Complete Short Stories (30 page)

T
HE DIM OLD
‘Pelican’ sign had been wittily repainted by a modern poster artist. The once foul stable yard, frequented by hordes of sooty sparrows, had been converted into a car park. White muslin curtains graced the windows. An adjoining network of howling, stinking, typhoidal slum, where in my childhood policemen dared enter only four by four – truncheons drawn
and whistles in their mouths – had utterly vanished; garaged residences now occupying the site were already well matured, their elms almost overtopping the roofs. The road-crossing which pale-faced street-Arabs with ragged trousers, bare feet and scanty brooms used to sweep clear of mud and horse-dung for us gentry to cross – ‘Don’t forget the sweeper, lady!’ – had become a gleaming asphalt roundabout,
and the rain-water gurgling down the gutters looked positively potable.

‘There are the gates of Hell!’, I nevertheless reminded myself, as I pushed open the door marked ‘Saloon Bar’. Amelia, my nurse, had told me so when I was four years old, pointing across the road through the bathroom window. ‘A man goes in at that door sober, industrious and God-fearing; he comes out a fiend in human guise,
whether it’s the beer or whether it’s the gin.’ She then dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘I had a good home and husband once,’ she said. ‘I never thought as I should be forced to earn my living in domestic service at twenty pound a year. And look what’s happened to that poor foolish Annie! The Pelican has been her downfall, too.’ She was referring to our parlour-maid’s fatal love for Harold,
the barrel-man, a big red-faced ex-soldier with shoulder-of-mutton fists, green baize apron, and shiny black corduroys. Annie had stolen two of our silver entrée dishes to buy Harold a watch-chain for Christmas; and been dismissed without a character.

Mr Gotobed, Junior, the plump-faced innkeeper – probably ‘Brassy’ Gotobed’s grandson – lounged alone behind the bar. He was youngish, with side-burns,
Savile Row tailoring and an Old Malthusian tie. I entered hesitantly and earned an easy though enigmatic smile.

On the walls hung three Baxter prints, two matched warming-pans, a cluster of knobkerries, an Indian Mutiny bundook, a dartboard, a large
wooden spoon, a pair of indifferent French Impressionist paintings in art-gallery frames, and an iron hoop.

‘With what may I have the pleasure of
serving you, sir?’

‘A double brandy,’ I ordered, remembering the beer and the gin.

‘Splash?’

‘No, thanks; neat.’ And I drank it at a blow.

‘These were the gates of Hell, Mr Gotobed,’ I remarked, putting down two half-crowns.

‘Sir?’

‘I used to live in that big house opposite.’

‘You mean Rosemary Mansions?’

‘I mean Rosemary House, before it became immansionized. That was when the Pelican’s
best beer still sold at twopence a pint; and was strong as the kick of a dray-horse. When tankards and curses flew along this ancient bar like bees on a summer’s day. When soused lobsters went tumbling out into the inspissated muck, heels over busby, with almost boring regularity, propelled by the hobnailed boots of courageous Corporal Harold Vesey. These, I repeat, were the gates of Hell.’

‘That will have been in what I might call pre-Reformation days, sir,’ he said rather crossly. ‘My clientele now consists almost entirely of City men. But we have a lot of quiet democratic fun here together. It amused us last year to form a Saloon Bar Darts Club and enter for the South-West London Championship. We won that wooden spoon fair and square; and my team treasure it like the apple of their
corporate eye.’

But I refused to be sidetracked. ‘It was the time,’ I insisted, pointing to a handsome portrait of the Duke of Cornwall suspended behind the bar, ‘of that boy’s great-great-great-grandmother. I remember the old lady well, driving along High Street in an open barouche with a jingling escort of Lancers.’

He eyed me with awe. ‘
Three
greats?’ he inquired, ‘are you sure?’

‘Rip van
Winkle’s the name,’ I answered. ‘I suppose it’s no use asking you what happened to Corporal Harold Vesey? I’m sure of the surname because he sent our parlour-maid Annie a lace-Valentine inscribed: “Yours respectably, Harold Vesey, Corporal, 1900”; that was after he came back gloriously wounded from the South African war. Harold was barrel-man; and porter at the Gates of Hell.’

‘Rings a bell,’
said Mr Gotobed meditatively. ‘Hell’s bells, if you like, ha, ha! 1900? Time of my grandfather?’

‘If your grandfather was the bold hero in the purple waistcoat whom the boys nicknamed “Brassy”,’ I said, and ordered another brandy.

He waved that one off. ‘Funny,’ he remarked, ‘how we reckon time here in terms of war. South African. First World. Second World.’

