Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (11 page)

And sometimes I play the piano. Not well. Passably. To amuse myself. When I had my friend’s letter I went to an old chest in which for years I have kept papers, music, books, press cuttings, photographs. I knew I still had it. And there it was. The chocolate box.

I look at it now as I write. Why did I keep it? I never put anything in it, and I suppose I kept it only as evidence of something that did really happen. What shall I use it for now? Or shall I at last burn it?

There is still a faint brown stain in it. And as I put the lid back and look again at the picture of George V and think of my mother and how she loved these particular chocolates, I hear something in the room. It is a humming, a buzzing, coming and going.

I do not think it will ever stop, this noise. It is always in my ears.

VI

Quintin Claribel

From his earliest infancy, Quintin Claribel had fallen victim to two tyrants: words, and his own tongue. The tongue was very ready to express in words thoughts that should have stayed in his mind, or sometimes thoughts that had never been in his mind until the words planted them there. The words themselves were sweeter tyrants, acknowledged and revered; it mattered not to the child what a word meant; had it a pleasant sound it demanded, sooner or later, the service of his tongue. Such words as ‘orphrey, balm, tiercel, sponge, incest, loosestrife, vaseline’ – these were music to his ears at even such an early age as eight.

Perhaps Miss Bond, who once told him that Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky ‘meant nothing,’ was partly responsible; according to Quintin she was certainly responsible for his ultimate punishment. This lady, a firm character who always believed in saying what you meant – who, in fact, treated words merely as weights in the scales of wisdom – was his governess. The unique history of Quintin Claribel does undoubtedly begin in the schoolroom at Hassocks where daily he sat picking up stale crumbs of Miss Bond’s scholarship.

‘Have you,’ she might ask, ‘mastered the first declension yet, Quintin?’

She would not look at him as she asked the question. With her right forefinger she would trace designs in her left palm as though, in those lines of fate and head and heart she read, not her own future, but her pupil’s. It was a trick that fascinated Quintin. Watching her, he would forget to answer, until again she would speak, her head still bent over the cupped palm, but the voice keener now, the words clipped shorter.

Then, hurriedly, he would reply: ‘Oh yes, Miss Bond! Oh yes! I’ve learnt it.’

‘Then repeat it!’ And suddenly with this command, both Miss Bond’s hands would come down slap on the desk and he would find himself gazing emptily at her rounded owl-like face.

‘
Mensa
,
mensa
 – ’ Here Quintin might stammeringly pause.

‘You have
not
mastered it!’ Miss Bond would cry, almost with pleasure it seemed to Quintin. ‘Why did you say that you had?’

‘I didn’t mean it, Miss Bond. I meant to say that I was just in the middle of learning it.’

‘Would it not be better to say what you mean?’

Quintin could find no response to that. And because he was so often trapped by his governess, he came gradually to hate her. She was, for one thing, so ugly; so frighteningly like an owl. He was sure she hooted in the night and devoured mice in the small hours. Like an owl, the inscrutable face was expressionless. She knew everything; and he felt he would never know anything.

One bright frosty morning in early January, Quintin found it even more difficult than usual to keep his mind upon his studies. Miss Bond was standing with her back to the fire, pointing with a long rod to the position of Australia on the globe. Quintin was cold; Miss Bond looked very warm. If, the child wondered, he were to hold out his hands and warm them in front of her, would she take the hint and move a little?

His seat was near the window. His eyes strayed to the frosted walnut tree and beyond, to the park where, over a thin crust of snow, shaggy cattle moved. The pond would be frozen. Surely it was idle to sit here and consider Australia on such a morning, when a new pair of skates reposed on the shelf in his bedroom cupboard?

She was speaking.

‘Be so good as to tell me, Quintin, what do we mainly import from Australia?’

He heard the question, asked for a second time, and in his mind a swarm of words buzzed. Cotton, wool, coal, tea, coffee, candles, rice, copal, gum? Making a supreme effort, Quintin sought to clutch on to one of these words, hoping it would rescue him from this slough of uncertainty. ‘Copal’ was the word that seemed most likely, since he did not know what copal was, and invariably the right answer turned out to be only the prelude to further questions equally unanswerable. Quintin, if he understood nothing else, understood Miss Bond’s technique. Were ‘copal’ to be the required word, she would at once pounce on him: ‘And what is copal, may I ask?’ Perhaps, then, it was wiser to grasp another word from his mental list. ‘Tea’ for example. But something told him that tea was not Australian; it was Chinese. Should he fling himself boldly into battle and announce that he knew what came from China? But his distaste for the word ‘tea’ (could it be called a word at all?) overcame this impulse.

