The New Collected Short Stories (23 page)

‘Miss Haddon!’ said the Principal. ‘Miss Haddon! How is it you are not supervising the girls?’

Miss Haddon removed the shell from her ear, and faced her employer with a growing determination.

‘I can hear Ellen’s voice though we are at the other side of the house,’ she continued. ‘I half thought it was the elocution hour. Put down that paper-weight at once, please, Miss Haddon, and return to your duties.’

She took the shell from the music mistress’s hand, intending to place it on its proper shelf. But the force of example caused her to raise it to her own ear. She, too, listened . . .

She heard the rustling of trees in a wood. It was no wood that she had ever known, but all the people she had known were riding about in it, and calling softly to each other on horns. It was night, and they were hunting. Now and then beasts rustled, and once there was an ‘Halloo!’ and a chase, but more often her friends rode quietly, and she with them, penetrating the wood in every direction and for ever.

And while she heard this with one ear, Miss Haddon was speaking as follows into the other:

‘I will not return to my duties. I have neglected them ever since I came here, and once more will make little difference. I am not musical. I have deceived the pupils and the parents and you. I am not musical, but pretended that I was to make money. What will happen to me now I do not know, but I can pretend no longer. I give notice.’

The Principal was surprised to learn that her music mistress was not musical; the sound of pianos had continued for so many years that she had assumed all was well. In ordinary circumstances she would have answered scathingly, for she was an accomplished woman, but the murmuring forest caused her to reply, ‘Oh, Miss Haddon, not now; let’s talk it over tomorrow morning. Now, if you will, I want you to lie down in my sitting-room while I take preparation instead, for it always rests me to be with the girls.’

So Miss Haddon lay down, and as she dozed the soul of the sea returned to her. And the Principal, her head full of forest murmurs, went to the preparation-room, and gave her cough three times before she opened the door. All the girls were at their desks except Dolores and Violet, and them she affected not to notice. After a time she went to fetch the tree of Marie Louse, which she had forgotten, and during her absence the cavalry passed again. . . .

In the morning Miss Haddon said, ‘I still wish to go, but I wish I had waited to speak to you. I have had some extraordinary news. Many years ago my father saved a man from drowning. That man has just died, and he has left me a cottage by the edge of the sea, and money to live in it. I need not work any more; so if only I had waited till today I could have been more civil to you and’ – she blushed a little – ‘to myself.’

But the Principal shook her by both hands and kissed her. ‘I am glad that you did not wait,’ she said. ‘What you said yesterday was a word of truth, a clear call through the thicket. I wish that I, too——’ She stopped. ‘But the next step is to give the school a whole holiday.’

So the girls were summoned, and the Principal made a speech, and Miss Haddon another, giving everyone the address of the cottage, and inviting them to visit her at it. Then Rose was sent to the pastry-cook’s for ices, and Enid to the greengrocer’s for fruit, and Mildred to the sweetshop for lemonade, and Jane to the livery stables for brakes, and they all drove out an immense distance into the country, and played disorganized games. Everyone hid and nobody sought; everyone batted and nobody fielded; no one knew whose side she was on, and no mistress tried to tell her; and it was even possible to play two games at once, and to be Clumps in one and Peter Pan in the other. As for the co-ordinative system, it was never mentioned, or mentioned in derision. For example, Ellen composed a song against it, which ran:

Silly old Boney

Sat on his Pony,

   Eating his Christmas Pie,

He put in his thumb

And pulled out a plum,

   And said, ‘What a good boy am I,’

and the smaller girls sang it without stopping for three hours.

At the end of the day the Principal summoned the whole party round Miss Haddon and herself. She was ringed with happy, tired faces. The sun was setting, the dust that the day had disturbed was sinking. ‘Well, girls,’ she said, laughing, but just a little shy, ‘so you don’t seem to value my co-ordinative system?’

‘Lauks, we don’t!’ ‘Not much!’ and so on, replied the girls.

‘Well, I must make a confession,’ the Principal continued. ‘No more do I. In fact, I hate it. But I was obliged to take it up, because that type of thing impresses the Board of Education.’

