Seven Tales and Alexander Read online

  What should we do then, like young leverets, but jump up together!

  ‘One at once, balmy!’

  What fools we were! Like a pair of Siamese twins we used to sit down together.

  ‘Now then!’

  We scuffled. Evidently I was born to be a creature of misfortune, for a dozen times out of thirteen I used to knock down Jonah’s umbrellas. God knows why, but Jonah used to repair umbrellas—and there they would lie like a heap of great dead bats—black umbrellas, green umbrellas, blue umbrellas, snuff umbrellas, cart umbrellas, silk umbrellas, ladies’ umbrellas as genteel as parasols and with heads like birds. And Jonah might have been the mother of them all, his pretended fury was so like a storm.

  ‘Look at what you’ve done, you sprats! Nice thing! Who’s going to pay for it? I’ll cut your tails off!’

  And he would seize one of his precious umbrellas and, brandishing it high and wide, belabour our backsides without mercy. Our running and feinting never saved us—we were cornered and pinched and cuffed unmercifully by that great black barber. It was painful; even the laughter pained.

  ‘What do you come here for?’ he would keep demanding.

  ‘Haircuts.’

  ‘Haircuts! I don’t cut hair—I only cut tails off, you plagues!’

  That provoked another ripple of titters. Only his being out of breath saved us.

  ‘How many winter beans make five?’ he would question gravely, with recovering breath.

  We knew that joke.

  ‘Four!’ we bawled.

  ‘Wait till I get hold of your shirt-tail!’

  The chase would begin. The whirr of the blue flames under the geyser would be smothered by inarticulate cries, a chatter of trembling cigar boxes, and by that stentorian voice bellowing at us.

  Then suddenly—quiet, a frown, and the grave command:

  ‘Tidy the boxes. Quick! Quick!’

  We were obedient. In a moment all was orderly, and we could once again hear the gas singing.

  ‘Kneel in the chair!’

  Only one would go. Swiftly a white sheet was tucked in at his collar and fell about him like a surplice. There would be a brief snip-snip of Jonah exercising his scissors, and then he stood in readiness.

  Phouff! Whoever was in that chair would abruptly choke, struggle and cry. There was no end to Jonah, no end to the caprices of his imperial black will, and the sight of a boy’s chin bearded with snowy lather apparently made life richer for him.

  He would teach us to go there for haircuts!

  All this, the umbrellas, the absurd catechisms, the comedy of the boxes and the lather smacked into one’s face had happened before. We were never certain whether we liked it or not. We were already shaggy as ponies about the ears, and had received orders not to return like hooligans. Doubtless we could have visited some more discreet, black-coated model of a barber, but we always chose Jonah.

  Presently the bell would jangle again and a man would enter, a commercial traveller or a florist, perhaps, so that the Jonah we knew would dissolve utterly, and a Jonah we felt was not a familiar, a Jonah as polite and neutral as a commissionaire, took his place, with the brush that had once wildly soaped our mouths now as prudent as the smelling-bottle of a lady.

  ‘Zip-scrape! Chip-chip!’ went that razor again. ‘Zip-scrape!’

  Gradually the pews began to fill again with more horsey, stinking, black-faced men, who smoked clays, chewed vile wads and swore about ‘the silly sod who had let them down in the Cambridgeshire.’ Jonah once again ignored us. The span of innumerable trims and shaves, shaves and trims would drearily lengthen. Patiently we would watch different faces coming and going. The sheep’s-head clock on the wall would show that we had waited two hours. Hunger, sore backsides, aching knees, and eyes smarting from tobacco smoke would fill us with a wearisome, maddening desire to be gone.

  At last, when there were perhaps ten men waiting to be shaved or trimmed, a look would pass between us, and as softly as we could we would rise and creep away.

  Then, artful and mischievous as mice, we would push each other against the door until that bell of his wrangled wildly, tauntingly, avengingly, happily, until Jonah ran out, a cart-umbrella in one hand and a razor in the other, and until we were sick with laughter at the sight and sound. If only he could have caught us! But he never advanced.

  He vanished at last as if he had never seen us, and we returned home shaking those shaggy, ruffled rats-tailed heads he had never even touched with his scissors.

