The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (32 page)

Claribel (how she hated the absurd name!) had a splendid opportunity for observing everything in life, simply because she was so universally neglected. The Matchams and the Dorsets and the Duddons (all the relations, in fact) simply considered her of no importance at all.

She did not mind this: she took it entirely for granted, as she did her plainness, her slowness of speech, her shyness in company, her tendency to heat spots, her bad figure, and all the other things with which an undoubtedly all-wise God had seen fit to endow her. It was only that having all these things, Claribel was additionally an unfortunate name; but then, most of them called her Carrie, and the boys ‘Fetch and Carry' often enough.

She was taken with the others to parties and teas, in order, as she very well knew, that critical friends and neighbours should not say that ‘the Dorsets always neglected that plain child of theirs, poor thing'.

She sat in a corner and was neglected, but that she did not mind in the least. She liked it. It gave her, all the more, the opportunity of watching people, the game that she liked best in all the world. She played it without any sense at all that she had unusual powers. It was much later than this that she was to realize her gifts.

It was this sitting in a corner in the Hortons flat that enabled her to perceive what it was that had happened to her Cousin Tom. Of course, she knew from the public standpoint well
enough what had happened to him – simply that he had been wounded three times, once in Gallipoli and twice in France; that he had received the DSO and been made a Major. But it was something other than that that she meant. She knew that all the brothers and the sisters, the cousins, the uncles and the aunts proclaimed gleefully that there was nothing the matter with him at all. ‘It's quite wonderful,' they all said, ‘to see the way that dear Tom has come back from the war just as he went into it. His same jolly generous self. Everyone's friend. Not at all conceited. How wonderful that is, when he's done so well and has all that money!'

That was, Claribel knew, the thing that everyone said. Tom had always been her own favourite. He had not considered her the least little bit more than he had considered everyone else. He always was kind. But he gave her a smile and a nod and a pat, and she was grateful.

Then he had always seemed to her a miraculous creature; his whole history in the war had only increased that adoration. She loved to look at him, and certainly he must, in anyone's eyes, have been handsome, with his light, shining hair, his fine, open brow, his slim, straight body, his breeding and distinction and nobility.

To all of this was suddenly added wealth – his uncle, the head of the biggest biscuit factory in England, dying and leaving him everything. His mother and he had already been sufficiently provided for at his father's death; but he was now, through Uncle Bob's love for him, an immensely rich man. This had fallen to him in the last year of the war, when he was recovering from his third wound. After the Armistice, freed from the hospital, he had taken a delightful flat in Hortons (his mother preferred the country, and was cosy with dogs, a parrot, a butler, and bees in Wiltshire), and it was here that he gave his delightful parties. It was here that Claribel, watching from her corner, made her great discovery about him.

Her discovery quite simply was that he did not exist; that he was dead, that ‘there was nobody there'.

She did not know what it was that caused her just to be aware of her ghostly surprise. She had in the beginning been
taken in as they all had been. He had seemed on his first return from the hospital to be the same old Tom whom they had always known. For some weeks he had used a crutch, and his cheeks were pale, his eyes were sunk like bright jewels into dark pouches of shadow.

He had said very little about his experiences in France; that was natural, none of the men who had returned from there wished to speak of it. He had thrown himself with apparent eagerness into the dancing, the theatres, the house-parties, the shooting, the flirting – all the hectic, eager life that seemed to be pushed by everyone's hands into the dark, ominous silence that the announcement of the Armistice had created.

