make an effort,” or do any of the troublesome things so dear to the heart of a friend. Fond as she was of Camilla, she had a disinclination—of course she was fond of her, there was nothing she would not do for Camilla Hobbs—a disinclination to reside with her again. What if they had lived together for twenty years? It is a great nuisance that one’s loves are determined not by judgment but by the feelings. There are two simple tests of any friendly relationship: can you happily share your bed with your friend, and can you, without unease, watch him or her partake of food? If you can do either of these things with amiability, to say nothing of joy, it is well between you; if you can do both it is a sign that your affection is rooted in immortal soil. Now, Olive was forthright about food; she just ate it, that was what it was for. But she knew that even at breakfast Camilla would cut her bread into little cubes or little diamonds; if she had been able to she would surely have cut it into little lozenges or little marbles; in fact, the butter was patted into balls the same as you had in restaurants. Every shred of fat would be laboriously shaved from the rasher and discarded. The cube or the diamond would be rolled in what Camilla called the “jewse”—for her to swallow the grease but not the fat was a horrible mortification to Olive—rolled and rolled and then impaled by the fork. Snip off a wafer of bacon, impale it; a triangle of white egg, impale that; plunge the whole into the yolk. Then, so carefully, with such desperate care, a granule of salt, the merest breath of pepper. Now the knife must pursue with infinite patience one or two minuscular crumbs idling in the plate and at last wipe them gloatingly upon the mass. With her fork lavishly furnished and elegantly poised, Camilla would then bend to peer at sentences in her correspondence and perhaps briskly inquire:

  “Why are you so glum this morning, Olive?”

  Of course Olive would not answer.

  “Aren’t you feeling well, dear?” Camilla would exasperatingly persist, still toying with her letters.

  “What?” Olive would say.

  Camilla would pop the loaded fork into her mouth, her lips would close tightly upon it, and when she drew the fork slowly from her encompassing li
ps it would be empty, quite empty and quite clean. Repulsive!

  “Why are you so glum?”

  “I’m not!”

  “Sure? Aren’t you?” Camilla would impound another little cube or diamond and glance smilingly at her letters. On that count alone Olive could not possibly resume life with her.

  As for sleeping with Camilla—not that it was suggested that she should, but it was the test—Olive’s distaste for sharing a bed was ineradicable. In the whole of her life Olive had never known a woman with whom it would have been anything but an intensely unpleasant experience, neither decent nor comfortable. Olive was deeply virginal. And yet there had been two or three men who, perhaps, if it had not been for Camilla—such a prude, such a killjoy—she might—well, goodness only knew. But Camilla had been a jealous harpy, always fond, Olive was certain, of the very men who had been fond of Olive. Even Edgar Salter, who had dallied with them one whole spring in Venice. Why, there was one day in a hayfield on the Lido when the grass was mown in May—it was, oh, fifteen years ago. And before that, in Paris, Hector Dubonnel, and Willie Macmaster! Camilla had been such a lynx, such a collar-round-the-neck, that Olive had found the implications, the necessities of romance quite beyond her grasp. Or, perhaps, the men themselves—they were not at all like the bold men you read about, they were only like the oafs you meet and meet and meet. Years later, in fact not ten years ago, there was the little Italian count in Rouen. They were all dead now, yes, perhaps they were dead. Or married. What was the use? What did it all matter?

  Olive would lie abed till midday in torpor and vacancy, and in the afternoon she would mope and mourn in dissolute melancholy. The soul loves to rehearse painful occasions. At evening the shadows cast by the down-going sun would begin to lie aslant the hills and then she would look out of her window, and seeing the bold curves bathed in the last light, she would exclaim upon her folly. “I have not been out in the sunlight all day; it would be nice to go and stand on the hill now and feel the warmth just once.” No, she was too weary to climb the hill, but she would certainly go tomorrow, early, and catch the light coming from the opposite heaven. Now it was too late, or too damp, and she was very dull. The weeks idled by until August came with the rattle of the harvest reapers, and then September with the boom of the sportsman’s gun in the hollow coombs. Camilla one evening was sitting with her, Camilla who had become a most tender friend, who had realized her extremity, her inexplicable grief; Camilla who was a nuisance, a bore, who knew she was not to be trusted alone with her monstrous weakness for liquor, who constantly urged her to cross the garden and live in peace with her. No, no, she would not. “I should get up in the night and creep away,” she thought to herself, “and leave her to hell and the judgment,” but all she would reply to Camilla was: “Enjoy your own life, and I’ll do mine. Don’t want to burden yourself with a drunken old fool like me.”