The first
sight
I had of P. St. J. Hobart was in the distance.
Coming back one of those evenings from the woods, we saw him
standing there in the doorway, as might the owner. He was tall, bald
and wore a curious smile. As we approached, he vanished inside.
Though he continued for some time to fight shy of us, we from then
on saw him go past the windows.
Then came the evening when he took a long look in at us. The
window was closed, for the dusk was damp, due to sea mist coming
up the estuary. He put one hand flat against the pane – through
the glass I beheld his teeth and his eyeballs. Not only that but I saw
him laugh. “Arthur,” I said as quietly as possible, “dear, let’s shut the
shutters, shall we?”
Somehow I’m never comfortable being laughed at. Also, his
manner reflected upon Arthur.
Yet you could pity him, there alone.
I should explain that what Arthur never considered, for one
moment, was our quitting the house. He was not for our yielding an
inch. He took this trouble up as he might a challenge, saying, “No,
what’s good enough for him is good enough for me.” The night
Hobart gave me a fright in bed, Arthur did ask if I’d care to go for
a change to Mary’s. “What,” I said, “and leave you? No, I know
where
my
place is!”
Giving up looking for the will, P. St. J. Hobart turned his
attention upon us. Nothing we did escaped him. Finding we did not
go away, he commenced studying us for his own reasons. Wanting,
was he, in some way to come to terms? I put it to Arthur, whether
we could not? Arthur replied, “Not while he continues his present
attitude.” I pointed out that P. St. J. Hobart had all but given up
sneering: he’d remain quite quiet in the corners of rooms or rove
through our woodlands quite inoffensively, or stand by the water
much as did Arthur. He knew his way in the dark. He was back
home.
For my part, I should not have objected to having a bachelor in
the house – had he been a living one.
That
was what was the matter. That was what put out Arthur.
Arthur could never tolerate what was not aboveboard. “I’d deal fairand-square,” he said, “with any living man.” Such had been his rule
throughout his business days: to do otherwise would not have been
himself. “All I ask,” he said, “is a
living
man. As it is, I call this a dirty
trick.” He felt himself taken advantage of by P. St. J. Hobart.
“Well, you can’t blame
him
, Arthur. Blame that air-crash!”
But with Arthur, it was the principle of the thing. Till he’d had
this out, he could not enjoy his home. Could not settle to anything
till he’d cleared this up. He was hit, you understand, right in his
sense of property. He said: “I’ll have this out with him, if I die.” So
it was Arthur, from that day on, who took to going after P. St. J.
Hobart.
Arthur
would creep and look suddenly through a window to
see whether P. St. J. Hobart was in a room.
Arthur
would stand hourlong in our doorway, watching to see who’d come out of our woods.
Or bang down his teacup and dart out – in vain: he’d come back
ever so crestfallen.
“Never mind,” I’d say, “he’s just a Slippery Sam.”
For P. St. J. Hobart would never face Arthur squarely. No sort of
satisfaction would he give. Wherever Arthur was not, Hobart would
be – all the place was queer with that smile of his.
1
Get us out? – no,
he’d done better than that. May have been his revenge, may have
been his fun.
Looking back, one thing’s strange: no such word as “ghost” ever
passed Arthur’s or my own lips. No, not even when we all but
quarrelled.
Only all but quarrelled. P. St. J. Hobart brought about no rift
between my dear Arthur and me. I trust I shall always remember
that. After thirty-five years – no it wasn’t possible. It was just that
Arthur was such an upright man, who could not sit down under what
seemed wrong, whereas I am the easy-going sort – live and let live.
So the thing preyed on Arthur.
The end came suddenly.
I don’t care to speak of it, so I’ll tell you shortly. All that day, it
was gathering up for thunder. Stifling and awful. So dark indoors
that to get through in the kitchen took all my morning – I don’t
know when it was that I dished up dinner. Arthur barely spoke and
had little appetite: he sat as usual in the master’s chair we’d bought
with other furniture in the house – and now and then behind
Arthur’s shoulder I caught a glimpse of P. St. J. Hobart. After, for
some hours I don’t remember: I put my feet up on the livingroom
sofa to snatch a nap, but went deep asleep. The storm breaking
woke me. P. St. J. Hobart sat on the end of my sofa, tipping towards
me his bald head. He never had come so near before.
