Essential Stories (2 page)

“Ah! This
is
nice!” he crowed, in the cockerel voice that took us back to the Oxford years. He pulled up a chair and placed it so that none of us could easily get out. . . .

“How awfully nice.” For niceness was everything for him. “Everyone is here,” he said. . . .

From this comic start, the unfolding of something more serious forces the reader—more, if anything, than the narrator—into a self-examining kind of sympathy. One recalls Chekhov’s requirements of short-story writing, as Pritchett listed them in an essay:
¹⁰

absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature.

total objectivity.

truthful descriptions of persons and objects.

extreme brevity.

audacity and originality: avoid the stereotype.

compassion.

Each of these qualities is found in V. S. Pritchett, but none more than the last.

JEREMY TREGLOWN is the author of V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life. A former editor of
The Times Literary Supplement,
he is professor of English at the University of Warwick and has recently been Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow of the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. His previous books include
Roald Dahl:
A Biography
and
Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green,
which won the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award. He lives in England.

NOTES

1. “An English Chekhov,”
The Times Literary
Supplement,
January 4, 2002.

2. V.S.P., BBC Radio 3, December 14, 1997.

3. Henry David Thoreau, letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857, published in Thoreau,
Correspondence,
ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode, 1958.

4.
The New Yorker,
December 22–29, 1997.

5. “A Family of Emotions,”
The New York Times Book
Review,
June 25, 1978.

6. Introduction to
The Oxford Book of Short Stories,
1981.

7. V. S. Pritchett, Complete Collected Essays, “Maupassant,” p. 435.

8. Edmund Wilson, letter to VSP, March 17, 1970, published in Wilson,
Letters in
Literature and Politics,
ed. Elena Wilson, 1977.

9. “On Falling in Love,” in
Virginibus Puerisque,
1881:
The Works of Robert Louis
Stevenson,
Vailima Edition, 1922, vol. ii, p. 43.

10.
Complete Collected Essays,
“A Doctor,” p. 793.

THE SACK OF LIGHTS

She was an old charwoman whose eyes stared like two bits of tin and whose lips were twisted like rope round three protruding teeth. All day long she was down on her knees scrubbing flights of stone stairs, cleaning out evil passages, emptying oozy pails down the drain with the soapsuds frilled about it, and listening to its dirty little voice gulping out of the street. All day long she chattered to herself and sang “Valencia, land of oranges . . .” and broke out into laughter so loud at some fantastic recollection that it sounded as though she had kicked her pail downstairs.

One evening, after a week’s absence from her work, she said mysteriously, as she left the house, “I’m going to do it again. I’m going orf to git me lights.”

“Lights?”

“Yes, ’e stopped me ’e did. ‘Better practise it at ’ome,’ ’e said. So I took the lot. I took the train, an’ rockets, an’ that wicked ol’ General with the monercle, oh, I took ’im. I took ’em all ’ome. O, ’e warn’t ’arf a wicked ol’ dear.” She laughed, and her teeth seemed to skip up and down like three acrobats with the rope lips twirling round them. “Yer know what ’e called me, the ol’ monercle? ‘Lor,’ says ’e, peeping through the winder, ‘ain’t she a proper beauty!’ That’s what ’e called me. We didn’t ’arf dance.”

“Trains! Rockets? Generals? Dance?” The people of the house touched their sound foreheads. “Gone, oh quite gone,” said the people of the house. “Haven’t you noticed, the last few days? Away a week and comes back singing and talking about dances and Generals worse than ever.”

Before there was time to say any more she was off again down the road singing “Valencia, land of oranges . . .” and gutter children calling after her.

No one else could hear what her mind heard. No one else could see what her eyes saw. Alight with it, she walked from her room at the back of Euston to Piccadilly Circus with a sack on her back—the sack which she always carried in case there was anything worth having in the gutters—and “Valencia, land of oranges . . .” twiddling like a ballroom of dancers in her head.