  The Child

  In colour the sea was of the grey-green of a thistle-leaf in summer, though sometimes were revealed patches of dull violet, brief, evanescent patches that were without the dancing white veins of the rest of the sea. In the foreground, on the pale-red shore, the green and violet and white merged into long lines of miniature breakers that kept up a soft thunder.

  A row of bathing-tents between the cliffs and the waves were striped red and white. Up on the little yellow cliff the sunblinds of the house were barred red and white also. A faint wind coming with the sun blew out the tamarisk foliage as it would feathers and mingled softly the scent of sea and greenness and shore.

  The wind flapped lazily at the awning of the window where the child stood. The child was perching on a stool and the stool had been set on two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so that the child could survey the world.

  From the window could be seen the whole sweep of the sea, the green and white and violet, with a thin strip of pale beaten shore. Watching it the child had ecstatic moments when the stool swayed like the tamarisks in the wind and the child murmured:

  ‘Oh! Lord!’

  Long ago the architect of the house had inserted into the window panes of scarlet and yellow and blue. Blue squares filled the corners. Yellow oblongs united the squares. The middle had been left a pool of vivid blood. The child could therefore look out on a world more evanescent and startling in colour than ever the sea could be. Leaning forward it saw sea and rocks and sky as if washed in bloody rain; it detected and became excited at a red man escorting a red lady towards, into, and finally under a red sea; lastly it saw red boats darting hither and thither like red flies between a red shore and the thunderously red line of sky.

  On growing tired of a crimson world it could, by magic twists, discover a blue, in which foliage, cliffs, bathers, sea and shore would look dyed like a royal robe; so that in the garden between itself and the sea sprang forth blue pagodas, blue lawns, blue discs and trumpets of silent blue, all of a brilliant, prepossessing beauty.

  Through the red pane the world appeared even in its beauty a little forbidding and dangerous, for the sea appeared always to be about to drown bathers and mariners. Through the blue glass it resembled a painted picture and the figures that walked from the bathing-huts to the sea were queens and kings.

  Gazing through them the child clutched its frock, tip-toed on the Encyclopaedia Britannica and murmured again:

  ‘Oh! Lord !’

  But it had no words for the scene through the yellow pane. There the world was softened and quietened; between sky and shore hung some ripe day. The sea was a yellow pond, and in colour the sky was somewhere between the hue of a lemon and an autumn pear. Some tall grass, waving on the cliff’s edge, was like turning corn, and the bathing-huts below appeared suddenly like big lacquered carriages that had brought Chinese ladies and gentlemen to be washed in the sea.

  Lazily a yellow gull dipped from the cliff to the waves. The child made precarious bends in order to watch it, wishing it would fly upwards and sun its back on the yellow sill. At the same time Volume One of the Encyclopaedia Britannica slipped a little from under its feet.

  The child had still no words. In texture and warmth and hue the day beyond the yellow pane seemed to ripen. The pane itself was warm, a sunny petal, and the garden a lemon wilderness. With a start the child saw itself beyond the petal and the wilderness, dipping its feet into the soft yellow sea.

  Then the child saw a p
arty of bathers running pell-mell towards the sea. They appeared slightly ridiculous, but interesting, for side by side with skinny, decrepit men ran immense, magnificently bosomed women holding each other’s hands. Some danced, some hopped miserably between stone and stone, others made splendid efforts to run straight into the sea. They were all yellow in colour and might have been gigantic wasps except that they shouted as they ran.

  The child pressed on the yellow glass. Not all the bathers had yet reached the sea. And some who had arrived had paused on the edge and were bending forward to touch it, as if it had been a bank of yellow flowers.

  Tiptoeing, the child watched carefully the fat and thin, the more athletic and the wary, as they approached the sea. Every moment the day and the sea seemed softer and riper. The bathers were steeped in sun.

  Finally the child saw that only two bathers remained on the shore. One was a fat woman who, with legs apart and arms spread out like wings, was about to push an aged, thin-legged gentleman into the yellow waves. The woman pushed and struggled. All the other bathers appeared to be shouting and laughing. The thin man, waving his arms, made mock shudders and protests.

