The Bazaar and Other Stories (19 page)

“Back at the Swan, as usual?” said Miss Mapsby, as they walked
down the hill together. “You find it, and us, a little battered, no
doubt? Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, roaring about the place – so much
noisier since they were mechanised, poor boys. They and the
Germans between them gave one plenty to organise: we hardly
know where we are, now they’re gone.”

“How much must have happened here!” Bertram said, with a
mingled pang of jealousy and distaste.

 

“However,” Miss Mapsby concluded kindly, “we are always glad
to see visitors back. You, I suppose, have kept on writing away?”

 

She was right: Bertram was,
au fond
, the eternal visitor. His love
for Seale, which reached back into his childhood, was of the wholly
enjoyable, pure, illusory kind, not strained by ties, not taxed by
responsibilities, not charged with serious memories of any asso
ciations more poignant than those with his own past feeling. The
old town, the hill, the marsh, the curve of the bay had composed
themselves long ago, and remained composed, into something that
inexplicably, gently and recurrently pierced, then soothed his heart,
something as unique as the relation between the features of a
beloved face. Seale was, to him, timeless, but at the same time
drenched in something amicable distilled from time. He loved the
place, perhaps as one loves a place in art – immune. This feeling of
his extended even to Seale people, and to the rhythm of their lives.
It can be seen with how many apprehensions he had returned
this
time – in fact, how nearly he had not returned at all.

 

During the walk to town, this morning Miss Mapsby outlined for
Bertram what they had been doing.
She
, of course, had always been
as strong as a horse: he was more surprised to learn that delicate
Miss Moira had worked long night shifts at the canteen in the
church hall. This had, said her elder sister firmly, taken Moira
completely out of herself.

 

Bertram (though only now) recollected hearing that Miss Moira
had had a
fiancé
killed in the 1914 war: if
this
war had made, in
however abstract a form, any restitution for that – good. He found
it hard, however, to revise his picture of the middle-aged girl,
¹
in
whom hopeful youthfulness, a few unspent bright drops in a misted
phial, seemed forever to have been stoppered up by grief. He had
not yet, in fact, had time to revise the picture when Miss Moira
herself greeted him that same day. In the afternoon silence of the
scarred, battered High Street someone came up behind him in a
breathless hurry: before he could turn, Miss Moira’s hand was lightly
upon his elbow, and her blue eyes were fixed upon his face before
its abstraction was quite gone.

 

“Mr. Bertram – I am so sorry. I’m afraid you were thinking! But my
sister told me at lunch that you had come back, and I wanted to
speak to you so much. In fact, I have been to look for you at your
hotel. There is something – for several years I have thought of
writing to you.”

 

“How I wish you had! Is there, was there, anything I could do?”

 

If there were, she did not know how to begin. Bertram said, “Let’s
go back to the Swan; let us have tea.”

 

So, they were side by side in broken-springed hollows of the
hotel sofa. She, pouring out, stooped intently over the tea-tray on
the dwarf table. Not till the lounge was empty, till there was nobody
left to keep casting glances at the shy local woman and the dis
tinguished strange man, did Bertram say gently, “Well . . . ?”
²

 

She was ready. “It’s that I wanted to show you –
this
.” She brought
out of her handbag a wad of writing: limp manuscript paper, dingycornered, rubbed. With one glance, with an uncontrollable inner
groan, he exclaimed, “Why, Miss Moira –
you
have been writing
stories?”

 

“No; all I did was to promise. It was a young soldier: about in the
middle of the war he came in twice to the canteen, from some place
out in the marsh. In those years altogether so many hundreds came
in, perhaps more; they were all different when I began to know
them, but he was more different, though he only came in twice. He
looked round, the first time, as though he could not get the darkness
out of his eyes: I could see that he did not intend to speak. He stood
warming his hands round his cup, frowning to himself. But then
suddenly, as if a wire had pulled at him, he pushed through the rest
and joined into the conversation. That was when I said your name.”

