The Black Boxer Tales Page 4

  One warm, blue afternoon in July we took two baskets and walked over a stretch of meadowland and through a wood to a solitary house beyond, where we were to buy cherries for her mother. It was not until we emerged from the wood into the sunshine that we saw the house we had gone to visit, resting among its bright-coloured flowers and beehives like an aged woman on a stick, sleepy and bowed, with the shadows of a grove of cherry trees falling over its yellow walls and its dark red threshold.

  The whole world was hot and still. A few frightened blackbirds rose screeching from the cherry trees, red with fruit but unnetted, as Christina ran into the garden, I following slowly with the white baskets, hanging backward a little, wondering who we were going to see.

  Christina stood for one moment at the doorway. She was dressed all in pale, shining green, and there was something so fresh and delicate about her that I could not take my eyes away from her. I saw her lean forward and watched with envy a little white kitten come and caress her feet with its nose.

  She spoke to someone, and then disappeared, while I waited in the drowsy garden, thinking of her.

  Presently she reappeared and called to me:

  ‘Come in! Don’t be shy!’

  And simultaneously an unknown masculine voice, old and croaking, repeated:

  ‘Yes, come in, young man, come in!’

  I entered the house through the low doorway and passed into a tiny room beyond.

  There, in one corner, his head resting on a window-ledge set out prettily with pink and white geraniums and a solitary rich blue gloxinia, an old man was sitting. He was dressed simply in brown corduroy trousers and a faded blue shirt, without a jacket. Round his neck was tied a crimson neckerchief. He seemed disabled and did not get up, but contemplated me dreamily for some moments, never moving his massive, simple features. At last he nodded, smiled, held out his hand, and as I shook it, called out in a heavy, guttural voice:

  ‘Mary Ann! Mary Ann! Fanny’s girl come for her cherries!’

  There was a brief silence, during which I gazed at Christina again.

  But suddenly through a door behind her, I saw a woman appear. She came noiselessly, thin, frail, yellow-skinned, dressed all in black except for a silver brooch at her throat. Her pale melancholy eyes could hardly raise themselves to look at me, and they fell almost instantaneously again to the little lace-bobbin, on which she seemed to be threading beads of turquoise and amber with a silver wire quivering in her long pale fingers.

  After a moment she saw Christina.

  ‘Cherries!’ she broke out, a little fearfully. ‘You’ve come for the cherries? But not this afternoon? You don’t mean to take them away?’

  Our coming had excited her and her voice began to waver:

  ‘We’ve none gathered. Won’t you leave your basket and come again?’ she said.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ we suggested.

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday? Yes, tomorrow.’ Sitting down, she gave me a look of relief and tried to go on threading the blue and amber beads again.

  As if something were on her mind, however, her fingers grew idle and she kept looking at each of us in turn, and I knew she was aching to speak. At last she managed to whisper:

  ‘It would have been different if Elijah had been here. You see, you should have had them then. You see, Saturday afternoon he’d have been free, and up the trees before you could speak.’

  I nodded. Immediately, as if in response to this gesture, she ran into the other room. Before she returned the other figure among the geraniums strained forward and pulled at my sleeve. There was suddenly an air of excitement. In the succeeding moments the old man began relating, rapidly and fitfully, some story which the woman came and interrupted with her small, quavering voice and rendered incoherent. I could only gather that they were talking about their son.

  At last the woman brought out a photograph, dusting it zealously with her long sleeve. He had been a shoe-smith, and the portrait depicted him standing by the side of a beautiful black mare. Both man and horse were enormous, handsome creatures. The woman dropped her bobbin in the excitement of pointing out that the strong white arms of the man were as thick as the forelegs of the beast. She began to heap on me documents, certificates, yellow cuttings from newspapers, red and crimson ribbons, medals, and a silver cup, all relating to him.

  ‘They couldn’t touch him. He was a masterpiece. But you see that, don’t you? They used to carry him home after the championship was over. He always won. No one couldn’t touch him.’

