Short Stories 1927-1956 (4 page)

Between mouthfuls Mr Bloom indulged in general conversation – of the exclamatory order. It covered a pretty wide autobiographical field. He told me of his boyhood in Montrésor. The estate had been in his family for close on two centuries. For some years he had shared it with the last of his three sisters – all now dead.

‘She’s there!’ he exclaimed, pointing an instant with uplifted fork at a portrait that hung to the right of the chimneypiece. ‘And that’s my mother.’ I glanced up at Miss Bloom; but she was looking, in the other direction, and our real and painted eyes did not meet. It seemed incredible that these two could ever have been children, have played together, giggled, quarrelled, made it up. Even if I could imagine the extinguished lady in the portrait as a little girl, no feat of fancy could convert Mr Bloom into a small boy – a sufferable one, I mean.

By the time I had given up the attempt, and, having abandoned the jelly, we had set to work on some Camembert cheese, Mr Bloom’s remarks about his secretary had become almost aggrieved.

‘He was of indispensable use to me in my literary work,’ he insisted as he chawed rapidly on, ‘modest enough in itself – I won’t trouble you with that – only an obscure by-way of interest. Indis
pen
sable. We differed in our views, of course: no human beings ever see perfectly eye to eye on such a topic … In a word, the occult. But he had an unusual
flair
of which he himself, you will hardly believe it, until he came to me, was completely ignorant.’ He laid his left hand on the table. ‘I am not denying that for one moment. We succeeded in attaining the most curious and interesting results from our little experiments. I could astonish you.’

I tried in vain to welcome the suggestion; but the light even of only six candles is a little stupefying when one has to gaze through them at one’s host, and Mr Bloom was sitting up immediately opposite to me on the other side of the table.

‘My own personal view,’ he explained, ‘is that his ill-health was in no way due to these investigations. It was, I assure you, against my wish that he should continue them even on his own account. Flatly, two heads, two wills, two cautions even, are better than one in such matters. Dr Ponsonby – I should explain that Dr Ponsonby is my medical adviser; he attended my poor sister in her last illness – Dr Ponsonby, unfortunately, lives at some little distance, but he did not hesitate to sacrifice all the time he could spare. On the other hand, as far as I can gather, he was not in the least surprised that when the end came, it came suddenly. My secretary, Mr Dash, was found dead in his bed – that is, in his bedroom. Speaking for myself, I should —’ back went his head again, and once more his slightly bolting eyes gazed out at me like polished agates across the silvery lustre of the
candlelight
– ‘speaking for myself,’ his voice had muffled itself almost into the inarticulate beneath his beard, ‘I should prefer to go quickly when I have to go at all.’

The white plump hand replenished his glass with champagne. ‘Not that I intend to imply that I have any immediate desire for that. While as for you, my dear young sir,’ he added almost merrily, ‘having enjoyed only a morsel of my experience in this world, you must desire that consummation even less.’

‘You mean, to die, Mr Bloom?’ I put it to him. His chin lowered itself into his collar again; the eyelids descended over his eyes.

‘Precisely. Though it is as well to remember there is more than one way of dying. There is first the body to be taken into account; and there is next – what remains: though nowadays, of course – well, I leave it to you.’

Mr Bloom was a peculiar conversationalist. Like an astute letter-writer
he ignored questions in which he was not interested, or which he had no wish to answer; and with the agility of a chimpanzee in its native wilds would swing off from a topic not to his liking to another that up to that point had not even been hinted at. Quite early in our extravagantly
tête-à-
tête
meal I began to suspect that the secret of his welcome to a visitor who had involuntarily descended on him from out of the blue, was an insensate desire to hear himself talk. His vanity was elephantine. Events proved this surmise to be true only in part. But in the meantime it became pretty
evident
why Mr Bloom should be in want of company; I mean of ordinary human company, though he seemed to have wearied of his secretary’s some little time before that secretary had been summoned away.

