Читать книгу Above the Dark Tumult: An Adventure - Hugh Walpole - Страница 6

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I had no more thought for barber or barber’s shop. My final vision of the place was of the barber and the sailor grappling together in a muttering, gasping embrace among the tumbled chairs and china. I had picked up my hat and coat and was out of the door into the passage.

There was no Pengelly. Indeed, there was nothing in the dreary little box of a passage but a dim light and a musty smell of oranges. Then I heard voices. Two people came round the corner of the stairs, and I stood aside that they might go by. A stout woman and a little man. The stout woman was breathing heavily and complaining bitterly.

As they passed me I heard the little man say: ‘But how was I to know? You always liked liver and bacon before this. I don’t know what’s come to you with all these new fancies....’

I waited until they had gone. Everything was as silent as an ice-box. From inside the barber’s shop there came no sound. Very cautiously I moved up the stairs, turned the corner, and there, on the next landing, looking up the farther staircase, his head cocked as though he were listening, stood Pengelly.

I drew back in the corner of the staircase, restraining every breath in my body, restraining, yet more, my eager desire to catch his dirty bony neck between my fingers and wring it until his eyes stared over the back of his body!

I didn’t move, and Pengelly didn’t move either. What it was to me to see him again after all these years! He hadn’t changed an iota! His cheek bones were as prominent, his nostrils as wide and hungry, his eyes as gray and narrow, his mouth as cruel and mean, and his whole air as shabby and dusty as of old. He was an immemorial figure, standing for spite and meanness like a carved figure in a Cathedral choir stall. But, as I looked at him, it was not of himself that my heart was full, but of Osmund and Helen. At last I should have news of them, at last know whether they were alive, whether they were married, yes, even though I had to push his mean eyes into his dirty little face to discover it.

But what, after all, was he doing there? He was engaged, it was plain, on some game of his own, some game that was of great importance to himself. His whole body was strung together in its absorption of eagerness and curiosity. There was something or somebody on the floor above that concerned him very nearly, and I knew enough about him to be aware that it was something that boded ill.

A noise startled him. He turned and, looking back down the staircase, seemed to be staring right into me. You must remember that here there was only a half-light. A window threw a glow upon his evil countenance, but I was myself in obscurity. I looked into the white frosted door of some offices that had upon the glass names printed in deep black letters.

When he stared at me there was something uncanny about our encounter. For more than fourteen years I had again and again imagined our reunion. With any one of them, Osmund, Helen, Pengelly, Buller, Hench, the meeting would have been enough to provide a link for me with the others, but, for some reason, it had been Pengelly whom I had first envisaged. How often I had planned just what I would say and do, forcing him onto his knees wherever our meeting might be, and then, having had my will with him, throwing him aside like a dirty rag. But I had never imagined it like this.

He stared at me as though he must see and recognize me, but I realized that he was staring beyond me, down into the dark recesses of the staircase, listening with all his protruding ears for a voice, a footstep, an opening door.

Suddenly he nodded his head, as though he had come to a decision, turned and very cautiously climbed the staircase. For a moment I hesitated. Should I follow him or wait for his return? I didn’t want to climb to the next floor and then confront him, when perhaps he had already rung a bell and so could escape into some flat. If I waited where I was he would in all probability return—or would he? He might be swallowed up by some apartment and not emerge again that night. The thought decided me. I mounted the stairs after him. I went cautiously, and the turn of the stairs was dark enough to make a slip very easy. I remember that I clutched the volume of Quixote to me as though it were a talisman. I emerged onto the next landing, and—there was no Pengelly! He had vanished as though he had never been.

I was caught by a beat of bitter disappointment. I had missed him, then! I looked around me. Above me the stairs, thinning now as they reached the heights of the building; in front of me the door of a flat with bell and letter box but no name, to my right a ledge with a small window.

I went to this last and looked out. The snow had ceased; roofs ran parallel with my vision, roofs and, above and beyond them, some crooked chimneys that, in this half-light, resembled human beings. One chimney near to me, peering over shelving tiles, seemed like a swollen and doubly malevolent Pengelly. The large ears were cocked; the face, thickened and roughened, was corrugated and lined with sneering laughter. But especially it wore exactly that look of evil listening attention that Pengelly had just now worn.

All this was in the air, but through a division between walls, I could look down, as one looks over a hilly ridge, into the lights of the Circus. The air was thickened and darkened, and so I peered over as it were into a river of light that twinkled and flashed and seemed sometimes to bubble as though, at any moment, it would burst into flame. I was not, in actual fact, so high here above the ground, but I seemed to be high, in a thick gray world with the light flowing like a lava stream between the clefts.