  The old man, half laughing, half crying, put into my hands another photograph in a heavy gilded frame.

  ‘There he is again. See him? That’s him. Cocking there in the front row with all the cavalry officers. He used to shoe all their horses. They liked him that much they treated him just like one of themselves.’

  And they continued. After a little time, however, I felt their tone change, and presently they spoke of his death. They spoke heavily, with regret, but also as if challenging me to deny that for him death had been something noble and glorious.

  He had been kicked one night by a ferocious horse at the camp, and had died without seeing them again.

  As they were talking, I became conscious, suddenly, of a shadow over the doorway, and looking up, noticed a figure there. With her face half turned to us, her sturdy arms holding before her a basket of mellow gooseberries, stood a dark-haired girl of twenty-five or six, watching and listening. The grave dreaminess of her face, her unbroken silence, her apathetic pose, arrested me by their air of mystery. The resignation of her small white face, never stirring, never changing its expression of dumb meekness, troubled me. So she stood, for a long time a mere object, like the shadow she cast in the doorway, until she silently vanished without having uttered a word.

  Soon after she had disappeared, we rose and departed too. Their last earnest, apologetic words were called after us as we crossed the garden:

  ‘If he’d been here you could have had them, like a shot, you see, while you waited. But you come tomorrow. They’ll be ready then!’

  We entered the wood, traversing the green, half-sunlit riding in silence. The heaviness of the summer air under the oak trees, and the pure and delicate presence of the girl at my side, made me forget the house we had left behind. The desire to express my admiration and love for her drove away all others.

  But presently, speaking in an incredulous tone, she remarked:

  ‘What a fool that son was. A drunkard—drunk night after night. The cavalry officers ruined him. But they’ll hear nothing against him. They still believe he was kicked to death by a horse, but every-one knows he drove home drunk and was pitched out and broke his neck.’

  And as we talked about him, and of the blind, pitiful faith of the parents, the opportunity to express what I felt for her slipped past again.

  We returned to the house on the following afternoon. Again the July sunshine was warm and tranquil: again there lingered the same sense of peacefulness, and the house looked as asleep behind its flowers and cherry trees; once more the old man, his head among the geraniums, sat hunched and staring, and his wife answered his call in the same silent, timid way.

  The cherries were ready. Christina put the money into the woman’s wrinkled yellow hand. While we were waiting for her to return with the change, the man bent forward and seized my sleeve.

  ‘We forgot to show you this,’ he said. He held out a riding-whip. A smile of pleasure and pride came over his face. The whip-lash was twisted about the handle, which was handsomely bound and mounted with silver, and the leather was fresh and dry, and the silver brightly polished. The whip had never been used. I took it from him, and simultaneously he broke out, in the same half-proud half-weeping voice as before:

  ‘The officers of the cavalry made him a present of it on his birthday. You see, they treated him like one of themselves.’

  The woman returned. And again they poured out for us the story of their son. They repeated it like a catechism, droning, unalte
red, with the same gestures, the same photographs, the same ribbons and medals, until it became unendurable to hear this reiteration of sadness and glory.

  And then, as I still held the whip, I became conscious once again that the dark-haired girl had appeared in the doorway.

  I glanced up at her. She was watching me. The expression on her face was gloomy and intense. Its grave dreaminess had gone, her body had lost its apathy, and I saw that her hands were clenched against her black dress. They were clenched rigidly, with an intensity of angry bitterness which gradually passed over her whole frame, until it possessed her lips and cheeks and rushed into her dark eyes, which she swung rapidly backwards and forwards from my own to the whip, and from the whip to the garrulous lips of the woman and her husband. Once or twice she started. And then gradually the anger consumed her utterly, until she looked as though each word and each memory maddened and sickened her. At last there swept over her face a spasm of impatient fury, as if she thought the repetition of each word maudlin and hollow, as if she longed to snatch the whip from my hands and lash out for ever their blind, foolish faith in him and beat into them at last the truth of his degradation and death.