Then how they all had crowded about him! Claribel, seated in her dark little corner, had summoned them one by one – Mrs Freddie Matcham with her high, bright colour and wonderful hair, her two daughters, Claribel's cousins, Lucy and Amy, so pretty and so stupid, the voluminous Dorsets, with all their Beaminster connections, Hattie Dorset, Dollie Pym-Dorset, Rose and Emily; then the men – young Harwood Dorset, who was no good at anything, but danced so well, Henry Matcham, capable and intelligent would he only work, Pelham Duddon, ambitious and grasping; then her own family, her elder sisters, Morgraunt (what a name!), who married Rex Beaminster, and they hadn't a penny, and Lucile, unmarried, pretty and silly, and Dora, serious and plain and a miser – Oh! Claribel knew them all! She wondered, as she sat there, how she
could
know them all as she did, and, after that, how they could be so unaware that she
did
know them! She did not feel herself preternaturally sharp – only that they were unobservant or simply, perhaps, that they had better things to observe.

The thing, of course, that they were all just then observing was Tom and his money. The two things were synonymous, and if they couldn't have the money without Tom, they must have him with it. Not that they minded having Tom – he was exactly what they felt a man should be – beautiful to look at, easy and happy and casual, a splendid sportsman, completely free of all that tiresome ‘analysis' stuff that some of the would-be clever ones thought so essential.

They liked Tom and approved of him, and oh! how they wanted his money! There was not one of them not in need of it! Claribel could see all their dazzling, shining eyes fixed upon those great piles of gold, their beautiful fingers crooked out towards it. Claribel did not herself want money. What she wanted, more than she allowed herself to think, was companionship and friendship and affection… And that she was inclined to think she was fated never to obtain.

The day when she first noticed the thing that was the matter with Tom, was one wet, stormy afternoon in March; they were all gathered together in Tom's lovely sitting-room in Hortons.

Tom, without being exactly clever about beautiful things, had a fine sense of the way that he wished to be served, and the result of this was that his flat was neat and ordered, everything always in perfect array. His man, Sheraton, was an ideal man; he had been Tom's servant before the war, and now, released from his duties, was back again; there was no reason why he should ever now depart from them, he having, as he once told Claribel, a contemptuous opinion of women. Under Sheraton's care, that long, low-ceilinged room, lined with bookcases (Tom loved fine bindings), with its gleaming, polished floor, some old family portraits and rich curtains of a gleaming dark purple – to Claribel this place was heaven. It would not, of course, have been so heavenly had Tom not been so perfect a figure moving against the old gold frames, the curtains, the leaping fire, looking so exactly, Claribel thought, ‘the younger image of old Theophilus Duddon, stiff and grand up there on the wall in his white stock and velvet coat, Tom's great-grandfather'.

On this particular day Claribel's sister, Morgraunt Beaminster, and Lucile, Mrs Matcham, Hattie Dorset, and some men were present. Tom was sitting over the rim of a big leather chair near the fire, his head tossed back laughing at one of Lucile's silly jokes. Mrs Matcham was at the table, ‘pouring out', and Sheraton, rather stout but otherwise a fine example of the Admirable Crichton, handed around the food. They were laughing, as they always did, at nothing at all, Lucile's shrill, barking laugh above the rest. From the babel Claribel caught phrases like ‘Dear old Tom!' ‘But he didn't – he hadn't got the
intelligence.' ‘Tom, you're a pet…'‘Oh, but of
course
not. What stuff! Why, Harriet herself…!' Through it all Sheraton moved with his head back, his indulgent indifference, his supremely brushed hair. It was just then Claribel caught the flash from Mrs Matcham's beautiful eyes. Everyone had their tea; there was nothing left for her to do. She sat there, her lovely hands crossed on the table in front of her, her eyes lost, apparently, in dim abstraction. Claribel saw that they were not lost at all, but were bent, obliquely, with a concentrated and almost passionate interest, upon Tom. Mrs Matcham wanted something, and she was determined this afternoon to ask for it. What was it? Money? Her debts were notorious. Jewels? She was insatiable there… Freddie Matcham couldn't give her things. Old Lord Ferris wanted to, but wasn't allowed to… Claribel knew all this, young though she was. There remained, then, as always, Tom.

