“I don’t want any address to appear,” said Lally. “Just a plain sheet, please.”
A few moments later she received a neatly typed page folded in an envelope, and after paying the charge she hurried off to a district messenger office. Here she addressed the envelope in a disguised hand to P. Stick Repton, Esq., at the address in Holborn. She read the typed letter through again:
Dear Sir,
In common with many others I entertain the greatest admiration for your literary abilities, and I therefore beg you to accept this tangible expression of that admiration from a constant reader of your articles, who for purely private reasons, desires to remain anonymous.
Your very sincere
Wellwisher
Placing the fifty-pound note upon the letter Lally carefully folded them together and put them both into the envelope. The attendant then gave it to a uniformed lad, who sauntered off whistling very casually, somewhat to Lally’s alarm—he looked so small and careless to be entrusted with fifty pounds. Then Lally went out, changed one of her five-pound notes, and had a lunch—half a crown, but it was worth it. Oh, how enchanting and exciting London was! In two days more she would have been gone; now she would have to write off at once to her Glasgow friends and tell them she had changed her mind, that she was now settled in London. Oh, how enchanting and delightful! And tonight he would take her out to dine in some fine restaurant, and they would do a theatre. She did not really want to marry Phil, they had got on so well without it, but if he wanted that too she did not mind—much. They would go away into the country for a whole week. What money would do! Marvellous! And looking round the restaurant she felt sure that no other woman there, no matter how well-dressed, had as much as thirty pounds in her handbag.
Returning home in the afternoon she became conscious of her own betraying radiance; very demure and subdued and usual she would have to be, or he might guess the cause of it. Though she danced up the long flight of stairs, she entered their room quietly, but the sight of Repton staring out of the window, forlorn as a drowsy horse, overcame her and she rushed to embrace him, crying: “Darling!”
“Hullo, hullo!” he smiled.
“I’m so fond of you, Phil dear.”
“But—but you’re deserting me!”
“Oh, no,” she cried archly; “I’m not—not deserting you.”
“All right.” Repton shrugged his shoulders, but he seemed happier. He did not mention the fifty pounds then; perhaps it had not come yet—or perhaps he was thinking to surprise her.
“Let’s go for a walk, it’s a screaming lovely day,” said Lally.
“Oh, I dunno,” he yawned and stretched. “Nearly tea-time, isn’t it?”
“Well, we—” Lally was about to suggest having tea out somewhere, but she bethought herself in time. “I suppose it is. Yes, it is.”
So they stayed in for tea. No sooner was tea over than Repton remarked that he had an engagement somewhere. Off he went, leaving Lally disturbed and anxious. Why had he not mentioned the fifty pounds? Surely it had not gone to the wrong address? This suspicion once formed, Lally soon became certain, tragically sure, that she had misaddressed the envelope herself. A conviction that she had put No. 17 instead of No. 71 was almost overpowering, and she fancied that she hadn’t even put London on the envelope—but Glasgow. That was impossible, though, but—oh, the horror!—somebody else was enjoying their fifty pounds. The girl’s fears were not allayed by the running visit she paid to the messengers’ office that evening, for the rash imp who had been entrusted with her letter had gone home and therefore could not be interrogated until the morrow. By now she was sure that he had blundered; he had been so casual with an important letter like that! Lally never did, and never would again, trust any little boys who wore their hats so much on one side, were so glossy with hair-oil, and went about whistling just to madden you. She burned to ask where the boy lived but in spite of her desperate desire she could not do so. She dared not, it would expose her to—to something or other she could only feel, not name; you had to keep cool, to let nothing, not even curiosity, master you.
Hurrying home again, though hurrying was not her custom and there was no occasion for it, she wrote the letter to her Glasgow friends. Then it crossed her mind that it would be wiser not to post the letter that night; better wait until the morning, after she had discovered what the horrible little messenger had done with her letter. Bed was a poor refuge from her thoughts, but she accepted it, and when Phil came home she was not sleeping. While he undressed he told her of the lecture he had been to, something about Agrarian Depopulation it was, but even after he had stretched himself beside her, he did not speak about the fifty pounds. Nothing, not even curiosity, should master her, and she calmed herself, and in time fitfully slept.
At breakfast next morning he asked her what she was going to do that day.
“Oh,” replied Lally offhandedly, “I’ve a lot of things to see to, you know; I must go out. I’m sorry the porridge is so awful this morning, Phil, but—”
“Awful?” he broke in. “But it’s nicer than usual! Where are you going? I thought—our last day, you know—we might go out somewhere together.”
“Dear Phil!” Lovingly she stretched out a hand to be caressed across the table. “But I’ve several things to do. I’ll come back early, eh?” She got up and hurried round to embrace him.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t be long.”