  I gave back the whip into the old man’s hands, and she could see it no longer, and when I looked up again her anger was already dying, her hands hung loose against her dress, and gradually, as her anger had done, a strange tranquillity possessed her, and after giving me one indefinable look of stoicism mingled with sadness, as if she were struggling against tears, she slipped away.

  Presently I picked up the two baskets of dark cherries, and we said farewell and walked out of the house, across the garden, and so into the wood again.

  We were silent. The wood, soundless also, full of a fragrance of trees and of hidden blossoms, stood over us like something watchful, infinite, everlasting.

  All at once, attracted by some stir in the oak trees, Christina stopped, tilted back her head and gazed upward.

  And I remember how I suddenly set down the cherries in the grass, hastily seized her hands and began to speak to her urgently and tenderly, overcome by a strange fear lest it should be too late.

  Charlotte Esmond

  • I •

  Esmond’s, the cooked-meat shop, stood in a narrow street exactly opposite the back doors of an old variety theatre. In contrast to the drab walls pasted over with violent pictures of acrobats flying into the arms of operatic ladies, and of jugglers tossing green and yellow bottles over the heads of ravishing pink dancers, and still more in contrast to the performers themselves, who arrived with a rather cosmopolitan and dowdy air along with their faded properties on Sundays and Thursdays, Esmond’s was prim, white and respectable.

  The first performance at the theatre ended at half-past eight every evening. A few minutes before this a little woman would come into Esmond’s from the room behind and carefully light the extra gas-lamp hanging over the white marble counter. She usually had on a neat white pinafore painted with little crimson rose-like buds and flowers. She was quick, dark-eyed and turning grey. There was an air of nervousness and prudence about the way in which she always surveyed for a moment the array of sausages, pies, smoked hams, polonies, blood-puddings and joints of stuffed pork displayed in the window. From her pensive and melancholy eyes she looked like a woman to whom suffering came readily, but always as something to be repressed and borne in silence. Long civility and servitude had left her face still delicate and gentle; there was a certain ladylike manner about her that made her lips appear for ever half-smiling. After this one glance at her meats and pies and another into the street, she would dart away. A moment or two later a red-and-gold commissionaire would appear and fling back the doors of the theatre, and Charlotte Esmond would return carrying a hot grid of frizzling sausages, filling the shop with their savoury odour just in time to meet the first customers trooping in from the theatre.

  Each night, for many years, as soon as the variety performance was over, the poor of the district had besieged Esmond’s for hot sausages. Struggling, talking, coughing, rubbing their hands, they pressed against the counter and exchanged remarks with Mrs. Esmond as she served them. And Mrs. Esmond, although she resented their poverty, and dreamed of a shop in a residential quarter with appropriate delicacies in her window, had known them for so long that their lives seemed subtly entwined with her own.

  As she served them the smile on her face never lessened or went away. Soon, as the opportunity arose, she asked a question.

  ‘Well, and what was it like at the theatre to-night?’ she would say.

  Her voice was soft and refined, but it lacked familiarity, and the remark was only a habit of years.

  ‘Oh! it was passable,’ they would say. ‘The conjuror was the best. Very smart. But the singing—well, I’ve heard some singing; a cat could sing better. But the conjuror was tip-top.’

  She would nod in silence. Something in her honest, religious soul mistrusted conjurors.

  ‘Wasn’t there a juggler?’ she would say.

  Jugglers appealed to her. One could see all they were doing, one knew that their art was pure and straightforward. Unlike conjurors, they had no deceptions.

  ‘No, there wasn’t a juggler.’

  ‘Oh!’ she would say.

  And then she would withdraw, like a snail to its shell, and wrap up sausages with courteous dexterity, and say no more.