Suddenly, and from the floor below, someone switched on the light and, turning, I saw my little rabbit hutch of a passage all ablaze. If Pengelly came down now or emerged from that door, nothing could prevent our meeting.

Someone was coming up from the floor below. I waited. A head appeared, then a body. It seemed to me not to be odd at all that in another moment I was face to face with Charlie Buller. I had always told myself that if I ever were lucky enough to encounter one of them he would carry the others with him. I don’t know why I had been sure of this. After all, nothing was more unlikely. And yet it turned out to be true in a much wider, deeper sense than I had ever suspected. Yes, it turned out to be very true indeed! But at the actual sight of Charlie Buller I must confess that my heart leapt with joy, for Buller meant Osmund and Helen more than Pengelly did. I was sure then, with a glorious triumphant certainty, that my contact with Helen had at last begun again!

Nevertheless, if Charlie was no surprise to me I was like a ghost or miracle to Charlie! He had come up the stairs, his head down, lost in his own thoughts (and, as I was to find out afterwards, he had plenty to think about just then). He almost ran straight into me. He pulled himself up and then stood there, staring as though, in spite of the light, he must be deceived.

‘Well, Charlie,’ I said, smiling and holding out my hand. At first glance he looked to me just as he used to look—a little rounder, a little tubbier, clothed in just the same sort of rather loud brown tweeds that he used to wear, his round face of the same ruddy brown colour, his eyes bordered by the same good-humoured wrinkles. I had changed, of course, and, I am afraid, not for the better.

At first he really did not know me.

‘Dick Gunn,’ I said.

‘My God!’ he answered, taking me in. He stood looking me over, shook me warmly by the hand, then dropped it as though he had suddenly remembered something.

‘Have you come to see ...?’ He stopped abruptly.

‘I haven’t come to see anyone,’ I answered, dropping my voice because I was conscious of Pengelly, as though his nasty spying presence were everywhere around us. ‘I’m here entirely by chance. I’m jolly glad to see you, though. I’ve been hoping for years that I should run against you.’

I remember that he made then the movement that I recollected so well, sucking in his cheeks as though he were pulling at a straw, and his eyes narrowed as though he were suddenly suspicious of something.

‘Glad to meet you too,’ he said, also dropping his voice. ‘Long time since we met, isn’t it? Plenty happened since ...’ He broke off, listening.

‘Look here,’ I went on, ‘I don’t want to stop you now if you’re busy, but I must have a talk with you, and to-night if it’s possible.’

‘Why, yes,’ he said. He was looking around him, staring up the stairs and then at the flat-door.

‘Course we’ll have a talk—after all this time. Things are pressing a bit at the moment. Where are you staying?’

‘Can’t we eat together somewhere?’ I remember saying that with a grand confidence, although my precious half-crown was all that I had. You must remember too that all this time I was ravenous with hunger.

‘Fact is—afraid I’m booked. Let’s know where to ring you.’ I interrupted him. It seemed to me possible that Pengelly might appear at any moment.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I must tell you something. Why I’m here at all is that I followed Pengelly. I saw him downstairs, I followed him up. I kept sight of him as far as this landing and then I lost him.’

‘Pengelly!’ He stiffened like a terrier sighting a rat. ‘Pengelly! Already—he’s before his time. Did he see you?’ he asked, coming nearer to me and dropping his voice yet lower, as though we’d become two conspirators.

‘No,’ I answered. ‘What’s he doing here? He wasn’t up to any good.’

‘He never is,’ Charlie answered.

I noticed then that he was very different indeed from the man of earlier days. There was something in the glance of his eye, in his bodily posture, that set him apart not only from myself, but from all the rest of humanity. In the old days he hadn’t given a thought to anything at all save the game or rascality of the moment; now he was neither furtive nor secretive—those are not the words—but suspicious of everybody and everything, as though at any moment someone would spring on him from a dark corner and collar him. Then in a flash I realized. It was prison that had made this difference, set him apart, like some member of a monastic order, given him a secret life that no one who had not suffered that experience could understand.

I might not understand, but I sympathized.

He seemed to have made up his mind. ‘Well—so long,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘We’ll meet soon and have a crack.’ I saw that my news about Pengelly had made him impatient. He had moved instinctively towards the door of the flat close to us. Someone was inside there to whom he must give information. But I couldn’t lose sight of him without a clue to the others.

‘Look here,’ I said. ‘Where are we going to meet and when?’

‘What’s your telephone number?’ he answered, his eyes both on the staircase and the flat-door.

‘I haven’t got one.... I’m passing through London. But I could meet you anywhere.’

