The Complete Short Stories Part 7

'There was a slight resemblance between us,' Sybil remarked. The projector purred on.

'Look, there's a little girl rather like you, Sybil.' Sybil, walking between her mother and father, one hand in each, had already craned round. The other child, likewise being walked along, had looked back too.

The other child wore a black velour hat turned up all round, a fawn coat of covert-coating, and at her neck a narrow white ermine tie. She wore white silk gloves. Sybil was dressed identically, and though this in itself was nothing to marvel at, since numerous small girls wore this ensemble when they were walked out in the parks and public gardens of cathedral towns in 1923, it did fortify the striking resemblance in features, build, and height, between the two children. Sybil suddenly felt she was walking past her own reflection in the long looking-gla.s.s. There was her peak chin, her black bobbed hair under her hat, with its fringe almost touching her eyebrows. Her wide-s.p.a.ced eyes, her nose very small like a cat's. 'Stop staring, Sybil,' whispered her mother. Sybil had time to s.n.a.t.c.h the gleam of white socks and black patent leather b.u.t.ton shoes. Her own socks were white but her shoes were brown, with laces. At first she felt this one discrepancy was wrong, in the sense that it was wrong to step on one of the cracks in the pavement. Then she felt it was right that there should be a difference.

'The Colemans,' Sybil's mother remarked to her father. 'They keep that hotel at Hillend. The child must be about Sybil's age. Very alike, aren't they? And I suppose,' she continued for Sybil's benefit, 'she's a good little girl like Sybil.' Quick-witted Sybil thought poorly of the last remark with its subtle counsel of perfection.

On other occasions, too, they pa.s.sed the Coleman child on a Sunday walk. In summer time the children wore panama hats and tussore silk frocks discreetly adorned with drawn-thread work. Sometimes the Coleman child was accompanied by a young mad-servant in grey dress and black stockings. Sybil noted this one difference between her own entourage and the other girl's. 'Don't turn round and stare,' whispered her mother.

It was not till she went to school that she found Desiree Coleman to be a year older than herself. Desiree was in a higher cla.s.s but sometimes, when the whole school was a.s.sembled on the lawn or in the gym, Sybil would be, for a few moments, mistaken for Desiree. In the late warm spring the cla.s.ses sat in separate groups under the plane trees until, as by simultaneous instinct, the teachers would indicate time for break. The groups would mingle, and 'Sybil, dear, your shoe-lace,' a teacher might call out; and then, as Sybil regarded her neat-laced shoes, 'Oh no, not Sybil, I mean Desiree.' In the percussion band Sybil banged her triangle triumphantly when the teacher declared, 'Much better than yesterday, Sybil.' But she added, 'I mean Desiree.'

Only the grown-ups mistook one child for another at odd moments. None of her small companions made this mistake. After the school concert Sybil's mother said, 'For a second I thought you were Desiree in the choir. It's strange you are so alike. I'm not a bit like Mrs Coleman and your daddy doesn't resemble him in the least.'

Sybil found Desiree unsatisfactory as a playmate. Sybil was precocious, her brain was like a blade. She had discovered that dull children were apt to be spiteful. Desiree would sit innocently cross-legged beside you at a party, watching the conjurer, then suddenly, for no apparent reason, jab at you viciously with her elbow.

By the time Sybil was eight and Desiree nine it was seldom that anyone, even strangers and new teachers, mixed them up. Sybil's nose became more sharp and p.r.o.nounced while Desiree's seemed to sink into her plump cheeks like a painted-on nose. Only on a few occasions, and only on dark winter afternoons between the last of three o'clock daylight and the coming on of lights all over the school, was Sybil mistaken for Desiree.

Between Sybil's ninth year and her tenth Desiree's family came to live in her square. The residents' children were taken to the gardens of the square after school by mothers and nursemaids, and were bidden to play with each other nicely. Sybil regarded the intrusion of Desiree sulkily, and said she preferred her book. She cheered up, however, when a few weeks later the Dobell boys came to live in the square. The two Dobells had dusky-rose skins and fine dark eyes. It appeared the father was half Indian.

How Sybil adored the Dobells! They were a new type of playmate in her experience, so jumping and agile, and yet so gentle, so unusually courteous. Their dark skins were never dirty, a fact which Sybil obscurely approved. She did not then mind Desiree joining in their games; the Dobell boys were a kind of charm against despair, for they did not understand stupidity and so did not notice Desiree's.