‘You will agree, my dear sir, that to see eye to eye with an invalid for any protracted period is a severe strain. Illness breeds fancies, not all of them considerate. Not a happy youth,
ever
:
introspective – an ‘introvert’ in the cant term of our time. But still meaning well; and, oh yes, endeavouring not to give way when – when in company. My sister never really liked him, either. Not at all. But then, she was the prey of conventions that are yet for some, perhaps, a safeguard.
We
shared the same interests, of course – he and I. Our arrangement was based on that. He had his own views, but was at times, oh yes’ – he filled his glass again – ‘exceedingly obstinate about them. He had little
staying
power. He began to fumble, to hesitate, to question, to fluster himself – and me, too, for that matter – at the very moment perhaps when we were arriving at an excessively interesting
juncture
.

‘You know the general process, of course?’ He had glanced up over his food at me, but not in order to listen to any answer I might have given. ‘It is this’ – and he forthwith embarked on a long and tedious discourse concerning the sweet uses of the planchette, of automatic writing,
table-rapping
, the hidden slate, ectoplasm, and all the other – to me rather
disagreeable
– paraphernalia of the spiritualistic
séance.
Nothing I could say or do, not even unconcealed and deliberate yawning, had the least effect upon Mr Bloom’s fluency. ‘Lung trouble’ appeared to have been the primary cause of his secretary’s final resignation. But if the unfortunate young man had night after night been submitted to the experience that I was now
enduring
, exasperation and boredom alone would have accounted for it. How on earth indeed, I asked myself, could he have endured Mr Bloom so long.

I ceased to listen. The cascade of talk suddenly came to an end. Mr Bloom laid his hands on either side of his dessert plate and once more fixed me in silence under his glasses. ‘You, yourself, have possibly dabbled a little in my hobby?’ he enquired.

I had indeed. In my young days my family had possessed an elderly female friend – a Miss Algood. She had been one of my mother’s
bridesmaids
,
and it was an unwritten law in our household that all possible
consideration
and affection should be shown to her in all circumstances. She, poor soul, had come down in the world – until indeed she had come down at last to one small room on the top floor in lodgings in Westbourne Park. She was gaunt, loquacious, and affectionate; and she had a consuming interest in the other world. I hear her now: ‘On the other side, my dear Charles.’ ‘Another plane, Charles.’ ‘When I myself pass over.’ It is curious; she was absolutely fearless and quixotically independent.

For old sake’s sake, and I am afraid for very little else, I used to go to tea with her occasionally. And we would sit together, the heat welling up out of the sun-struck street outside her window; and she would bring out the hateful little round Victorian table, and the wine-glass and the cardboard alphabet; and we would ask questions of the unseen, the mischievous and the half-crazy concerning the unknowable; and she would become flushed and excited,
her lean hands trembling, while she urged me now to empty my mind, and now, to concentrate! And though I can honestly say I never deliberately tampered with that execrable little wine-glass in its wanderings over the varnished table; and though she herself never, so far as I could detect, deliberately cooked the messages it spelt out for us; we enjoyed astonishing revelations. Revelations such as an intelligent monkey or parrot might invent – yet which by any practical test proved utterly valueless.

These ‘spiritistic’ answers to our cross-examination were at the same time so unintelligibly intelligent, and yet so useless and futile, that I had been cured once and for all of the faintest interest in ‘the other side’ – thus
disclosed
I mean. If anything, in fact, the experience had even a little tarnished the side Mr Bloom now shared with me.

For this reason alone his first mention of the subject had almost
completely
taken away my appetite for his chicken, his jelly and his champagne. After all, that ‘other side’s’ border-line from which, according to the poet, no traveller returns, must be a good many miles longer even than the wall of China, and not
all
its gates can lead to plains of peace or paradise or even of mere human endurableness.

I explained at last to Mr Bloom that my interest in spiritualism was of the tepidest variety. Alas, his prominent stone-blue eyes – lit up as they were by this concentrated candle-light – incited me to
be more emphatic than I intended. I told him I detested the whole subject. ‘I am convinced,’ I assured him, ‘that if the messages, communications, whatever you like to call them, that you get that way are anything else than the babblings and mumblings of sub-consciousness – a deadly dubious term, in itself – then they are
probably
the work of something or somebody even more “sub” than that.’

