Pity, love, admiration, and anger find expression once they have
been sounded by the depth-charge of fiction. Stories continue to
resonate after they end because they locate funds of unexpended
feeling within the reader. The metaphor of a ship dropping charges
to locate an enemy submarine heralds an encounter between the
story as a work of art and the unknown, even antagonistic, reader.
The stories in this volume drop a series of charges at different
depths to flush the reader’s hidden funds of feeling from their hiding
place. Whether the depth-charges find their target depends entirely
on the reader’s capacity to respond and to move, either by diving for
deeper cover or by taking a direct hit.
UNCOLLECTED
SHORT STORIES
Salon des Dames
I
t was a wet summer season, the second for which the
hotel had opened since the war. The fine rain made a desolate, even
sound like breathing in the pinewoods, and below, milky layers of
mist covered the lake, and were stained here and there by the
darkness of the water beneath. Sometimes, for an hour or two, the
sun would show his face tremulously, and the ladies, picking their
way up and down the wet gravel of the terrace, would say that
Switzerland must be sometimes very nice.
For the last week there had been no arrivals. In the enormous
salle-à-manger
many tables made a brave and glittering show of
expectancy, but their number diminished; the visitors dined together
in a group by one window, inevitably huddled, starting at the echoes
of their voices in the spectral void. The third and second floors were
closed, not a slit from any doorway lightened the long perspective
of the corridors. Each of the hundred bedrooms with their shuttered
windows might have held a corpse, rotting in humidity beneath the
glacial swathings of the bed. In the lounge, a mist perpetually filmed
the mirrors; the wicker armchairs gathering sociably around the
glass-topped tables creaked at one another in the silence, so that
now and then an apprehensive human head would bob up from over
a writing table or the back of a settee. The rain was always audible
on the glass roof of the verandah.
It is terrible to be alone in the darkness of rain, swept aside by
one’s world’s indifference into a corner of a house. It is still more
terrible to be swept aside into a corner of a continent. M. Grigoroff
was staying at Seestein indefinitely, because he could think of no
specific reason for going anywhere else. Travelling was expensive,
and besides, he knew the manager. He really knew the manager
quite well, though his diffident inspection of Herr Müller’s eye
brows, seen above the office roll-top through the glass panels of
the office door, did not encourage him to enter and improve the
acquaintance ship. There was something sinister, this afternoon,
about Herr Müller’s eyebrows.
The war had caused M. Grigoroff considerable inconvenience.
He had spent the greater part of it in Switzerland, and was not at all
sure that he really liked the country. It is true that he had dallied
away the summer before the war very pleasantly here at Seestein.
The place was different then; a band at nights and amorous pink
lights along the terrace. He had met and loved an English lady
called Connie. He was wondering now, as he patrolled the corridor
outside the office in his greatcoat (the heating was not satisfactory),
what had become of her, and whether she was married.
C’était une
jeune fille superbe
.
1
Every time he reached the end of the corridor he hesitated, in
turning, before a door. The panels were all wooden and impen
etrable; to the centre one was screwed a small enamelled plate,
announcing:
Salon des Dames
. M. Grigoroff yearned to enter.
He did not like men, especially English husbands. Of these,
there was an unusually large percentage among the visitors. They
roared at him, making observations about the weather, to which
M. Grigoroff responded vaguely, sympathetically, “
Oh, mon Dieu
.” If
he entered the salon there would be ladies; too many ladies perhaps,
or there might, infinitely more desirably, be a few. There would be
the warmth of radiators and draped curtains. M. Grigoroff found
great comfort in the society of women. He entered.
The click of knitting-needles was suspended as the three women
turned their faces to the door. They were sitting close together by
the big window, looking out into the wet, black pinewoods, with
their knees pressed against the radiator under the window-sill. Mrs.
Hobson was knitting, Miss Pym
2
was mending something which
she rolled into a ball and sat on as M. Grigoroff entered, and Miss
Villars was, with some difficulty, re-translating into her mother
tongue a German translation of
King Lear
.
“Come right in, M. Grigoroff,” said Miss Villars, as the Romanian
gentleman entered.