‘All right.’ I could see how urgent he was to be rid of me. ‘Ring me up at the Regent Palace any time before eleven.’

I nodded, and then, without any warning, the roar of an angry sea was in my ears, a long cold serpent coiling tightly round my stomach, and Charlie Buller turned into a scarecrow. Also the electric light danced gaily about the floor. I tottered. He caught me in his arms.

‘Hullo ... what’s up?’ With all the strength that I had I tried to stiffen my spine, to beat down the lights, to stifle the roar. Through it all I could smell the rough tweed of Charlie’s clothes.

‘I can’t—no food——’ I muttered, and sank into a black well of infinite depth.

The first sight after that I had was of a magnificent old secretaire. This thing towered above me. Looking up I could take in all the details: its ancient black wood, the beautiful carving of the old brass handles, but especially the lovely little pictures in white and red ivory with which every one of its multitudinous little doors was faced. These pictures danced before my eyes, but with all the seriousness of semi-consciousness I was gravely tracing them out—there were scenes of hunts, men chasing the deer, of ladies in towering headdresses leaning over high balconies, of armoured knights jousting in tournament, of winding rivers and delicately shaped hills, and all toned to a lovely old richness that harmonized perfectly with the deep ebony of the wooden panels.

Then I looked further, half-raising myself, and stared straight into the eyes of Osmund.

He was standing high above me, watching me very gravely, in his hand a glass.

‘Here, drink some more of this,’ he said, giving me the glass; and the sound of his voice—deep, gentle, exceedingly harmonious—brought back the old days, the old events, until they seemed to be gathered crowding about me. Oh! but I was glad to see him!

I drank the brandy. My head cleared. My one thought then was that he shouldn’t think that I had planned this faint as a ruse. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ I said, sitting up; ‘I didn’t mean to. I’ve been so busy, I haven’t eaten anything. Overtaxed myself.’ I remember so well that ridiculous excuse, the poor effort of the remnants of my pride.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

‘That’s all right, Dick,’ he said. ‘We’re very glad to see you. There’s some food here at your side. Have some grub before you talk.’

With that I am free to confess that I forgot everything save the food. I can taste it still—the cold ham, the bread and butter, cold chicken, Gruyère.... They say that a starving man must eat penuriously. There wasn’t, I fear, much caution about myself that evening. I swallowed the food like a wolf.

All the time Osmund stood watching me, not saying a word. I finished: I lay back on the sofa, my hands above my head, with a sigh of content. Then I looked up at him, smiling; then, at last, in full control of my faculties, I sat up, facing him.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Now I’ll go. You’re busy. But let me see you later on. I’ve been wanting to tumble against you for donkey’s years.’

‘Have you, Dick?’ He stood there, still staring at me in that same odd, grave, contemplative way. ‘Well, now you’ve found me, what’s been happening to you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘One thing and another. It isn’t too easy these days for a man of my age....’ But I wasn’t going to expose my poverty. I remember feeling that I’d rather lose sight of Osmund and Helen at once and forever than that they should spy out my nakedness. I climbed to my feet. ‘I’ll be off,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the meal. We’ll have dinner one night, shall we? Come and dine with me somewhere. We’ll talk over old times.’

‘Yes,’ he said, still staring at me. ‘I’ve had two years in jail, you know. That gives a man something to talk about....’ Then, as though he had just made up his mind to something, he put both his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the sofa again. ‘You stay here for a bit. I need your company.’

He gave me a cigarette and sat down on the sofa near to me. Then we looked at one another. He was vast as he lounged back sprawling on that sofa, his great legs stuck forward, his head up with that gesture that I remembered so well, his eyes half closed, staring at me from under the lids. His dark hair was flecked now with gray; his eyes were as beautiful, as large and clear, as audacious and courageous as ever they had been. At first I thought that there was nothing very much altered about him save his mouth. The change in that I noticed at once. It had been in the old days careless, casual and friendly. Now it was hard and would have been relentless and almost cruel had not the lips, even as I watched, moved a little and their lines shifted to uncertainty and hesitation. His eyes, too, shifted; after a short look from me they dropped and refused to meet mine. Where had I quite recently seen just that same shyness? Why, of course, Charlie Buller ... and with that I knew also the reason of the similarity. He had also been making his inspection of me.

‘Well, Dick—so you’ve turned up again. You’re looking pretty fit whatever you’ve been doing. Hair a bit long, which it usedn’t to be.’

Then, quite without warning, he gripped my hand. ‘I’m damn glad to see you. I’ve missed you a lot.’

