Complete Short Stories (2 page)

WHEN LIGHTS WENT
out at half-past nine in the evening of the second Friday in the Quarter, and the faint footfalls of the departing House-master were heard no more, the fun began.

The Head of Under Cubicles constituted himself examiner and executioner, and was ably assisted by a timekeeper, a question-recorder, and a staff of his disreputable friends. I was a timorous ‘new-bug’
then, and my pyjamas were damp with the perspiration of fear. Three of my fellows had been examined and sentenced before the inquisition was directed against me.

‘It’s Jones’s turn now,’ said a voice. ‘He’s the little hash-pro who hacked me in run-about today. We must set him some tight questions!’

‘I say, Jones, what’s the colour of the House-master – I mean what’s the name of the House-master
of the House whose colours are black and white? One, two, three…’

‘Mr Girdlestone,’ my voice quavered in the darkness.

‘He evidently knows the simpler colours. We’ll muddle him. What are the colours of the Clubs to which Block Houses belong? One, two, three, four…’

I had been slaving at getting up these questions for days, and just managed to blurt the answer before being counted out.

‘Two
questions. No misses. We must buck up,’ said someone.

‘I say, Jones, how do you get to Farncombe from Weekites? One, two, three…’

I had issued directions only as far as Bridge before being counted out.

‘Three questions. One miss. You’re allowed three misses out of ten.’

‘Where is Charterhouse Magazine? One, two, three, four…’

‘Do you mean
The Carthusian
office?’ I asked.

Everyone laughed.

‘Four questions. Two misses. I say, Robinson, he’s answered far too many. We’ll set him a couple of stingers.’

Much whispering.

‘What is the age of the horse that rolls Under Green? One, two, three..’

‘Six!’ I said, at a venture.

‘Wrong; thirty-eight. Five questions. Three misses! Think yourself lucky you weren’t asked its pedigree.’

‘What are canoeing colours? One, two, thr…’

‘There aren’t
any!’

‘You’ll get cocked-up for festivity; but you can count it. Six questions. Three misses. Jones?

‘Yes!’

‘What was the name of the girl to whom rumour stated that last year’s football secretary was violently attached? One, two, three, four…’

‘Daisy!’ (It sounded a likely name.)

‘Oh, really! Well, I happen to know last year’s football secretary; and he’ll simply kill you for spreading scandal.
You’re wrong anyhow. Seven questions. Four misses! You’ll come to my “cube” at seven tomorrow morning. See? Good night!’

Here he waved his hair-brush over the candle, and a colossal shadow appeared on the ceiling.

(Written while I was living in a converted Thames barge moored at Hammersmith.)

A
SUDDEN HOARSE
shouting woke me. I looked out of the window beside my bed. Nearly full tide on the river and no wind; a tug was neatly casting off one of its train of barges at the wharf next door. A consignment of glassware in crates. The early morning greetings of tugmaster and wharfman were
of their usual mock-abusive friendliness. After all this hubbub there followed half an hour of calm, in which I half slept and half watched a pair of dabchicks bobbing about only a few yards from the window. The water was pink and grey in the dawn, the towpath on the opposite bank was deserted and there was no river traffic. The stage was well set for the five swans that floated up with the tide
and swam about under my window for some time. They expected bread; they should have known that it was too early. I could distinguish the plebeian swans, with their nicked beaks, the property of the Vintners’ and Dyers’ Companies, from the royal swans with unnicked beaks which owe immediate allegiance to the Crown. But I could distinguish them only by their nicks, not by their carriage. They went off
sulkily after a while.

The next event was the drifting past of a brown-paper parcel, accompanied by a flock of about twenty gulls. They screamed and wheeled and dived and tore at it; and fluttered and squabbled and grew very excited. Though it passed slowly, I could not make out what it contained. I was glad when it had gone, because I was still sleepy. The amount of things that drift by! Especially
at high tide, when there has been heavy rain two days previously up the Thames Valley. Baskets, cabbages, chairs, fruit, hats, vegetables, bottles, tins, heaps of rushes or straw, dead things. Not so many dead things now as in the summer. Far fewer dogs. That is because in the winter they don’t go in so much after sticks and get carried away by the current or murderously held under water by
the swans, who are jealous of their river.