He came nearer, showing me his white eyes.
Well, I knew evil when I saw it. I cried out, but the thunder was
like great guns. Right overhead. Then I could not see for the light
ning – I don’t know therefore for how long Arthur’d been planted
there in the door. Down, down the dark rain came, smacking on the
water of the estuary: it was full tide.
Hobart gave such a laugh as I never heard, but backed off the
sofa. “You needn’t go,” said Arthur, “I want a word with you” – he
spread his arms, barred the one way out of the room. At last he’d got
Hobart into a corner.
P. St. J. Hobart did not so much as trouble to laugh again. He
walked straight through Arthur, out of that door. Arthur made a grab
at his own chest, almost unbelievingly. Then he turned, with no
word to me, and went after Hobart. I’m so stout, I stumbled as I ran
to the window. Hobart, shimmering in the lightning, waited for
Arthur to come up with him – through the downpour I watched
them come face to face. Like that they stood, as they never had.
What began to pass, I shall never know. Hobart broke it off, moved
away. Arthur always after him. Arthur again overtook him near the
lawn’s edge, raised his fist and struck out – battling at air.
P. St. J. Hobart strolled off away down the jetty. Lightning
flashed a white sheet on to the water, over which Hobart walked
forward, on. Arthur, however, fell where the jetty ended. What
remained was the roaring storm and the racing water into which my
dear had gone like a stone.
Not till the following day did they bring home Arthur.
More than peaceful his face was, satisfied. Nothing more on his
mind, he had said his say. He had had it out.
I suppose I got through on the telephone to the village. I know I
was not left alone long. A death finds you friends, wherever you are.
Somebody wired Mary and she came, and it was with her that I went
away. Never to return.
So there is that place, for whoever wants it. Once again for sale,
for I need the money. Empty or not empty, I cannot say. Who is in
possession, I do not ask.
Candles in the Window
A
unt Kay came to us every Christmas, arriving at
always the same hour, in the winter dusk of the day before. Un
failingly as our grandfather clock chimed, we heard her cab draw up,
then her voice in the hall. Children love repetition, and ceremonial.
Each time, her coming added solemnity to the pre-Christmas excite -
ment in our home. We four stood crowded at the head of the
staircase, waiting for Mother to summon us one by one: Aunt Kay
never cared to be crowded, or in any way rushed. Tall in her furlined cloak, her dark veil thrown back, she stooped as many times as
there were children, to imprint a kiss on each upturned forehead;
and with the kiss went a moment of searching gaze, though the gaze
seemed to be coming from far off. Then, drawing off her fine,
shabby French gloves, she would sweep ahead of Mother into the
parlour, where, under the mantle now wreathed in holly, the same
chair by the fire was always hers.
Likewise, her trunk with the studded top always preceded her to
the same bedroom: at the back, for she did not care to look at the
sea. (Married, as a girl, to a sea captain, she had early been widowed
by a gale: nothing had ever been heard of the lost ship.) “Aunt Kay’s
room” was a little darkened by the hill of so many houses rising
behind it, tall sedate old weathered houses like ours, with greyslated fronts and white-sashed windows. Our town was a small but
anciently famous port on an estuary in the south of Ireland: here the
sea crooked deep inland between sheltering hills.
1
Quays, less busy
now than they were once, made a foreground for climbing buildings,
one or two mansions raised on maritime wealth, the old lovely
church, the Queen Anne courthouse. And, though major shipping
trade had withdrawn, adventurous little trawlers from France and
Spain still docked here, unloading exotic cargoes. Also, our town
flourished as a market centre; it was the bourn of farmers and
countryfolk out of lonely miles extending between the coast and the
mountains. Down the narrow streets were little bow-fronted shops.
These, at Christmas, glittered like jewel boxes.