Thrilled by this discovery of Mrs Matcham's eyes, Claribel pursued her discoveries further, and the next thing that she saw was that Lucile also was intent upon some prize. Her silly, bright little eyes were tightened for some very definite purpose. They fastened upon Tom like little scissors. Claribel knew that Lucile had developed recently a passion for bridge and, being stupid… Yes, Lucile wanted money. Claribel allowed herself a little shudder of disgust. She was only seventeen, and wore spectacles, and was plain, but at that moment she felt herself to be infinitely superior to the whole lot of them. She had her own private comfortable arrogances.

It was then, while she was despising them, that she made her discovery about Tom. She looked across at him wondering whether he had noticed any of the things that had struck her. She at the same time sighed, seeing that she had made, as she always did, a nasty sloppy mess in her saucer, and knowing that Morgraunt (the watchdog of the family) would be certain to notice and scold her for it.

She looked across at Tom and discovered suddenly that he wasn't there. The shell of him was there, the dark clothes, the black tie with the pearl pin, the white shirt, the faintly coloured clear-cut mask with the shining hair, the white throat, the heavy
eyelashes – the shell, the mask, nothing else. She could never remember afterwards exactly what it was that made her certain that nobody was there. Lucile was talking to him, eagerly, repeating, as she always did, her words over and over again. He was, apparently, looking up at her, a smile on his lips. Morgraunt, so smart with the teasing blue feather in her hat, was looking across at them intent upon what Lucile was saying. He was apparently looking at Lucile, and yet his eyes were dead, sightless, like the eyes of a statue. In his hand he apparently held a cigarette, and yet his hand was of marble, no life ran through the veins. Claribel even fancied, so deeply excited had she become, that you could see the glitter of the fire through his dark body as he sat carefully balanced on the edge of the chair.

There was Nobody there, and then, as she began to reflect, there never had been anybody since the Armistice. Tom had never returned from France; only a framework with clothes hung upon it, a doll, an automaton, did Tom's work and fulfilled his place. Tom's soul had remained in France. He did not really hear what Lucile was saying. He did not care what any of them were doing, and that, of course, accounted for the wonderful way that, during these past weeks, he had acquiesced in every one of their proposals. They had many of them commented on Tom's extraordinary good nature now that he had returned. ‘You really could do anything with him that you pleased,' Claribel had heard Morgraunt triumphantly exclaim. Well, so you can with a corpse!…

As she stared at him and realized the dramatic import of her discovery, she was suddenly filled with pity. Poor Tom! How terrible that time in France must have been to have killed him like that, and nobody had known. They had thought that he had taken it so easily, he had laughed and jested with the others, had always returned to France gaily… How terrified he must have been – before he died!

As she watched him, he got up from the chair and stood before the fire, his legs spread out. The others had gathered in a corner of the room, busied around Hattie, who was trying some new Jazz tunes on the piano. Mrs Matcham got up from her table and went over to Tom and began eagerly to talk to
him. Her hands were clasped behind her beautiful back, and Claribel could see how the fingers twisted and untwisted again and again over the urgency of her request.

Claribel saw Tom's face. The mask was the lovelier now because she knew that there was no life behind it. She saw the lips smile, the eyes shine, the head bend. It was to her as though someone were turning an electric button behind there in the middle of his back…

He nodded. Mrs Matcham laughed. ‘Oh, you darling!' Claribel heard her cry. ‘If you only knew what you've done for me!'

The party was over. They all began to go.

When everybody had gone that evening and the body of Tom was alone, it surveyed the beautiful room.

Tom's body (which may for the moment be conveniently but falsely called Tom) looked about and felt a wave of miserable, impotent uselessness.

Tom summoned Sheraton.

‘Clear all these things away,' he said.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘I'm going out.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Dinner jacket to-night, sir?'

‘No, I'm not dressing.' He went to the door, then turned round. ‘Sheraton!'

‘Yes, sir!'

‘What's the matter with me?'

‘I beg your pardon, sir!'