The girl lacked mental stamina, could not keep up an imaginative game for long, was shrill and apt to kick her playmates unaccountably and on the sly; the Dobells reacted to this with a simple resignation. Perhaps the lack of opposition was the reason that Desiree continually shot Sybil dead, contrary to the rules, whenever she felt like it.

Sybil resented with the utmost pa.s.sion the repeated daily ma.s.sacre of herself before the time was ripe. It was useless for Jon Dobell to explain, 'Not yet, Desiree. Wait, wait, Desiree. She's not to be shot down yet. She hasn't crossed the bridge yet, and you can't shoot her from there, anyway - there's a big boulder between you and her. You have to creep round it, and Hugh has a shot at you first, and he thinks he's got you, but only your hat. And ...'

It was no use. Each day before the game started the four sat in conference on the short dry p.r.i.c.kly gra.s.s. The proceedings were agreed. The game was on. 'Got it all clear, Desiree?'

'Yes,' she said, every day. Desiree shouted and got herself excited, she made foolish sounds even when supposed to be stalking the bandits through the silent forest. A few high screams and then, 'Bang-bang,' she yelled, aiming at Sybil, 'you're dead.' Sybil obediently rolled over, protesting none the less that the game had only begun, while the Dobells sighed, 'Oh, Desiree!'

Sybil vowed to herself each night, I will do the same to her. Next time - tomorrow if it isn't raining - I will bang-bang her before she has a chance to hang her panama on the bough as a decoy. I will say bang-bang on her out of turn, and I will do her dead before her time.

But on no succeeding tomorrow did Sybil bring herself to do this. Her pride before the Dobells was more valuable than the success of the game. Instead, with her cleverness, Sybil set herself to avoid Desiree's range for as long as possible. She dodged behind the laurels and threw out a running commentary as if to a mental defective, such as, 'I'm in disguise, all in green, and no one can see me among the trees.' But still Desiree saw her. Desiree's eyes insisted on penetrating solid mountains. 'I'm half a mile away from everyone,' Sybil cried as Desiree's gun swivelled relentlessly upon her.

I shall refuse to be dead, Sybil promised herself. I'll break the rule. If it doesn't count with her why should it count with me? I won't roll over any more when she bangs you're dead to me. Next time, tomorrow if it isn't raining ...

But Sybil simply did roll over. When Join and Hugh Dobell called out to her that Desiree's bang-bang did not count she started hopefully to resurrect herself; but 'It does count, it does. That's the rule,' Desiree counter-screeched. And Sybil dropped back flat, knowing utterly that this was final.

And so the girl continued to deal premature death to Sybil, losing her head, but never so much that she aimed at one of the boys. For some reason which Sybil did not consider until she was years and years older, it was always herself who had to die.

One day, when Desiree was late in arriving for play, Sybil put it to the boys that Desiree should be left out of the game in future. 'She only spoils it.'

'But,' said Jon, 'you need four people for the game.'

'You need four,' said Hugh.

'No, you can do it with three.' As she spoke she was inventing the game with three. She explained to them what was in her mind's eye. But neither boy could grasp the idea, having got used to Bandits and Riders with two on each side. 'I am the lone Rider, you see,' said Sybil. 'Or,' she wheedled, 'the cherry tree can be a Rider.' She was talking to stone, inoffensive but uncomprehending. All at once she realized, without articulating the idea, that her intelligence was superior to theirs, and she felt lonely.

'Could we play rounders instead?' ventured Jon.

Sybil brought a book every day after that, and sat reading beside her mother, who was glad, on the whole, that Sybil had grown tired of rowdy games.

'They were preparing,' said Sybil, 'to go on a shoot.' Sybil's host was changing the reel.

'I get quite a new vision of Sybil,' said her hostess, 'seeing her in such a ... such a social environment. Were any of these people intellectuals, Sybil?'

'No, but lots of poets.'

'Oh, no. Did they all write poetry?'

'Quite a lot of them,' said Sybil, 'did.'

'Who were they all? Who was that blond fellow who was standing by the van with you?'

'He was the manager of the estate. They grew pa.s.sion-fruit and manufactured the juice.'

'Pa.s.sion-fruit - how killing. Did he write poetry?'

'Oh, yes.

