Essential Stories (8 page)

In the morning the dream was still in his mind; mingling with some obscure sense of triumph it ceased to be a dream and became reality. It became like a new landscape imposed upon the world. The voice of the woman was more real to his ear than his own breathing.

He felt free, was protected and cleansed, and his dream seemed to him like an impervious world within a world, a mirage in which he musically walked. In the afternoon he was exalted. He walked out of the house and taking the long way round by the lanes went to the schoolmaster’s. The frost still held and the air was windless, the land fixed and without colour. As it happened the schoolmaster had taken it into his head to go as far as his gate.

“Man, I’m glad to see ye about,” cried the schoolmaster at the sight of Charlie. “I meant to see ye. Come in now. Come in. ’Tis terrible lonely for you in that place.”

Charlie stood still and looked icily through him.

“Ye thought she was in bed,” he said. “But I’m after seeing her in the flames of hell fire.”

Without another word he walked away. The schoolmaster made a rush for him. But Charlie had climbed the stone wall and had dropped into the field opposite.

“Come here. Come back. What’s that you say?” called the schoolmaster. But Charlie walked on, gathering speed as he dropped behind the hill out of sight going to his house. Then he ran for his life.

The schoolmaster did not wait. He went in for his coat, bicycled into Ballady Post Office and rang up the Guards at Dill.

“There’s a poor feller here might do harm to himself,” he said. “Will you send someone down?”

But on the way back to the house Charlie’s accompanying dream and its dazed exaltation left him. Speaking had dissolved it. It lifted like a haze and suddenly he was left alone, exposed, vulnerable in the middle of the fields. He began to run, shying at every corner, and when he got to the house he clawed at the door and ran in gasping to throw himself on the bed. He lay there on his face, his eyes closed. There had been brief excitement in the run, but as he recovered his breath the place resumed its normal aspect and its horror became real as slowly he turned over and opened his eyes to it. And now they were open he could not close them again. They stared and stared. Slowly it came to him there was nothing in life left for him but emptiness. Career gone, peace gone, God gone, Micky gone, dog—all he had ever had trooped with bleak salute of valediction through his mind. He was left standing in the emptiness of himself. And then a shadow was cast upon the emptiness; looking up he saw the cold wing of a great and hovering bird. So well he knew it that in this last moment his mind cleared and he had no fear. “ ’Tis yourself, Micky, has me destroyed,” he said. He took out a razor and became absorbed in the difficulty of cutting his throat. He was not quite dead when the Guards broke in and found him.

THE UPRIGHT MAN

Calvert was an upright man, tall, shy, short-stepping. His eyes were lowered and his narrow shoulders square. Proud in his poverty he kept to himself, he feared to know himself to be known. He came to the office punctually, he hung up his raincoat and hat in the cloakroom reserved for the male staff, he changed into a grey jacket in order to save his better one, he used his own towel when he washed his thin hands. He did not stand as the other clerks did, with dejected buttocks to the cashier’s fire, defying him in his absence and scattering to their stools when the blowing of a nose announced that he had arrived. Calvert did not spend himself in gestures or extravagances. He kept himself apart. He went straight to his desk, took out his blotting paper, cleaned his pens, took down his books and, before all others, bent his body and bowed his head. The clerks smiled at him. He was fair.

The carpenter bends over his bench, the cobbler over his shoe, the mechanic over his machine, the priest over his altar, the clerk over his desk. By day, the heads of all men are bowed and their bodies bent. Not one of them is upright. Yet Calvert, the first to bow, was an upright man. Soldierly in duty, remembering his mother, scrupulous in poverty, when others laughed only smiling, saying two words while others spoke ten, eating sparingly alone, secret in life and parsimonious of himself. He trod the path of a single preoccupation, an instinctive loneliness. He conserved himself, every sinew was restraining. There were iron bars to the windows of his office. Through them if a bowed man looked up, he saw not the sky but across the street the flat walls of windows where other bowed men worked.

At first he had been restless, his mouth had the desire to speak, his legs fidgeted on the stool—the chains unfamiliar—his hands reckoning his money, his grey eyes looking at the window-bars for a space to squeeze through and escape. “Calvert,” the cashier warned him. And the chant of the office went on. He bowed his head and ducked with the rest repentant. Then cautiously at twenty-two he let a little of himself go. He lit his eyes, guiltily conscient of his mother and their poverty, permitted himself a little of the great secrecy of love. He cautiously looked up at the bars expecting to see a miracle, a vision, the appearance of an angel. For months he continued this deep espionage. No vision came. He bowed his head at last. He was an upright man.