No one noticed her as she stood on the curb of Piccadilly Circus, nor guessed that at that moment she could have died of laughter, she was so happy. She wanted to shout to see what would happen, but she laughed instead. A miraculous place as high and polished as a ballroom. The façades of the buildings were tall mirrors framed in gold, speeding lights. “Chucking it about,” she cried out. The crowds did not even hear her in the roar. If she jumped, could she see herself in the mirrors? She jumped, but not high enough. She laughed. Rockets shot up in numbered showers and exploded noiselessly into brief diagrams of green stars. A tilted bottle dripped beads of wine as red as railway signals into a glass and there was the General—Smoke the Army Smoke—standing on a house-top, with a white-hot monocle in his eye, and his cigarette pricking red. Diamonds and pearls and rubies were streamers flying into the Circus and flashed so that people’s faces bobbed up and down like Chinese lanterns.

But below the streaming lights everything was dancing. That was what she noticed. Below it was “Valencia, land of oranges . . .” She sang it out and waved to the cars as they passed. “Valencia . . .” The dark couples of taxis waltzed down dipping to the roll of the tune, and the big dowager cars slipped by, their jewelled bosoms beaming. The young sparking cars darted like dragon-flies—those were the ones she liked, the noisy, erratic ones. The perfume of the dance rose among them. Low horns breathed out flights of warning. The saxophone horns wailed, the jazz engines drummed—how her heart was dancing—and under all was the everlasting undertone, the deep ’cello vibration of the wheels. The ’cello, the voice of movement being born, the voice of the soul. That sound caught her by the waist like a lover. “Valencia . . .” She ran out into the traffic, not to cross the road, but to dance in it!

In a second she was carried away by the traffic, and it waltzed graciously, understandingly about her. She felt its rhythm. Dancing a grotesque step she let herself drift on a river of circling moody joy as though she were another Ophelia floating with flowers about her.

She was dancing in a land of oranges, and she saw women as beautiful as orchids gliding high beside her in their dowager saloons. She chased them as you chase butterflies, but she could not keep up with them. The chauffeurs were at their wits’ ends, swerving to avoid her, as something too awful even to run over. Then as she gambolled the cars began to slow down; she saw the spaces narrowing, the floor of the Circus disappearing under thickening wheels. The traffic crowded, breathing and swearing about her. To her surprise she saw it had stopped. A policeman was coming for her. She wanted to throw her arms round his neck and kiss him, but he gripped one arm and led her away.

“ ’Ere, Lizzy,” he said. “You’d better practise it at home a bit before you try it on ’ere.”

“Yer right. In course y’are,” she shouted at him. “But I must get me lights. Can’t do it without me lights.” And with her free hand she held the sack open like a pail she was filling to wash down flights and flights of stairs with, but in poured the lights instead: all the signs and diagrams and patterns, the bottle that poured endless wine, the engine wheels that never stopped, all the jerks and clicks of brilliance. The last to go was the General, monocle and all.

“Garn, yer wicked ol’ dear,” she laughed, giving him a kick. The following crowd laughed to see her give the policeman one like that.

“Lor, it’s ol’ Bertha,” voices shouted. “Drunk and disorderly, got it bad. Ya! Gor!”

She was in a cold cell, but she was far too excited to know that. As soon as they left her she carefully took her sack and shook it upside down. The warder was watching her through the grille. The tune began turning again in her head. “Valencia . . .” she jumped to her feet. Out of the sack the lights sprang like so many eels and serpents. The wine poured, the engine wheels whizzed, the yellow rockets broke upwards, and the General—he skipped out like a harlequin.

“Gawd! Ain’t she a proper beauty!” said a voice from the grille of the cell.

“Lor, General!” she retorted. “I’m surprised at a man of your age.” She danced up to him and tried to pull the monocle out of his eye. He dodged her. She danced up to him and away from him, leading him on while the lights rained their brilliance upon her. Big cars swayed by as she pirouetted, and there hummed in her ear the buzzing undertone of wheels, like the voice of a lover. She jumped sky high to see herself in the tall gilt mirrors that went up out of sight among the stars. She jumped, but not high enough. She laughed. The rockets clicked and spilled and glittered in tune like an orchestra playing. The railway engines running on catherine-wheels rushed on and on, into infinity. Words hopped off into space. The messages of the electric signs stepped away as daintily as a ballet into nothing.