'And who was the girl, the one I thought was you?'

'Oh, I had known her as a child and we met again in the Colony. The short man was her husband.'

'And were you all off on safari that morning? I simply can't imagine you shooting anything, Sybil, somehow.'

'On this occasion,' said Sybil, 'I didn't go. I just held the gun for effect.'

Everyone laughed.

'Do you still keep up with these people? I've heard that colonials are great letter-writers, it keeps them in touch with -'

'No.' And she added, 'Three of them are dead. The girl and her husband, and the fair fellow.'

'Really? What happened to them? Don't tell me they were mixed up in shooting affairs.'

'They were mixed up in shooting affairs,' said Sybil.

'Oh, these colonials,' said the elderly woman, 'and their shooting affairs!'

'Number three,' said Sybil's host. 'Ready? Lights out, please.'

'Don't get eaten by lions. I say, Sybil, don't get mixed up in a shooting affair.' The party at the railway station were unaware of the noise they were making for they were inside the noise. As the time of departure drew near Donald's relatives tended to herd themselves apart while Sybil's cl.u.s.tered round the couple.

'Two years - it will be an interesting experience for them.'

'Mind out for the shooting affairs. Don't let Donald have a gun.'

There had been an outbreak of popular headlines about the shooting affairs in the Colony. Much had been blared forth about the effect, on the minds of young settlers, of the climate, the hard drinking, the shortage of white women. The Colony was a place where lovers shot husbands, or shot themselves, where husbands shot natives who spied through bedroom windows. Letters to The Times arrived belatedly from respectable colonists, refuting the scandals with sober statistics. The recent incidents, they said, did not represent the habits of the peaceable majority. The Governor told the press that everything had been highly exaggerated. By the time Sybil and Donald left for the Colony the music-hall comics had already exhausted the entertainment value of colonial shooting affairs.

'Don't make pets of snakes or crocs. Mind out for the lions. Don't forget to write.'

It was almost a surprise to them to find that shooting affairs in the Colony were not entirely a music-hall myth. They occurred in waves. For three months at a time the gun-murders and suicides were reported weekly. The old colonists with their very blue eyes sat beside their whisky bottles and remarked that another young rotter had shot himself. Then the rains would break and the shootings would cease for a long season.

Eighteen months after their marriage Donald was mauled by a lioness and died on the long stretcher journey back to the station. He was one of a party of eight. No one could really say how it happened; it was done in a flash. The natives had lost their wits, and, instead of shooting the beast, had come calling 'Ah-ah-ah,' and pointing to the spot. A few strides, shouldering the gra.s.s aside, and Donald's friends got the lioness as she reared from his body.

His friends in the archaeological team to which he belonged urged Sybil to remain in the Colony for the remaining six months, and return to England with them. Still undecided, she went on a sight-seeing tour. But before their time was up the archaeologists had been recalled. War had been declared. Civilians were not permitted to leave the continent, and Sybil was caught, like Donald under the lioness.

She wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, as she intended to do. It was plain to her that they must have separated had he lived. There had been no disagreement but, thought Sybil, given another two years there would have been disagreements. Donald had shown signs of becoming a bore. By the last, the twenty-seventh, year of his life, his mind had ceased to inquire. Archaeology, that thrilling subject, had become Donald's job, merely. He began to talk as if all archaeological methods and theories had ceased to evolve on the day he obtained his degree; it was now only a matter of applying his knowledge to field-work for a limited period. Archaeological papers came out from England. The usual crank literature on roneo foolscap followed them from one postal address to another. 'Donald, aren't you going to look through them?' Sybil said, as the journals and papers piled up. 'No, really, I don't see it's necessary.' It was not necessary because his future was fixed; two years in the field and then a lectureship. If it were my subject, she thought, these papers would be necessary to me. Even the crackpot ones, rightly read, would be, to me, enlarging.

Sybil lay in bed in the mornings reading the translation of Kierkegaard's Journals, newly arrived from England in their first, revelatory month of publication. She felt like a desert which had not realized its own aridity till the rain began to fall upon it. When Donald came home in the late afternoons she had less and less to say to him.

'There has been another shooting affair,' Donald said, 'across the valley. The chap came home unexpectedly and found his wife with another man. He shot them both.'

'In this place, one is never far from the jungle,' Sybil said.

'What are you talking about? We are eight hundred miles from the jungle.'