Off went Lally to the messenger office, at first as happy as a bird, but on approaching the building the old tremors assailed her. Inside the room was the cocky little boy who bade her “Good morning” with laconic assurance. Lally at once questioned him, and when he triumphantly produced a delivery book she grew limp with her suppressed fear, one fear above all others. For a moment she did not want to look at it: truth hung by a hair, and as long as it so hung she might swear it was a lie. But there it was, written right across the page, an entry of a letter delivered, signed for in the well-known hand, P. Stick Repton. There was no more doubt, only a sharp indignant agony as though she had been stabbed with a dagger of ice.
“Oh yes, thank you,” said Lally calmly. “Did you hand it to him yourself?”
“Yes’m,” replied the boy, and he described Phillip.
“Did he open the letter?”
“Yes’m.”
“There was no answer?”
“No’m.”
“All right.” Fumbling in her bag, she added: “I think I’ve got a sixpence for you.”
Out in the street again she tremblingly chuckled to herself. “So that is what he is like, after all. Cruel and mean! He was going to let her go and keep the money in secret to himself!” How despicable! Cruel and mean, cruel and mean! She hummed it to herself. “Cruel and mean, cruel and mean!” It eased her tortured bosom. “Cruel and mean!” And he was waiting at home for her, waiting with a smile for their last day together. It would have to be their last day. She tore up the letter to her Glasgow friends, for now she must go to them. So cruel and mean! Let him wait! A bus stopped beside her, and she stepped on to it, climbing to the top and sitting there while the air chilled her burning features. The bus made a long journey to Plaistow. She knew nothing of Plaistow, she wanted to know nothing of Plaistow, but she did not care where the bus took her; she only wanted to keep moving and moving away, as far away as possible from Holborn and from him, and not once let those hovering tears down fall.
From Plaistow she turned and walked back as far as the Mile End Road. Thereabouts wherever she went she met clergymen, dozens of them. There must be a conference, about charity or something, Lally thought. With a vague desire to confide her trouble to someone, she observed them; it would relieve the strain. But there was none she could tell her sorrow to, and failing that, when she came to a neat restaurant she entered it and consumed a fish. Just beyond her, three sleek parsons were lunching, sleek and pink; bald, affable, consoling men, all very much alike.
“I saw Carter yesterday,” s
he heard one say. Lally liked listening to the conversation of strangers, and she had often wondered what clergymen talked about among themselves.
“What, Carter! Indeed. Nice fellow, Carter. How was he?”
“Carter loves preaching, you know!” cried the third.
“Oh yes, he loves preaching!”
“Ha, ha, ha, yes.”
“Ha, ha, ha, oom.”
“Awf’ly good preacher, though.”
“Yes, awf’ly good.”
“And he’s awf’ly good at comic songs, too.”
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
Three glasses of water, a crumbling of bread, a silence suggestive of prayer.
“How long has he been married?”
“Twelve years,” returned the cleric who had met Carter.
“Oh, twelve years!”
“I’ve only been married twelve years myself,” said the oldest of them.
“Indeed!”
“Yes, I tarried very long.”
“Ha, ha, ha, yes.”
“Ha, ha, ha, oom.”
“Er—have you any family?”
“No.”
Very delicate and dainty in handling their food they were; very delicate and dainty.
“My rectory is a magnificent old house,” continued the recently married one. “Built originally 1700. Burnt down. Rebuilt 1784.”
“Indeed!”
“Humph!”
“Seventeen bedrooms and two delightful tennis courts.”
“Oh, well done!” the others cried, and then they all fell with genteel gusto upon a pale blancmange.
From the restaurant the girl sauntered about for a while, and then there was a cinema wherein, seated warm and comfortable in the twitching darkness, she partially stilled her misery. Some nervous fancy kept her roaming in that district for most of the evening. She knew that if she left it she would go home, and she did not want to go home. The naphtha lamps of the booths at Mile End were bright and distracting, and the hum of the evening business was good despite the smell. A man was weaving sweetstuffs from a pliant roll of warm toffee that he wrestled with as the athlete wrestles with the python. There were stalls with things of iron, with fruit or fish, pots and pans, leather, string, nails. Watches for use—or for ornament—what d’ye lack? A sailor told naughty stories while selling bunches of green grapes out of barrels of cork dust which he swore he had stolen from the Queen of Honolulu. People clamoured for them both. You could buy back numbers of the comic papers at four a penny, rolls of linoleum for very little more—and use either for the other’s purpose.
“At thrippence per foot, mesdames,” cried the sweating cheapjack, lashing himself into ecstatic furies, “that’s a piece of fabric weft and woven with triple-strength Andalusian jute, double-hot-pressed with rubber from the island of Pagama, and stencilled by an artist as poisoned his grandfather’s cook. That’s a piece of fabric, mesdames, as the king of heaven himself wouldn’t mind to put down in his parlour—if he had the chance. Do I ask thrippence a foot for that piece of fabric? Mesdames, I was never a daring chap.”
Lally watched it all, she looked and listened; then looked and did not see, listened and did not hear. Her misery was not the mere disappointment of love, not that kind of misery alone; it was the crushing of an ideal in which love had had its home, a treachery cruel and mean. The sky of night, so smooth, so bestarred, looked wrinkled through her screen of unshed tears; her sorrow was a wild cloud that troubled the moon with darkness.
