The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (11 page)

Returning, finally, toward the door, he looked at the last frame, which had the title “Begging.” A crippled, bandaged creature crouched, huddled, in the middle of the frame; its head, composed of wire netting, seemed to be swathed in wrappings and gave the impression of blind, listening urgency. One of its limbs, a bent pipe wrapped in tarred rag, extended, pleadingly, right out of the frame, and was flattened at the extremity into the approximate form of a hand; to this hand a small white square of paper in the shape of a visiting card had been fastened by staples.

Moving closer, to discover whether the tiny characters on the card were real letters, real words, he received a shock. Neatly printed across the white, in black India ink, he read his own name: JOHN MIDDLEMASS, M.D.

He gasped and then laughed. Turning to the girl at the desk, in an attempt to cover the extraordinary agitation he felt at this strange, this outrageous portent, he said:

“What an amazing thing! The name—this name here, in the picture—on the card—it’s
my
name, John Middlemass!—Only I’m not a doctor,” he added.

“Is that so?” The girl—thin, dark, long-haired, wan—looked at him with a wholly uninterested, lackluster indifference which immediately seemed to reduce the coincidence to minimal proportions. After all, her look suggested,
somebody
in the whole of New York has to have that name—what’s so peculiar about
your
having it? Why are you making such a to do? “Perhaps the artist got it out of the phone book,” she suggested, yawning. “But you’re not a doctor, you say?” she added kindly, as if to humor him.

“No, no, I’m a teacher—” Feeling foolish, as if he had made a fuss about nothing at all, he left the gallery and went to buy his sandwich. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Then he walked up Madison Avenue, feeling the sun warm on his shoulder blades, and turned left, toward the park. He could hear sparrows chirping and one shrill bird cry, far in the distance, that took him back in memory to a spring holiday on Cape Cod.

The day was so warm that all the park benches were filled. Finally, unable to find a seat on one, he settled on a slope of warm rock near the pond, looking south toward the Plaza Hotel. The water in the pond was low, and patches of reeds stood out on small mud islands; as he ate his sandwich, he noticed how neatly gulls landed on the surface of the water to swim and drink and preen themselves and how clumsily pigeons, unable to land on the water, thumped down on an island of rock and then waddled to the edge in order to drink. Planes droned overhead, and helicopters stuttered; an ambulance siren wailed and gibbered not far off on its way across town.

Presently Middlemass began to be aware of the couple who sat on the end of the bench nearest him, a girl and a boy, intent on their conversation with each other. It was not so much the human pair he noticed as their animals. The boy had a dog, which he allowed to roam loose: a kind of black mongrel with traces of retriever. A loose-jointed, floppy, active dog that went on forays, dashing off splashily round the verge of the pond, and returned every now and then, damp, smiling, panting, to lavish affection on its master.

But the girl had a cat; making the second cat I’ve seen today, thought Middlemass with a sudden shiver, remembering his earlier horrible experience. What a strange day it had been! But that was how life piled up in the city, one event splashing on top of another like lava from a volcanic eruption, hardly time to assimilate an experience before the next one came tumbling about you.

This cat, though, the cat in the park, was a very different creature from that poor, dead, expensive, elegant piece of fur that had no doubt long since been shoveled off the sidewalk and into some garbage can. This cat in the park was half white, half ginger in color. It was an old cat; its fur was patchy, molting, dusty, its ears were tattered, its nose was scarred, its tail looked moth-eaten. The girl had it on a leash, but she was paying no attention to it, and while she talked to her boyfriend the cat sulked, squatting behind the bench on which the pair sat, with its head thrust forward, as if it found the whole park, the dusty ground, the beaten-up grass, the muddy pond, the dingy sparrows, hopelessly distasteful, as if it were fed up with the world and its own ancient disheveled body.

Every now and then the black dog, returning from one of its excursions, would suddenly, with a kind of delighted surprise, rediscover the sulky cat and would then roll it over and over, tousling and biting it, rubbing its fur in the dust. The cat retaliated with what seemed a kind of resigned rage, spitting and kicking, tail bushed out, ears flattened.

“
Don’t
do that, Buster,” the boy would call absently, and the girl would say, “Oh, it’s all right, never mind, Ginger quite enjoys it really,” a statement which Middlemass, watching, considered to be quite patently untrue; it seemed to him that the cat disliked the dog’s teasing roughness to the whole of its capacity for feeling.