‘Harold Vesey had served at Tel-el-Kebir
in 1882. He was a veteran when I knew him.’

‘Indeed? Well, I never saw any service myself, and I’m not ashamed to tell you the story, now it’s all over. If it had been a question of volunteering, I dare say I’d have gone along with all the other b. fools. But not under Conscription. We Malthusians have our pride. Between you and me I fooled the Board by a simple and quite ingenious wheeze. A
fortnight beforehand I started eating sugar. Gradually worked up to two pounds a day. Ghastly treatment with ghastly symptoms. Ghastly expensive, too, with rationing in full blast. Naturally, just because of the rationing, the medicos never suspected a thing.’

‘Naturally,’ I agreed. ‘Harold once fooled his M.O. too, to avoid being drafted somewhere on garrison duty. He chewed cordite, which sent
up his temperature to 106. When duly crimed, he owned up; whereupon the Colonel drafted him to South Africa instead, which was what he wanted. And he subsequently had the pleasure of relieving Ladysmith. But that, of course, took place in the days before Conscription.’

‘Good for him!’ said Mr Gotobed without conviction and switched the topic again. ‘By the way, see that iron hoop over there?
It’s a curious relic of my grandfather’s days. I bought it at an antique shop for our Christmas celebration to use as a frame for the wreath of holly and ivy over the door. The old merchant told me that iron hoops were trundled here in the days of gaseous street-lighting and horse-drawn traffic.’

‘Harold Vesey gave me an iron hoop once,’ I said, ‘but unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to use it.
I was a little gentleman and little gentlemen were supposed to use only wooden hoops. We were also forbidden to whistle on our fingers or turn cartwheels, because that was what the street-Arabs did. Thus you obscure the relentless evolution of modern society, Mr Gotobed. The street-Arab is forced by industrial progress to become a respectable citizen. His grandsons, if not his sons, are born little
gentlemen; and therefore forbidden to whistle on their fingers or turn cartwheels on the bemuddied crossing. And iron hoops, like peg-tops with dangerous spikes (another ancient working-class distinction) are relegated to the antique shops. Harold Vesey would have been surprised.’

I kept on the Harold Vesey tack mercilessly, until the bell rang again in Mr Gotobed’s mind.

‘Vesey? I’ve got it
now. Yes, my grandfather employed one H. Vesey at the Pelican. Comic story in its weird way. It seems that soon after he sent that Valentine to your parlour-maid, an aunt died and left him an Essex country cottage and a small legacy – in recognition of his patriotic services. However, just before Hitler’s War, when he was in his late seventies, the County Council condemned the cottage and transplanted
him to a brand-new Council-house: modern plumbing, well-equipped kitchen, built-in cupboards, everything laid on. But the obstinate old – well – basket didn’t take to it. Sulked. Sat out on a bench in the garden, all weathers, “just to spite them,” he said – until he was carried off by pneu–
monia. The joke was that they never got around to pulling down the cottage after all. Its timbers were
still sound and the premises served during the War to accommodate evacuees. Recently my father bought the place – that’s how I happen to know the story. He spent four or five thousand pounds on doing it up for a week-end hang-out. But the Council wouldn’t let us alter the façade or build another storey, because by then – this is the real pay-off – the cottage had been scheduled as an ancient monument.
What a country, eh?’

But at that moment jovial members of the City clientele came wandering in, and called for dry Martinis. I managed to retire without comment or attention.

T
HOUGH SOME DETRACTORS
are found who affirm that Gnaeus Robert ulus Gravesa was born of mean stock, his father being a servile Irish pedlar of mussel-fish, and his mother a Teutonic freedwoman, daughter of an ambulant apothecary, yet his descendants, on the contrary, claim that the Gravesae were an ancient equestrian clan of Gallic origin and that the
poet’s paternal grand-father was both High Priest of Hibernian Limericum and a man very learned in the mathematic sciences.

This difference of opinion may be left unsettled. In any event, Gnaeus Robertulus Gravesa, whether of ancient stock or of parents and forefathers in whom he could take no just pride, was born in a suburban villa at the tenth milestone from Londinium, when L. Salisburius
was sole Consul, in the year following the death of A. Tennisonianus Laureatus, whom the deified Victoria raised to patrician rank. It is handed down that the infant, being the eighth child of his father, did not cry at his birth, but wore only a beast-like scowl, which already gave assurance of a determination to overcome the cruel pricks of fate by a mute and cynical habit of mind. There was added
another omen: a cauliflower plant growing in his father’s garden began to sprout with unnatural and unwonted shoots, namely with such alien potherbs as leeks, onions, mallows, parsnips, marjoram, turnips and even samphire of the cliff, thus portending the excessive variety of the studies to which he would devote his stylus, and which subsequently earned him the title of Polyhistor. But on the crown
of the cauliflower burgeoned Apollo’s laurel.