Now there were two women, his mother and this other. It was his duty not to look up. She and he must save themselves. They must not speak too much, nor smile too much, nor touch too much each other’s skin, in case they should love too much and exclaim out of their hearts. How long the old live! They sat in the evenings with his mother and with hers, looking through the fine lace curtains to the sky, waiting for the miracle. But there was no sky. There were the walls of lace curtains in the houses opposite and behind them invisible presences looking up. For ten years looking through lace curtains for a miracle they brought laughter to others.

Clerks flung their lives about and committed follies. One married to a voracious wife drank on Thursdays a glass of stout. One who copied weighing slips gave imitations of the voice of the cashier. One who was bald put his hand down the blouse of his secretary and was slapped in the face. One would absent himself for twenty minutes in the morning to read the newspaper in the lavatory. One going deaf turned to an Oriental religion. One made use of the office telephone to communicate with a bookmaker. One told the Port of London Authority of an error in demurrage; it was his own. One staying after six lit his pipe. The oldest, in charge of stamps, went up in an aeroplane for a few minutes at a resort; he had married a widow. But Calvert did not so defy the gods, his gaolers.

So the gods, his gaolers, got drunk and went mad. They opened the doors of the cell, they flung in the keys. “You are not a slave. You are not a tame man,” they whispered in his ears. “You are a beast and brute fighting for survival. You have saved yourself too long. Go outside,” they said to him, patting him on the back. “Stand out in the air, draw yourself up to your full height, take a deep breath. Do you see? You are a man already. Your pale face is tanned by the sun, your neck is golden. Your hair which had gone dead and greasy is alive again like corn. Your shoulders are like walls, your muscles are hard. Do not lower your eyes! Do not bow your head any more! That day has passed and gone. My dear fellow, those red spots in front of your eyes have nothing to do with your liver, they are made of blood.”

“Blood?” murmured Calvert incredulously.

“Yes, yes,” they said. “Blood. Life. You’re a hero. Go and kill.”

Women, above all, they said, expected this of him. Now was the time to save nothing but to spend all.

He mistrusted them until they said, remembering his tradition, that it was his duty. He had bowed but now at last had come the time of freedom and uprightness.

And indeed the whole world of men was changed. The carpenter no longer bent over his bench, nor the mechanic over his screw, nor the cobbler at his last, nor the clerk at his desk. They were not many bowed men. They were all upright, bolt upright, chins up, shoulders back, forefinger on the seam of trousers, and they marched on grass under the sky. Like upright gods they marched, strong, healthy and beautiful. Women watched them. They would never go back they said. Many indeed did not.

For it appeared that this was a trick. They were made to stand in rows in trenches as they had sat in rows at desks, but the pens they now used required two arms to lift. The cashiers had three stripes on their arms, the partners red bands to their hats. The bars of the office windows had become bars of wire. Accounts were opened and kept, but not of bales. It soon became the habit not to be an upright man, but to duck the head once more. Looking at the sky, they saw miracles but they were sulphurous, and there was a tone of hoarse, consumptive wailing in the voices of the angels as they passed over to be entertained unawares.

But Calvert was an upright man. He had waited long with great passion. He had waited to make a life for himself. He had come to the end of his loneliness. Recklessly he talked, loudly he laughed. He entered into fellowship. He had to spend himself and all his life, to laugh with his whole body, to love and die and live again with his whole nature. This was a supreme duty. All his life he had waited, to stand in all his stature and fullness, attending the Passion. And after sundown between the lights of day and night when the bowed men stand up, he looked up through the wire bars at the sky, and the miracle occurred. He was shot by a sniper in the head.

First of all it was as if, angered with his standing, the earth had swung up with all its metals like a pick and hit with full might upon the head, that his life leapt from his feet and all parts of his body to that place. He fell. It seemed he was whipped off his feet while his head pealed like a helpless belfry. Now there was nothing left of him, he was scattered into fragments and flung together in an iron ball of pain, to be struck and struck until he broke into nothing but clangorous and bloody echoes; and then great toothed pliers picked him up by the skull and flung him away down into a black pit that had no end to it and measured only by the wail of his pain as he dropped down. He had not imagined a death so extravagant.