Twelve lemons have just gone past. Now there are several more. They look sound enough. An accident to a barrow? One learns to distinguish accidental flotsam from intentional flotsam. That hat over there, for instance, was accidental, blown off at Westminster or Kew, by the look of it; the one that went by a few minutes ago was surely intentional – a
discard from Brentford or Rotherhithe?

The amount of drift-wood is extraordinary. I wonder that someone does not farm it for profit. But perhaps someone does. I do not count the old woman who walks along the narrow foreshore at low tide and puts a few pieces into a muddy sack; I mean somebody who collects it by the ton, dries it in front of huge furnaces, and sells it in bundles for firewood.
Perhaps the supply would give out sooner than I suppose. A lot of the variety is repetitious. After all, certain pieces that I recognize when I see them again (for instance, that bit of ‘Diving Girl’ apple box) go up and down with the tide for a week or more before I lose sight of them.

Human corpses are rare. If one can catch a corpse and pull it out, one is paid seven shillings and sixpence.
I wouldn’t do it for that. And I suppose one also would have to give evidence at the inquest. No, I would leave the corpse for someone else to earn money with. There go the river police in their motor launch. They are watching suspiciously in case I throw my apple core out of the window. It is a prosecutable offence. I will wait until they have gone. Here comes the
Mary Blake
. I am getting to
know the tugs well. I can distinguish the
Mary Blake
, the
Vixen
or the
Elsa
at half a mile. But every day something new of one sort or another goes by. One early morning last year was sensational. There went by an opera hat, a submarine, and a seal. Today I am content with the dabchicks and the lemons. At low tide I expect the old woman with the sack and the old man who pokes about under the stones
and puts what he finds into jam jars. He would puzzle you, but I have been at this window long enough to find out what he is after. He is an anthology poem by William Wordsworth, ‘The Leech Gatherer’. Plenty of leeches on these beaches. The demand, I hear, is steady. Whether from extremely old-fashioned doctors or from extremely modern ones I do not know. Or care much at the moment. I am busy
being pleased with the river, which is now as still as a lake, at the exact balance of the tide. A child’s ball floats motionless under the window. I am tempted to get up and rescue it. But it looks as though it mightn’t bounce. I’ll stay in bed a little longer.

WHEN WE ARRIVED
with our bags at the Asylum cricket ground, the chief medical officer, whom I had met at the house where I was staying, came up to shake hands. I told him that I was only scoring for the Lampton team today (I had broken a finger the week before, keeping wicket on a bumpy pitch). He said: ‘Oh, then you’ll have an interesting companion.’

‘The other scoresman?’ I asked.

‘Crossley is the most intelligent man in the asylum,’ answered the doctor, ‘a wide reader, a first-class chess-player, and so on. He seems to have travelled all over the word. He’s been sent here for delusions. His most serious delusion is that he’s a murderer, and his story is that he killed two men and a woman at Sydney, Australia. The other delusion, which is more humorous, is that his soul is
split in pieces – whatever that means. He edits our monthly magazine, he stage manages our Christmas theatricals, and he gave a most original conjuring performance the other day. You’ll like him.’

He introduced me. Crossley, a big man of forty or fifty, had a queer, not unpleasant, face. But I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting next to him in the scoring box, his black-whiskered hands so close
to mine. I had no fear of physical violence, only the sense of being in the presence of a man of unusual force, even perhaps, it somehow came to me, of occult powers.

It was hot in the scoring box in spite of the wide window. ‘Thunderstorm weather,’ said Crossley, who spoke in what country people call a ‘college voice’, though I could not identify the college. ‘Thunderstorm weather makes us patients
behave even more irregularly than usual.’

I asked whether any patients were playing.

