Shivers for Christmas (59 page)

Miss Brett shuddered.

‘Yes—I know,' said Northanger. ‘London seems dead to lots of people when the shops are shut, and the theatres are closed. It doesn't get me like that. It seems alive to me.'

‘What with?' It was Mrs Stenning who asked this.

‘With the spirits of people. We were talking about ghosts. Well, how could you expect a ghost to clank a chain when the rattle of motor buses would drown the noise of it out of existence? What's the good of blowing out candles when the streets are daylight with night signs? There's one thing I always do when I'm in London on Christmas Day. I go to my club. It used to be one of the old gaming houses before the Regency. Modern interior decoration has hidden all that, but on Christmas Day, when some of the rooms are absolutely empty, they come back, the old gamesters. You can feel them about you. Imagination, I know—but who has properly defined what imagination is? Memory's impulse of association isn't good enough. Where does the impulse come from?

‘I always go to my club. I went there that afternoon and to my amazement found Ganthony in the smoking-room writing letters. Ganthony is one of those men who belong to a London club and appear in it, somewhat like a comet, at rare intervals. Suddenly he walks in, gets his letters from the hall porter, fills a waste-paper basket with the accumulated rubbish, and writes a pile of answers. For the next week or so you can find him practically at any moment on the premises. Then one day, you say to the hall porter, “Mr Ganthony in the club?” “Mr Ganthony, sir? He's gone.”

‘Perhaps as much as three years go by before you see him again. That Christmas Day I hadn't seen him for four years at least. He was surrounded with letters and was writing for all he was worth. I think he was as glad to see me as I was to see him. He'd just come home from Ceylon—didn't know how long he was going to stay. He never does. I picked out a comfortable chair and we talked. Presently I inquired about his wife, whether he'd brought her with him—how she was. His eyes went like pebbles when the water's dried off them.

‘“My wife died nearly a year ago,” said he.

‘I must tell you about Ganthony's wife. He had met and married her during the War. But the War had nothing to do with it. We've got into the habit of putting those hurried marriages down to the War. Whenever they'd met, Ganthony would have married her. It was the case of a man meeting the fate that was in store for him and rushing to it like a bit of steel to a magnet. What he had meant to her I've never been able to quite satisfy my mind about. The relationships that circumstance contrives between individuals must have some sort of scheme about them. But I'm blowed if it's possible to begin to think what it is or how it's regulated.

‘Ganthony met her in a restaurant. He'd just come out of hospital. Been knocked out by a shell burst on Vimy Ridge. His face had been cut about and was still all wrapped in bandages. One side of his face was fairly clear—on the other, his eye just peeped out of a mass of lint. He didn't care what he looked like. In fact I think it rather amused him to go and dine in public. He went alone.

‘She was dining at a table a few yards away with a man. Like everyone else she was attracted by the sight of this bandaged face of Ganthony's. She drew her companion's attention. I had all this from Ganthony himself just before he was married. It was as though she said, “They've been knocking him about— haven't they?”

‘The man looked at him for a moment or two. Wounded men were pretty common those days. He was a soldier himself. He was in khaki. He took no more notice. But the woman went on looking. Every other second Ganthony caught her eye. More than that, he could see she didn't want her companion to notice it. Something about it intrigued Ganthony. The scheme, whatever it is, was beginning to work. The fate was beginning to draw him. He smiled—so far as that was possible with half his face in bandages. She smiled in return—one of those smiles a woman can hide from everyone but the person for whom it is intended. In a few minutes they were talking to each other with their eyes, that sort of conversation that isn't hampered with the expression and meaning of mere words.

‘Ganthony cut a course out and finished his meal before they did. He ordered his bill when she was looking at him. He paid it, looked at the door, then at her, then he got up and went out. He hadn't to wait more than two seconds before she was outside on the pavement beside him. She'd made some excuse to her companion. She had for decency's sake to go back and finish her dinner. They arranged to meet later.