Presently the couple rose to walk away. The dog instantly darted off ahead, delighted to be on the move again; but the cat, as if obstinately determined not to cooperate in any way during this disagreeable outing, now refused to budge. Before, it had sat sulkily ignoring its surroundings; now it wished to delay and sniff round the legs of the bench. The girl, impatient to be gone, jerked crossly at its lead, and, when it still would not follow, dragged it up bodily by the leash so that it hung in its collar, choking and scowling.

“
Don’t
do that to the cat,” Middlemass wanted to call out. “Pick it up properly!” But rage choked him, quite as much as its collar was choking the cat. When the girl put it down it did slowly begin to follow, trotting a few steps, then stopping to sniff things at the side of the path; its pace was not nearly fast enough to satisfy its mistress, who several times either dragged it along bodily, sliding on its feet, or again hoisted it up on the end of the leash. Middlemass felt an intense relief when the couple had passed out of view. He hated that girl; he really loathed her—But the cat was an old one, he told himself; it must have become used to such treatment years ago—No, it was no use; how
could
the horrible girl be so insensitive to the feelings of the creature she lived with?

His hands were clenched so tightly that the knuckles, when he finally relaxed them, felt swollen and quite painful. He looked down at his hands, thinking ruefully, not so elastic as they used to be. I am growing old. I should have interfered. Why didn’t I? Because if I had, the girl would only have thought that I was a meddlesome old busybody. “Mind your own business, Mister,” she would have said. “This cat belongs to me and I can do what I like with it.”

Interfering gets you nowhere. And where does noninterfering get you?

The day had clouded and cooled. He walked over to Fifth Avenue to catch a bus home, thinking about the various disagreeable tasks that awaited him: tax forms to be filled out, bills to be paid, household articles to be repaired, business letters to be written. However inconspicuously we endeavor to conduct our lives, creeping along, keeping our heads well down out of the line of fire, still in the end we fall prey to circumstances, he thought, and I suppose the final knockout is not one single blow, so much as a whole series of minor assaults, to which, in the end, we wearily succumb.

I’d just as soon be nibbled to death by ducks, he remembered somebody saying; where in the world could that extraordinary phrase have come from?

His bus drew to a stop, and he climbed on to it and walked along the aisle, hoping for a seat in the back row, so that he need not travel sitting sideways, which he disliked. My life, he thought, is assembled out of an endless procession of unimportant choices.

The back row was all occupied, so he took the last of the side seats, in hopes that presently somebody might get off, and then he could switch seats. The bus had a long way to go, all down Fifth Avenue. As it slowly jerked and clanked through the heavy afternoon traffic, his mind went back to Mrs. Schaber; poor woman, she would be at home now, examining her wrecked possessions, listening to the callous comments of the police, who,s as Middlemass knew from experience, never offered the slightest hope of getting back any of the lost property. They were not interested in that; the only thing that concerned them at all was the possibility of identifying the thieves.

“It’s like losing a whole
world
,” she had moaned.

But at least, thought Middlemass, she had a world to lose.

At Twenty-eighth Street he suddenly thought of the cat—the first cat. It must have happened just about here. You’d never guess it now. People were darting to and fro on the pavement at that point, with their usual manic speed. The patch of blood would have been sanded over and swept away. So we come; so we go. What had made him think of the cat? Before that his mind had been on Mrs. Schaber and her loss.

Then he heard the sound again: a faint, querulous grumbling mew; the sigh of meow let out by a cat who is shut up, bored, exasperated, wishing to remind its owner of the tedium of its plight: a kvetch in cat language.

For a moment Middlemass wondered if perhaps he might be going mad; haunted by the ghost of a cat; of two cats. But then, turning his head slightly, he saw the girl close beside him on his right, sitting at the window end of the row of back seats, had a covered basket on her lap. And as the quiet, complaining conversational mew came again, she bent her head close over the basket, opened the lid a crack, and murmured to the occupant: “Hush. Hush! We’ll be home very soon.”

Looking up she met the eyes of Middlemass. He smiled at her—she was a small, thin, dark girl, not unlike the one at the desk in the gallery. And, like the girl in the gallery, she did not return his smile, just gave him a steady, thoughtful look, as if it would take much more than a smile to make her trust him, or allow him to impinge on any of her concerns.

Rebuffed, he turned his head away and rose to his feet; the bus had reached his stop, anyway.

Returned home, he sat down at his desk, impatiently turning his back on the untidiness which, hurrying out into the sunny morning, he had promised himself that he would later set to rights.

He pulled an official college report form toward him, and, in the blank for Instructor’s Name, printed
mrs. marcia schraber
. In the blank for Subject, he wrote
listening
. In the blank for Observer, he wrote his own name, Prof. John Middlemass, and the date. Then, in the section headed “
Comments
” he began to write:

“Mrs. Schraber has something very important to teach her students, but I am not sure what it is. . . .”