  Suddenly, as if taken unawares, he joined the chaos of dancing yellow shoulders, yellow heads and ripe, yellow breasts with a splash and a shout.

  Immediately all the world appeared to be gaily splashing and shouting.

  Through the yellow pane the child saw all this as a picture of entrancement and delight. And it longed suddenly to emulate it, even if not to be part of it all. This longing it fulfilled at once by making swimming motions with its arms, its neck craned forward, one foot occasionally swinging free of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It swam lustily, not moving an inch. The room was full of the confused sounds of blowings and splashings and supposedly breasted waves.

  Suddenly the child tired of it all. Down in the yellow ocean was such splashing and breasting and swimming as it could never hope to attain. There the fat women were wallowing like yellow fish and the waves were caressing them. For a distance of a hundred yards outward yellow heads danced in and out of view.

  The child suddenly ceased its own imaginary swimming, stood still, and watched greedily.

  Its longing to be part of the ripe, lemon-coloured, pear-coloured day grew greater. Its eyes grew fiercely and intensely wondrous with what it saw.

  All of a sudden its hands were at its clothes. Buttons suddenly ripped away from their holes, bows flew undone and the child slid away from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the yellow pane. Over the child’s head slipped a dress and a petticoat, like skins, and a pair of little blue drawers fell noiselessly to her feet, draping the books and the stool.

  Through the window the day now appeared like a strange, perfectly made jig-saw puzzle of red and yellow and blue.

  Soft lights fell suddenly over the naked breast, arms and shoulders of the child. The child made no sound in the passage to the door. And on the landing and the stairs there was no sound either except of a blue fly buzzing in some sunny pane.

  The stairs let the naked feet pass without a creak; the air took the child’s excited, expectant breath and hushed it.

  Running among the trees and flowers that had once appeared like blue pagodas and trumpets the child felt an immense elation. Her eyes were dazzled; she still saw the sea as a yellow pond, and the bathing-huts as lacquered carriages that had brought Chinese ladies and gentlemen to be washed in the sea.

  She ran on. The sun was hot, the wind gentle, kissing her pink body as it kissed the tamarisk and the sea. She flaunted and swayed her body as she ran.

  Descending the steps of the cliff she came within reach of the sea. The bathers were still struggling with the waves and themselves, splashing the sea upward in silver-green bows.

  Pausing, the child held her hands to her own unripened breast and watched greedily again. She could feel her heart beating; the beat was like the noise of the gently thunderous sea.

  She ran suddenly forward to where the dancing shapes, the fat and thin, the more athletic and the wary, were rolling their old, white, misshapen, ill-kept would-be seductive and repulsive bodies like hoary seals in the sun. As she ran forward she made little jubilant noises and waved her hands.

  She came to within twenty feet of the sea.

  Suddenly all the fat women and the thin men stood up in the water. They stared, gasped and dashed the water from their flabby eyes. The sea-drops glistened and dripped from their bedraggled limbs. And suddenly, as if ashamed of something, they all strode forward in the water, waving their fat and thin and pallid arms, gesticulating forbiddingly, making noises of horror and shame.

  ‘Go back! Go back! they shouted to the naked child. ‘Go back!’

  They shouted and continued to shout.

  But towards the sea that with its rolling yellow breast had appeared the very emblem of some bright, entrancing day, the child in its loveliness ran on.

  A Comic Actor

  Of all the farmers in our district William Twelvetree was the poorest and most unfortunate. He was a good fellow, very conscientious and very diligent, but he worked without method and bargained without astuteness, and, most serious of all, he lived in dreams.

  His modest farm was set in a lonely spot two miles from the village, seven from the town and fifteen from market. Owls roosted in his barn and a pair of impudent magpies would often build in his orchard. Providence had never bestirred itself either to help his pigs to farrow or to keep blights from his trees or to ripen his harvests profitably. With these troubles and a wife and four children to keep, life was not easy for him. Furthermore, his children were all girls, who, since they had come late in marriage, were still young enough to be problems of feeding and clothes. His wife did her best for them, but she was old-fashioned and simple, and the best she could do was to make them curiously frilled and gussetted little frocks cut out of her own, so that the children, like her, looked for ever like frowsy bundles of discarded petticoats.