When he had gone on his first big shoot, eight hundred miles away in the jungle, she had reflected, there is no sign of a living mind in him, it is like a landed fish which has ceased to palpitate. But, she thought, another woman would never notice it. Other women do not wish to be married to a Mind. Yet I do, she thought, and I am a freak and should not have married. In fact I am not the marrying type. Perhaps that is why he does not explore my personality, any more than he reads the journals. It might make him think, and that would be hurtful.

After his death she wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, whatever that might have been. She took a job in a private school for girls and cultivated a few friends for diversion until the war should be over. Charming friends need not possess minds.

Their motor launch was rocking up the Zambezi. Sybil was leaning over the rail mouthing something to a startled native in a canoe. Now Sybil was pointing across the river.

'I think I was asking him,' Sybil commented to her friends in the darkness, 'about the hippo. There was a school of hippo some distance away, and we wanted to see them better. But the native said we shouldn't go too near - that's why he's looking so frightened - because the hippo often upset a boat, and then the crocs quickly slither into the water. There, look! We got a long shot of the hippo - those b.u.mps in the water, like submarines, those are the snouts of hippo.'

The film rocked with the boat as it proceeded up the river. The screen went white.

'Something's happened,' said Sybil's hostess.

'Put on the light,' said Sybil's host. He fiddled with the projector and a young man, their lodger from upstairs, went to help him.

'I loved those tiny monkeys on the island,' said her hostess. 'Do hurry, Ted. What's gone wrong?'

'Shut up a minute,' he said.

'Sybil, you know you haven't changed much since you were a girl.'

'Thank you, Ella.' I haven't changed at all so far as I still think charming friends need not possess minds.

'I expect this will revive your memories, Sybil. The details, I mean. One is bound to forget so much.'

'Oh yes,' Sybil said, and she added, 'but I recall quite a lot of details, you know.

'Do you really, Sybil?'

I wish, she thought, they wouldn't cling to my least word.

The young man turned from the projector with several feet of the film-strip looped between his widespread hands. 'Is the fair chap your husband, Mrs Greeves?' he said to Sybil.

'Sybil lost her husband very early on,' her hostess informed him in a low and sacred voice.

'Oh, I am sorry.'

Sybil's hostess replenished the drinks of her three guests. Her host turned from the projector, finished his drink, and pa.s.sed his gla.s.s to be refilled, all in one movement. Everything they do seems large and important, thought Sybil, but I must not let it be so. We are only looking at old films.

She overheard a sibilant 'Whish-sh-sh?' from the elderly woman in which she discerned, 'Who is she?'

'Sybil Greeves,' her hostess breathed back, 'a distant cousin of Ted's through marriage.'

'Oh yes?' The low tones were puzzled as if all had not been explained. 'She's quite famous, of course.

'Oh, I didn't know that.'

'Very few people know it,' said Sybil's hostess with a little arrogance. 'OK,' said Ted, 'lights out.'

'I must say,' said his wife, 'the colours are marvellous.'

All the time she was in the Colony Sybil longed for the inexplicable colourings of her native land. The flamboyants were too rowdy, the birds, the native women with their heads bound in cloth of piercing pink, their blinding black skin and white teeth, the baskets full of bright tough flowers or oranges on their heads, the sight of which everyone else admired ('How I wish I could paint all this!') distressed Sybil, it bored her.

She rented a house, sharing it with a girl whose husband was fighting in the north. She was twenty-two. To safeguard her privacy absolutely, she had a plywood part.i.tion put up in the sitting-room, for it was another ten years before she had learnt those arts of leading a double life and listening to people ambiguously, which enabled her to mix without losing ident.i.ty, and to listen without boredom.

On the other side of the part.i.tion Ariadne Lewis decorously entertained her friends, most of whom were men on leave. On a few occasions Sybil attended these parties, working herself, as in a frenzy of self-discipline, into a state of carnal excitement over the men. She managed to do this only by an effortful sealing-off of all her critical faculties except those which a.s.sessed a good male voice and appearance. The hangovers were frightful.