A SERIOUS QUESTION

That night, when it was time to go to bed, James Harkaway kissed his wife, went to his room and she to hers which was next door, and there they lay like two children talking guiltily through the wall to each other. But talking like adults, long-married and never saying what they meant, keeping it all on the surface and only letting glints of real intent and buried brooding appear. You can lead a very tolerable life if you play at everything. Harkaway was irritated by this fact. The one thing he could not stand was playing, for he was a small, trim man with a wide patient chest, blue eyes that looked slightly upwards as if to penetrate what was a long way ahead, and a sandy moustache as neat as a little arithmetic. He did not wish to play. He did not wish to be a child, though he desired children as a bill desires its receipt. That was the trouble: he was, as it were, a payment going begging, a man with a fanciful desire to be suspected of passion, to be known for his dangerousness and to father progeny. His difficulty was his fatal unobtrusive-ness, his resignation. Once a rent collector always a rent collector, he argued, once on the earth and of it always on the earth and of it. And this is where he and Mrs. Harkaway differed. She was not the kind of woman to commit herself or resign herself to anything; to regard herself as the vehicle of nature, the tool of a fate, or the wedded wife of James Harkaway. She would not admit it. This was the reason why they had no children and talked through the wall; why she was most affectionate when Harkaway kept on the other side of it. She was a perverse woman, small, young and dainty, with a voice like the playing of a musical box, and a will of iron.

The questions she had to ask when she got into bed! How agitated her head and her wide open eyes were, that lay quite still like indoor flowers in the dark. She stared at the ceiling wondering if there were any spiders on it. “Did you lock the back door?” she said. “Did you let the cat in? Did you leave me my matches? What was that? It must have been that mouse. Do you think it was really only him? What a noise those apples make when they fall off the trees. Why don’t they gather those apples instead of letting them waste? Did you put the guard round the fire? Did you shut the gate? ”

Ah, that was a
serious
question, thought Harkaway leaning on his elbow and looking out towards the window. Did he shut the gate? He was a man of habit and he always shut the gate, but this night had he or hadn’t he? He strained his eyes and could see nothing but the hairy darkness of the trees and the brow of pale sky above the hedge.

And then a breeze of reckless greatness inspired him, who was rarely reckless and never great except on the day he proposed to Mrs. Harkaway, and then he was not thinking.

“Yes. I shut the gate,” he called.

But in between their talk that white gate seemed every now and then to rush down the full length of the garden, wide-open and accusing into his mind.

Then Mrs. Harkaway’s mind was easy and she laughed, given freedom by the dark. She mocked. She thought her warm bed was a boat that floated free of everything towards delightful dangers; and she laughed more to make it rock merrily on the ripples. And then she tried something sharper than laughter. Something more dangerous. But Harkaway’s bed was a bed, nothing more, straight, still, and serious, and with brass knobs on the end of it. It was meant to be slept in, Harkaway perceived and prepared to sleep. Mrs. Harkaway had no notion of sleeping.

“I feel very talkative,” she said.

“Well I don’t,” said Harkaway.

“You never do,” said she.

There was no reply.

“Talk to me,” she pleaded. “Say something to me.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Harkaway, “What shall I tell you?”

“Tell me what you think.”

“Oh, my God!” thought Harkaway, as though his soul were slipping out of his body. Then aloud, “I don’t think anything.”

There was a long silence and Harkaway was nearly dozing when his wife began again: “Did you see Mrs. Feathers this morning?”

Harkaway grunted. He couldn’t remember. What was the importance of Mrs. Feathers? Sleep was the most important thing. And “What did old Mr. Dukes say?”

“Oh nothing. Only about his dogs,” grunted Harkaway.

“Lovely boys. I wish we had a dog,” persisted Mrs. Harkaway. “And Mr. Radfield,” she went on, “has he paid his rent yet?”

That touched John Harkaway on a serious matter. He opened his eyes.

“No,” he said. “It’s a bad look out for him. He hasn’t.”

“Poor man,” she said.

“Poor man!” exclaimed Harkaway slightly annoyed. “I like that. He’ll be poor if we sell him up.” To call dogs “lovely boys,” and an old scoundrel like Radfield “a poor man”!

“You’re not going to do that?” exclaimed Mrs. Harkaway rebelliously. “He can’t help it. It isn’t a crime.”