  Secretly she was very fond of the theatre, though she had never been since her husband’s death. The theatre appealed to her by its tradition, by its interpretation of life, and again because of its rarefied atmosphere, its gaudy colours and romantic words. It seemed always a little finer and higher than life. In the same way she was fond of the church. But now she never went either to the theatre or to church. During the week she worked too hard and on Sundays she woke so tired out that she could hardly dress herself, and she was tired all day, too tired even to put on her best clothes and take a walk somewhere.

  Saturday was a long day. Besides sausages she cooked a few special things such as savoury faggots and salted beef, which were set steaming in the window, and her work began much earlier and went on much later. As the hot, spicy steam filled the shop and the crowd of customers thickened, her brow would become clammy and at last she would pause a moment, wipe the sweat away, and gaze over the staring faces of her customers and apologize:

  ‘Excuse me,’ she would say, ‘I shall just have to call Effie to come and help me.’

  And fluttering quickly to the back of the shop she would draw aside the curtain of slatted green cane over the doorway and call:

  ‘Effie! Effie! I shall be wanting you.’

  Sometimes there would be no answer; more often a voice would merely repeat in languid and resentful tones:

  ‘Wanting me? Shall you? What for?’

  That was all. Charlotte would return to the counter, recommend the steaming beef again, wrap up her black puddings, count out her sausages and answer remarks without ever letting the smile on her face relax or become dull. No Effie would appear however, and at last Charlotte would lay down her knife and call again:

  ‘Effie! Effie! Can’t you come?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s ’aving a bath,’ some wit would say.

  Charlotte would try to quell the laughter.

  ‘Please don’t laugh—it encourages her—she’ll never come if you laugh.’

  And she would try something between insistence and cajolery:

  ‘Effie dear, do try and come!’

  At last, after more entreaties, a white shape, rather characterless and expansive and languid, would move backwards and forwards in the dim light behind the screen; and presently, like a fat white cloud drifting slowly into view, Effie would appear.

  After a disdainful look or two at her mother and the customers, the girl would sidle to the counter and begin to serve. Her manner of serving was to jerk up her head with something between pride and hostility, as if mortally insulted, in the direction of the nearest customer, and th
en turn languidly away to cut beef or ham or spoon up hot faggots—neither the fixed hostility of her glance nor her patronizing silence ever broken. As she moved stiffly to and fro, she resembled some big, fair-haired doll made of pink-and-white china. There was something also about her large blue eyes that was hard and cold; all the hyper-sensitive superiority of her being was centred there. At times they seemed also to fill with shame, the horrid, demeaning shame with which she felt the work in that shop covered her. She hated it, she shrank from it, she was too good for it. And she would use her fingers daintily, like a lady, keeping the customers waiting and handing over the food at last as if it were contaminated.

  Charlotte Esmond was puzzled and unhappy about her daughter. As a child the girl had been plump and pretty, but as soon as her childhood was past she developed with alarming rapidity and became stout and strangely indolent. Her face was puffy and white; her bust was like a pillow. Pretty dresses and vivid colours did not suit her. She rarely walked out. People laughed at her. Hadn’t she even seen them laughing in the shop? And she hated them for it, protecting herself with a cold reserve which seemed to them only a sort of insolent pride.

  A little reasoning from Charlotte made her weep at once. The mother took the problem of the girl about with her, troubled continually. Sons found their way out into the world and were a blessing, she thought, even in absence. But she felt that Effie would never find her way.

  On the other hand, Effie herself was constantly reading and dreaming of her future, poring alternately over cheap novels and the works of Scott.

  The room behind the shop was large but dark. Its one window looked on a narrow yard, in which stood an old outhouse with broken windows. A frail rhododendron bush had tried for many years to flourish in a green tub set on an iron tank, but flowers had never come, and the plant seemed to make no fresh leaves and would have been better dead. But Effie still hoped for its blossoms, just as she hoped for romance as she reclined on the rickety American-leather sofa under the window and watched it.