  But William and his family were devoted. They were like a little community, naive, honest, strangely refined and bound up in themselves. One thing only was startling about them and that was William’s ambition. That ambition, however, providence had ignored also. The four children and the mother alone were aware of its existence. To the children it was magic and wonder. To Isabel, the wife, it was the impulse to occasional prayer. For William, who was a bright, fat little man, it was something to be pursued tirelessly and infinitely, like the Holy Grail. It was William’s ambition to act in a play.

  Every Christmas, for many years, the family played The Midsummer Night’s Dream in the big kitchen, and the children were the fairies. The little girls played well and sweetly. Isabel, who was very tall, was a splendid Titania, even if she did veil her hair in a butter-cloth. But only William could act his part; he alone remembered to employ his hands, to flourish his dirty overcoat as though it were a cloak and to make his voice sound poetic and touching. And when at the end the family applauded each other, again William was the important figure. He it was whom they cheered. And he it was who bowed low and deep with grave smiles that were purposely faintly weary too, as if he were indeed some real jeune premier, very bored and very successful.

  But William’s ambition went no farther. Once, before he had grown so fat, he had imagined himself as Hamlet or some young king, but now he would have been glad of a minor role, something as small as the part of the porter in Macbeth or of the peasant taking the basket of figs to Cleopatra. But not even these opportunities ever arose, and he arrived at the age of forty-five without having once appeared upon a stage.

  Then, one autumn, the local journal printed an announcement. All those interested in drama and the birth of a dramatic society for the town of Wander were requested to attend a meeting there.

  There followed days of unprecedented excitement at the farm, and then William drove to the meeting in a milk-float. Rain had been falling, churning the roads to swamps, and William walked into the hall looking like
a tramp. But as he took off his overcoat he felt almost unbearably happy. Not even the unanimous decision of the society to act, not a play of Goldsmith or Shakespeare, but a musical drama called The Prisoner of Love, could change for him his almost childish delight. And nervously, tentatively, he offered himself for a part.

  He was told in return that within a week he should apply for a part, while being warned that such a part was not, of course, bound to be allotted him.

  William read the play. Each act, each scene, each line, filled him with the conviction that he must apply for the part of a certain Duke. That, he felt, was his destiny. Gradually he began to rehearse the part, then to take it into the fields with him, then to dream of it at nights.

  But at the first rehearsal it appeared that seven men besides William had pictured themselves as Dukes. This amused the company. William, nursing his libretto, tried to laugh also, but his mortification was too sickening and the memory of his secret, earnest rehearsals too painful. And, not daring to reflect on what his fate might be, he stared and waited.

  Eventually the play was cast. Then it was announced that he, who resembled perhaps more than anything a publican, had been chosen for a monk.

  And arriving home, he smiled wanly, puffed out his cheeks, and looked doleful in that comic way which so delighted the children. Yet it almost hurt him to say to them: ‘I’m a monk, and I visit a maiden in prison, then I make jokes to her. That’s my part.’

  ‘And a very good part, too, I’m sure,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Oh, it’s awfully comic, if that’s anything.’

  ‘Well, then, be thankful, William dear. I’m sure you’ll be as good a monk as a duke.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said; but he spoke ironically.

  Many weeks passed. There was in the play a young girl of extraordinary talent who took the part of the imprisoned maiden. Her beauty was light and delicate, her eyes were translucent and expressed all the shades and tones of youth with unforgettable, ravishing loveliness. She herself was like a sea-shell. Her voice, very low and soft, made the other actors give up whispering and listen. William thought of that voice as being like a bee in a window-pane in summer. But her singing voice was of even rarer, lovelier quality; then it was an exquisite soprano which sounded like a dulcimer or the glass hangings of a chandelier jingled by a breeze. From the first rehearsal her acting was remarkable. By intuition she knew how to look, move, speak and carry herself. Half the actors fell at once in love with her. William himself felt that in the scenes with her he acted more certainly, inspired by her extraordinary cleverness and beauty.