‘What's the matter with me? You know what I mean as well as I do. Ever since I came back… I can't take an interest in anything – not in anything nor in anybody. To-day, for instance, I didn't hear a word that they were saying, not one of them, and they made enough noise, too! I don't care for anything, I don't want anything, I don't like anything, I don't hate anything. It's as though I were asleep – and yet I'm not asleep either. What's the matter with me, Sheraton?'

Sheraton's eyes, that had been so insistently veiled by decent society, as expressionless as a pair of marbles, were suddenly human; Sheraton's voice, which had been something like the shadow of a real voice, was suddenly full of feeling.

‘Why, sir, of course I've noticed… being with you before the war and all, and being fond of you, if you'll forgive my saying so, so that I always hoped that I'd come back to you. Why, if you ask me, sir, it's just the bloody war – that's all it is. I've felt something of the same kind myself. I'm getting over it a bit. It'll pass, sir. The war leaves you kind o' dead. People don't seem real any more. If you could get fond of some young lady, Mr Duddon, I'm sure…'

‘Thanks, Sheraton. I daresay you're right.' He went out.

It was a horrible night. The March wind was tearing down Duke Street,
¹
hurling itself at the windows, plucking with its fingers at the doors, screaming and laughing down the chimneys. The decorous decencies of that staid bachelor St James's world seemed to be nothing to its mood of wilful bad temper. Through the clamour of banging doors and creaking windows the bells of St James's Church could be heard striking seven o'clock.

The rain was intermittent, and fell in sudden little gusts, like the subsiding agonies of a weeping child. Every once and again a thin wet wisp of a moon showed dimly grey through heavy piles of driving cloud. Tom found Bond Street almost deserted of foot passengers.

Buttoning his high blue collar up about his neck, he set himself to face the storm. The drive of the rain against his cheeks gave him some sort of dim satisfaction after the close warm comfort of his flat.

Somewhere, far, far away in him, a voice was questioning him as to why he had given Mrs Matcham that money. The voice reminded him of what indeed he very well knew, that it was exactly like throwing water down a well, that it would do Millie Matcham no good, that it was wasted money… Well, he didn't care. The voice was too far away, and altogether had too little concern with him to disturb him very deeply. Nothing disturbed him, damn it – nothing, nothing, nothing!

When he was almost upon Grosvenor Street, a sudden gust of wind drove at him so furiously that, almost without knowing what he was doing, instinctively he stepped back to take shelter beneath a wooden boarding. Here a street-lamp gave a pale yellow colour to the dark shadows, and from its cover the street shot like a gleaming track of steel into the clustered lights of Oxford Street.

Tom was aware that two people had taken shelter in the same refuge. He peered at their dim figures. He saw at once that they were old – an old man and an old woman.

He did not know what it was that persuaded him to stare at them as though they could be of any importance to him. Nothing could be of any importance to him, and he was attracted, perhaps, rather by a kind of snivelling, sniffling noise that one of them made. The old lady – she had a terrible cold. She sneezed violently, and the old man uttered a scornful ‘chut-chut' like an angry, battered bird. Then he peered up at Tom and said in a complaining, whining voice:

‘What a night!'

‘Yes, it is,' said Tom. ‘You'd better get home.'

His eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, he saw the pair distinctly. The old man was wearing a high hat, battered and set rakishly on the side of his head. The collar of a threadbare overcoat was turned up high over his skinny neck. He wore shabby black gloves. The old lady, sheltering behind the old man, was less easily discerned. She was a humped and disconcerted shadow, with a feather in her hat and a sharp nose.

‘You'd better be getting home,' Tom repeated, wondering to himself that he stayed.

The old man peered up at him.

‘You're out for no good, I reckon,' he mumbled. ‘Waiting like this on a night like this.' There was a note in his voice of scornful patronage.

‘I'm not out for anything particular,' said Tom. ‘Simply taking a walk.' The old lady sneezed again. ‘You'd really better be going home. Your wife's got a terrible cold.'