 

“
My
name?” Bertram exclaimed on a gay light note of gratifi
cation, as though his name had never been heard before. “In what
connection?”

 

“The men had begun by talking about film stars; then somehow
the talk passed to any kind of celebrities, famous people. They asked
if I, in my life, had ever met one of those, and I said” – she coloured

 

– “you. He stared at me and said, ‘what, do you know
him
?’”

 

Bertram concentrated on lighting a cigarette: finally, off-hand, he
said, “And so?”

 

“So then, of course I asked if he liked your books.”

 

“You would spare me, I know, if he did not.”

 

“He said, ‘He’s very successful, isn’t he?’ He waited for the others
to move away with so much patience that I was sorry: in his face I
saw questions coming that I could never answer. I was frightened by
the importance of you to him. He seemed to me younger than the
others, not because less had happened to him but because more
would happen. His mouth moved, and his hand looked as if it were
going to break his cup; he fixed his eyes, when I couldn’t answer his
questions, as though he were trying to spell out something I must
know without knowing I knew. Last of all he said, ‘But did you know
him when he was young?’”

 

“Now,
that
was absurd,” said Bertram, smiling, brotherly, into her
unlined face.

 

“Why?” she said – lost, indifferent to his grace. She went on: “The
second time he came in, it was in a hurry: his lot were moving out
next day, though we did not know that, we never knew. He had
come in only to give me this – .” She raised the manuscript from the
seat between them, as though to make Bertram aware of its key
presence. “He made me promise to give it to you. To read.”

 

“I see.”

 

She flushed, sensing at least something of what was behind the
dryness of his tone. “I hope I did not do wrong? But I – I have never
been asked for a promise that meant so much. And I thought
perhaps you might look on it as, as an honour.”

 

“And did your young man send any message to me?”

 

“He only sent you this,” she said, fingering a corner of the
manuscript.

 

“Or expect some message from me?”

 

“He didn’t say so.”

 

The monomania, the persistent impertinence of young would-be
authors did not become less, Bertram found, when they joined the
Forces. He found it hard to believe that at any age
he
had been so
well able to look after himself. Generosity, born of the first pure
flush of joy in his reputation, had years ago ravaged too much of
his time: it became necessary for him to make a stand; and, behind
the guard of a secretary, he had kept to it. Mr. Bertram now read
beginners’ manuscripts under no circumstances whatever. Miss
Moira owed her victory (without even knowing it was a victory) to
Seale, to its ambience, to her share in that, to his unguarded lover
like happiness in the place and susceptibility to its littlest events.
Bertram took the story up to this room that night.
³
The bedside
lamp cast a half moon on to the difficult writing; a sea wind, which
had sprung up at dusk, rattled his window and made crepitations
around the room.

 

Next morning he started uphill to Windy Bend. The wind had
not dropped: the October sun blazed. He saw everything – the
dishevelled petals of the michaelmas daisies, the leaves and the veins
in the leaves of the red Japanese plum boughs that together swirled
in the gardens, the patterns on curtains blowing out of the windows

 

– as though he were wearing too strong spectacles. In the same way
the sea, when he looked behind him, had broken up into white
horses. He smelled pungent rot from the gardens and smelled the
saturating and singing wind – beneath whose accompaniment he
could hear everything: a sewing machine at work in one of the
houses, a bluebottle on the inside of a pane. All this sensation was
forced on his unwillingness like a draft. Before the ascent of the
Windy Bend steps he stopped to regain his breath, to control his
nervosity. At the top of the steps Miss Moira came to meet him,
untying the housework handkerchief from her hair. She went in
ahead of him to the living room, inconsiderable annexe of a vast
bow window. She looked at him this morning as though there
were something new, untoward, between them: their relation had
changed.

 

“Well, I have brought you your story back.”

 

“So soon? – What a strong, clean envelope: one of yours?” They
sat down at opposite ends of the window seat: she plunged into the
pocket of her overall what might have been betraying hands. “You’ve
read it?”