He studied grammar and rhetoric at a school maintained by the Carthusian Guild, but interrupted them to march in the war against Gulielmus the German, being appointed centurion in the XXIII Legion. It is related that when, riddled with wounds at the battle of the Corvine Wood, his supine body was set aside by his comrades for cremation on the common
pyre, lo! the god Mercury, distinguished by winged sandals and
caduceus
as well as by conspicuously divine grace, appeared to the military
Tribune who was lamenting this premature death, and spoke as follows: ‘Man: there remain yet the seeds of life in that gory and mutilated frame. Do not anger the gods by conveying to the flames that which they have themselves spared! My Robertulus, recovering
his spent forces, will yet lead a life profitable to the Legion on account of his shining sword, and pleasing to his fatherland because of his well-tuned lyre and replete tablets.’ So saying, the Herald of the Gods vanished, and the Tribune did not despise this message, for after binding up the wounds which had ceased to bleed, he wrapped his own military cloak about the seeming corpse, whereupon
a she-weasel (or a witch in weasel’s disguise) appeared on the right hand and blew life with her own mouth into those motionless nostrils.

He was above the usual stature and not over-fat, with curly hair ill-combed, a crooked nose broken in youth while he contended in the gymnasium, and the same physical disproportion noted by the divine Homer in Ulysses, namely that his legs were too short for
his body. His skin was exceedingly white and did not vary its colour even in the hottest suns of Egypt and Spain; but, at the most, freckled only moderately, so that if ever two freckles joined together in one, he would exclaim: ‘This is the nearest that you let me approach, O Phoebus, to a manly bronze.’ He often suffered from affections of the stomach and lungs, but nursed no jealousy against
the gods on this score, and is recorded to have said that, since his parents had left him a rich legacy of health, he alone must bear the blame if he frittered away this gift by insalubrious practices.

Upon being presented with the wooden foil and hanging up his arms and helmet in the temple of Mars, he resumed his rhetorical studies, inserting himself among the Oxonians, but determined thereafter
to be beholden to no man as his patron but always remain to his own self a master; and this resolution, confirmed with an oath to Infernal Hecate, he obstinately maintained throughout his life.

In the fatal year that saw the universal ruin both of the moneylenders and of the grain merchants, an event which sowed widespread poverty in every part of the world, he went into voluntary banishment,
choosing the Greater Balearic Island for his retreat. Some say that he departed in haste and a dark cloak to avoid the lictors, being accused of the capital crime of murder, and that he left word with his freedmen to forward his household goods by ship secretly, lest they be seized; certain it is that for the space of the next six years he kept himself close in the Balearic villa which he had built
for himself, not even crossing over to the Hispanic mainland, and practising it is not known what strange and secret rites.

He married twice, each wife being a Briton of generous birth, and had four children by the first marriage and an equal number by the second. With several vernacular languages grown familiar, besides his own and the pure Latin and Greek tongues, he spoke all with greater
fluency than
accuracy or elegance. His vices were few, apart from an immoderate greed. He himself confesses, in a letter, to a peculiar relish for coarse bread rubbed with garlic and dipped in olive oil; and for the sausage of raw and greasy pork for which the island of his choice is notorious. To this failing must, however, be added a severe pride and a certain disregard not only of his personal
appearance but – except in formal company – of befitting table manners. His eldest daughter, though she loved and honoured him, often complained in public that he would at times wear two
socci
of different colour, one on the left foot and one on the right; and that his hair was at times smeared with honey and sprinkled with dead leaves. Moreover, one of his ex-slaves has reported how once, lifting
the cover from a particularly succulent dish of mushrooms at a birthday banquet, Gravesa asked eagerly: ‘Are all of these for me?’ His pride showed itself nowhere to worse advantage than in his refusal to do what all his more experienced friends implored,
viz
. to write the same book often, changing merely the names and the scenes, since the crowd loves to be reminded of what it has once enjoyed
and to which it has become accustomed. Indeed, when they voiced this plea with tears and torn white locks, he, being set upon a continuous change of theme, petulantly inquired: ‘Sirs, would you have me grow rich by inventing a formula for limning comical rabbits?’ This he confirmed with the following sharp improvisation, magisterially declaring that the awkward scansion of ‘rabbits’ (cu˘nicu˘li)
should not deny them the glory of entering his hexameters.