“I’m not so sure,” returned Harkaway loftily, putting his chin over the top of the sheet. For, to a rent collector, it is a crime not to pay your rent. It is a blow at the roots of society. “I say I’m not so sure. It’s stealing, when you think it out. It’s taking what isn’t yours.”

“How can you say so,” exclaimed Mrs. Harkaway, hot in the defence, for she knew that Harkaway rebuked her in a general way when rebuking others in a particular one.

“Supposing I took all my takings every month,” he said derisively at the ceiling, but intending it for her.

“Well,” she tossed out the word. “Suppose you did.”

For lying in the dark with the wall between them and the door pleasantly open every mocking sentence was like a dip of the paddle which shot her boat wildly forward, more sharply every time into the mists and uncertainties of a quarrel which could, after all, be stopped in a moment.

“And land me in gaol and you in the workhouse,” he said. “A fine lookout.”

“Well,” she said giving a final reckless push to the argument. “What of it? What about it? We’re not like that poor Mrs. Radfield. We haven’t any children.”

That was the sore point and yet she played like this with it.

“No, thank God,” said Harkaway with painful bitterness, but he did not mean that at all. At the word “children,” his thoughts froze him and then his heart galloped like horses, his blood rushed back in a swirl as though his limbs were filled with the roll of drums, rousing him and waking him to pain. There was a fiery anvil in his breast. No children. This perversity and playfulness in his house, but no children! Why did he live adding little bits of charm and persuasiveness to his manners; “Good morning to you, Mrs. Feathers,” and “A very good day to you, Mr. Radfield,” only to have Radfield slamming the door in his face and others treating him like a licensed burglar. Was there nothing serious, understanding and purposeful in the world? Was he wasting the pride of his strength as he sang down the hills on his bicycle with his bowler hat over his eyes; and was there no reward for the sense of moral endeavour which filled him as he got off his machine and, with greater pride because it was difficult, pushed it slowly up the steeper hills? And all the time, when he knocked at a door, schooling himself to pretend that the last thing he had in him was a packet of virgin receipt forms.

Now Mrs. Harkaway knew she had said the word which ought not to have been said. She had said something real to him by accident, when the only way she could be happy with him was by inventing a fairyland of pretence. Their talk became painful, bitter, and spasmodic.

“I ought not to have married you,” she said in a small high voice. She had often said that in the middle of the night, from the safety of her room and the darkness.

The ripe September cold came in at the window blowing the smell of fallen apples with it and the dampness of the fields. She sighed and he dramatically groaned. She sighed again and beat the sheets with wafts of desolation. He muttered aloud. In a moment they were playing at sighing and being unhappy, until at last startled by the distance to which they had mysteriously slipped, he said.

“What is it, dear?”

She would not answer.

“What is it darling? . . . Oh well, if you won’t speak . . .”

He sighed miserably and she relenting said, “Darling.”

This was his turn to enjoy silence.

“Oh dear, what has happened!” she said.

A devilish joy gurgled inside him where the bitterness had been. He unclenched his fists and smiled and stretched himself spaciously. Lord, but bicycling didn’t half play up the calves of your legs! There was no way out of it. Once a rent collector always a rent collector. Once a husband always a husband. So on it went day after day, night after night, he yawned. World without end, he went on yawning. Now and ever shall be, he punched the pillow and sank from depth to depth into sleep.

But Mrs. Harkaway troubled by her pillow, wondering if she were going to be warm enough, if there were any spiders on the ceiling, sitting up to listen for the watch, wondering if that mouse was going to nibble at the wainscot again—in short, refusing to be resigned to anything and determined to do the opposite of all the sleeping people in the world, Mrs. Harkaway lay awake as long as she could. There were always noises; the apples falling off the trees, the creeper rustling, the chickens fluttering in the barn, the sound of the cat padding in the room. Now he was asleep, she thought, she could passionately love her husband. Tears were in her eyes.

She slept at last with a pretty, defiant heaviness and her head became alive with dreams that burned as clearly as the scenes of a lighted stage. One after another, hour after hour, through the night the caravans passed. She listened astonished to her secret thoughts. She heard herself say in fright “What’s that noise?” Saw herself sit up in bed, saw herself see a man with hob-nailed boots on climb in at the window, and walk through the room; the tall, dark man whom you see when a fortune teller, noting you have no wedding ring, encourages your hopes. But he was a burglar. She heard herself scream. Harkaway said when she screamed: “It’s only a burglar.”