In miserable desultory wanderings she had spent her day, their last day, and now, returning to Holborn in the late evening, she suddenly began to hurry, for a new possibility had come to lighten her dejection. Perhaps, after all, so whimsical he was, he was keeping his “revelation” until the last day, or even the last hour, when (nothing being known to her, as he imagined) all hopes being gone and they had come to the last kiss, he would take her in his arms and laughingly kill all grief, waving the succour of a flimsy bank-note like a flag of triumph. Perhaps even, in fact surely, that was why he wanted to take her out today! Oh, what a blind, wicked, stupid girl she was, and in a perfect frenzy of bubbling faith she panted homewards for his revealing sign.
From the pavement below she could see that their room was lit. Weakly she climbed the stairs and opened the door. Phil was standing up, staring so strangely at her. Helplessly and half-guilty she began to smile. Without a word said he came quickly to her and crushed her in his arms, her burning silent man, loving and exciting her. Lying against his breast in that constraining embrace, their passionate disaster was gone, her doubts were flown; all perception of the feud was torn from her and deeply drowned in a gulf of bliss. She was aware only of the consoling delight of their reunion, of his amorous kisses, of his tongue tingling the soft down on her upper lip that she disliked and he admired. All the soft wanton endearments that she so loved to hear him speak were singing in her ears, and then he suddenly swung and lifted her up, snapped out the gaslight, and carried her off to bed.
Life that is born of love feeds on love; if the wherewithal be hidden, how shall we stay our hunger? The galaxy may grow dim, or the stars drop in a wandering void; you can neither keep them in your hands nor crumble them in your mind.
What was it Phil had once called her? Numskull! After all it was his own fifty pounds, she had given it to him freely, it was his to do as he liked with. A gift was a gift, it was poor spirit to send money to anyone with the covetous expectation that it would return to you. She would surely go tomorrow.
The next morning he awoke her early and kissed her.
“What time does your train go?” said he.
“Train!” Lally scrambled from his arms and out of bed.
A fine day, a glowing day. Oh, bright, sharp air! Quickly she dressed and went into the other room to prepare their breakfast. Soon he followed, and they ate silently together, although whenever they were near each other he caressed her tenderly. Afterwards she went into the bedroom and packed her bag; there was nothing more to be done, he was beyond hope. No woman waits to be sacrificed, least of all those who sacrifice themselves with courage and a quiet mind. When she was ready to go she took her portmanteau into the sitting-room; he, too, made to put on his hat and coat.
“No,” murmured Lally, “you’re not to come with me.”
“Pooh, my dear!” he protested; “nonsense!”
“I won’t have you come,” cried Lally with an asperity that impressed him.
“But you can’t carry that bag to the station by yourself!”
“I shall take a taxi.” She buttoned her gloves.
“My dear!” His humorous deprecation annoyed her.
“Oh, bosh!” Putting her gloved hands around his neck she kissed him coolly. “Good-bye. Write to me often. Let me know how you thrive, won’t you, Phil? And”—a little wavering—“Love me always.” She stared queerly at the two dimples in his cheeks; each dimple was a nest of hair that could never be shaved.
“Lally, darling, beloved girl! I never loved you more than now, this moment. You are more precious than ever to me!”
At that, she knew her moment of sardonic revelation had come—but she dared not use it, she let it go. She could not so deeply humiliate him by revealing her knowledge of his perfidy. A compassionate divinity smiles at our puny sins. She knew his perfidy, but to triumph in it would defeat her own pride. Let him keep his gracious, mournful airs to the last, false though they were. It was better to part so, better from such a figure than from an abject scarecrow, even though both were the same inside. And something capriciously reminded her, for a flying moment, of elephants she had seen swaying with the grand movement of tidal water—and groping for monkey nuts.
Lally tripped down the stairs alone. At the end of the street she turned for a last glance. There he was, high up in the window, waving good-byes. And she waved back at him.
The Field of Mustard (1926)
About the Author
A. E. C
OPPARD was born in Kent, England, in 1878. He rose to prominence with short stories depicting rural England, tales that contained fantastic elements of supernatural horror and allegorical fantasy. Numerous volumes of his poetry were also published, and the first volume of his autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord! appeared posthumously. He died in London in 1957.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Ecco Art of the Story
The Three Button Trick and Other Stories by Nicola Barker
The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles
Catastrophe by Dino Buzzati
The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins
Continent by Jim Crace
The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski
The General Zapped an Angel by Howard Fast
Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates
Mr. and Mrs. Baby by Mark Strand
Monstress by Lysley Tenorio
A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev
We Are Taking Only What We Need by Stephanie Powell Watts
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff
Copyright
THE HURLY BURLY AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2021 by Julia Reisz. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
The Hurly Burly and Other Stories Page 28