They carried Calvert away on a stretcher. He was written off the books. His name appeared in many entries. By goods, cash. His account closed, he entered into heaven where all men were lying down full length and only the angels bowed their heads over them. For a long time the hammer-on-anvil clangour of the earth was there, but slowly as he sank into heaven there was the tolerable melody of bells and endurable singing. God came in white coat and held his head together by the pressure of his hands so that these sounds died and after God had held his head it was rigid. Calvert slept, and in his sleep lived many lives and enacted dreams. After many months his eyes, which had long been open, saw a white ceiling and a human face looking down at him. He closed his eyes, unwilling to return from the fevers of heaven from which he was drifting on the sweet stream of sleep. He could have wept that he was not dead. When again he opened his eyes two women were looking at him. One of them was old and one desired. “Save yourself,” their eyes pleaded. He had nothing now to save. He had spent. “Do not let him bend his head,” they said in one voice. “HE CANNOT MOVE HIS HEAD,” said the doctor. “The bullet is still in it.”

At this the gods sobered and grabbed back the keys. “All men to the cells,” they said. “All men back to the bars. No more holidays—work!” The clerks in this new freedom were gay. One who had come to suspect Divine Justice took to games of chance. One who was bald consummated love with a telephone operator and was presented with a clock on his marriage; one saddened by an adding machine took drugs which gave him visions; one moved into a town whose train service had been electrified; one who could imitate the voice of the cashier played in an orchestra; one sold his house at a profit; a typist given to the circulation of religious pamphlets had a week’s leave to serve on a jury; many grew flowers and had newborn children.

But what can a man do in the world who cannot bend his head? Even the inspired blind are led erect, tapping, can bend their heads and work. They can lean down to kiss, they can grope into the convulsions of love. But a man screwed upright by a bullet in his neck, a bullet like the clot of a spirit level to be steadily carried, cannot bend over tools or ledger, nor grovel with fingers.

In this new world returning to life Calvert walked now rigid as the memory of the fear of death. Eyes now wide open, face narrow, shoulders fixed, body bleak, he was fixed in uprightness for ever. Many pitied him. But life requires pliable men. Regimentation of the pliable, they said; it was the lesson of the war. All must bend to the wheel together. No head out of alignment.

What could he do, fixed now in the discipline of uprightness for ever, not of men, lately of heaven, but not of the angels, needing to eat? He sank from plane to plane. There were two women. He had been, he said, staring, a clerk. He went from place to place asking. “There,” they said, “that is what you can do.” He could go from place to place, he could be a pair of hands, impersonal. Take this. Bring that. Fetch me . . . Give him . . . A messenger, walking from room to room, standing in lifts, waiting at desks, an intermediary, lifeless. Not a live man, not a dead man, a man now without all means of desiring anything, a man indelibly alone not looking up nor down. An upright man.

YOU MAKE YOUR OWN LIFE

Upstairs from the street a sign in electric light said “Gent’s Saloon.” I went up. There was a small hot back room full of sunlight, with hair clippings on the floor, towels hanging from a peg and newspapers on the chairs. “Take a seat. Just finishing,” said the barber. It was a lie. He wasn’t anywhere near finishing. He had in fact just begun a shave. The customer was having everything.

In a dead place like this town you always had to wait. I was waiting for a train, now I had to wait for a haircut. It was a small town in a valley with one long street, and a slow mud-coloured river moving between willows and the backs of houses.

I picked up a newspaper. A man had murdered an old woman, a clergyman’s sister was caught stealing gloves in a shop, a man who had identified the body of his wife at an inquest on a drowning fatality met her three days later on a pier. Ten miles from this town the skeletons of men killed in a battle eight centuries ago had been dug up on the Downs. That was nearer. Still, I put the paper down. I looked at the two men in the room.

The shave had finished now, the barber was cutting the man’s hair. It was glossy black hair and small curls of it fell on the floor. I could see the man in the mirror. He was in his thirties. He had a swarthy skin and brilliant long black eyes. The lashes were long too and the lids when he blinked were pale. There was just that suggestion of weakness. Now he was shaved there was a sallow glister to his skin like a Hindu’s and as the barber clipped away and grunted his breaths, the dark man sat engrossed in his reflection, half smiling at himself and very deeply pleased.

