65 Short Stories (179 page)

‘I’ve settled her hash all right,’ she said.

The bell rang again, it rang repeatedly, but they did not answer it, and presently it stopped. They guessed that Betty had gone away.

It was fine next day, with just the right velocity in the wind, and Herbert, after failing two or three times, found he had got the knack of flying the big box-kite. It soared into the air and up and up as he unreeled the wire. ‘Why, it’s a mile up if it’s a yard,’ he told his mother excitedly.

He had never had such a thrill in his life.

Several weeks passed by. They concocted a letter for Herbert to write in which he told Betty that so long as she didn’t molest him or members of his family she would receive a postal order for thirty-five shillings every Saturday morning and he would pay the instalments on the furniture as they came due. Mrs Sunbury had been much against this, but Mr Sunbury, for once at variance with her, and Herbert agreed that it was the right thing to do. Herbert by then had learnt the ways of the new kite and was able to do great things with it. He no longer bothered to have contests with the other kite-flyers. He was out of their class. Saturday afternoons were his moments of glory. He revelled in the admiration he aroused in the bystanders and enjoyed the envy he knew he excited in the less fortunate flyers. Then one evening when he was walking back from the station with his father Betty waylaid him.

‘Hullo, Herb,’ she said.

‘Hullo.’

‘I want to talk to my husband alone, Mr Sunbury.’

‘There’s nothing you’ve got to say to me that my dad can’t hear,’ said Herbert sullenly.

She hesitated. Mr Sunbury fidgeted. He didn’t know whether to stay or go. ‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘I want you to come back home, Herb. I didn’t mean it that night when I packed your bag. I only did it to frighten you. I was in a temper. I’m sorry for what I did. It’s all so silly, quarrelling about a kite.’

‘Well, I’m not coming back, see. When you turned me out you did me the best turn you ever did me.’

Tears began to trickle down Betty’s cheeks.

‘But I love you, Herb. If you want to fly your silly old kite, you fly it, I don’t care so long as you come back.’

‘Thank you very much, but it’s not good enough. I know when I’m well off and I’ve had enough of married life to last me a lifetime. Come on, Dad.’ They walked on quickly and Betty made no attempt to follow them. On the following Sunday they went to chapel and after dinner Herbert went to the coal-shed where he kept the kite to have a look at it. He just couldn’t keep away from it. He doted on it. In a minute he rushed back, his face white, with a hatchet in his hand.

‘She’s smashed it up. She did it with this.’

The Sunburys gave a cry of consternation and hurried to the coal-shed. What Herbert had said was true. The kite, the new expensive kite, was in fragments. It had been savagely attacked with the hatchet, the woodwork was all in pieces, the reel was hacked to bits.

‘She must have done it while we were at chapel. Watched us go out, that’s what she did.’

‘But how did she get in?’ asked Mr Sunbury.

‘I had two keys. When I came home I noticed one was missing, but I didn’t think anything about it.’

‘You can’t be sure she did it, some of them fellows on the common have been very snooty, I wouldn’t put it past them to have done this.’

‘Well, we’ll soon find out,’ said Herbert. ‘I’ll go and ask her, and if she did it I’ll kill her.’

His rage was so terrible that Mrs Sunbury was frightened.

‘And get yourself hung for murder? No, Herbert, I won’t let you go. Let your dad go, and when he comes back we’ll decide what to do.’

‘That’s right, Herbert, let me go.’

They had a job to persuade him, but in the end Mr Sunbury went. And in half an hour he came back.

‘She did it all right. She told me straight out. She’s proud of it. I won’t repeat her language, it fair startled me, but the long and short of it was she was jealous of the kite. She said Herbert loved the kite more than he loved her and so she smashed it up and if she had to do it again she’d do it again.’

‘Lucky she didn’t tell me that. I’d have wrung her neck even if I’d had to swing for it. Well, she never gets another penny out of me, that’s all.’

‘She’ll sue you,’ said his father.

let her.’