‘Two of them, this first wicket partnership. The tall one, B.C. Brown, played for Hants three years ago, and the other is a good club player. Pat Slingsby usually turns out for us too – the Australian fast bowler, you know – but we are dropping him today. In weather like this he is apt to bowl at the batsman’s
head. He is not insane in the usual sense, merely magnificently ill-tempered. The doctors can do nothing with him. He wants shooting, really.’ Crossley began talking about the doctor. ‘A good–
hearted fellow and, for a mental-hospital physician, technically well advanced. He actually studies morbid psychology and is fairly well-read, up to about the day before yesterday. I have a good deal of
fun with him. He reads neither German nor French, so I keep a stage or two ahead in psychological fashions; he has to wait for the English translations. I invent significant dreams for him to interpret; I find he likes me to put in snakes and apple pies, so I usually do. He is convinced that my mental trouble is due to the good old “antipaternal fixation” – I wish it were as simple as that.’

Then Crossley asked me whether I could score and listen to a story at the same time. I said that I could. It was slow cricket.

‘My story is true,’ he said, ‘every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is “true”, I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and therefore
true. If I were always to use the same formula, it would soon drag and become false. I am interested in keeping it alive, and it is a true story, every word of it. I know the people in it personally. They are Lampton people.’

We decided that I should keep score of the runs and extras and that he should keep the bowling analysis, and at the fall of every wicket we should copy from each other.
This made story-telling possible.

Richard awoke one morning saying to Rachel: ‘But what an unusual dream.’

‘Tell me, my dear,’ she said, ‘and hurry, because I want to tell you mine.’

‘I was having a conversation,’ he said, ‘with a person (or persons, because he changed his appearance so often) of great intelligence, and I can clearly remember the argument. Yet this is the first time I have
ever been able to remember any argument that came to me in sleep. Usually my dreams are so different from waking that I can only describe them if I say: “It is as though I were living and thinking as a tree, or a bell, or middle C, or a five-pound note; as though I had never been human.” Life there is sometimes rich for me and sometimes poor, but I repeat, in every case so different, that if I were
to say: “I had a conversation,” or “I was in love,” or “I heard music,” or “I was angry,” it would be as far from the fact as if I tried to explain a problem of philosophy, as Rabelais’s Panurge did to Thaumast, merely by grimacing with my eyes and lips.’

‘It is much the same with me,’ she said. ‘I think that when I am asleep I become, perhaps, a stone with all the natural appetites and convictions
of a stone. “Senseless as a stone” is a proverb, but there may be more sense in a stone, more sensibility, more sensitivity, more sentiment, more sensibleness, than in many men and women. And no less sensuality,’ she added thoughtfully.

It was Sunday morning, so that they could lie in bed, their arms about each other, without troubling about the time; and they were childless, so breakfast could
wait. He told her that in his dream he was walking in the sand hills with this person or persons, who said to him: ‘These sand hills are a part neither of the sea before us nor of the grass links behind us, and are not related to the mountains beyond the links. They are of themselves. A man walking on the sand hills soon knows this by the tang in the air, and if he were to refrain from eating and
drinking, from sleeping and speaking, from thinking and desiring, he could continue among them for ever without change. There is no life and no death in the sand hills. Anything might happen in the sand hills.’

Rachel said that this was nonsense, and asked: ‘But what was the argument? Hurry up!’

He said it was about the whereabouts of the soul, but that now she had put it out of his head by
hurrying him. All that he remembered was that the man was first a Japanese, then an Italian, and finally a kangaroo.

In return she eagerly told her dream, gabbling over the words. ‘I was walking in the sand hills; there were rabbits there, too; how does that tally with what he said of life and death? I saw the man and you walking arm in arm towards me, and I ran from you both and I noticed that
he had a black silk handkerchief; he ran after me and my shoe buckle came off and I could not wait to pick it up. I left it lying, and he stooped and put it into his pocket.’

‘How do you know that it was the same man?’ he asked.

‘Because,’ she said, laughing, ‘he had a black face and wore a blue coat like that picture of Captain Cook. And because it was in the sand hills.’

He said, kissing
her neck: ‘We not only live together and talk together and sleep together, but it seems we now even dream together.’