At this all the mistresses and girls laughed and cheered, and Dolores and Violet, who thought that the Board of Education was a new round game, laughed too.

.   .   .   .   .

Now it may be readily imagined that this descreditable affair did not escape the attention of Mephistopheles. At the earliest opportunity he sought the Judgement Seat, bearing an immense scroll inscribed ‘J’accuse!’ Half-way up he met the angel Raphael, who asked him in his courteous manner whether he could help him in any way.

‘Not this time, thank you,’ Mephistopheles replied. ‘I really have a case now.’

‘It might be better to show it to me,’ suggested the archangel. ‘It would be a pity to fly so far for nothing, and you had such a disappointment over Job.’

‘Oh, that was different.’

‘And then there was Faust; the verdict there was ultimately against you, if I remember rightly.’

‘Oh, that was so different again. No, I am certain this time. I can prove the futility of genius. Great men think that they are understood, and are not; men think that they understand them, and do not.’

‘If you can prove that, you have indeed a case,’ said Raphael. ‘For this universe is supposed to rest on co-ordination, all creatures co-ordinating according to their powers.’

‘Listen. Charge one: Beethoven decrees that certain females shall hear a performance of his A minor quartette. They hear – some of them a band, others a shell. Charge two: Napoleon decrees that the same shall participate in the victory of Austerlitz. Result – a legacy, followed by a school treat. Charge three: Females perform Beethoven. Being deaf, and being served by dishonest clerks, he supposes they are performing him with insight. Charge four: To impress the Board of Education, females study Napoleon. He is led to suppose that they are studying him properly. I have other points, but these will suffice. The genius and the ordinary man have never co-ordinated once since Abel was killed by Cain.’

‘And now for your case,’ said Raphael, sympathetically.

‘My case?’ stammered Mephistopheles. ‘Why, this is my case.’

‘Oh, innocent devil,’ cried the other. ‘Oh, candid if infernal soul. Go back to the earth and walk up and down it again. For these people have co-ordinated, Mephistopheles. They have co-ordinated through the central sources of Melody and Victory.’

Few things have been more beautiful than my notebook on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean. It dived, like a piece of black slate, but opened soon, disclosing leaves of pale green, which quivered into blue. Now it had vanished, now it was a piece of magical india-rubber stretching out to infinity, now it was a book again, but bigger than the book of all knowledge. It grew more fantastic as it reached the bottom, where a puff of sand welcomed it and obscured it from view. But it reappeared, quite sane though a little tremulous, lying decently open on its back, while unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.

‘It is such a pity,’ said my aunt, ‘that you will not finish your work in the hotel. Then you would be free to enjoy yourself and this would never have happened.’

‘Nothing of it but will change into something rich and strange,’ warbled the chaplain, while his sister said, ‘Why, it’s gone in the water!’ As for the boatmen, one of them laughed, while the other, without a word of warning, stood up and began to take his clothes off.

‘Holy Moses,’ cried the Colonel. ‘Is the fellow mad?’

‘Yes, thank him, dear,’ said my aunt: ‘that is to say, tell him he is very kind, but perhaps another time.’

‘All the same I do want my book back,’ I complained. ‘It’s for my Fellowship Dissertation. There won’t be much left of it by another time.’

‘I have an idea,’ said some woman or other through her parasol. ‘Let us leave this child of nature to dive for the book while we go on to the other grotto. We can land him either on this rock or on the ledge inside, and he will be ready when we return.’

The idea seemed good; and I improved it by saying I would be left behind too, to lighten the boat. So the two of us were deposited outside the little grotto on a great sunlit rock that guarded the harmonies within. Let us call them blue, though they suggest rather the spirit of what is clean – cleanliness passed from the domestic to the sublime, the cleanliness of all the sea gathered together and radiating light. The Blue Grotto at Capri contains only more blue water, not bluer water. That colour and that spirit is the heritage of every cave in the Mediterranean into which the sun can shine and the sea flow.

As soon as the boat left I realized how imprudent I had been to trust myself on a sloping rock with an unknown Sicilian. With a jerk he became alive, seizing my arm and saying, ‘Go to the end of the grotto, and I will show you something beautiful.’