Struggling thus to answer, he did indeed open his mouth intending to utter the word ‘copal’ – the best sounding word of the lot. But other words lay back in his mind, words that flavoured his mouth and made him want to curl up with joy. The word ‘vile’ for example. Shivering with the cold, sliding his hands between his stockinged knees, he opened his mouth very wide, certain now that he could answer Miss Bond. Instead of answering her, he gasped out the three dreadful words:

‘Vile old owl!’

An ominous cloud surged into the pale face of the governess. Her wand clattered to the floor, lying like Aaron’s rod on the rug before the fire, ready to writhe and hiss at Quintin in defence of its mistress.

After the first shock Miss Bond behaved with acid courtesy. The offence was grave indeed, but it must be met calmly and with fortitude.

‘What – ’ she spoke very quietly, ‘ – did I hear you say, Quintin?’

The three terrible words were ringing in his head. Could he possibly have spoken them? He looked round as though in search of another culprit. Somebody in that cupboard; somebody behind that screen; one of those Watteau-like vignettes that swung from peachy frills and tassels in the tapestry above the fireplace; the anvil jaw of Napoleon Buonaparte from his frame over the bookshelves. Could any of these have spoken? But no! It was too clear that his own tongue, that irresponsible instrument of his darkest thoughts, had made public what should have been forever private.

Suddenly Miss Bond spoke again, less calmly.

‘What did I hear you say, Master Quintin?’

He burst up from his chair in distress.

‘I didn’t mean it, Miss Bond; really, I didn’t. I was thinking of what you asked me. Copal, that’s what I meant. I didn’t mean it was you who was the vile old – ’

‘Enough!’

Miss Bond’s hand shot up sharply, checking a repetition of the offensive word.

‘I wonder,’ she said (and there was sadness in her voice) for who knew better than herself that she was not beautiful?) ‘that those wicked words don’t freeze in the air as a perpetual reproach to you, Quintin.’

Walking to the window she turned her back upon him, perhaps to hide the unfortunate face that had prompted the outrageous words or perhaps to imprint the insult upon the ice-grey sky.

Again, desperately, Quintin tried to restore himself to her favour.

‘Please, Miss Bond, I really didn’t mean it. I don’t know what made me say it. I wasn’t thinking of you. I didn’t mean it was you who was the vile – ’

Again Miss Bond stopped him.

‘One day,’ she said, ‘you will eat your words, Quintin.’

And with something like a sob, she turned and left the room. Had he called her a liar, a murderer, a thief – these she could have borne because they would have been so manifestly untrue. But to be called an owl – and a
vile
one, an
old
one – some ghastly truth lurked there. Hurrying to her bedroom she locked the door and surveyed herself in her mirror.

Alone, Quintin turned gloomily to the fire and warmed himself. Now that the thing had happened he wasn’t really sorry. In the first place, surely it was true, what he had said? Truer than tea from Australia or copal from China. In the second place she had gone and now he could get warm.

But why stay by the fire? This was not the way to get warm on a winter morning.

Going to the door, he crept upstairs, ran to his bedroom, found his skates and came down. In another minute he was outside, running past the walnut tree, over the little bridge, to the park.

Soon, in a hollow in the land, the house was lost. The morning, the ice, his freedom stretched before him.

While he skated he found himself fascinated by the twirling spirals that he was making on the ice; in time, if he practised, he would be able to make figures, signs, words. Even wonders. The morning passed all too quickly. The stable clock chimed the three-quarters-to-one; he would have to return to an angered mother and father.

Unwillingly he took off his skates, slung them over his shoulder and stood moodily looking at the beautiful designs of his exercise. There, clear on the ice, was a great letter ‘O’; so perfect a letter that he could not resist putting on his skates again, going to the ice and soaring up and down in angles, driven by a mad desire to engrave the letter ‘W’ on the pond. He came back to the grass and surveyed what he had made. Not a very good ‘W.’ ‘OW,’ he said. And then stopped. ‘OW?’ But surely? Yes – and so she was A
vile
old owl. He bit his lip. But she was!

Very slowly he walked up the rising field towards the house. By now the sky was heavy with fresh snow. He stopped for a moment on the bridge. It was very quiet. A few flakes of snow fell. It seemed as though everything had lost its voice so that the patter of the snow upon the ground could be clearly heard. For the last time, aware that he must never utter them aloud again, Quintin, in the silence, spoke clearly and happily the three words that had given him a morning on the ice.

He turned then from the cold rail of the bridge and retraced his steps homewards. A few yards on he stopped. Before him, above his head, a long branch of the walnut tree lay frozen against the hard, livid sky. Twined in and out of it, as though they had been threaded with a stalactite upon the bough, were ten icicles shaped like letters of the alphabet.

