Complete Short Stories (24 page)

With Beryl, to whom I am married, I enjoy the less spectacular but more relevant rapport that comes of having all friends in common, four children, and no secrets from each other. The only eccentric form which our rapport takes is that sometimes, if I am working on
some teasing historical problem and go to bed before I reach a solution, its elements may intrude not into my dream but into hers. The classic instance was when she woke up one morning, thoroughly annoyed by the absurdity of her nightmare: ‘A crowd of hags were swinging from the branches of a large tree in our olive grove and chopping off the ends with kitchen knives. And a horde of filthy gipsy
children were waiting below to catch them…’ I apologized to Beryl. I had been working on textual problems in the New Testament, and established the relation between Matthew xviii, 20 and Isaiah xvii, 6 which ran: ‘As the gleaning of an olive-tree: two or three berries at the top of the topmost branch’; and of this with Deuteronomy xxiv; 20: ‘When thou beatest thine olive-trees thou shalt not go over
the boughs again: the gleanings shall be for the stranger, the fatherless and the widow.’ I went to bed wondering idly how the fatherless and the widow managed to glean those inaccessible olives, if no able-bodied stranger happened to be about.

‘Well, now you know!’ Beryl answered crossly.

Once when Julia and I were taking a walk down a dark road not far from the sea, and exchanging our usual
nonsense, I suddenly asked her to tell me something really frightening. She checked her pace, clutched my arm and said: ‘I ought to have told you, Robert, days ago. It happened when I was staying with my grandmother in New Orleans, the one who had the topaz locket and eyes like yours. I guess I must have been twelve years old, and used to ride off to school on my bicycle about half a mile away.
One summer evening I thought I’d come home by a different route, through a complicated criss of cross-streets. I’d never tried it before. Soon I lost my way and found myself in a dead-end, with a square patio behind a rusty iron gate, belonging to an old French mansion overgrown with creepers. The shutters were green too. It was a beautifully cool, damp place in that heat. And as I stood with my hand
on the latch, I looked up, and there at an attic window I saw a face… It grinned and rapped on the glass with its leprous-white fingers and beckoned to me…’

By Julia’s description it was the identical face that had been painted on glass in Mr Reilly’s shop. When I told her about it, we broke into a run of perfect terror, hurrying towards the nearest bright light.

I thought it over afterwards.
Perhaps Julia had become aware of my
long-buried fear, which then became confused in her imagination with childhood memories of New Orleans; and it stood out so vividly that she really believed that she had seen the face grinning at her. She mentioned no pipe; but then the pipe could be discounted as extraneous.

After supper, an American called Hank, a New York banker’s son, burst into the house,
in a state of semi-collapse. Since he came of age Hank had fallen down on every job found for him by his father, and now drifted about Europe as a remittance-man. He wanted to write, though without an inkling of how to begin, and was more than a bore about his problems. Hank told me once: ‘The night before I sailed my father said a very cruel thing to me. He said: “Hank, you’re a good watch,
but there’s a part missing somewhere.”’ As a regular time-piece Hank was certainly a dead loss; and the place of the missing part had been filled by an erratic ancillary movement which by-passed time altogether. For instance, a few days before this, Hank had begun to jabber hysterically about a terrifying earthquake, and wondered whether the world were coming to an end. Next morning the papers mentioned
a very limited earthquake in Southern Spain, which had swung pictures on walls, dislodged cornices from half a dozen buildings in a small town, and made several girls in the telephone exchange faint for terror. Now, Hank could hardly have felt the distant shock, although Majorca is said to form part of a range, mostly submerged, which continues south-westward to the mainland; but he had certainly
caught the emotion of the frightened telephone girls.

‘What’s new, Hank?’ I asked coldly.

‘I’ve had a most horrible experience,’ he gasped. ‘Give me a drink, will you? I took a car to Sóller this afternoon. The heel had come off my walking shoe and I wanted to get it fixed. You know Bennasar the shoemaker, off the market square? I was just about to go in when I happened to look through the window…’

Julia and I glanced at each other. We both knew what Hank was going to say. And he said it: ‘I saw a frightful face…’

That made us feel more scared than ever.