The barber was careful and responsible in his movements but nonchalant and detached. He was in his thirties too, a young man with fair receding hair, brushed back from his forehead. He did not speak to his customer. His customer did not speak to him. He went on from one job to the next silently. Now he was rattling his brush in the jar, wiping the razor, pushing the chair forward to the basin. Now he gently pushed the man’s head down, now he ran the taps and was soaping the head and rubbing it. A peculiar look of amused affection was on his face as he looked down at the soaped head.

“How long are you going to be?” I said. “I’ve got a train.”

He looked at the clock. He knew the trains.

“Couple of minutes,” he said.

He wheeled a machine on a tripod to the back of the man. A curved black thing like a helmet enclosed the head. The machine was plugged to the wall. There were phials with coloured liquids in them and soon steam was rushing out under the helmet. It looked like a machine you see in a Fun Fair. I don’t know what happened to the man or what the barber did. Shave, hot towels, haircut, shampoo, this machine and then yellow liquid like treacle out of a bottle—that customer had everything.

I wondered how much he would have to pay.

Then the job was over. The dark man got up. The clippers had been over the back of his neck and he looked like a guardsman. He was dressed in a square-shouldered grey suit, very dandyish for this town, and he had a silk handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket. He wore a violet and silver tie. He patted it as the barber brushed his coat. He was delighted with himself.

“So long, Fred,” he smiled faintly.

“Cheero, Albert,” said the upright barber and his lips closed to a small, hardly perceptible smile too. Thoughtfully, ironically, the barber watched his handiwork go. The man hadn’t paid.

I sat in the chair. It was warm, too warm, where the man had sat. The barber put the sheet round me. The barber was smiling to himself like a man remembering a tune. He was not thinking about me.

The barber said that machine made steam open the pores. He glanced at the door where the man had gone. “Some people want everything,” he said, “some want nothing.” You had to have a machine like that.

He tucked in the cotton wool. He got out the comb and scissors. His fingers gently depressed my head. I could see him in the mirror bending to the back of my head. He was clipping away. He was a dull young man with pale blue eyes and a look of ironical stubbornness in him. The small dry smile was still like claw marks at the corners of his lips.

“Three bob a time,” he said. He spoke into the back of my neck, and nodded to the door. “He has it every week.”

He clipped away.

“His hair’s coming out. That’s why he has it. Going bald. You can’t stop that. You can delay it but you can’t stop it. Can’t always be young. He thinks you can.” He smiled drily but with affection.

“But he wasn’t so old.”

The barber stood up.

“That man!” he said. He mused to himself with growing satisfaction. He worked away in long silence as if to savour every possible flavour of my remark. The result of his meditation was to make him change his scissors for a finer pair.

“He ought to be dead,” he said.

“TB,” he said with quiet scorn.

He looked at me in the mirror.

“It’s wonderful,” he said, as if to say it was nothing of the sort.

“It’s wonderful what the doctors can do,” I said.

“I don’t mean doctors,” he said. “Consumptives! Tuh! They’re wonderful.” As much as to say a sick man can get away with anything—but you try if you’re healthy and see what happens!

He went on cutting. There was a glint in his pale-blue eyes. He snipped away amusedly as if he were attending to every individual hair at the back of my head.

“You see his throat?” he said suddenly.

“What about his throat?” I asked.

“Didn’t you notice anything? Didn’t you see a mark a bit at the side?” He stood up and looked at me in the mirror.

“No,” I said.

He bent down to the back of my neck again. “He cut his throat once,” he said quietly. “Not satisfied with TB,” he said with a grin. It was a small firm, friendly grin. So long, Fred. Cheero, Albert. “Tried to commit suicide.”

“Wanted everything,” I said.

“That’s it,” he said.

“A girl,” the barber said. “He fell in love with a girl.”

He clipped away.

“That’s an item,” said the barber absently.

He fell in love with a local girl who took pity on him when he was in bed, ill. Nursed him. Usual story. Took pity on him but wasn’t interested in him in that way.

“A very attractive girl,” said the barber.

“And he got it badly?”

“They get it badly, consumptives.”

“Matter of fact,” said the barber, stepping over for the clippers and shooting a hard sideways stare at me. “It was my wife.”

“Before she was my wife,” he said. There was a touch of quiet, amused resolution in him.

He’d known that chap since he was a kid. Went to school with him. Used to be his best friend. Still was. Always a lad. Regular nut. Had a milk business, was his own guv’nor till he got ill. Doing well.