There he stopped, holding the pen, staring at the blank form and his own name printed across the Observer space, while his mind’s eye went back to fix, again, on that melancholy, huddled, crippled figure, gagged, blindfold, beseeching, mutely extending his own name out of the wooden frame.

Lob’s Girl

Some people choose their dogs, and some dogs choose their people. The Pengelly family had no say in the choosing of Lob; he came to them in the second way, and very decisively.

It began on the beach, the summer when Sandy was five, Don, her older brother, twelve, and the twins were three. Sandy was really Alexandra, because her grandmother had a beautiful picture of a queen in a diamond tiara and high collar of pearls. It hung by Granny Pearce’s kitchen sink and was as familiar as the doormat. When Sandy was born everyone agreed that she was the living spit of the picture, and so she was called Alexandra and Sandy for short.

On this summer day she was lying peacefully reading a comic and not keeping an eye on the twins, who didn’t need it because they were occupied in seeing which of them could wrap the most seaweed around the other one’s legs. Father—
Bert Pengelley
—and Don were up on the Hard painting the bottom boards of the boat in which Father went fishing for pilchards. And Mother—Jean Pengelly—was getting ahead with making the Christmas puddings because she never felt easy in her mind if they weren’t made and safely put away by the end of August. As usual, each member of the family was happily getting on with his or her own affairs. Little did they guess how soon this state of affairs would be changed by the large new member who was going to erupt into their midst.

Sandy rolled onto her back to make sure that the twins were not climbing on slippery rocks or getting cut off by the tide. At the same moment a large body struck her forcibly in the midriff and she was covered by flying sand. Instinctively she shut her eyes and felt the sand being wiped off her face by something that seemed like a warm, rough, damp flannel. Its owner was a large and bouncy young Alsatian, or German shepherd, with topaz eyes, black-tipped prick ears, a thick, soft coat, and a bushy black-tipped tail.

“
Lob!
” shouted a man further up the beach. “
Lob, come here!
”

But Lob, as if trying to atone for the surprise he had given her, went on licking the sand off Sandy’s face, wagging his tail so hard all the while that he kept knocking up more clouds of sand. His owner, a gray-haired man with a limp, walked over as quickly as he could and seized him by the collar.

“I hope he didn’t give you a fright?” the man said to Sandy. “He meant it in play—he’s only young.”

“Oh, no, I think he’s
beautiful
,” said Sandy truly. She picked up a bit of driftwood and threw it. Lob, whisking easily out of his master’s grip, was after it like a sand-colored bullet. He came back with the stick, beaming, and gave it to Sandy. At the same time he gave himself, though no one else was aware of this at the time. But with Sandy, too, it was love at first sight, and when, after a lot more stick-throwing, she and the twins joined Father and Don to go home for tea, they cast many a backward glance at Lob being led firmly away by his master.

“I wish we could play with him every day,”
Tess sighed.

“Why can’
t we?
” said Tim.

Sandy explained, “Because Mr. Dodsworth, who owns him, is from Liverpool, and he is only staying at the Fisherman’
s Arms till Saturday.
”

“Is Liverpool a long way off?”

“Right at the other end of England from Cornwall, I’
m afraid.
”

It was a Cornish fishing village where the Pengelly family lived, with rocks and cliffs and a strip of beach and a little round harbor, and palm trees growing in the gardens of the little whitewashed stone houses. The village was approached by a narrow, steep, twisting hill-road, and guarded by a notice that said
low gear for 1 ½ miles, dangerous to cyclists.

The Pengelly children went home to scones with Cornish cream and jam, thinking they had seen the last of Lob. But they were much mistaken. The whole family was playing cards by the fire in the front room after supper when there was a loud thump and a crash of china in the kitchen.

“My Christmas puddings!” exclaimed Jean, and ran out.

“Did you put TNT in them, then?” her husband said.

But it was Lob, who, finding the front door shut, had gone around to the back and bounced in through the open kitchen window, where the puddings were cooling on the sill. Luckily only the smallest was knocked down and broken.

Lob stood on his hind legs and plastered Sandy’s face with licks. Then he did the same for the twins, who shrieked with joy.

“Where does this friend of yours come from?” inquired Mr. Pengelly.

“He’s staying at the Fisherman’s Arms—I mean the owner is.”

“Then he must go back there. Find a bit of string, Sandy, to tie to his collar.”