‘She's not my wife,' said the old man. ‘She's my sister, if you want to know.'

‘I don't want to know especially,' said Tom. ‘Well, good-night: I see the rain's dropped.'

He stepped out into Bond Street, and then (on looking back he could never define precisely the impulse that drove him) he hurried back to them.

‘You'd better let me get you a cab or something,' he said. ‘You really ought to go home.'

The old man snarled at him. ‘You let us alone,' he said. ‘We haven't done you any harm.'

The impulse persisted.

‘I'm going to get you a cab,' he said. ‘Whether you like it or no.'

‘None of your bloody philanthropy,' said the old man. ‘I know you. M'rier and me's all right.'

It was Maria then who took the next step in the affair. Tom, although he was afterwards to have a very considerable knowledge of that old lady, could never definitely determine as to whether the step that she took was honest or no. What she did was to collapse into the sodden pavement in a black and grimy heap. The feather stood out from the collapse with a jaunty, ironical gesture.

‘'Ere, M'rier,' said the old man, very much as though he were addressing a recalcitrant horse, ‘you get hup.'

No sound came from the heap. Tom bent down. He touched her soiled velvet coat, lifted an arm, felt the weight sink beneath him. ‘Well,' he said, almost defiantly, to the old man, ‘what are you going to do now?'

‘She's always doing it,' he answered, ‘and at the most aggravating moments.' Then with something that looked suspiciously like a kick, he repeated: ‘You get hup, M'rier.'

‘Look here, you can't do that,' Tom cried. ‘What an old devil you are! We've got to get her out of this.'

A voice addressed them from the street: ‘Anything the matter?' it said.

Tom turned and found that the driver of a taxi had pulled up his machine and was peering into the shadow.

‘Yes. There's been an accident,' Tom said. ‘This lady's fainted. We'd better get her home.'

‘Where's she going to?' said the driver suspiciously.

‘What business is that of yours?' cried the old man furiously. ‘You just leave us alone.'

‘No, you couldn't do that,' Tom answered. ‘There'll be a policeman here in a moment, and he'll have you home whether you want it or not. You never can lift her yourself, and you can't leave her there. You'd better help me get her into the cab!'

The old man began to gargle strangely in his throat.

‘Policeman!' he seemed to say. ‘If I 'ad my way –'

‘Well, for once you haven't,' said Tom shortly. ‘Here, driver, help me lift her in.'

‘Where's she going?' he repeated.

‘If you don't help me at once I'll see that a policeman
is
here. I've got your number. You'll hear from me in the morning.'

The man got off his box, cursing. He hesitated a moment, then came across. Together he and Tom lifted the inert mass, pushed it through the door of the cab and settled it in the seat.

‘Makin' my cab dirty and all,' growled the driver.

‘Well,' said Tom to the old man, ‘are you going to see your sister home? If not, I shall take her to the nearest hospital.'

For a moment the old man remained perched up against the wall, his top hat flaunting defiance to the whole world. Suddenly, as though he had been pushed, he came across to the driver.

‘Eleven D Porker's Buildings, Victoria,'
²
he said.

‘B?' asked the driver.

‘D, you damned fool,' the old man almost shouted.

‘Thought you said B,' remarked the driver very amiably.

The old man got in. He was on one side of the motionless Maria, Tom on the other.

That was a remarkable and even romantic ride. The roads were slippery, and the driver, it appeared, a little drunk. The cab rocked like a drunken boat, and the watery moon, now triumphant over the clouds, the gleaming pavement, the houses, gaunt in the uncertain moonlight, and thin as though they had been cut from black paper, seemed to be inebriated too. Maria shared in the general irresponsibility, lurching from side to side, and revealing, now that her hat was on Tom's lap, an ancient
peeked face with as many lines on it as an Indian's, and grey, untidy hair. She seemed a lifeless thing enough, and yet Tom had a strange notion that one eye was open, and not only watching, but winking as well.