“He knew I was courting her,” he smiled. “That didn’t stop him.” There was a glint in his eye.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I lay low,” he said.

She had a job in the shop opposite. If you passed that shop you couldn’t help noticing her in the cash desk near the door. “It’s not for me to say—but she was the prettiest girl in this town,” he said. “Still is,” he mused.

“You’ve seen the river? You came over it by the station,” he said. “Well he used to take her on the river when I was busy. I didn’t mind. I knew my mind. She knew hers. I knew it was all right.”

“I knew him,” he grinned. “But I knew her. ‘Let him take you on the river,’ I said.”

I saw the barber’s forehead and his dull blue eyes looking up for a moment over my head in the mirror.

“Damp river,” he said reflectively. “Damp mists, I mean, on the river. Very flat, low lying, unhealthy,” he said. “That’s where he made his mistake. It started with him taking her on the river.”

“Double pneumonia once,” he said. “Sixty cigarettes a day, burning the candle at both ends.”

He grunted.

“He couldn’t get away with it,” he said.

When he got ill, the girl used to go and look after him. She used to go and read to him in the afternoons. “I used to turn up in the evenings too when we’d closed.”

The barber came round to the front and took the brushes lazily. He glanced sardonically at the door as if expecting to see the man standing there. That cocksure irony in the barber seemed to warm up.

“Know what he used to say to her?” he said sharply and smiled when I was startled. “ ‘Here, Jenny,’ he used to say. ‘Tell Fred to go home and you pop into bed with me. I’m lonely.’ ” The young barber gave a short laugh.

“In front of me,” he said.

“What did you say?”

“I told him to keep quiet or there’d be a funeral. Consumptives want it, they want it worse than others, but it kills them,” he said.

“I thought you meant
you’d
kill him,” I said.

“Kill him?” he said. “Me kill him?” He smiled scornfully at me: I was an outsider in this. “He tried to kill
me,
” he said.

“Yeah,” he said, wiping his hands on a towel. “Tried to poison me. Whisky. It didn’t work. Back OK?” he said, holding up a mirror. “I don’t drink.”

“I went to his room,” he said. “I was his best friend. He was lying on the bed. Thin! All bones and blue veins and red patches as if he’d been scalded and eyes as bright as that bottle of bath salts. Not like he is now. There was a bottle of whisky and a glass by the side of the bed. He wanted me to have a drop. He knew I didn’t drink.

“ ‘I don’t want one,’ I said. ‘Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘You know I never touch it,’ I said. ‘Well, touch it now,’ he said. ‘I tell you what,’ he said; ‘you’re afraid.’ ‘Afraid of what?’ I said. ‘Afraid of catching what I’ve got.’ ‘Touch your lips to it if you’re not afraid. Just have a sip to show.’

“I told him not to be a fool. I took the bottle from him. He had no right to have whisky in his state. He was wild when I took it. ‘It’ll do some people a bit of good,’ I said, ‘but it’s poison to you.’

“ ‘It
is
poison,’ he said.

“I took the bottle away. I gave it to a chap in the town. It nearly finished him. We found out it
was
poison. He’d put something in it.”

I said I’d have a singe. The barber lit the taper. I felt the flame warm against my head. “Seals up the ends,” the barber said. He lifted up the hair with the comb and ran the flame along. “See the idea?” he said.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just married my girl that week,” the barber said. “When she told him we were going to get married he said, ‘I’ll give you something Fred won’t give you.’ We wondered what it would be. ‘Something big,’ he said. ‘Best man’s present,’ he said. He winked at her. ‘All I’ve got. I’m the best man.’ That night he cut his throat.” The barber made a grimace in the mirror, passed the scissors over his throat and gave a grin.

“Then he opened the window and called out to a kid in the street to fetch
her.
The kid came to me instead. Funny present,” he said. He combed, he patted, he brushed. He pulled the wool out of the back of my neck. He went round it with the soft brush. Coming round to the front he adroitly drew off the sheet. I stood up.

“He got over it,” he said. “Comes round and plays with my kids on Sundays. Comes in every Friday, gets himself up. See him with a different one every week at the Pictures. It’s a dead place this, all right in the summer on the river. You make your own life. The only thing is he don’t like shaving himself now, I have to go over every morning and do it for him.”

He stood with his small grin, his steady eyes amused and resolute. “I never charge him,” he said. He brushed my coat, he brought my hat.