He made me jump off the rock on to the ledge over a dazzling crack of sea; he drew me away from the light till I was standing on the tiny beach of sand which emerged like powdered turquoise at the farther end. There he left me with his clothes, and returned swiftly to the summit of the entrance rock. For a moment he stood naked in the brilliant sun, looking down at the spot where the book lay. Then he crossed himself, raised his hands above his head, and dived.

If the book was wonderful, the man is past all description. His effect was that of a silver statue, alive beneath the sea, through whom life throbbed in blue and green. Something infinitely happy, infinitely wise – but it was impossible that it should emerge from the depths sunburned and dripping, holding the notebook on the Deist Controversy between its teeth.

A gratuity is generally expected by those who bathe. Whatever I offered, he was sure to want more, and I was disinclined for an argument in a place so beautiful and also so solitary. It was a relief that he should say in conversational tones, ‘In a place like this one might see the Siren.’

I was delighted with him for thus falling into the key of his surroundings. We had been left together in a magic world, apart from all the commonplaces that are called reality, a world of blue whose floor was the sea and whose walls and roof of rock trembled with the sea’s reflections. Here only the fantastic would be tolerable, and it was in that spirit I echoed his words, ‘One might easily see the Siren.’

He watched me curiously while he dressed. I was parting the sticky leaves of the notebook as I sat on the sand.

‘Ah,’ he said at last. ‘You may have read the little book that was printed last year. Who would have thought that our Siren would have given the foreigners pleasure!’

(I read it afterward. Its account is, not unnaturally, incomplete, in spite of there being a woodcut of the young person, and the words of her song.)

‘She comes out of this blue water, doesn’t she,’ I suggested, ‘and sits on the rock at the entrance, combing her hair.’

I wanted to draw him out, for I was interested in his sudden gravity, and there was a suggestion of irony in his last remark that puzzled me.

‘Have you ever seen her?’ he asked.

‘Often and often.’

‘I, never.’

‘But you have heard her sing?’

He put on his coat and said impatiently, ‘How can she sing under the water? Who could? She sometimes tries, but nothing comes from her but great bubbles.’

‘She should climb on to the rock.’

‘How can she?’ he cried again, quite angry. ‘The priests have blessed the air, so she cannot breathe it, and blessed the rocks, so that she cannot sit on them. But the sea no man can bless, because it is too big, and always changing. So she lives in the sea.’

I was silent.

At that his face took a gentler expression. He looked at me as though something was on his mind, and going out to the entrance rock gazed at the external blue then returning into our twilight he said, ‘As a rule only good people see the Siren.’

I made no comment. There was a pause, and he continued. ‘That is a very strange thing, and the priests do not know how to account for it; for she of course is wicked. Not only those who fast and go to Mass are in danger, but even those who are merely good in daily life. No one in the village had seen her for two generations. I am not surprised. We all cross ourselves before we enter the water, but it is unnecessary. Giuseppe, we thought, was safer than most. We loved him, and many of us he loved: but that is a different thing from being good.’

I asked who Giuseppe was.

‘That day – I was seventeen and my brother was twenty and a great deal stronger than I was, and it was the year when the visitors, who have brought such prosperity and so many alterations into the village, first began to come. One English lady in particular, of very high birth, came, and has written a book about the place, and it was through her that the Improvement Syndicate was formed, which is about to connect the hotels with the station by a funicular railway.’

‘Don’t tell me about that lady in here,’ I observed.

‘That day we took her and her friends to see the grottoes. As we rowed close under the cliffs I put out my hand, as one does, and caught a little crab, and having pulled off its claws offered it as a curiosity. The ladies groaned, but a gentleman was pleased, and held out money. Being inexperienced, I refused it, saying that his pleasure was sufficient reward! Giuseppe, who was rowing behind, was very angry with me and reached out with his hand and hit me on the side of the mouth, so that a tooth cut my lip, and I bled. I tried to hit him back, but he always was too quick for me, and as I stretched round he kicked me under the armpit, so that for a moment I could not even row. There was a great noise among the ladies, and I heard afterward that they were planning to take me away from my brother and train me as a waiter. That, at all events, never came to pass.