‘They were married in a week. No need to tell you more than that. You can put it down to the War if you like. But Ganthony wasn't the sort of man to marry that sort of woman just because there was a war on. He did it with his eyes open even if his face was bandaged. He knew the kind she was. He knew he wasn't the first, but I suppose he may have thought that when he took her out to Ceylon after he was quit of the War, he would be the last. I never thought so. But it was no good telling him that. When a man runs into his fate as he did, platitudes and speculations about morals don't stop him. He has to find things out for himself. God disposes sometimes, it seems to me before and after a man's proposal.

‘Anyhow that's as much as it has to do with this story. Ganthony had married and now his wife was dead. I confess to a feeling of satisfaction when I heard it. She was a beautiful woman no doubt—intensely attractive. I had never seen her, but he had sent me a snapshot of himself and her from Ceylon after they got out there. However, attraction isn't everything. It invites, but it doesn't always entertain.'

‘It doesn't sound very much like a ghost story,' said Mrs Stenning.

Northanger apologized.

‘I warned you it wasn't a ghost story for children,' said he.‘I told you they wouldn't understand it. I doubt if I understand it myself.'

‘Shove a log on, Valerie,' said Stenning, ‘and don't interrupt him, Grace. The man's earning his punch with me anyhow. Go on, Northanger. You tell it your own way. Women always want to see the last page. Ganthony's wife was dead.'

‘Yes—dead,' Northanger went on. ‘Ganthony saw her dead. They had lived in Colombo for the first six or eight months and apparently in that short time, he came to know how attractive she was. And yet, it was not only her physical attraction for men, he told me, as a sort of fatality about her that drew them as it had drawn him.

‘Apparently he knew nothing in fact. She was not so much secretive about it, as almost mysterious. As far as I can make out, it was as though she had a vocation for that sort of life, like the sacred women in the temple of Osiris at Thebes. I can imagine her having been extraordinarily mysterious with that other man in the restaurant when she first met Ganthony. She must have just slipped away from him when that dinner was over. At one moment he may have thought she was his for the evening. The next she was gone.

‘It was the beginning of that feeling in Ganthony that at any moment he might lose her, made him leave Colombo and take her up country to a spot close to his plantations. She made no complaint. It was not as though she were a gay woman and were being torn away from her gaiety. She went without a word. He was terribly fond of her. Any fool could have seen that. Notwithstanding the way he had met her, it had not continued to be promiscuous with him. She was a sacred women to him right enough. He told me about her death, in that slow, measured sort of way as a man walks at the end of a journey. Whatever she'd been, her death had left a wound in his life that wouldn't heal in a hurry.'

‘Are we to hear how she did die?' I asked.

‘Yes—I want to hear how she died,' said Miss Brett.

‘I'm coming to that,' said Northanger. ‘Away there up country, Ganthony felt she was safe. Except down at the plantations, there were no Englishmen about. After a few months up there, when she seemed to be quite contented, Ganthony had to go down to Colombo on business. He was gone three days. When he came back, she was gone. The native servants were in a panic. He scoured the country for two days. They'd heard nothing of her down at the plantations. She'd vanished—slipped away. On the third day, coming back after a fruitless search, he found a Buddhist priest waiting for him at his bungalow. All the man would say was, “I've come to bring you to see the memsahib.” Ganthony followed him. Again and again he asked the fellow what was the matter, threatened him, tried to frighten him, but he'd say nothing except—“You shall see the memsahib.”

‘On the side of a hill about three miles from Ganthony's bungalow, there was a Buddhist monastery. He was taken there, and there on a rough sort of bed in one of the rooms—it was a rest place—he found his wife lying—dead. There was no question of getting a doctor. There was not a doctor within miles.

‘I asked him if he was sure she was dead, and he turned those stone eyes of his on me.

‘“You have to be your own doctor out there,” said he, “and there are one or two things you can't fail to recognize. Death's one of 'em. She'd been dead some time. She was quite cold. There's no mistaking when the spirit's gone out of the body. Hers was gone. I could feel it had. She lay there, just a dead body, and I felt I couldn't touch her then—it seemed repulsive without her spirit.”

