THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Page 19

  Terribly alone. Now, at last, he knew what loneliness meant, that ghastly soul-searching loneliness that can assail a man married to a woman utterly and entirely uncongenial. Maudie, once well and truly married, dropped her sweet-little woman pose like a hot cake, and the dumbfounded Tom found himself faced with an acid-tongued shrew. A trivial vulgar minx whose only idea of life was chocolates, ‘movies’, as many clothes as she could squeeze out of him or anybody else (for she made no bones, once married, about what her previous life had been), irritated by his stunned stare of amazement ,she even went to the length, at last, of jeering at him for a ‘mug’, a ‘softy’, not to have guessed what she was by trade. She even twitted him with the number of her lovers, hoping to rouse him to some crude masculine outbreak of jealousy, some display of the physical brutality that was her only criterion of manhood; she called him ‘coward’ for his lack of the fighting instinct, and scoffed loudly and contemptuously at his love of poetry, music, art, resenting bitterly the very qualities in him that had made him so piteously easy a prey. She was a hopeless failure as housekeeper, spending his small weekly pittance on sweets, cheap papers, silk stockings, and visits to the cinema. Before his brief honeymoon was over, Tom learnt enough about the girl he had married to know that his castle in Spain was built upon sand, and in three months’ time he had bidden even his dream of it goodbye for ever.

  The months that ensued were sheer hell to Tom Harrison. Doggedly and in silence he endured them, feeling dimly that by so doing he was, perhaps, paying for the prime sin he had committed (for so he felt it) in driving away from his side the Dream Girl he loved, the lovely intangible creature who had filled his life and his heart and his soul with a happiness so utterly beyond and above anything he had ever dreamed of since, that even to remember it made him wince with pain, in the light of these other days. When he thought of the way in which he had driven her from him, he could have scourged himself with rods of steel. At the call of sex, urged by an earthly-minded fool, he had bartered a whole world of dreams, a universe compounded of beauty, faith, affection, companionship! Because the world told him jeeringly it was but a glass bubble he held, he had let it fall, and lo, it lay broken at his feet, and with it his heart and his hopes . . . it was no wonder the office commented in some wonder on the change in young Tom’s looks these days, even though the Boss, pleased with his progress, had given him yet another rise of salary. Yet even that did nothing to stem the tide of Maudie’s discontent.

  It may be that a rougher, more brutal type of man might have made something out of Maudie Simpson, with all her faults; but Tom was the wrong type to handle her with any hope of success. She had married him simply for want of a better offer, knowing that her market both on the stage and off, was waning, but she had frankly despised him from the first, and as time went on, her bitterness and rancour waxed greater and more great, and found vent in sour whining grumbles, peevish tears or shrill reproaches; indeed, in less than six months’ time after her marriage she had developed into a first-class specimen of the persistent nagger, and when she discovered herself to be with child, her poor young husband’s lot was indeed one to arouse compassion.

  Glancing at her dispassionately, a year after his marriage as she lay in bed in the chilly grey autumn morning, watching him dress to go to the office, Tom felt a vague stirring of compunction. After all, the blame was partially his. He had married her—she was bearing his child, sharing his bed, and wretched as he was, assuredly she was but little less wretched. There she lay, sullen, withdrawn into herself, hating him for his failure to be the sort of husband she wanted, hating herself for being tied to him, hating the child that was so soon to be born more bitterly than all. Pitying her for the ordeal that lay before her, sorrowful for her disappointment in him, as for his own in her, he came wistfully up to the bed just before he left, holding out his hand. . . .

  ‘I’m sorry, Maudie. I know I’m not the sort of chap you wanted—but we’re married after all, and we got to make the best of it. Be friends, won’t you . . . because of the kid. . . .’

  The word boggled, he was still shy of it, but she flounced over in the bed, pulling the dirty quilt about her ears and snapped at him like an angry cat.

  ‘Oh, get out, for goodness sake! You and your kid . . . faugh!’

  Darley, knowing young Mrs Harrison was ‘in the family way’, and guessing from his young colleague’s gravity that matters were imminent, greeted Tom kindly enough in his bluff casual way, clapping him on the back and bidding him ‘cheer up, wait until it’s the fourth’—which remark brought a momentary gleam of grim amusement to the boy’s sombre eyes. He startled his friend a trifle by rejoining grimly.