But he hadn’t. I knew at once even as he spoke those words that he wasn’t thinking of what he was saying, that when he had gripped my hand he was expressing some emotion that hadn’t anything to do with myself. Even in the old days he had had the irritating habit of allowing his mind to run ahead of what he was actually saying. This had grown on him apparently. But suddenly he jumped up, walked about the room as though he were looking for something, then went to the door, glanced out of it, closed it very carefully, and came back to me.

‘Sorry,’ he said, sitting down beside me. ‘But I’m half-expecting someone.’

‘Yes, I told Buller——’ I began. Then I stopped. I wasn’t going to be the first to mention Pengelly.

‘Buller went out for a minute. He’ll be back.’ Then he tried to concentrate on me. ‘Now, Dick,’ he said. ‘Fire away. Tell me all about yourself—all your adventures. You’re as fat as ever, you old pig. Been doing yourself proud? Married yet?’

No, I was not married yet, but I didn’t tell him the reason. I began a long rigmarole, but neither of us was attending. My nerves were on edge. For what? I don’t know. Looking back, I try hard to recover every moment of that important half-hour. For one thing, I was, I fancy, expecting that at any moment Charlie Buller would enter, and for another I had the consciousness that that swine Pengelly was skulking behind the curtains somewhere.

Of course he wasn’t. But I couldn’t rid myself of the sense and smell of him. And all the time Osmund’s fingers were tapping restlessly on the arm of the sofa.

‘And so I’ve been living in Westminster lately,’ I added at last, lamely. ‘Quite a decent place. Nice woman—food not bad as those things go——’

Osmund nodded his head. ‘I know,’ he said. But he’d only caught the last words. ‘As things go, but I tell you what, Dick, things go damnably. Damnably, that’s the way they go. Wait a minute. Do you hear anything?’

He held up his hand. I must confess that what I heard was my heart beating like a pendulum clock. ‘What do you expect me to hear?’ I asked at last.

‘The crowd,’ he answered.

‘The crowd?’ I repeated feebly.

‘Yes, the crowd,’ he answered impatiently. With a swift movement he jumped up, went to the window, and flung it open.

‘Now listen,’ he said. There came up to us all the murmur of the Circus. Like the sea it was, coming in with a regular beat and rhythm, ‘Tip-Top, Tip-Top, Tip-Top,’ and this was broken into by the cry of a motor horn, the distant shout of the calling of the evening papers, the muffled ringing of a church bell—and I seemed to hear also a plaintive undertone as though some giant were whimpering.

He banged the window down again. He came back to me and stood in front of me.

‘There you are,’ he cried. ‘You can’t hear it with the windows shut, but I can—night and day. It never stops.’

‘What do you live here for,’ I asked him, ‘if it bothers you so? There are plenty of quiet streets.’

‘That wouldn’t make any difference,’ he answered. ‘They’d be there just the same. It’s the thought of them, all alike, all thinking the same things, all doing the same things, all dirty, diseased, making love, eating, drinking, sleeping——’ He broke off. ‘Don’t think I’ve gone crazy. I haven’t. But that time in prison gave me a turn about crowds. I always had it, in a way. Since I was a kid I’ve always wondered that people weren’t better-looking, didn’t care for themselves more. Yes, and why they didn’t get rid of the unfit and all the rotters, just shove them into a lethal chamber.... I’m a rotter myself, of course. Deserve extinction as much as anybody. But I’m quite ready to be put away if someone decided....’ He broke off, and smiled in just his old charming way. ‘Aren’t I an ass, Dick? But I always was, and jail didn’t improve me. I wonder you come near me.’

‘No,’ I answered him; ‘but what I can’t understand is why, if you feel like that, you’ve pitched on this place for a flat, in the very middle of all the racket.’

‘Ah, you see,’ he answered, nodding his head. ‘But I wanted to beat it. When I first came out I tried to live in the country, but they all knew about me, and I felt as though I had the plague. So then I shifted to Spain. There I was quiet enough. A beautiful country—beautiful.... But I was an exile all the same. I had to come home. I had crazy notions about all sorts of things. And then I joined up, of course; changed my name, and by that time they wanted men so badly they didn’t bother to ask whether I’d been in quod or no. I was in France two years. And not a thing touched me. Not a thing. I’d have been glad enough to die, but my life was charmed. Well in ’Eighteen I came home, and knowing how my feelings were, I set out to beat them. And sometimes I have. And then again—sometimes I haven’t.’

I’ve tried here to recover an impression of the spirit behind the words rather than the words themselves. But that is hard indeed to recover. There was something so touching, so alarming, and yet, in spite of its indecision, so determined in the force with which Osmund spoke.

