The Best British Short Stories of 1922 Part 50

By G.B. STERN

(From _John o'London's Weekly_)

1922

After Hal Burnham had banged himself with his usual vigour out of the house, d.i.c.kie sat quite inconsolably staring in front of him at a favourite picture on his wall; a dim, sombre effect of quays and masts and intent hurrying men; his neat little brows were pulled down in a worried frown, his childish mouth was puckered.

Was it accurate and just, what Hal had said? Or, simpler still, was it true?

"What you d.a.m.n well need, d.i.c.kie, old son, is life in the raw. You're living in a lady's work-box here."

It was a bludgeoning return for the courteous attention with which d.i.c.kie had that evening listened to his friend's experiences of travel, for Hal was not even a good raconteur; he started an anecdote by its point, and roughly slapped in the scenery afterwards; he had likewise a habit of disconnecting his impressions from any sequence of time; also he exaggerated, and forgot names and dates; and even occasionally lapsed into odd silence just when d.i.c.kie was offering himself receptively for a climax.

And then the inevitable: "Well--and what have _you_ been doing meanwhile?"

d.i.c.kie was not in the least at a loss; he had refurnished his rooms, to begin with; and that involved a diligent search in antique shops and at sale rooms, and one or two trips across country in order not to miss a real gem. And they had to be ready for comfortable habitation before the arrival of M. and Mlle. St. Andre for their annual stay with him--a delightful old pair, brother and sister, with peppery manners and hypercritical appreciation of a good cuisine--but so poor, so really painfully poor, that, as d.i.c.kie delicately put it: "I could not help knowing that it might make a difference to them if I postponed their visit, of less trivial annoyance, but more vital in quality, than with other of my friends for whom I should therefore have hurried my preparations rather less--this is in confidence, of course, my dear Hal!" He had set himself to complete his collection of Watts's Literary Souvenirs--"I have the whole eleven volumes now----" And he had been a guest at two charming house-parties in the country, and at one of them had been given the full responsibility of rehearsing a comic opera in the late eighteenth-century style. "Amateurs, of course. But I was so bent on realizing the flavour of the period, that I'm indeed afraid that I did not draw a clear enough line between the deliciously robust and the obnoxiously coa.r.s.e----"

"Coa.r.s.e--_you_!" Hal guffawed. And then--out came the accusation which was so disturbing little d.i.c.kie.

Life in the raw! Why did the phrase make him want to clear his throat?

Raw--yes, that was the a.s.sociation--when you opened your mouth and the fog swirled in. Newsboys scampering along a foggy street that was neither elegant nor squalid, but just a street of mixed shops and mixed traffic and barrows lit with a row of flapping lights, and men and women with faces that showed they worked hard to earn a little less than they needed.... Public-houses.... Butchers' shops with great slabs of red meat.... Yes, and a queue outside the picture palace--and a station; people bought the evening papers as they hurried in and out of the station. "'Ere yer are, sir," and on the sheets were headlines that blared out all the most sordid crimes of the past twenty-four hours, ignored during a sober morning of politics and commerce, but dragged into bold view for the people's more leisured reading.

Newsboys in a foggy street on a Sat.u.r.day night--thus was d.i.c.kie's first instinct to define "life in the raw...." Then he discovered that this was only the archway, and that the crimes themselves were life in the raw--and the criminals.

But one must get nearer by slow degrees.

If at all.

Hal had said that he was living in a lady's work-box. d.i.c.kie was sensitive, and not at all stupid. His penetration was quite aware that Burnham's remark was not applied to the harmonizing shades of the walls between which he dwelt, nor to the soft, mellow pattern of his silky Persian rugs, nor to his collections--heavens, _how_ he collected!--of glowing Sevres china, of Second Empire miniatures, of quaint old musical instruments with names that in themselves were a tender tinkle of song, and of the shoes that had been worn by queens.

All these things were merely accessories: his soul making neat, tiny gestures, shrugging its shoulders, pointing a toe. What Hal meant was that d.i.c.kie dared not live dangerously.

"What am I to do?"

He raised wistful, light brown eyes to the picture which was the one incongruous touch to the dainty perfection of his octagonal sitting-room. He had bought it at a rummage sale; it was unsigned, and the canvas, overcrowded with figures, had grown sombre and blurred; yet queerly d.i.c.kie liked the suggestion of powerful, half-naked men; the foreign quay-side street, with a slatternly woman silent against a doorway, and the clumsy ship straining to swing out to a menacing sea beyond.

All these things that he would never do: strip and carry bales on his back; linger in strange doorways and love hotly an animal woman who was unaccomplished and without grace and breeding; and then embark on an evil-smelling hulk that would have no human sympathy with his human ills.

