Short Stories 1895-1926 (24 page)

That he had desisted simply in case she should herself have answered his summons and so have encountered the spurious animal as she mounted the dark staircase seemed literally too ‘good' to be true. Not only was Jimmie no sentimentalist, but that particular kind of goodness, even in a state of mind perfectly calm and collected, was not one of his pleasanter characteristics.

Yet facts are facts – even comforting ones. And unless his memory was utterly untrustworthy, he had somehow – somehow contrived to regain his physical balance. Candelabrum in hand, he had actually, indeed, at last emerged from the room, and stooped his dark head over the balusters in search of what unaccountably had
not
awaited his nearer acquaintance. And he had – he must have – flung the substantial little blue-banded slopbasin, primroses and all, clean straight down in the direction of any kind of sentient target that happened to be in its way.

‘You must understand, Mrs Thripps,' he had afterwards solemnly explained, ‘I don't care to be disturbed, and particularly at night. All litter should, of course, be immediately cleared away. That's merely as things go in a well-regulated household, as, in fact, they
do
go. And I see you have replaced the one or two little specimens I was looking over out of the cabinet on the staircase. Pretty things, too; though you hadn't the advantage of being in the service of their late owner – my uncle. As I was. Of course, too, breakages cannot be avoided. There, I assure you, you are absolutely free. Moth and rust, Mrs Thripps. No; all that I was merely enquiring about at the moment is that particular pot. There was an accident last night – primroses and so on. And one might have expected, one might almost have sworn, Mrs Thripps, that at least a shard or two, as the Psalmist says, would have been pretty conspicuous even if the water
had
completely dried away. Not that I heard the smash, mind. I don't go so far as that. Nor am I making any insinuations
whatever
. You are the best of good creatures, you are indeed – and it's no good looking at me like Patience on a monument; because at present life is real and life is earnest. All I mean is that if one for a single moment ceases to guide one's conduct on reasonable lines – well, one comes a perfectly indescribable cropper, Mrs Thripps. Like the pot.'

Mrs Thripps's grey untidy head had remained oddly stuck out from her body throughout this harangue. ‘No, sir,' she repeated once more. ‘High and low I've searched the house down, and there isn't a shadder of what you might be referring to, not a shadder. And once more, I ask you, sir; let me call in Dr Stokes. He's a very nice gentleman; and one as keeps what should be kept as close to himself as it being his duty he sees right and proper to do. Chasing and racketing of yourself up and down these runs of naked stairs – in the dead of night – is no proper place for you, sir, in
your
state. And I don't like to take the responsibility. It's first the candles, then the bells, and then the kitching, and then the bason; I know what I'm talking about, sir, having lost two, and one at sea.'

‘And suppose, my dear,' Jimmie had almost as brilliantly as ever smiled; ‘suppose we are all of us “at sea.” What then?'

‘Why then, sir,' Mrs Thripps had courageously retorted, ‘I'd as lief be at the bottom of it. There's been as much worry and trouble and making two ends meet in
my
life not to make the getting out of it what you'd stand on no ceremony for. I say it with all decent respect for what's respectful and proper, sir; but there isn't a morning I step down those area steps but my heart's in my mouth for fear there won't be anything in the house but what can't answer back. It's been a struggle to keep on, sir; and you as generous a gentleman as need be, if only you'd remain warm and natural in your bed when once there.'

A little inward trickle of laughter had entertained Jimmie as he watched the shapeless patient old mouth utter these last few words.

‘That's just it, Mrs Thripps,' he had replied softly. ‘You've done for me far more effectively than anyone I care to remember in my insignificant little lifetime. You have indeed.' Jimmie had even touched the hand bent like the claw of a bird around the broom-handle. ‘In fact, you know – and I'm bound to confess it as gratefully as need be – they are
all
of them doing for me as fast as they can. I don't complain, not the least little bit in the world. All that I might be asking is, How the devil – to put it politely – how the goodness gracious is one to tell which is which? In my particular case, it seems to be the miller that sets the wind: not, of course, that he's got any particular grain to grind. Not even wild oats, you funny old mother of a youthful mariner. No, no, no. Even the fact that there wasn't perhaps any pot after all, you will understand, doesn't positively prove that neither could there have been any primroses. And before next January's four months old we shall be at the end of yet another April. At least —' and a sort of almost bluish pallor had spread like a shadow over his face – ‘at least you will be. All of which is only to say, dear Madam, as Beaconsfield remarked to Old Vic, that I am thanking you
now
.'