‘The instalment on the furniture is due next week, Herbert,’ said Mrs Sunbury quietly. ‘In your place I wouldn’t pay it.’

‘Then they’ll just take it away,’ said Samuel, ‘and all the money he’s paid on it so far will be wasted.’

‘Well, what of it?’ she answered. ‘He can afford it. He’s rid of her for good and all and we’ve got him back and that’s the chief thing.’

‘I don’t care twopence about the money,’ said Herbert. ‘I can see her face when they come to take the furniture away. It meant a lot to her, it did, and the piano, she set a rare store on that piano.’

So on the following Friday he did not send Betty her weekly money, and when she sent him on a letter from the furniture people to say that if he didn’t pay the instalment due by such and such a date they would remove it, he wrote back and said he wasn’t in a position to continue the payments and they could remove the furniture at their convenience. Betty took to waiting for him at the station, and when he wouldn’t speak to her followed him down the street screaming curses at him. In the evenings she would come to the house and ring the bell till they thought they would go mad, and Mr and Mrs Sunbury had the greatest difficulty in preventing Herbert from going out and giving her a sound thrashing. Once she threw a stone and broke the sitting-room window. She wrote obscene and abusive postcards to him at his office. At last she went to the magistrate’s court and complained that her husband had left her and wasn’t providing for her support. Herbert received a summons. They both told their story and if the magistrate thought it a strange one he didn’t say so. He tried to effect a reconciliation between them, but Herbert resolutely refused to go back to his wife. The magistrate ordered him to pay Betty twenty-five shillings a week. He said he wouldn’t pay it.

‘Then you’ll go to prison,’ said the magistrate. ‘Next case.’

But Herbert meant what he said. On Betty’s complaint he was brought once more before the magistrate, who asked him what reason he had for not obeying the order.

‘I said I wouldn’t pay her and I won’t, not after she smashed my kite. And if you send me to prison I’ll go to prison.’

The magistrate was stern with him this time.

‘You’re a very foolish young man,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a week to pay the arrears, and if I have any more nonsense from you you’ll go to prison till you come to your senses.’

Herbert didn’t pay, and that is how my friend Ned Preston came to know him and I heard the story.

‘What d’you make of it?’ asked Ned as he finished. ‘You know, Betty isn’t a bad girl. I’ve seen her several times, there’s nothing wrong with her except her insane jealousy of Herbert’s kite; and he isn’t a fool by any means. In fact he’s smarter than the average. What d’you suppose there is in kite-flying that makes the damned fool so mad about it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I took my time to think. ‘You see, I don’t know a thing about flying a kite. Perhaps it gives him a sense of power as he watches it soaring towards the clouds and of mastery over the elements as he seems to bend the winds of heaven to his will. It may be that in some queer way he identifies himself with the kite flying so free and so high above him, and it’s as it were an escape from the monotony of life. It may be that in some dim, confused way it represents an ideal of freedom and adventure. And you know, when a man once gets bitten with the virus of the ideal not all the King’s doctors and not all the King’s surgeons can rid him of it. But all this is very fanciful and I dare say it’s just stuff and nonsense. I think you’d better put your problem before someone who knows a lot more about the psychology of the human animal than I do.’

A WOMAN OF FIFTY

♦

My friend Wyman Holt is a professor of English Literature in one of the smaller universities of the Middle West, and hearing that I was speaking in a near-by city-near-by as distances go in the vastness of America-he wrote to ask me if I would come and give a talk to his class. He suggested that I should stay with him for a few days so that he could show me something of the surrounding country. I accepted the invitation, but told him that my engagements would prevent me from spending more than a couple of nights with him. He met me at the station, drove me to his house, and after we had had a drink we walked over to the campus. I was somewhat taken aback to find so many people in the hall in which I was to speak, for I had not expected more than twenty at the outside and I was not prepared to give a solemn lecture, but only an informal chat. I was more than a little intimidated to see a number of middle-aged and elderly persons, some of whom I suspected were members of the faculty, and I was afraid they would find what I had to say very superficial. However, there was nothing to do but to start and, after Wyman had introduced me to the audience in a manner that I very well knew I couldn’t live up to, that is what I did. I said my say, I answered as best I could a number of questions, and then I retired with Wyman into a little room at the back of the stage from which I had spoken.