“I wonder how he found his way here,” Mrs. Pengelly said, when the reluctant Lob had been led whining away and Sandy had explained about their afternoon’s game on the beach. “Fisherman’s Arms is right round the other side of the harbor.”

“Lob’s owner scolded him and thanked Mr. Pengelly for bringing him back. Jean Pengelly warned the children that they had better not encourage Lob any more if they met him on the beach, or it would only lead to more trouble. So they dutifully took no notice of him the next day until he spoiled their good resolutions by dashing up to them with joyful barks, wagging his tail so hard that he winded Tess and knocked Tim’s legs from under him.

They had a happy day, playing on the sand.

The next day was Saturday. Sandy had found out that Mr. Dodsworth was to catch the half-past-nine train. She went out secretly, down to the station, nodded to Mr. Hoskins, the stationmaster, who wouldn’t dream of charging any local for a platform ticket, and climbed up on the footbridge that led over the tracks. She didn’t want to be seen, but she did want to see. She saw Mr. Dodsworth get on the train, accompanied by an unhappy-looking Lob with drooping ears and tail. Then she saw the train slide away out of sight around the next headland, with a melancholy wail that sounded like Lob’
s last good-bye.

Sandy wished she hadn’t had the idea of coming to the station. She walked home miserably, with her shoulders hunched and her hands in her pockets. For the rest of the day she was so cross and unlike herself that Tess and Tim were quite surprised, and her mother gave her a dose of senna.

A week passed. Then, one evening, Mrs. Pengelly and the younger children were in the front room playing snakes and ladders. Mr. Pengelly and Don had gone fishing on the evening tide. If your father is a fisherman, he will never be home at the same time from one week to the next.

Suddenly, history repeating itself, there was a crash from the kitchen. Jean Pengelly leaped up, crying, “My blackberry jelly!” She and the children had spent the morning picking and the afternoon boiling fruit.

But Sandy was ahead of her mother. With flushed cheeks and eyes like stars she had darted into the kitchen, where she and Lob were hugging one another in a frenzy of joy. About a yard of his tongue was out, and he was licking every part of her that he could reach.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Jean. “How in the world did
he
get here?
”

“He must have walked,” said Sandy. “Look at his feet.”

They were worn, dusty, and tarry. One had a cut on the pad.

“They ought to be bathed,” said Jean Pengelly. “Sandy, run a bowl of warm water while I get the disinfectant.”

“What’ll we do about him, Mother?” said Sandy anxiously.

Mrs. Pengelly looked at her daughter’s pleading eyes and sighed.

“He must go back to his owner, of course,” she said, making her voice firm. “Your dad can get the address from the Fisherman’s tomorrow, and phone him or send a telegram. In the meantime he’d better have a long drink and a good meal.”

Lob was very grateful for the drink and the meal, and made no objection to having his feet washed. Then he flopped down on the hearthrug and slept in front of the fire they had lit because it was a cold, wet evening, with his head on Sandy’s feet. He was a very tired dog. He had walked all he way from Liverpool to Cornwall, which is more than four hundred miles.

The next day Mr. Pengelly phoned Lob’s owner, and the following morning Mr. Dodsworth arrived off the night train, decidedly put out, to take his pet home. That parting was worse than the first. Lob whined, Don walked out of the house, the twins burst out crying, and Sandy crept up to her bedroom afterward and lay with her face pressed into the quilt, feeling as if she were bruised all over.

Jean Pengelly took them all into Plymouth to see the circus on the next day and the twins cheered up a little, but even the hour’s ride in the train each way and the Liberty horses and performing seals could not cure Sandy’s sore heart.

She need not have bothered, though. In ten days’ time Lob was back—limping, this time, with a torn ear and a patch missing out of his furry coat, as if he had met and tangled with an enemy or two in the course of his four-hundred-mile walk.

Bert Pengelly rang up Liverpool again. Mr. Dodsworth, when he answered, sounded weary. He said, “That dog has already cost me two days that I can’t spare away from my work—plus endless time in police stations and drafting newspaper advertisements. I’m too old for these ups and downs. I think we’d better face the fact, Mr. Pengelly, that it’s your family he wants to stay with—that is, if you’d be willing to have him.”

Bert Pengelly gulped. He was not a rich man, and Lob was a pedigree dog. He said cautiously, “How much would you be asking for him?”

“Good heavens, man, I’m not suggesting I’d sell him to you. You must have him as a gift. Think of the train fares I’ll be saving. You’ll be doing me a good turn.”

“Is he a big eater?” Bert asked doubtfully.