It would have been the natural thing to have opened her dress and given her air, to have poured whisky or brandy down her throat, to have tickled her with feathers! Tom did none of these things: afterwards he imagined that his inaction was due to the fact that he knew all the time that she had not really fainted.

Not a word was exchanged during the journey. They drove down Victoria Street, turned off on the right of Westminster Cathedral, and drew up in a narrow, dirty street.

A high block had ‘Porker's Buildings' printed in large, ugly letters on the fanlight near the door.

‘You'd better help me lift her in,' Tom said to the driver. ‘The old man's not good for anything.'

The driver grunted, but helped Maria into the street. The fresh night air seemed to refresh her. She sighed and then sneezed.

‘Maybe she can walk herself,' said the driver.

The door opened of itself, and Tom was in a dark, dingy hall with a faint gas-jet like a ghostly eye to guide him. The old man started up the stairs.

‘Can you walk a bit?' Tom asked the old lady.

She nodded. Tom paid the driver and the door closed behind him. It was a hard fight to conquer the stairs, and Maria clung like a heavy bag round her deliverer's neck; but on the third floor the old man unlocked a door, walked in before them and lighted a candle. He then sat himself down with his back to them, pulled a grimy piece of newspaper out of his pocket, and was apparently at once absorbed in reading.

The room was a wretched enough place. One of the windows was stuffed with brown paper; a ragged strip of carpet covered only a section of the cracked and dirty boards. There was a grimy bed; the fireplace was filled with rubbish.

Tom helped Maria on to the bed and looked about him. Then in a sudden fit of irritation he went up to the old man and shook him by the shoulder.

‘Look here,' he said. ‘This won't do. You've got to do
something for her. She may die in the night, or anything. I'll fetch a doctor, if that's what you want, or get something from the chemist's –'

‘Oh! go to hell!' said the old man without turning.

An impulse of rage seized Tom, and he caught the old man by the collar, swung him out of the chair, shook him until he was breathless and coughing, then said:

‘Now be civil.'

The old man collapsed on the bed near his sister, struggled for breath, then screamed:

‘You damned aristocrat! I'll have you up before the courts for this; invading a man's peaceable 'ome –'

Then Maria unexpectedly interfered. She sat up, smoothing her hair with her old trembling fingers. ‘I'm sure,' she said, in a mincing, apologetic voice, ‘that we ought to be grateful to the gentleman, Andrew. If it 'adn't been for him, I'm sure I don't know where we'd 'ave been. It's your wicked temper you're always losing. I've told you of it again and again – I'm much better now, thank you, sir, and I'm sure I'm properly grateful.'

Tom looked around him, then back at the two old people.

‘What a filthy place,' he said. ‘Haven't you got anybody to look after you?'

‘Me daughter run away with a musical gentleman,' said Maria. ‘My 'usband died of DT's
³
three years back. Andrew and meself's alone now. We get the Old Age Pension, and manage very nicely, thank you.'

‘Well, I'm coming back to-morrow,' said Tom fiercely, turning on the old man. ‘Do you hear that?'

‘If yer do,' said Andrew, ‘I'll 'ave the perlice after you.'

‘Oh, no, 'e won't,' said Maria. ‘That's only 'is little way. I'm sure we'll be pleased to see you.'

Tom put some money on the bed and left.

Out in the street he paused. What was the matter with him? He stood in the street looking up at the Westminster Cathedral tower and the thin sheeting of sky now clear – a pale, boundless sea in which two or three little stars were remotely sailing. What was the matter with him?

He felt a strange stirring and trembling about him. He had
some of the pain and hurt that a man feels when he is first revived from some drowning adventure. But it was a pain and hurt of the soul, not of the body. His heart beat expectantly, as though around the corner of the lonely street a wonderful stranger might suddenly be expected to appear. He even strained his eyes against the shadows, piercing them and finding only more shadows behind them.