He had done a little yachting, of course; with the Ansteys the year before last.

His lips bent to a small ironical smile as he reflected on the difference between "a little yachting" and the sinister fascination of that ugly, uninspired painting....

Slowly he got up and went out; that is to say, he very precisely selected the hat, gloves, coat, and silk m.u.f.fler suitable to wear, and as precisely put them on. Then he blew up the fire with an old-fashioned pair of worked bra.s.s bellows; turned out the lamp; told Mrs. Derrick--who would have died in his service every day from eight to eight o'clock, but would not crook a finger for him a minute before she entered the house nor five seconds after she left it--that he was going for a walk and would certainly be back at a quarter to seven, but probably before; and then went out.

For this was the natural way for d.i.c.kie Maybury to behave.

At twenty to seven he returned, with a sheaf of news-papers--raucous, badly-printed papers with smudged lines and a sort of speckled film over the ill.u.s.trations, and startlingly intimate headlines to every item of news.

d.i.c.kie was trying to get into touch with "life in the raw."

At first he was merely bewildered. He had read his daily newspaper, of course--though not with the stolid regularity with which the average man does so. And besides, it was pre-eminently a journal of dignity and good form, with an art column, and a curio column, and a literary page, and a chess problem, and rather a delicately witty causerie by "Rapier"; it is to be feared that d.i.c.kie absorbed himself in these items first, and altogether left out most of the topical and sensational news.

Now, however, he read it. And out of it, the horror of the underworld swayed up at him. A twilit world, where cisterns dripped, and where homely, familiar things like gas-brackets and braces and coal-shovels were turned to dreadful weapons of death. The coroner and the broker's man and the undertaker sidled in and out of this world, dispa.s.sionately playing their frequent parts.... Stunted boys and girls died for love, like Romeo and Juliet, leaving behind them badly-punctuated cries of pa.s.sion and despair that made d.i.c.kie wince as he read them....

Pale but fascinated, d.i.c.kie turned over a page, and came to the great sensation of the moment. "Is Ruth Oliver Guilty?" "Dramatic Developments." "I Wish You Were Dead, Lucas!"

The account of the first day of the trial filled the entire page, and dribbled excitedly over on to the next. There was a photograph of Ruth Oliver, accused of murdering her husband. You could see that she had gay eyes in a small oval face, and a child's wistful mouth. This must have been taken while she was very happy.

d.i.c.kie had never read through a murder trial before. But he did so now, every line of it ... and the next day, and the next. Until the woman who had pleaded "Not guilty" was acquitted. And then he wrote to her, and asked her to marry him.

And who would dare say of him now that he had feared to meet life in the raw?

He did not know, of course, that his offer was one among fifty; did not know that the curious state of mind he was in, between trance and hysteria, was a very common one to the public after a trial in which the elements are dramatic or the central figure in any way picturesque.

He did not even know how Ruth Oliver was being noisily besieged by Pressmen and Editors anxious for her biography; by music-hall and theatrical managers willing to star her; by old friends curiously proud of a.s.sociation with her notoriety; by religious fanatics with their proofs of a strictly localized Deity--"whose Hand has clearly been outstretched to save you!"; by unhealthy flappers who had Believed in her all along--(autograph, please).

But not knowing, yet his letter, chivalrous, without ardour, promised her a cool, quiet retreat from the plague of insects which was buzzing and stinging in the hot air all about her.... "My house is in a little square with trees all around it; it is shady and you cannot hear the traffic. I wonder if you are interested in old china and j.a.panese water-colours?..." Finally: "I shall be very proud and happy if you can trust me to understand how deeply you must be longing for sanctuary after the sorrowful time you have been through...."

"Sanctuary." She saw it open for her like a cloistered aisle between cold pillars. He offered her, not the emotional variations, intolerable to her weariness just then, of a new devotion; but green shaded rooms, and the beauty of old things, and a little old-fashioned gentleman's courtesy.... So, ignoring the fifty other offers of marriage which had a.s.sailed her, she wrote to d.i.c.kie Maybury and asked him to come and see her.

He went, still in a strangely exultant mood, in which his will acted as easily and yet as fantastically as though it were on a slippery surface. And if he had met Hal Burnham on his way back from his visit to Ruth Oliver he would undoubtedly have swaggered a little.