The scarcity of white girls made it easy for any one of them to keep a number of men in perpetual attendance. Ariadne had many boyfriends but no love affairs. Sybil had three affairs in the s.p.a.ce of two years, to put herself to the test. They started at private dances, in the magnolia-filled gardens that smelt like a scent factory, under the Milky Way which looked like an overcrowded jeweller's window. The affairs ended when she succ.u.mbed to one of her attacks of tropical flu, and lay in a twilight of the senses on a bed which had been set on the stone stoep and overhung with a white mosquito net like something bridal. With damp shaky hands she would write a final letter to the man and give it to her half caste maid to post. He would telephone next morning, and would be put off by the house-boy, who was quite intelligent.

For some years she had been thinking she was not much inclined towards s.e.x. After the third affair, this dawned and rose within her as a whole realization, as if in the past, when she had told herself, 'I am not predominantly a s.e.xual being,' or 'I'm rather a frigid freak, I suppose, these were the sayings of an illiterate, never quite rational and known until now, but after the third affair the notion was so intensely conceived as to be almost new. It appalled her. She lay on the shady stoep, her fever subsiding, and examined her relations with men. She thought, what if I married again? She shivered under the hot sheet. Can it be, she thought, that I have a suppressed tendency towards women? She lay still and let the idea probe round in imagination. She surveyed, with a stony inward eye, all the women she had known, prim little academicians with cream peter-pan collars on their dresses, large dominant women, a number of beauties, conventional nitwits like Ariadne. No, really, she thought; neither men nor women. It is a not caring for s.e.xual relations. It is not merely a lack of pleasure in s.e.x, it is dislike of the excitement. And it is not merely dislike, it is worse, it is boredom.

She felt a lonely emotion near to guilt. The three love affairs took on heroic aspects in her mind. They were an attempt, thought Sybil, to do the normal thing. Perhaps I may try again. Perhaps, if I should meet the right man ... But at the idea 'right man' she felt a sense of intolerable desolation and could not stop shivering. She raised the mosquito net and reached for the lemon juice, splashing it jerkily into the gla.s.s. She sipped. The juice had grown warm and had been made too sweet, but she let it linger on her sore throat and peered through the net at the backs of houses and the yellow veldt beyond them.

Ariadne said one morning, 'I met a girl last night, it was funny. I thought it was you at first and called over to her. But she wasn't really like you close up, it was just an impression. As a matter of fact, she knows you. I've asked her to tea. I forget her name.'

'I don't,' said Sybil.

But when Desiree arrived they greeted each other with exaggerated warmth, wholly felt at the time, as acquaintances do when they meet in another hemisphere. Sybil had last seen Desiree at a dance in Hampstead, and there had merely said, 'Oh, hallo.'

'We were at our first school together,' Desiree explained to Ariadne, still holding Sybil's hand.

Already Sybil wished to withdraw. 'It's strange,' she remarked, 'how, sooner or later, everyone in the Colony meets someone they have known, or their parents knew, at home.'

Desiree and her husband, Barry Weston, were settled in a remote part of the Colony. Sybil had heard of Weston, unaware that Desiree was his wife. He was much talked of as an enterprising planter. Some years ago he had got the idea of manufacturing pa.s.sion-fruit juice, had planted orchards and set up a factory. The business was now expanding wonderfully. Barry Weston also wrote poetry, a volume of which, ent.i.tled Home Thoughts, he had published and sold with great success within the confines of the Colony. His first wife had died of blackwater fever. On one of his visits to England he had met and married Desiree, who was twelve years his junior.

'You must come and see us,' said Desiree to Sybil; and to Ariadne she explained again, 'We were at our first little private school together.' And she said, 'Oh, Sybil, do you remember Trotsky? Do you remember Minnie Mouse, what a h.e.l.l of a life we gave her? I shall never forget that day when ...'

The school where Sybil taught was shortly to break up for holidays; Ariadne was to visit her husband in Cairo at that time. Sybil promised a visit to the Westons. When Desiree, beautifully dressed in linen suiting, had departed, Ariadne said, 'I'm so glad you're going to stay with them. I hated the thought of your being all alone for the next few weeks.'

'Do you know,' Sybil said, 'I don't think I shall go to stay with them after all. I'll make an excuse.

'Oh, why not? Oh, Sybil, it's such a lovely place, and it will be fun for you. He's a poet, too.' Sybil could sense exasperation, could hear Ariadne telling her friends, 'There's something wrong with Sybil. You never know a person till you live with them. Now Sybil will say one thing one minute, and the next ... Something wrong with her s.e.x-life, perhaps ... odd ...'