His pince-nez shimmered in the light as he made them an
inclusive bow, and a smile tucked up his upper lip under his nose.
He made gestures and little noises of diffidence and gratitude. “Do
sit down,” said Mrs. Hobson, and Miss Pym inspected her fingernails
and fluttered her eyelids.
3
“I expect M. Grigoroff would like to put his feet near the
radiator,” said Miss Villars understandingly. Leaning forward, she
repeated the remark in French. Miss Villars came from Boston. So
they made room for him, and he sat down, beaming at them and
rubbing his knees.
Mrs. Hobson’s nose had a fine edge to it, as though it were an
axe, but the rest of her was comfortably rotund. She bent forward
and plucked some strands of mauve wool off her skirt, and arranged
the front of her blouse. “This is another muffler,” she said, shaking
out her work. “I finished the grey one I was beginning on Friday.”
“Oh ye-es?” said M. Grigoroff, admiringly.
“Now, M. Grigoroff, do you know German?
Savez-vous parler
– ”
“Oh no-o, a leetle.”
“I guess that means a lot,” said Miss Villars firmly. She felt that
she had a great deal in common with M. Grigoroff, they were both
such cosmopolitans. She did not wish to exclude the others, but
how much easier it would have been to talk in French! “You speak
well, German?”
“Oh ye-es, a leetle.”
“I’m afraid M. Grigoroff’s feeling the cold,” said Miss Pym
obliquely. She never made advances to men. The colour spread
softly from her pretty pink cheeks to her ears, peeping through her
fluffy hair, and down to the tip of her nose. She looked round under
her lashes, and caught M. Grigoroff’s eye, and the pink deepened.
M. Grigoroff decided that she might not be as old as she had
looked. It was a pity English ladies did not seem to marry. “Are you
cold?” she inquired, boldly.
“Oh, ye-es,” said M. Grigoroff, nodding and smiling.
“M. Grigoroff knows quite a lot about knitting, don’t you?” said
Mrs. Hobson, evidently referring back. “He was telling me about the
shawls his mother used to make in Romania, weren’t you?”
“Ye-es?”
“
Shawl
,” she raised her voice and made an expansive movement of
wrapping something round her shoulders. “Shawl!” she shouted.
Miss Villars did not knit. “When I was in Rome,” she said – “
une
fois, pendant que je suis restée à Rome
4
. . . I used to know two or three
Romanians. A charming Baroness.
Connaissez-vous
– ?”
“Oh ye-es. But it is so
triste
– ”
“Oh, not
triste
, M. Grigoroff. Antique – the dolours of antiquity.
Have you read –
est-ce que vous avez lu
5
– Do forgive me,” she said
aside to the others, and continued the conversation rapidly in
French.
It became evident that Miss Pym did not like Miss Villars. She
raised her eyebrows expressively at Mrs. Hobson, moved her knees
pettishly, and dropped her scissors. M. Grigoroff swooped sideways
after them, it was like a dive.
“Oh, how kind! No, over there . . . under the radiator . . . No,
more to the right . . . let me . . . oh well . . .
Thank you
!”
He straightened his pince-nez and looked at her intensely
through them, handing her the scissors. “Thank you,” she repeated,
taking the scissors, and meditatively snipping with them at the air.
“I hope you’re not cold any more now?”
“Oh ye-es,” he smiled.
Miss Villars cleared her throat. “
Et quand je serai revenue de Florence
...”
she continued.
6
“Would you mind, would you mind very much if I were to try this
muffler on you, just to try? Yes,
muffler!
” She shook it out. “I want to
see if it will go round twice and tie in a knot.” While he was still
looking wonderingly at her, she had lassoed him; the folds of the
muffler, warm and scratchy, pleasantly titivated the soft flesh under
his chin.
“I think that looks very nice,” said Miss Pym, generously.
“
Puis, je vais aller jusqu’à Naples
. . .”