The first icicle was shaped like a letter ‘V’; the second, very clearly, a bold letter ‘I’; the third, a perfect right angle, the letter ‘L’; the fourth –

But it will be obvious to the reader. Frozen upon the branch above him, in bold Roman capitals, each one a foot in height, were the deadly letters of that deadly phrase

VILE OLD OWL

At first he only wondered. It was so beautiful. So icily true. He reached up to try to touch the letters, but they were out of reach. Taking a stick he considered breaking one of them; but he could not bring himself to do this any more than a painter could have brought himself to scrape off a little colour from a finished canvas.

Inside the house the luncheon gong sounded, deep and portentous in the aphonic silence of the gathering snow. Quintin did not move. He was enthralled. Had anybody ever done this before? What mattered Australia now? What mattered anything? He prayed for continuation of the cold spell; the thaw, the wasting away to water of his ice words, would be harder to endure than the death of even the most gargantuan snow-man.

After lunch, he told himself, he would bring Miss Bond out to see for herself. He had no desire to be cruel. But she, worshipping at the shrine of veracity, would surely not wish to miss so rare a demonstration of truth? Frozen there against the sky, the insult ceased to be personal. Nobody, not even Miss Bond, could honestly fail to see that.

Anticipating the joy he was going to have, he moved to the house. Then again he stopped, not many yards from the lobby door, looking at an espalier against the mellow bricks. There again, were the frozen words, the same size, the same Roman capitals. Quintin ran closer to the wall. He saw that the icicles were not joined to the espalier. They were simply standing out in the air, about a foot from the wall, supported by not so much as a spider’s web. As before, they were beyond his reach.

He blinked and shook his head. His first pride gave way to uneasiness. The words on the tree had enchanted him; but these – they were too independent. He turned back in bewilderment to the walnut tree. Frozen on the same branch, Miss Bond’s condemnation was still there. He looked again to the wall and sighed with relief. No words hung in the still air; he must have imagined them.

His mother appeared at the lobby door and called crossly.

‘Quintin, come in. What are you standing about like that for?’

He ran up to her.

‘I’m sorry, Mother, I’m awfully sorry. I just had to try my new skates.’

He wanted at once to drag her down to the walnut tree to show her what he had made. But there was no need. For there, forged in the air above him, though he did not at first see them directly, were the three fatal words; he knew they were there because of a sudden coldness over his head. He looked up. Yes, immediately above.

His mother frowned and took his arm.

‘What are you looking at? What’s the matter?’

‘Can’t you see, Mummy? Look!’

‘There’s nothing there, you funny boy.’

Irritated at being kept out in the cold, she dragged him inside and sent him to wash his hands and face.

A few minutes later Quintin came into the dining-room and took his place opposite Miss Bond. His father was away on business and for that he was glad. Nobody spoke. Mrs Claribel – who guessed from the governess’s red eyes that there had been mutiny in the schoolroom – uncomfortably made some reference to the hard weather. When Simmons, the parlourmaid, had taken up the soup and for a moment left the room, Mrs Claribel said in an unhappy voice (for she disliked having to rebuke her only child), ‘Quintin, come to see me in my work-room after luncheon.’

Quintin hardly heard the words. Terror clutched his young heart. For there, festooned above the luncheon table, some of the letters obscured in a bowl of early freesias, were the icy words which by now, he suddenly realized, he had come to dread.

He looked furtively at Miss Bond and his mother, then again at the words. It was obvious nobody could see them but him. The parlourmaid laid a plate before him; he was aware of her moving over to the corner table. But still, as though his very eyes were frozen, he stared at the words. His hands refused to grip the knife and fork. Hungry as he was he felt sick at the thought of the roast mutton on his plate. The clock ticked away; the silence grew unbearable.

‘Eat your food, Quintin.’ His mother, as she spoke, looked at him curiously. What was the matter with the boy, his eyes staring out of his head like that? Instinctively, she too looked in the direction he was following, a little above the freesias. There was nothing unusual about the flowers. What was wrong with the boy?

‘Eat your food, Quintin.’

The words brought the truth forcibly before poor Quintin; he knew only too well what his food was. Miss Bond had told him. She knew. She knew everything.

He rose suddenly from his chair, reached out a trembling hand, snatched in the air and crunched the letter ‘V’ into his mouth. Shivering with the shock of so much ice on his tongue, he fell back again.

His mother cried out in a horrified voice –

‘Quintin, are you ill?’

He did not answer. He still had nine letters to consume, nine bitingly cold letters. Oh, what a hateful thing the alphabet was! The prospect appalled him. But it would have to be done. Again rising, he snatched at the ‘L’ and bit half of it off, swallowing quickly. The warmth of his hand, still holding the other half of the letter, melted it. Drips of water fell upon the table. Mrs Claribel rose, her napkin held to her lips, and cried out –