Christmas Eve drew everyone into town. There was great
festivity: doffing of wide-brimmed hats, merry accordion playing by
a blind beggar, greetings shouted from one to another of the jostling
ass carts, on whose back shafts perched small boys, swinging their
legs. Mothers of families grave in their hooded black cloaks, gazed
through the misted panes at festoons of tinsel, gilded crockery,
pyramids of oranges, spiced black sausages, holy images, gaudy
neckerchiefs, couples of china dogs, debating how to lay out the
final shilling, while in their wake their more skittish daughters were
ogled by dark-eyed sailors seeking romance. Out through doorways
travelled a tempting spiciness from sugar-baked apples, pigs’ trotters
in jelly. There was coming and going out of the lamplit archways,
the echoing courtyards, the twisting alleyways. We children loved
our late-evening run through the town; we made last-minute penny
purchases, we delivered gifts. Our father was doctor here; we knew
everyone. Best of all was the climax, when, finally, we made our
ways to the quayside, then looked up, for the whole hill had become
like a Christmas tree! A gigantic candle, pink, scarlet, turquoise or
amber was alight in a window of every home. These would burn on
until the Feast of Epiphany. What a night for a ship to come in from
sea. And
this
, surely, should welcome Aunt Kay, we thought.
Aunt Kay, however, remained indoors. The shutters were shut, we
knew, and curtains drawn between her and that ceaseless though
distant sound, the wintry moaning of the Atlantic at the harbour’s
mouth. If, as might happen at Christmas, there were a storm,
Mother would hasten to the piano and begin to play, for we all felt
we could not shelter Aunt Kay enough. Her visits to us (living
where we did) were a brave concession. At no other time of year
would she stir from the midland city where she lived, by herself,
frugally, in back-street lodgings. Aunt Kay was too regal to seem
poor. She bestowed herself upon us, for these days each Christmas,
with the simplicity of an accepted beauty, ageless but for the silver
of her hair and shadowy remoteness behind her eyes. Her carriage
was upright, her movements measured; it was an event when slowly
she turned her head. Childless, she was drawn to us as a family by
her love for our father, her special nephew: he and she had been
linked since he was a boy. I, Katherine, the eldest of his children,
was named after her. After me had come Barbara, Linda, Frederick.
We four, forever upon the margin of her spell, were a little con
strained, perhaps, by her lack of chatter. In no way did she resemble
the lively great-aunts or rosy, plump and loquacious grandmammas
who from time to time visited our friends. (It cannot have been easy,
I see now, for Aunt Kay to break out those year-long silences
attendant on her very solitary life.)
Yet she distinguished between us. How she noted our characters
was shown by the miraculous rightness of her gifts. How could
mortal woman perceive, so almost uncannily, the unspoken desires
of each one of us? These marvels, did she conjure them into being,
or did she spend all year, between Christmas and Christmas,
stitching at fineries for us elder girls, or searching dusty trays in
curio shops for treasure trove for Linda and Frederick, dinted Roman
coins, jointed silver fish? Children take genius for granted, as they
take lovingness. I, however, Katherine, the firstborn, was soonest to
be fated to cross the threshold. There arrived the Christmas when I
was fourteen.
That, too, was the Christmas the snow fell. Snow is rare in
Ireland; it was preceded by an unfamiliar, curious, tawny hush. Onto
Aunt Kay’s cab, as it pulled up, the first of the big flakes came
twirling down. Later, they danced between the lights of the shops,
glistened on the cloaks of the countrywomen, silvered the backs of
the patient donkeys. They veiled with gauze the candles lit on the
hill, and looked wraithlike over the dark estuary. In the air, the taste
of snow mingled with the tang of the peat smoke and the perpetual
brininess from the sea; we shouted aloud with surprised delight,
breathing it in. Five-year-old Frederick, buttoned into his reefer, ran
with his tongue out. By Christmas morning, the wonder had been
perfected: yesterday’s grey town, transformed and dazzling, had
overnight entered the world of fairy tale! Linda shouted: “The
Christmas cards have come true!” The church bells, over the streets
with their soundless footfalls, enchanted our ears as never before.
And to crown everything I, Katherine, tonight would go to a ball!
Or, as a ball
I
thought of it. It was Christmas dancing in a big
house overlooking the harbour. Other years, I had longingly heard
the music, pulsing toward us over the water; but this year, oh, joy, I
was “old enough.” Sympathetic, my fanciful younger sisters helped
me build up a fiction of chandeliers, beaux, bouquets, Viennese
waltzes. Hanging, new as a pin, in my attic bedroom, my flouncey
white dress with the coral ribbons held a day-long reception of its
own; one by one my juniors stole in, admiring. Not the least of the
awe was mine. Could it be truly