At which Mrs Thripps immediately fell upon her knees on her housemaid's pad and plunged her hands into her zinc pail – only instantly after to sit back on her heels, skinny hands on canvas apron. ‘All I says, sir, is, We go as we go; and a nicer gentleman, taking things on the surface, I never worked for. But one don't want to move too much in the Public Heye, sir. Of all the houses below stairs I've worked for and all alone in I don't want to charnst on a more private in a manner of speaking than this. All that I was saying, sir, and I wouldn't to none but you, is the life's getting on my nerves. When that door there closes after me, and every day drawing out steady as you can see without so much as glancing at the clock – I say, to myself, Well, better that pore young gentleman alone up there at night, cough and all, than
me
. I wouldn't sleep in this house, sir, not if you was to offer me a plateful of sovereigns … Unless, sir, you
wanted
me.'

On reflection Jimmie decided that he had cut almost a gallant figure as he had retorted gaily – yet with extraordinary sobriety: ‘You shall have a whole dishful before I'm done, Mrs Thripps – with a big scoop in it for the gravy. But on my oath, I assure you there's absolutely nothing or nobody in this old barn of a museum except you and me. Nobody, unless, of course, you will understand, one happens to pull the bell. And that we're not likely to do in broad daylight. Are we, Mrs Thripps?' Upon which he had hastily caught up his aunt's handbag and had emerged into a daylight a good deal bleaker if not broader than he could gratefully stomach.

For a while Jimmie had let well alone. Indeed, if it had been a mere matter of choice, he would far rather have engaged in a friendly and jocular conversation of this description with his old charwoman than in the endless monologues in which he found himself submerged on other occasions. One later afternoon, for instance, at half-past three by his watch, sitting there by a small fire in the large muffled drawing room, he at length came definitely to the conclusion that some kind of finality should be reached in his relations with the Night Staff in his Uncle Timothy's.

It was pretty certain that
his
visit would soon be drawing to a close. Staying out at night until he was almost too exhausted to climb down to the pavement from his hansom – the first April silver of dawn wanning the stark and empty chimney-pots – had proved a dull and tedious alternative. The mere spectator of gaiety, he concluded, as he stared at the immense picture of the Colosseum on his Uncle Timothy's wall, may have as boring a time as must the slaves who cleaned out the cages of the lions that ate the Christians. And snapping out insults at former old cronies who couldn't help their faces being as tiresome as a whitewashed pigsty had soon grown wearisome.

Jimmie, of course, was accustomed to taking no interest in things which did not interest him; but quite respectable people could manage that equally well. What fretted him almost beyond endurance was an increasing inablity to keep his attention fixed on what was really
there,
what at least all such respectable people, one might suppose, would unanimously agree was there.

A moment's fixture of the eyes – and he would find himself steadily, steadily listening, now in a creeping dread that somewhere, down below, there was a good deal that needed an almost constant attention, and now in sudden alarm that, after all, there was absolutely nothing. Again and again in recollection he had hung over the unlighted staircase listening in an extremity of foreboding for the outbreak of a rabbit-like childish squeal of terror which would have proved – well,
what
would it have proved? My God, what a world! you can prove nothing.

The fact that he was all but certain that any such intolerably helpless squeal never
had
wailed up to him out of its pit of blackness could be only a partial consolation. He hadn't meant to be a beast. It was only his facetious little way. And you would have to be something pretty piggish in pigs to betray a child – however insubstantial – into the nausea and vertigo he had experienced in the presence of that unspeakable abortion. The whole thing had become a fatuous obsession. If, it appeared, you only remained solitary and secluded enough, and let your mind wander on in its own sweet way, the problem was almost bound to become, if not your one and only, at least your chief concern. Unless you were preternaturally busy and preoccupied, you simply couldn't live on and on in a haunted house without being occasionally reminded of its ghosts.