Convinced! I knew, of course, practically nothing at first hand about the subject – Miss Algood, poor soul, was only the fussiest and flimsiest of
amateurs – but ignorance, with a glimmer of intuition, perhaps gives one assurance. ‘Whatever I have heard,’ I told him flatly, ‘from
that
source – of the future, I mean, which awaits us when we get out of this body of ours, Mr Bloom, fills me with nothing but regret that this life is not the end of everything. I don’t say that you get
no
where, even by that route, and I don’t say that you mayn’t get further some day than you intend, but,’ I stupidly blustered on, ‘my own personal opinion is that the whole business, so
conducted
, is a silly and dangerous waste of time.’

His eyes never wavered, he lowered his head by not so much as the
fraction
of an inch, and then, as if in an aside, his lips hardly stirring, he
ejaculated
‘Quite so, but not exactly
n
o
where, it may be.’

And then, as I sat looking at him – it is difficult to put it into words – his face ‘went out’ so to speak; it became a face (not only abandoned but)
forsaken
, vacant, and as if uncurtained too, bleak and mute as a window. The unspeculating eyes remained open, one inert hand lay on the table beside his plate, but he, Mr Bloom, was gone. And for perhaps two minutes I myself sat on there, in the still clear candle-light of that festal board, in a
solitude
I do not covet to experience again. Yet – as I realized even then – Mr Bloom had succeeded in this miserable manoeuvre merely by a trick. The next instant his bluish eyes became occupied, his face took life, and he once again looked out at me with a leer of triumph, an almost coquettish vanity, though he blinked a little as if the light offended him, and as if he were trying to conceal the fact that he had not much appreciated the scene or state which he had come
from.

He gave me no time to reflect on this piece of buffoonery. ‘So, so,’ he was informing me, ‘shutters up or shutters down, we are what we are; and all that you have been saying, my dear Mr Dash, amuses me. Extraordinary! Most amusing! Illuminating! Quite so! Quite so! Capital! You tell me that you know nothing about the subject. Precisely. And that it is silly and dangerous. Ah, yes! And why not? Dangerous! Well, one word in your ear. Here, my dear sir, we are in the very thick of it; a positive hotbed. But if there is one course I should avoid,’ his eyes withdrew themselves, and the thick glasses blazed into the candle-light once more, ‘it would be that of taking any personal steps to initiate you into – into our mysteries. No; I shall leave matters completely to themselves.’

He had scarcely raised his voice; his expression had never wavered; he continued to smile at me; only his thick fingers trembled a little on the
tablecloth
. But he was grey with rage. It seemed even that the scalp of his head had a little raised the hair on its either side, so intense was his resentment.

‘A happy state – ignorance, Mr Dash. That of our first parents.’

And then, like a fool, I flared up and mentioned Miss Algood. He listened, steadily smiling.

‘I see. A superannuated novice, a would-be professional medium,’ he insinuated at last with a shrug of his great heavy shoulders. ‘You pay your money and you take your choice. Pooh! Banal!’

I hotly defended my well-meaning sentimental old friend.

‘Ah, indeed, a retired governess! An – an old maid!’ and once more his insolence nearly mastered him. ‘Have no fear, Mr Dash, she is not on
my
visiting list. There are deeps, and vasty deeps.’

With that he thrust out a hand and snatched up the chicken bone that lay on my plate.

‘Come out there!’ he called baldly. ‘Here,
you
!’
His head dipped out of sight as he stooped; and a yellowish dog – with a white-gleaming sidelong eye – of which up to the present I had seen or heard no sign, came
skulking
out from under a chair in the corner of the room to enjoy its evening meal. For awhile only the crunching of teeth on bones broke the silence.

‘Greedy, you! You glutton!’ Mr Bloom was cajoling him. ‘Aye, but where’s Steve? An animal’s intelligence, Mr Dash’ – his voice floated up to me from under the other side of the table – ‘is situated in his belly. And even when one climbs up to human prejudices one usually detects as primitive a source.’

For an instant I could make no reply to this pleasantry. He took
advantage
of the pause to present me with a smile, and at the same moment filled a little tulip-shaped glass for me with green Chartreuse.