Soon afterwards Julia went off on a rambling tour through France, Austria and Italy, and next year revisited Majorca with her mother. That was September 1952. She found me collaborating in a film-script with Will Price. Will comes from
Mississippi; but New Orleans is one of his family’s stamping grounds, so he and Mrs Fiennes were soon discussing third and fourth cousins. One day as we all sat outside a café, Julia happened to mention Hank. ‘Who’s Hank?’ the others wanted to know. We explained, and Julia repeated the story of the New Orleans face. Her mother gasped and shook her roughly: ‘Darling, why in Heaven’s name didn’t you
tell me about it at the time?’

‘I was terrified.’

‘I believe you’re making it up from something I told you, sweetie. I saw the same face myself before you were born –
and
the rusty iron gate –
and
the creepers and the shutters.’

‘You never told me anything of the sort. Besides, I saw it myself. I don’t have other people’s visions. You mustn’t confuse me with Hank.’

It occurred to me: ‘Probably
her mother had the vision, or whatever it was, first. And then Julia as a child must have heard her telling the story to somebody, and incorporated it in her own private nightmare world.’

But Will eased back in his chair and, turning to Mrs Fiennes, asked in the playful Southern accent that they were using: ‘Honey, did you ever hear them up there in the old attic, sloshing water all over the
place?’

None of us understood what he meant.

That night, when we were sitting about, drinking
coñac
, Will raised his voice: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your permission to spin a yarn?’

‘Why, of course.’

Will started: ‘A good many years ago my father’s law firm, Price & Price, acted for the mortgagees of a bankrupt property in Mississippi. Money was not forthcoming, so my father consented
to take his fees in real estate – about eighty acres of almost worthless land at Pond near Fort Adams. Fort Adams was once a prosperous river port for the cotton country east of the River; the town itself was perched on the high bluffs which overhang the water hereabouts. But the River suddenly chose to change course five miles to the west and left Fort Adams with a wide frontage of swamp, so
that all trade moved along to Natchez and Baton Rouge, which were still ports. These bluffs form the edge of a three-hundred-mile line of hills raised, they say, by prehistoric dust storms blowing in from the Great Plains, and cut up by streams and swamps. There used to be dozens of rich plantations in the hills, but when the River deserted Fort Adams they were abandoned and allowed to revert to
jungle.

‘A victim of this catastrophe was Pond, a village that had got its name from the cattle-pond which its leading citizen, old man Lemnowitz, dug and surrounded with two-storey frame stores and warehouses. It used to be a tough job to fetch cotton over the hills from the plantations in the interior. The bales were loaded on enormous, sixteen-wheeled wagons drawn by from six to ten yoke oxen.
Teamsters and planters would camp at Pond before making the final drive up-hill to Fort Adams. Old man Lemnowitz hired them extra oxen for the effort, and carried on a thriving trade in supplies of all sorts which he had hauled up from the River in the off-season.

‘There were still traces of ancient wealth near Pond when I visited it – ruins of the ante-bellum mansions and slave-quarters, with
huge, twisted vines writhing up through the floors – and at Pond itself Lemnowitz’s warehouse, formerly a sort of Macy’s, was still in business under the same
name. But only one corner was now occupied: by a small, not very elegant, store that sold tobacco, notions, staples and calico. It also called itself the Pond Post Office.

‘The rest of Pond was jungle. My mother had come down there to see
whether Price & Price owned any camellias; because sometimes these old planters collected rare flowers, and camellias could still be found growing wild in their deserted gardens. No! No orchids in that area, but camellias had been imported from all over the world, including even the Chinese mountains where they originally belonged. I was there to keep my mother company and check the land lines.
Well, I went to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Lemnowitz store, and before I could get my change, a Thing walked in.

‘It was undoubtedly human, in a weird way – walked upright and had the correct number of limbs. It even strode up to the counter and held out a dime for a can of snuff. But for the rest… The face was a glazed greenish white, with four fangs that crossed over the lips, and a protruding
underlip. It had dark-brown hair, dripping with wet, under a black felt hat – the sort that gave the po’ white trash from Georgia their nick-name of “wool-hats”. Long arms ending in gauntlets – the local work-gloves of canvas and leather with stiff cuffs – which hung below its knees as it walked. Muddy “overhawls”, leather brogans called “clod-hoppers”, and a stink as if fifty cess-pools
had been opened simultaneously. I said nothing, except perhaps “Oh!” What would any of you have said in the circumstances? Imagine the dark cavern of a mouldering warehouse behind you, with acres of empty shelves lost in the gloom, and then in It comes through the door with the blazing sun behind it. When It vanished again, I ran to the window to make sure that my mother had not fainted, and then
tip-toed back to the counter.
“What was that
?” “Why, that was only a Whitaker Negro,” Mr Lemnowitz said casually. “Never seen one before?” He seemed to be enjoying the situation.’