By this time the children, breathless in the background listening to one side of this conversation, had realized what was in the wind and were dancing up and own with their hands clasped beseechingly.

“Oh, not for his size,” Lob’s owner assured Bert. “Two or three pounds of meat a day and some vegetables and gravy and biscuits—he does very well on that.”

Alexandra
’s father looked over the telephone at his daughter’s swimming eyes and trembling lips. He reached a decision. “Well, then, Mr. Dodsworth,” he said briskly, “we’ll accept your offer and thank you very much. The children will be overjoyed and you can be sure Lob has come to a good home. They’ll look after him and see he gets enough exercise. But I can tell you,” he ended firmly,” if he wants to settle in with us he’ll have to learn to eat a lot of fish.”

So that was how Lob came to live with the Pengelly family. Everybody loved him and he loved them all. But there was never any question who came first with him. He was Sandy’s dog. He slept by her bed and followed her everywhere he was allowed.

Nine years went by, and each summer Mr. Dodsworth came back to stay at the Fisherman’s Arms and call on his erstwhile dog. Lob always met him with recognition and dignified pleasure, accompanied him for a walk or two—but showed no signs of wishing to return to Liverpool. His place, he intimated, was definitely with the Pengellys.

In the course of nine years Lob changed less than Sandy. As she went into her teens he became a little slower, a little stiffer, there was a touch of gray on his nose, but he was still a handsome dog. He and Sandy still loved one another devotedly.

One evening in October all the summer visitors had left, and the little fishing town looked empty and secretive. It was a wet, windy dusk. When the children came home from school—even the twins were at high school now, and Don was a full-fledged fisherman—Jean Pengelly said, “Sandy, your Aunt Rebecca says she’s lonesome because Uncle Will Hoskins has gone out trawling, and she wants one of you to go and spend the evening with her. You go, dear; you can take your homework with you.”

Sandy looked far from enthusiastic.

“Can I take Lob with me?”

“You know Aunt Becky doesn’t really like dogs—Oh, very well.”
Mrs. Pengelly sighed.
“I suppose she’ll have to put up with him as well as you.”

Reluctantly Sandy tidied herself, took her schoolbag, put on the damp raincoat she had just taken off, fastened Lob’s lead to his collar, and set off to walk through the dusk to Aunt Becky’s cottage, which was five minutes’ climb up the steep hill.

The wind was howling through the shroud of boats drawn up on the Hard.

“Put some cheerful music on, do,” said Jean Pengelly to the nearest twin. “Anything to drown that wretched sound while I make your dad’s supper.” So Don, who had just come in, put on some rock music, loud. Which was why the Pengellys did not hear the truck hurtle down the hill and crash against the post office wall a few minutes later.

Dr. Travers was driving through Cornwall with his wife, taking a late holiday before patients began coming down with winter colds and flu. He saw the sign that said
steep hill. low gear for 1 ½ miles.
Dutifully he changed into second gear.

“We must be nearly there,” said his wife, looking out of her window. “I noticed a sign on the coast road that said the Fisherman’s Arms was two miles. What a narrow, dangerous hill! But the cottages are very pretty. Oh, Frank, stop,
stop!
There’s a child, I’m sure it’s a child—by the wall over there!”

Dr. Travers jammed on his brakes and brought the car to a stop. A little stream ran down by the road in a shallow stone culvert, and half in the water lay something that looked, in the dusk, like a pile of clothes—or was it the body of a child? Mrs. Travers was out of the car in a flash, but her husband was quicker.

“Don’t touch her, Emily!” he said sharply. “She’s been hit. Can’t be more than a few minutes. Remember that truck that overtook us half a mile back, speeding like the devil? Here, quick, go into that cottage and phone for an ambulance. The girl’s in a bad way. I’ll stay here and do what I can to stop the bleeding. Don’t waste a minute.”

Doctors are expert at stopping dangerous bleeding, for they know the right places to press. This Dr. Travers was able to do, but he didn’t dare do more; the girl was lying in a queerly crumpled heap, and he guessed she had a number of bones broken and that it would be highly dangerous to move her. He watched her with great concentration, wondering where the truck had got to and what other damage it had done.

Mrs. Travers was very quick. She had seen plenty of accident cases and knew the importance of speed. The first cottage she tried had a phone; in four minutes she was back, and in six an ambulance was wailing down the hill.

Its attendant lifted the child onto a stretcher as carefully as if she were made of fine thistledown. The ambulance sped off to Plymouth—for the local cottage hospital did not take serious accident cases—and Dr. Travers went down to the police station to report what he had done.