7
Mrs. Hobson adjusted and tweaked the muffler, her sleeve
brushed against his cheek. Outside, they heard the breathy sound of
the rain, and, indoors, the film of mist thickened on the mirrors. The
smell of their woollen clothes against the radiator was warm and
comforting. Soon, as evening fell, the lamps would be lighted, and
Herr Müller would turn on the other radiators. Perhaps somebody
would ask him to tea in their bedroom. Then there would be dinner.
After dinner, he would seek out Miss Pym,
tête-à-tête
on a settee in the
lounge, and show her his album with the views of other parts of
Switzerland.
In this quiet island in the centre of Europe, the dusk gathered and
the rain drifted down. Deep in the hotel the chef prepared another
dinner for those forty useless mouths, and in the office at the back
of the empty lounge Herr Müller lurked like a spider.
M. Grigoroff, while they unwound the muffler from his throat,
leaned back smiling. He found great comfort in the society of
women.
Moses
S
he had a way of dawdling, and though Mr. Thomson
had timed his appearance for ten minutes later than the hour of the
rendezvous, he had still, he discovered, an unanticipated quarter of
an hour’s wait. Why, indeed, put it at even a quarter of an hour?
Standing at the foot of the Scala di Spagna, he lashed his walkingstick angrily to and fro behind him. He looked – and felt – a little
of the Lion; legs apart, staring indignantly up the Scala under his
tilted hat-brim. The hot steps curved up, their whiteness blistering
his eyes. They curved up and up till Mr. Thomson sweated at the
thought of them; till his kindly brim came down upon them, cut
them off. Behind him, in the piazza, Roman trams slid and clanged;
there were ascending triplets, multitudinies of hoots. The fountain
spattered, feathery and faint.
In her hotel at the top of the Scala she was inaccessible to him.
God forbid that he should go up to meet her! Whichever fork of the
staircase he went up by, she would come down the other; balancing
her parasol on her shoulder, perhaps even twirling it; smiling at the
further distances of Rome, with the possibility, the even imminent
possibility, of a Mr. Thomson utterly out of focus. When they were
married, he would stand behind her, always, while she put her hat
on, breathing audibly and clicking the lid of his watch. Meanwhile,
the proprieties ordained for them hotels sundered by the breadth of
several piazze, and she was free, up there, to dawdle with her hat.
A flower-seller wondered loudly why the beautiful gentleman
would buy no flowers. These dark-skinned peoples never showed
the heat, and she was cool as bronze as she turned the whites of her
eyes at him from under her awning, under her awning where the
banked-up flowers were sultry and dim. Her swinging earrings
glittered in the dusk. He thought how delighted Fenella would be if
he gave her irises, and those tawny carnations, cinnamon-scented.
How aloofly she would trail round Rome, carrying sheafs and sheafs
of them that wilted in the heat, in and out of the churches. She
would not have so much as a finger free to hold the other guidebooks, from which he was not reading aloud. He resolved never to
buy Fenella irises or carnations while they were in Rome.
Somewhere, in a cool church, black and clammily fragrant after
the sunshine, the Moses of Michelangelo, he knew, sat looking
out across the ages.
MOSES
1
He gathers the destinies of peoples under his
knotted hands. He hears the thunders of God in his ears, and sits
tense. His lips may even now be loud with the thunders of Sinai. Mr.
Thomson, familiar with many guide-books, knew exactly how he
sat, but all the same, he wanted to see for himself. The guide-books
were (for once) unanimous in urging him to go and see the Moses.
It – he – was one of the reasons why one came to Rome; and, having
seen it, one staggered away from Rome with a sense of the greater
repleteness. The wrist-bones and sinews, they said, were particularly
to be observed as the characteristic of the work of this great artist.
The wrist-bones and sinews . . . “O-oh,” whinnied Mr. Thomson,
stamping his feet, mopping the back of his neck. They had only
three days more. Was he never to see anything but blazing steps,
and these myriads of burning, whirling, infinitesimal particles of
sound and colour around him that he doubted to be Rome?
“Never to see anything? We are
sore
let and hindered,” he
murmured. “Sore, sore,
sore
let – ”
“Well, you’re very late,” said Fenella.
She stood two or three steps above him, a little pink but tolerably
cool.