  ‘Fourth? Not on your life, Bob! I’ve learnt something—I’ll never let Maudie have another kid!’

  The force and bitterness of his tone startled the head clerk into silence, and in silence Tom turned to his desk—but not for long. It was barely half an hour before the telephone rang, and after a hasty word Darley put down the receiver and nodded brusquely to Tom.

  ‘Kid’s on the way—cut along. I’ll see it’s all right with the Boss.’

  As he sat in the rattling Tube, staring unseeing at the dark flashing windows, Tom remembered Darley’s remark again, and grinned sardonically. Fourth? Never again should a child of his be born to a mother who so bitterly hated the bearing of it . . . poor little devil! Never again. . . .

  His heart thumping, he let himself softly into the tall dingy apartment house where they had their humble quarters, and was met by the landlady on the stairs, finger on lip. The child had been born, somewhat prematurely, the doctor and nurse were still there, but everything was going on fine. Wouldn’t Mr ’Arrison take a nice ’ot cupper tea to brice ’im up—she’d got the kettle on naow? Vaguely Tom assented, and wandering into the tiny stuffy sitting-room, crowded with the dolls, cushions, paper fans that Maudie loved, and heavy with the smell of stale scent and cigarettes, listened with a beating heart to the sounds of movement from the bedroom beyond. The rustle of a nurse’s starched skirts, the clink of china or glass, the low murmur of voices talking. Presently the outer door of the bedroom opened and shut, and a man’s step ran quickly downstairs.

  Dimly Tom realised that the doctor had gone, and without seeing him, and moved vaguely forward with some half-formed idea of catching him; but the door below banged, and it was too late. Sighing, he moved over to the window, where still stood his treasure, the great silver witchball, gleaming in the sullen light of the winter sun. He took it up gently, gazing into its depths with a yearning ache at his heart that brought tears smarting, salt to his eyes.

  ‘Oh, Dream Girl, Dream Girl! Where have you gone to, where?’

  The tears gathered thick and fast, and fell upon the brilliant surface of the ball; but no answering face gleamed up at him, the surface was smooth, unruffled, shining, and slowly he put it down, with the lingering tenderness with which one takes leave of the dead. She was dead—or dead to him. Lost for ever. Gone back to her own world, that world to which he had driven her. He turned sharply as a voice spoke at his elbow. It was the nurse, lean and stiff as a board in her professional blue-and-white. From beneath her coif her sharp eyes studied him oddly, as she held out to him a bundle, wrapped in a white knitted shawl.

  ‘Mr Harrison? I thought perhaps you’d like to see the baby?’

  As the cool brisk voice broke in upon his dreaming mood, it jerked him abruptly back to the present, to the sordid weary present, with Maudie, whining and bad-tempered, to perpetual debts and worries. . . . Mechanically he held out his arms, and, as the nurse pulled back the scrap of veiling that hid its face, gave a sudden cry that rang loud and almost terrifying through the tiny sitting-room. A cry that held wonder, terror and amazement, as he stared and stared, and a sentence now only completely and bitterly understood, beat like a gong, clear in his startled memory?.

  ‘I may succeed, but, oh, my dear, not perhaps in quite the way you want! For the gods give in their
own grim way. . . .’

  There looked up at him from the nest of white in his arms, a small pointed face with grey-green eyes, set in a frame of dusky hair.

  September

  The Traveller’s Tale

  The Dogs Of Pemba

  ‘Don’t you be so darn cocksure, my lad!’ Thus Garnett, dried-up little planter, to pinkly healthy young Colefax, just going East for the first time, and bucking about it a good deal to his cronies at the Club. Garnet had said little for some time, but his first remark, the opening of this story, was trenchantly snubbing. ‘I tell you, no white man really understands the native, nor what he can do—and far from the stories you hear of his capacity for mysterious and unpleasant vengeance and so on, being exaggerated—well, there, you’ll learn not to laugh at ’em soon, as I did in my young days!’

  Colefax, though a trifle bumptious, was not a bad lad at heart, and we all liked old Garnett.