As Will told the story my old terrors came alive again. ‘Well, what was it really?’ I croaked.

‘I guess it was just a Whitaker Negro,’ said Will. ‘Later, I decided to check up on my sanity. Mr Lemnowitz told me that
for a couple of nickels Boy Whitaker, who was only a half-Whitaker, would guide me to where his folk lived. And he did. There are, or were, several families of Whitaker Negroes near Pond, tucked away in the jungle swamps where nobody ever ventures, not even the Sanitary Inspector. You have to understand the geography of these hills and reckon with their amazing verdancy and complete lack of vistas.
One can march in a straight line up and down hills and over swamps for scores of miles without seeing a self-respecting horizon. The jungle is so thick in places that whole families have grown up and died within a mile of neighbours whose existence they didn’t even suspect; and we Mississippians are noted for our gregariousness. I don’t
know how I ever reached the place myself, because I was working
to windward and the stench spread for half a mile around the place. I nearly threw up even before I arrived. They live tax-free and aren’t mentioned in the census, and don’t of course have to send their kids to school, still less get drafted for military service. The kids live in wallows under their huts, which are built on piles: apparently they don’t come out much until they’re fourteen years
old or so – can’t stand the sun. A good documentary sequence could be taken of a sow and her litter wallowing in the slime with a bunch of young Whitaker monsters: you could title it
Symbiosis
– which is what we call a “fo’bit” word.

‘The adults make a sort of living by raising hogs and chickens: enough to keep them in snuff and brogans and gauntlets and other necessities. The hair proved to
be mostly spanish-moss clapped wet on the head to keep it cool – it comes grey-green and goes dark when you soak it; but their real hair is also long, brown and wavy, not kinky in the usual negroid style. The brogans and gauntlets were filled with water. You see, they have no sweat-glands – that’s their trouble. It’s a hereditary condition and their skin needs to be kept wet all the while, or they
die. They’re Negroes; but said to be mixed with Choctaw Indian, also perhaps a strain of Chickasaw and Natchez.’

Someone asked: ‘Didn’t the snuff get a bit
damp,
Will?’

Will answered blandly: ‘No, sir, it did not! Snuff is “dipped” not snuffed, in those parts. It’s sold in cans about an inch and a half high. The lid of the can is used to dip a little snuff into the buccal pouch – which is another
“fo’bit word” meaning the hollow under your nether lip, excuse me for showing off.’

Most of the
coñac
-drinkers grinned incredulously, but Will turned to me: ‘Did you ever hear of Turtle Folk? That’s what they call whites afflicted by the same disease. There are quite a few cases up and down the Mississippi – Natchez, Vicksburg, Yazoo City, Baton Rouge – kept a close secret, though. Once I was
in a house at Natchez where they kept a turtle-man in the attic, and I heard him sloshing water about overhead. That was what Julia must have seen in New Orleans, and Mrs Fiennes before her. And I guess what you saw in Limerick was a portrait of a turtle-man brought back from the South as a curiosity.’

We asked Will: ‘How did they get there? And why are they called “Whitaker Negroes”?’

He answered:
‘I was coming to that. Around 1810, or so the story goes, a big planter named George Whitaker grew disgusted with his labour problems. He was an intelligent, wide-eyed, gullible New Englander, with Christian leanings, who wanted to reform the South and incidentally get even richer than he already was. He disliked the business of buying slaves and breeding them like cattle – with the result,
he said, that they had no traditions, no morals, and no discipline but what could be instilled into
them by fear. Ideally, he thought, a planter should be able to take a long vacation, like a European landlord, and come back to find work proceeding smoothly under coloured overseers – only petty crimes to punish, and the crops properly harvested. He argued that if the early slave-traders had kept
families and clans together under their African chiefs, the labour problem would not have existed. Then it occurred to him: “Why not experiment?” And he went down to New Orleans, where he interviewed the famous pirate Jean Lafitte. “Sir,” he said, “I wish you to visit Africa on my behalf and bring me back a whole tribe of Negroes. Two hundred is the figure I aim at, but a hundred would do. I’ll
pay you two hundred dollars a head: men, women and children. But mind, it must be a whole tribe, not samples from a score of them, or I don’t buy.”