 

“And you want to know if I thought it ‘good’?”

 

She glanced at him, boxed and framed in the glare of the
window: the villa faced, at its own level, nothing but the sky. “Not
when you’re tired,” she said. “Not today.”

 

Bertram straightened himself. “There may be a hundred uses of
‘good’: with me, there’s only one that can pass. I would like to say,
because you would like to hear, that I found something,
here
, to take
away my breath. That didn’t happen. The effect on me was – how
shall I put it? – exasperation, strain, as though I were assisting at
⁴
a struggle, against my will. I felt the struggle need not have taken
place – all that passion heaving against, under, that tortuous,
knotted style. What is the matter with him, your young man? Let
him relax, let him breathe, let him love a little – I believe all writing
to be the overflow of a delight, even though it be a delight in pain.
Why all this urgency? Let him take his time.” He glanced at her, as
it seemed, uncomprehending face. “If I cannot put this to you, how
can you put it to him?”

 

“I can’t. He’s dead now. He was killed.”

 

He said in a harsh voice. “You should have told me.”

 

“But does that make any difference to his story?”

 

“You knew how much, when you did not tell me. You let me
be reproached by my own words.” He took back the envelope,
weighing it in his hand. “If I had known that this was the end, all – !
You left me to judge this as a beginning. And I have been racked by
asking the beginning of what?”

 

“You had been going to say, probably, that he would have
improved with experience?”

 

“Experience!” cried out Bertram. “How am I to judge between his
and mine! I was appalled by his misuse of experience – crushed in
on itself, over-packed, bruised. Yes, over-packed. He was obsessed
with trying to pack life – yes, the whole of life, and his whole
bursting sense of it – into those dozen miserable pages. What a
stupid hope! Art is not a trunk to be crammed till it will not shut.
Art cannot contain all life. To become a writer – and I speak as a
writer – one must discover just how much art
will
hold. Your young
man has not lived to do that.”

 

Miss Moira saw not Bertram but the young man’s face. She said,
“Might he have been disappointed?”

 

“
I
survived disappointment. The greater artists only put greater
faces on disappointment. What else, what else is it that gnaws and
grows inside each new victory of the accomplishment?” He rounded
on her: he frowned; he stared out at the skyline behind her head; he
said sharply, “You say he admired me?”

 

“He only said, ‘Be sure to give him my story.’ He only said, ‘Did
you know him when he was young?’ ”
I Died of Love
M
iss Mettishaw always used to tell us how she used
to have an establishment of her own. She had a toneless voice she
could somehow pitch above the stutter of the sewing-machine; and
you had to pitch your hearing to go to meet it. Only pins in her
mouth stopped her talking quite. She had to talk to anyone in the
room; we only knew she did not talk to the room because as we
opened the door she would newly open her mouth.
¹
She was a
dutiful sewing-woman, never idle; her eye would wander over the
work in progress even when she was stopping to drink tea: holding
the cup in her right hand, absently, inexpertly (as though she denied
the proper use of her fingers to anything but their craft) she would
with her left hand caress or test gathers, draw up and pull out a
tacking thread, or flatten inches of tuck or hem with her thumbnail.
But as she was just to us she must be just to herself, and what she
owed to herself was to tell us. This duty fatigued her more than
anything else: we could see her flag under it – as she did not flag
under the cutting, stitching and fitting that was her duty to us.

She came in to work for us by the day: in spring and autumn, the
poetical seasons when clothes are being conceived, we required her
on end for about a month. Also she would come at odd times if we
were invited to an important party or had to go into mourning. She
came in to make a trousseau, but made no comment on the excite
ment to be felt all over our house, in which love had arrived for the
first time. She did not give a single thought to the fates she sent us
out to meet in the clothes she made – she would cast one last
glance, like a thread snapping, at her dresses walking away from her
on us. Girls are used to interest in their fates; it took us some time
to understand that her humanity had gone to the bottom with her
establishment, when that foundered. Her humanity had been a
whole cargo lost.