  ‘Sorry, sir; I know I was swanking rather,’ he said. ‘But these tales you know—some of ’em seem too idiotic! Fellows bein’ wished to death and so on—d’you really know of a case like that?’

  ‘I do,’ said Garnett, grinding out the stump of his cigar. ‘I see you want the yarn; shut the door, one of you lads, and sit down, then. I’ll tell you the story of the “Dogs of Pemba”.’

  ‘I was a youngster like you, setting out to take up my first real job: assistant to a fellow called Hugh Kinnersley, Commissioner of Pemba. I was full of myself, and bucked about it no end to the admiring girls on board the boat going out; there were quite a lot of ’em did admire me, too. I was a decent-looking youngster, and in common with most youngsters had spent more than I could afford on nice white ducks, smart buckskin shoes, and so on.’

  We all glanced at Colefax, who was grinning shame-facedly.

  ‘Well, I left the boat at Zanzibar, and spent a couple of days there before taking the little steamer on to Pemba. While in Zanzibar I heard a little about my future boss, Hugh Kinnersley—nothing very good, to my secret dismay, as I had pictured a bluff, jolly fellow awaiting me, who might be a real pal. There was a wife too, apparently—came out only last year, so one of the men at the English Club said.

  ‘“Poor little woman!” said somebody else, and I asked why.

  ‘Glances were exchanged, shoulders shrugged, but very little actually said, till the fellow who had said “poor little woman” fathomed that I was joining Kinnersley in Pemba, and the club became curiously interested in me. Interested in a guarded, rather pitying way—rather the same sort of interest, I felt, that might be taken by a kindly crowd in a young man on his way to the scaffold. . . . I resented it, and asked Innes, the long man who had pitied Mrs Kinnersley, the reason.

  ‘He looked at me oddly and, patting me on the shoulder, told me not to be a young ass. Kinnersley wasn’t very popular, that was all, and they were rather sorry for any young chap boxed up with him morning, noon and night. Of course that was all. What did he do? Oh, he drank a bit, and there were various rather odd stories about him—but probably a lot of it was native talk and didn’t matter. . . . He was soothing my ruffled feelings quite nicely, when somebody a little tight suddenly broke in with a giggle.

  ‘“Fellow goin’ to Pemba?” He thrust an inane face over Innes’ shoulder. “Give my love to the famous Dogs!”

  ‘He fell, or was pulled back, amidst an angry murmur, and Innes, slipping a friendly arm round my shoulders, guided me out of the crowded room before I could utter the question that was rising to my astonished lips—though he answered it himself outside.

  ‘“Dogs? My dear lad, Fuller’s tight, and talking rot; don’t take any notice of him! Good night, and good luck to you!”

  ‘After this rather disquieting evening it may be imagined that it was with no very pleasant anticipations that I landed at Pemba next day, from the crazy little steamer that plied about the coast.

  ‘I felt singularly raw and ignorant and lonely as I watched the steamer chuff slowly away over the gleaming blue water into the eye of the sinking sun. It was six o’clock when I landed and the dusky veils of the approaching night were already misting the brilliance of the sunshine, darkening the vivid blueness of sky and sea to an amazing opalescent glory of lilac, violet and petunia, streaked with tender green.

  ‘I stood on the tiny jetty wondering what to do next, as there was no sign of Kinnersley, and trying to muster sufficient courage to speak to one of the silent group of lounging natives watching me with a listless interest but making no move to assist me with my baggage.

  ‘A little way back from the miniature landing-stage, under the lee of the immense towering trees, outposts of the forest I was later to know so well, lay a huddled collection of huts, mainly of wattle and daub, a red mud, dried hard as brick in the sun. A little apart, one whitewashed building of a slightly better class indicated the Customs House, but even here no one seemed to be stirring, and the door was inhospitably closed.