He spoke himself of ‘nerves’ and ‘feelings,’ and I felt as I listened that everything that had sensitiveness in him was on edge, straining at the leash (to mix my metaphors), for some crisis of dramatic action. But not an action unpremeditated. I realized that what he said about the ‘crowd’ and the rest was true enough, but that it was only a background behind some act that he was contemplating. I realized that I had, by a chance, tumbled in at this very hour upon some dramatic event.

Even the room that we were in seemed to encourage me in this belief. There was very little furniture in it. The superb secretaire with the pictured doors of red and white ivory, a long bare refectory table, three chairs with gilt backs, on the bare stained floor two rugs, ragged and torn, but of a lovely deep peach colour, an ancient silver stand for holding Bible or prayer book from some old church, two very old silver candlesticks—but the oddest thing about the room was the walls that were rough with uneven patches of white and gray on them, just as the workmen would leave them after preparing them for distemper. On one of the walls was a mirror of gilded wood, with that beautiful glimmer of rose-colour in it that the old Spanish wood-carving so often has. On another wall was a fine triptych in Limoges enamel, with deep burning blues and greens in it—on the other walls, nothing.

Over everything there was an odd air of dust, as though no one cared for the room properly, and this was strange, for Osmund had been always meticulously spruce and clean about himself and his surroundings. This led me to look at him more closely, and I realized that he was not now himself as smartly brushed and cared for as he used to be.

The collar of his coat was dusty, his tie a little crooked, his trousers a trifle baggy.

He had sat down beside me again and had his hand on my arm.

‘I’ll tell you something, Dick. In that cabinet there’ (pointing to the secretaire) ‘I’ve got a revolver, always loaded. And one day I shouldn’t wonder but that I’ll lean over the wall and look down into that damned Circus and take a pot at one or two of them. No, I’m not mad—far from it. It would be a sort of protest against this modern rush, noise, screaming and shrieking. Everything’s gone from the world, Dick, that made it worth while—all beauty and repose, all craftsmanship and originality. Men move like sheep pushing after one another through the same hole in the same fence.

‘It will be worse and worse unless someone makes an example, pulls things up for a moment. There they go, round and round the Circus, jumping the hoops, grinning the same silly grins. And the noise never stops, never stops. I lie awake at night listening to it. Rumble—rumble—rumble. Rustle—rustle—rustle, and the little man there was once, so grave, so quiet, working away in his room on a piece of wood or a fragment of stone, making something beautiful out of it, he’s dead, Dick—dead and buried, and everyone’s forgotten where his grave is.’

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I can’t see that potting a few stray unfortunate people out of the window is going to help matters much.’

‘No—neither it will,’ He shook himself briskly, flung back his head as though he’d suddenly waked from a dream. ‘Neither it will. I talk an awful lot of rot sometimes. I haven’t seen you for so long. That’s my excuse. Hullo! Here’s Charlie!’

The door opened, and Buller came in. He started on seeing me. He hadn’t expected, I suppose, to find me still there, and the words that he had intended to speak died on his lips.

We all three waited in silence. It was an awkward moment for me. Something was going on in which I had no part. So once more I said good-bye.

‘Let’s meet soon——’

Osmund stopped me. In those moments he had made up his mind. ‘No, hang on a minute, Dick. I think you can help us.’

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘As a matter of fact, you’ve tumbled in on a little plot. Nothing much, but you may as well know.’

Buller made a movement.

‘It’s all right, Charlie. Dick’s an old friend of the firm. You see, Dick, we’re a bit excited this evening, Charlie and I, because in another hour or so we’re hoping to have a little talk with our old friend, Mr. Pengelly.’

I nodded. ‘I know. I saw Pengelly hanging about outside.’

‘Yes. Exactly. He’d come up, I suppose, to see how the land lay. We’ve been waiting for this meeting a long time, Charlie and Hench and I. We owe Pengelly something—and the rum thing is that it’s he who has asked for the meeting.’

He was another Osmund now, with no nonsense about revolvers and crowds. He was smiling, his eyes were dancing, the old boyish gaiety that I had found so attractive in former days was here again.

‘Yes. Would you believe it? He had the cheek to write to Charlie three weeks ago—to suggest a meeting, said he had something important to suggest—that after the way he landed us! Well, Charlie brought the letter to me, and—I—I’ve arranged that he shall have a talk with all three of us.’

‘What are you going to do to him?’ I asked.

‘Do? Oh, I don’t know. We’ll see. Frighten him a bit. He deserves it. He——’

Then we all stiffened. Someone was turning a key in the outer door.

We all looked round. There were steps, a pause, then the handle of the door of our room was turned.

Staring, I found myself looking, wonder of wonders at last, into the eyes of Helen Cameron.