Nevertheless, he was thinking of Ruth, too, as well as of his own dare-devilry in thus seizing reality with both hands. Ruth's face, much older and more tormented than it had been in the photograph, had still that elusive quality which had from the beginning and through all the period of her trial haunted him. It outraged his refinement that any woman with the high looks and the breeding of his own cla.s.s should have been for any s.p.a.ce of time the property of a coa.r.s.e public. As _his_ wife, the insult should be tenderly rectified.... "The poor child! the poor sweet child!" He felt almost G.o.dlike with this new power upon him of acting, on impulse.

As for the peril of death which for a short while had threatened her, that was a fact too stark and hideous for contemplation: even with d.i.c.kie's altered appet.i.te for primitive adventure....

They did not leave town after their quiet, matter-of-fact wedding at the registrar's. A journey, in d.i.c.kie's eyes, would have seemed too blatant an interruption to his everyday existence, as though he were tactlessly emphasising to his wife the necessity of a break and a complete change; she might even think--and again "poor child!" that events should have rubbed into such super-sensitiveness--that he was slightly ashamed of his act, and was therefore hustling her and himself out of sight. So they went straight home. And Mrs. Derrick said: "Indeed, sir," when informed that her new mistress was the Ruth Oliver who had recently been acquitted of the charge of murdering her husband; she neither proffered a motherly bosom to Ruth, nor did she tender a haughty resignation from Mr. Maybury's service; but said she hoped it wouldn't be expected of her, under the new circ.u.mstances, to arrive earlier, nor to leave later, because she couldn't do it. As for d.i.c.kie's friends, most of them were of the country-house variety whom he visited once a year; next autumn would show whether Ruth would be included in those week and week-end invitations. Meanwhile, those few dwelling in London marvelled in a detached sort of way at d.i.c.kie's feat, liked Ruth, and p.r.o.nounced it a shame that she should have been accused. Hal Burnham, the indirect promoter of the match, had returned to China.

n.o.body was unkind; no word jarred; life was padded in dim brocade--Ruth drew a long breath, and was at peace. She was perfectly happy, watching d.i.c.kie. And d.i.c.kie was at play again, enjoying his collection and his _objets d'art_, and even his daily habits, with the added appreciation of a gambler who had staked, but miraculously, not lost them. Because, after all, anything might have resulted from his tempestuous decision at all costs to get into contact with naked actuality; all that _had_ resulted was the presence in his house of a slim, grave woman who dressed her hair like a very skilful and not at all unconscious Madonna; whose taste was as fastidious as his own, and whose radiantly human smile had survived in vivid contrast to something quenched from her voice and shadowed in her eyes. A woman who, with a "May I?" of half-laughing reverence, discovered that she could slip on to her exquisite feet one pair after another from his collection of the shoes of dead queens--"It sounds like a ballade--Austin Dobson, I think--except that they're not all powder-and-patch queens."

For she had an excellent feel of period--the texture of it, the fine shades of language, the outlook; d.i.c.kie hated people who had a blunt sense of period and in a jumbled fashion referred to old Venetian lace, and the Early Spanish School, and Louise de la Valliere, and a play by Wycherley indiscriminately as "historical."

Yes, d.i.c.kie had certainly been lucky, and, like a wise man, he did not strain his star to another effort. The big thing--well, he had squared up to it--and, truth to say, he had been fearfully shaky and uncertain about his capacity to do so when Hal had first roused his pride in the matter. Now the little things again, the little beautiful things--he had earned them.

Anyway, he could not have a newspaper in the house nowadays, for Ruth's sake--he owed it to Ruth to shut out for ever those cries of horror and fear and violence from the battering underworld.

"What I love about the way we live, d.i.c.kie, is that the just-rightness of it all flows on evenly the whole time; one can be certain of it.

Most people get it set aside for them in stray lumps--picture galleries and churches and a holiday on the Continent. And all the rest of their time is just-wrongness."

d.i.c.kie wondered how much of her existence with Lucas Oliver had been "just-wrongness"--or indeed "all-wrongness." But he never disturbed her surface of creamy serenity by referring to the husband who had been murdered by "some person or persons unknown."

He and Ruth were the most harmonious of comrades, but never, so far, confidential. Perhaps d.i.c.kie overdid tact and non-intrusiveness; or perhaps Ruth, in her very pa.s.sion of grat.i.tude to him, was yet checked for ever from pa.s.sionate expression by the memory that her innermost love and her innermost hate, wrung into words, had once, and not so long ago, been read aloud and commented upon in public court and in half the homes of England.

One evening, sitting together in front of the fire, they drifted into talk of their separate childhoods.

"There was a garden in mine," said Ruth.

"And in mine--a Casino garden!" His eyes twinkled. "Palm trees like giant pineapples, and flower beds in a pattern, and a fountain--"