To dismiss the matter as pure illusion – the spectral picturing of life's fitful fever – might be all very well; that is if you had the blood of a fish. But who on earth had ever found the world the pleasanter and sweeter a place to bid good-bye to simply because it was obviously ‘substantial', whatever
that
might mean? Simply because it did nothing you wanted it to do unless you paid for it pretty handsomely; or unless you accepted what it proffered with as open a hospitality as Jimmie had bestowed on his pilgrims of the night. Not that he much wanted – however pressing the invitation – to wander off out of his body into a better world, or, for that matter, into a worse.

Upstairs under the roof years ago Jimmie as a small boy would rather have died of terror than meddle with the cord above his bed-rail – simply because he knew that Soames Senior was at the other end of it. He had hated Soames; he had merely feared the nothings of his night hours. But, suppose Soames had been a different kind of butler. There must be almost as many kinds as there are human beings. Suppose his Uncle Timothy and Aunt Charlotte had chosen theirs a little less idiosyncratically; what then?

Well, anyhow, in a sense, he was not sorry life had been a little exciting these last few weeks. How odd that what all but jellied your soul in your body at night or in a dream, might merely amuse you like a shilling shocker in the safety of day. The safety of day – at the very cadence of the words in his mind, as he sat there in his aunt's ‘salon', his limbs huddled over Mrs Thripps's fire, Jimmie's eyes had fixed themselves again. Again he was listening. Was it that, if you saw ‘in your mind'
any
distant room or place, that place must actually at the moment contain you – some self, some ‘astral body'? If so, wouldn't, of course, you
bear
yourself moving about in it?

There was a slight whining wind in the street outside the rainy window that afternoon, and once more the bright idea crossed Jimmie's mind that he should steal upstairs before it was dark, mount up onto the Arabian bed and just cut the bell-pull – once for all. But would that necessarily dismiss the Staff? Necessarily? His eye wandered to the discreet S of yet another bell-pull – that which graced the wall beneath the expansive white marble chimney-piece.

He hesitated. There was no doubt his mind was now hopelessly jaundiced against all bell-ropes – whether they failed to summon one to church or persisted in summoning one to a six-foot hole in a cemetery. His Uncle Timothy lay in a mausoleum. On the other hand he was properly convinced that a gentleman is as a gentleman does, and that it was really ‘up to you' to treat
all
bell-answerers with decent courtesy. No matter who, when, where. A universal rule like that is a sheer godsend. If they didn't answer, well, you couldn't help yourself. Or rather, you would have to.

This shivering was merely physical. When a fellow is so thin that he can almost hear his ribs grind one against the other when he stoops to pick up a poker, such symptoms must be expected. There was still an hour or two of daylight – even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom. That house at this moment seemed to hang domed upon his shoulders like an immense imponderable shell. The flames in the chimney whispered, fluttered, hovered, like fitfully-playing, once-happy birds.

Supposing if, even against his better judgment, he leaned forward now in his chair and – what was infinitely more conventional and in a sense more proper than summoning unforeseen entities to one's bedside – supposing he gave just one discreet little tug at that small porcelain knob; what would he ask for? He need ask nothing. He could act. Yes, if he could be perfectly sure that some monstrous porcine caco-demon akin to the shapes of childish nightmare would come hoofing up out of the deeps at his behest – well, he would chance it. He would have it out with the brute. It was still day.

It was still day. But, maybe, the ear of pleasanter visitors might catch the muffled tinkle? In the young man's mind there was now no vestige of jocularity. In an instant's lightness of heart he had once thought of purchasing from the stiff-aproned old assistant at his Aunt Charlotte's family grocer's, a thumping big box of chocolates. Why, just that one small bowl in
famille rose
up there could be bartered for the prettiest little necklet of seed pearls. She had done her best – with her skimpy shoulders, skimpier pigtail and soda-reddened hands. Pigtail! But no; you might pull real bells: to pull dubiously genuine pigtails seemed now a feeble jest. The old Jimmie of that kind of facetiousness was a thing of the past.