Several people came in. They said the usual kindly things to me that are said on these occasions, and I made the usual polite replies. I was thirsting for a drink. Then a woman came in and held out her hand to me.

‘How very nice it is to see you again,’ she said. ‘It’s years since we last met.’ To the best of my belief I’d never set eyes on her before. I forced a cordial smile to my tired, stiff lips, shook her proffered hand effusively and wondered who the devil she was. My professor must have seen from my face that I was trying to place her, for he said:

‘Mrs Greene is married to a member of our faculty and she gives a course on the Renaissance and Italian literature.’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

I was no wiser than before.

‘Has Wyman told you that you’re dining with us tomorrow night?’

‘I’m very glad,’ I said.

‘It’s not a party. Only my husband, his brother, and my sister-in-law. I suppose Florence has changed a lot since then.’

‘Florence?’ I said to myself ‘Florence?’

That was evidently where I’d known her. She was a woman of about fifty with grey hair simply done and marcelled without exaggeration. She was a trifle too stout and she was dressed neatly enough, but without distinction, in a dress that I guessed had been bought ready-made at the local branch of a big store. She had rather large eyes of a pale blue and a poor complexion; she wore no rouge and had used a lipstick but sparingly. She seemed a nice creature. There was something maternal in her demeanour, something placid and fulfilled, which I found appealing. I supposed that I had run across her on one of my frequent visits to Florence and because it was perhaps the only time she had been there our meeting made more of an impression on her than on me. I must confess that my acquaintance with the wives of members of a faculty is very limited, but she was just the sort of person I should have expected the wife of a professor to be, and picturing her life, useful but uneventful, on scanty means, with its little social gatherings, its bickerings, its gossip, its busy dullness, I could easily imagine that her trip to Florence must linger with her as a thrilling and unforgettable experience.

On the way back to his house Wyman said to me:

‘You’ll like Jasper Greene. He’s clever.’

‘What’s he a professor of?’

‘He’s not a professor; he’s an instructor. A fine scholar. He’s her second husband. She was married to an Italian before.’

‘Oh?’ That didn’t chime in with my ideas at all. ‘What was her name?’

‘I haven’t a notion. I don’t believe it was a great success.’ Wyman chuckled. ‘That’s only a deduction I draw from the fact that she hasn’t a single thing in the house to suggest that she ever spent any time in Italy. I should have expected her to have at least a refectory table, an old chest or two, and an embroidered cope hanging on the wall.’

I laughed. I knew those rather dreary pieces that people buy when they’re in Italy, the gilt wooden candlesticks, the Venetian glass mirrors, and the high-backed, comfortless chairs. They look well enough when you see them in the crowded shops of the dealers in antiques, but when you bring them to another country they’re too often a sad disappointment. Even if they’re genuine, which they seldom are, they look ill-at-ease and out of place.

‘Laura has money,’ Wyman went on. ‘When they married she furnished the house from cellar to attic in Chicago. It’s quite a show place; it’s a little masterpiece of hideousness and vulgarity. I never go into the living-room without marvelling at the unerring taste with which she picked out exactly what you’d expect to find in the bridal suite of a second-class hotel in Atlantic City.’

To explain this irony I should state that Wyman’s living-room was all chromium and glass, rough modern fabrics, with a boldly Cubist rug on the floor, and on the walls Picasso prints and drawings by Tchelicheff. However, he gave me a very good dinner. We spent the evening chatting pleasantly about things that mutually interested us and finished it with a couple of bottles of beer. I went to bed in a room of somewhat aggressive modernity. I read for a while and then putting out the light composed myself to sleep.