Wasn’t it like him to be still and doing nothing! Then several men came in and she lay deathly still, stiffening gradually from the toes and keeping herself rigid and holding her breath. She lay so a long time until she woke up gasping as though she had put her head in a bucket of cold water. The eyes of sky between the branches of the trees were looking in at the window. It was morning already and there
were
noises. She was not dreaming. In the garden. Men walking in the garden. She screamed out:

“Darling, there are men in the garden. Quick.”

Harkaway sat up in bed dazed. The elms were full and clear, and the sky under the branches was cold and white. The ragged hedge stood up like hair on end. He listened and also heard the sounds. Men in the garden! And then he saw a smooth and silvery shadow pass by the sill. He jumped out of bed, his heart pumping loudly.

“All right,” he said, trembling, glad she was next door, the wild one. As he fumbled for his slippers he heard an unmistakable stamping of feet, a crunching, ripping noise, a heavy groping breathing as though some huge man were leaning and groaning against the house, and straining to push it over. There was an eerie snorting and hissing under the window. Some creature fantastic, malevolent and supernatural, was in the garden. And now he knew that stumbling, that snorting, puffing, tearing, crunching. The white gate, wide open and startling, seemed to whistle like a ghostly wind down the garden into his conscience; horses had got into the garden. Herds of horses trampling through the flower beds, kicking up his lawn.

“It’s horses,” he said, in consternation, for he was afraid of their jaws and legs, being a man for wheels, a bicycling man himself.

“In the garden,” exclaimed his wife. There was a scuffle of clothes, and a thump like the fall of one of those apples as she jumped out of bed. She met him at the door in her night-dress, her hair was bushy and her eyes were wide open and eager to get to the battle.

“The naughty boys!” she cried, as he pulled the door open. “Look at them.”

And with her behind him he picked up a twig and advanced upon them. He did not mind, he was indeed glad that she had called them boys.

In the cold air they stood, not a herd but three great farm horses, two roans and a grey, standing still and staring at him in his pyjamas. The creatures stopped like gawky louts who had been caught robbing an orchard. Sardonic in their nakedness, swishing their tails, and the smell of hide, manure and bruised grass steaming on them. While he had been sleeping they had been out all night, mysteriously arched, and munching through the darkness. The stars had shone upon them, the darkness coated them. Three grotesque gods, he thought they were, naked between wild mane and bearded fetlock, with fine feathery hair on their bellies; three gods sniffing raw morning at their nostrils, the rime of the morning on their backs, and amazed grins gone askew on their slobbering mouths.

Harkaway squared his shoulders and delivered them a final notice in his professional way.

“Go on. Get out of this. Gee up,” he shouted. They lowered and stretched their long necks, so weirdly long, to the grass, and casually, prosaically ate their way through the clover to the gate, turning to eye him as they went. He watched their great casual gait with awe as they swaggered through his Michaelmas daisies, snapped his sunflowers, slithered against the flints in his rows of potatoes, and shot up their shining hooves as they sprang, amid a shower of dew, through the bushes. He advanced upon them at a discreet distance, with dignity.

“Go along, you naughty boys. I will tell your master. They know they’ve done wrong,” cried Mrs. Harkaway. Harkaway emboldened, shouted louder:

“Get out of my garden. Gee up. Go on now!” And two of them trotted out with a ringing clatter. But the third, the grey, took fright and plunged at the wire in panic, wheeling round at every gap and throwing himself against it, broke into a brief clumsy gallop to the end of the garden, almost as far as the house, and then up again. Harkaway kept clear.

“Don’t frighten him,” commanded Mrs. Harkaway. How great Harkaway felt at the idea of his frightening anything. Down went the grey again and, at last, with an unearthly neigh as though he were laughing at Harkaway, he broke through the sunflowers, slithered on the gravel and went blindly at the gate, not stopping until he was on the road with the others, who were taking bites at the hedge in impudent farewell. At the grey’s arrival they swung their heads, neighed, and broke into a jog trot down the road with a confused gobbling of hooves.