‘I asked him how she got there, what he thought she'd died of, how long he imagined she'd been dead. None of his answers were very elaborate. He made it out to be fever. She had walked by herself into the monastery. She must have been dead two days. He arrived at that decision apart from what the monks told him.

‘Then he said an extraordinary thing which made me realize the repulsion he had felt for that body bereft of its spirit.

‘“I left her there,” he said—“they buried her.”

‘Well, that was Ganthony's story as he told it me that Christmas afternoon in the club. We had tea together while we talked. After that he went back to finish his letters. I went into the reading-room till about a quarter to seven. It was snowing then, coming down like a white fog over the black darkness outside. There was hardly a taxi moving in the streets. I'd ordered my dinner for eight o'clock at my rooms. I went out of the reading-room to make a move towards Stretton Street and then I thought of Ganthony, probably dining there in the club by himself. I looked into the smoking-room and asked him to come along. He pushed his hand through his bundle of letters.

‘“Only half finished,” said he.

‘“Finish 'em tomorrow.”

‘“No,” he said, “I'll get 'em done now while I'm at it. If I get finished before ten, I'll look in and have a drink with you. But no more raising from the dead. That's buried.”

‘I nodded my head. It was plain he wasn't coming. When a man wants to do a thing, he does it without ifs and buts. Those are feminine prerogatives. I left him to his letters. I walked out of the club, pushed my way through that white storm across the black gape of Trafalgar Square, up the Haymarket, and turned off into Jermyn Street.

‘I always think Jermyn Street is a queer street. I've known odd men living there, in little rooms over little shops. It keeps an atmosphere about it which the rest of London is losing as fast as a woman loses self-respect directly she takes to drink. It has dark, sunken doorways. The houses are so close together that you hardly ever look up at the windows as you pass along its narrow thoroughfare. I never used to think of the existence of those windows till an odd chap I knew invited me to his rooms there. There was something so queer about them that after that, I spent a morning walking along the north side of Jermyn Street looking up at the houses on the opposite side. They're nearly all of them funny. They're hiding places. And the street itself has got that feeling. So much has it got it, that it is one of the favourite walking places of that band of sisters who count the world well lost for—why shouldn't they call it love?

‘I never expected to see one of them that night. There wasn't a soul anywhere. The snow was coming down like a muslin curtain of a big design. A policeman passed me. His footsteps and mine were silent in the snow. I wished him a happy Christmas as I went by. His answer was like the voice of a man with a respirator on. The snow had dressed him in white. He just appeared and disappeared.

‘I was getting near the St James's end, just about where old Cox's Hotel used to stand when through that muslin curtain of snow, just as through the curtains you can dimly see someone moving about inside a room, I saw a figure coming towards me. I felt a moment's surprise. It was a woman.

‘There were not many steps for us to approach each other before we met. With that snow the whole of London was cramped up into the dimensions of a narrow, little room. As we passed, it was just as though she had pulled the curtains for an instant and looked through the window at me. Then, like the policeman, she was gone.'

It might have been the instinct of a raconteur to heighten the suspense, but here Northanger stopped and looked at Valerie Brett.

‘Go on,' we said.

‘Well,' said he, ‘I'm considering this young lady's feelings. To give you the proper impression of what happened, I have to be what the novelists call—psychological here. Will she mind?'

‘Don't be an ass,' said Stenning. ‘You know jolly well you're only trying to tantalize us. Go on with your psychology. She's on the stage. They're full of psychology there.'

‘I only felt it necessary,' said Northanger, ‘to describe a man's attitude towards encounters like this. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say my own towards this particular one. Because though, as far as the story is, she'd gone by, there had been that half-instant's pause—the moment as I said when she seemed to have pulled the muslin curtains and looked at me out of the window. That pause was indescribable. It was an encounter. Most often a woman like that says something—a fatuous word of endearment—a challenge—a salute as if you were old friends. This woman didn't say anything. She just looked through that pause at me, and though I could not have described her for the life of me, I felt clearly conscious of her personality.