  ‘My sense of forlornness increased. Two of the natives, tired of contemplating me and my traps, turned and stalked away towards the forest. I watched them disappear like slim shadows into the welcoming dusk of the trees, and realised afresh how utterly alien is the white man in the tropics, those dark, strange lands that only know and love their own dark people. I tried a few words of my new-learnt Swahili on the nearest native, but he shook his head, eyeing me from head to foot. He muttered a word to his neighbour, a splendid bronze statuette of youth, and they laughed in concert. . . . I was just feeling at my wits’ end to know what to do, when there was a clatter of approaching hoofs, and two donkeys trotted into view from the track that wound away into the forest behind the bunched huts.

  ‘The foremost donkey was ridden by a brawny native, the second by a big, loose-built fellow in dirty khaki shirt and shorts and a sun helmet, who, dismounting from his “moke”, an absurdly small beast for so big a man, seized my hand and poured forth apologies. He was obviously, or so I thought, delighted to see me: had a genial, bluff manner, though he talked erratically, jumping from one thing to another in a bewildering way, never pausing for a reply. He dragged me into the Customs bungalow, and ordering drinks, tossed off several whiskies in succession, the strength of which—the colour of strong tea—made me stare.

  ‘He was, or rather had been—for he had palpably gone to seed—a good-looking fellow enough; heavy-jowled, and with blue pouches under his eyes; his cheeks streaked with the red of broken veins; but still, at first sight, a fine specimen of a man. It was only when he sat down, which he didn’t often do, as he was most curiously, maddeningly restless, that one noticed the hint of a paunch, a flabbiness about the great thighs and shoulders, a shakiness of the hand that implied that the hints I had heard in Zanzibar as to his drinking might be founded on fact. . . . However, he was very nice to me, and in a short time, mounted on the second of the two donkeys, my luggage following behind on the shoulders of Kinnersley’s boy, Tugi, we were on our way.

  ‘It was not very far, he said; built in a clearing near the shore; but one had to cut through the forest to reach it; the shore was too rocky to go round, there was no road. Indeed, the “road” we were on, I privately thought, did not deserve that description; it was a track rather, only just wide enough to travel single file, and rough and stony beyond words.

  ‘One’s first experience of the utter hush of the primeval bush is always awe-inspiring. My word, I felt eerie, jogging along in the warm, moist, green-filled dusk, the only sound the clink and shuffle of our mounts’ little pointed hoofs on the track, the creak of the leather saddles and Kinnersley’s occasional muttered curses at the heat. Now and again we splashed through a tiny stream crossing the path, or a curious monkey chattered overhead; but for the most part the ride was dull to monotony, and as my host said, not very long. It was, indeed, barely half or three-quarters of an hour before the serried dark regiments of trees began to thin out into lower, more feathery bush, and in a few minutes we ran out into a clearing and Kinnersley, dismount
ing heavily, called loudly to his wife.

  ‘He certainly had a charming house; built of green painted corrugated iron, peeling with the heat, but veiled with the crimson and magenta glory of bougainvillaea that sprawled over the red tin roof and dropped like rainbow mist round the veranda that ringed the upper story. There was a short flight of wooden steps from the veranda to the ground; the ground floor was obviously merely store-rooms, and so on, as in most houses in that part of the world. Through the thin filming of mosquito netting that made the veranda almost like an outdoor room, I could see the amber gleam of a lamp, and a small moving shadow approaching the head of the steps. . . .

  ‘“What a delightful little place!” I said with genuine admiration. “I’d no idea. . . .”

  ‘Kinnersley cut me short with something like a snarl.

  ‘“My God! If ever there was a hell-hole? Well, well, don’t gawp at me like that, I’m tired and snappy—but if you’d spent four years on this blasted island you’d hate it as I do! Here, Tugi, take those bags up. Don’t drop ’em. Good lord, of all the bloody one-eyed niggers . . . unafania nini, pumbafu?.”

  ‘As Tugi dropped my bag, Kinnersley, losing his temper like a child, suddenly rushed off into a sickening torrent of abuse, finishing by striking at the fellow’s bare legs with his rattan riding switch. As the man quivered under the blow he said something in Swahili, perfectly unintelligible to me, except that I fancied that it was an allusion to “dog” or “dogs”, but it seemed to throw Kinnersley into a perfect frenzy. Throwing aside his stick, he made for the sullen native and I am perfectly certain would have, if not actually killed him, at least mauled him very severely—but this was more than I could stand, and I stepped between.