Short Stories 1927-1956 (50 page)

The House

The House
*

Having ascended the three semi-circular damp-darkened steps into his porch, Mr Asprey slipped his latch-key into its lock with a peculiar
disrelish
. He was utterly tired, exhausted – finished. Yet nothing, it seemed, could persuade his fevered mind to desist from its futile activities, although its one need was to be at rest …

In a few brief hours he would be compelled to surrender this very key, since he would be leaving the house he knew so well: finally, if not ‘for good’. Everything had been made ready for his departure. His two maidservants, the ample Emily and the angular Ada, having muffled the
furniture
with their sepulchral dust-sheets, and left their charge neat and seemly had departed but a few hours before, bound for their new situations. How odd a destiny!

Mr Asprey, being much older than either of them, had, he assumed, deeper roots. At daybreak it would be
his
turn, and as yet he was by no means certain of any particular ‘place’. Indeed of recent years he had given little thought to this eventuality. He had merely stayed on.

And now his eviction was no longer a question of tomorrow and
tomorrow
and tomorrow. Why indeed should he ‘wait’ until then? And yet, taken for all in all, this house of his had proved a pleasant one; peculiar here and there in ‘style’ perhaps, yet not wildly eccentric; commodious yet
compact
, a heritage adjusted to his private purposes, fairly central and yet secluded. He had of course seen and envied residences with amenities more charming – a poor excuse for having neglected his own! But renovation had proved impracticable, and repairs far from satisfactory. In what sense and in what degree it actually
belonged
to him remained one of its many
mysteries
. Taxes fell due and he had been compelled to meet them. But of rent – hardly a peppercorn; of definite agreement, contract, in early life so
frequently
referred to by his spiritual pastors and masters – not a trace. If
positive
landlord there were (himself perhaps the architect) Mr Asprey of late years had seldom ‘called on’ him, even in a merely metaphorical sense. And now – well, the one thing certain was that he had been given notice to quit.

Midnight had struck; the stars of the morning, though faintly hazed with a drift of dove-like cloud, were already traversing the heavens. In a little while it would be winter dawn. He had always hated change, and resented decay. Nevertheless destiny was spudding at his tap root.

The door ajar, and finger still on key, he turned reluctantly to look back. He had been wandering for hours alone in the darkness, and now he gazed
forsakenly and forlornly at the gentle familiar prospect – the wooded
down ward
slope, the faint line of low hills towards the south in the thin
illumination
of the night, and away, beyond the far horizon line, a soundless sea. The whole world was all but deathly still; and what weak fickle wind there was had lately changed its direction. The dark was turning colder.

And still – almost as if he were dubious whether he were being deceived by dream or wide awake – Mr Asprey continued to ponder. However sharply he mistrusted the term, he realized that he had been a little
psychic
of late: that, prey of foreboding, he had been living much too closely secluded (even for him) in his own mind. His staid old family doctor,
notoriously
incompetent at any such extremity as this, had but yesterday
morning
given him up. A prying probing alienist, more skilful in analyzing human puddingstone than quartz, might even have declared him a trifle ‘mental’. The notion amused Mr Asprey. Convinced of his own security, and aware that in these hazy matters silence is best, he had always enjoyed being a trifle mental. Partly perhaps for this reason he had no acute hankering to re-enter his house. He hated all good-byes. They entailed not only leaving but being left. Still, only the rankest discourtesy would admit of his posting off from so habitual and, despite its numerous defects and restrictions, so genial a residence with none; not even a grieved
adieu
,
an ironic
au
revoir.
And there was so much to say good-bye
to
!
Houses, as the years collect,
become
densely populated. This is especially apparent, Mr Asprey meditated, when they are about to be left vacant; and memories vividly revived may prove stubborn to exorcise.

They resemble a garden once beloved if seldom weeded, its wilder parts, its transitory solitudes, nearest to the heart and to the imagination. Tears cannot now refresh it, or sighs stir its seeded grasses, and the pitcher is broken at the well. This was the sad and enfeebling fact – Mr Asprey was being victimized by his past. What folly! Since the future would see to his own interment, why not let that remain buried? ‘Is thy servant a dog?’ Of recent months, moreover – though often in a perfunctory fashion – it had been Mr Asprey’s odd custom to ‘go over’ his house before retiring for the night. He had become almost timidly apprehensive of fire, indeed of any ‘act of God’; and he had acquired a belated passion for being tidy. Few hours for this were now left to him. He must make the most of them.

First, then, he would descend into the kitchen if merely to make sure that his breakfast would be ready for him at about half-past seven. Then he would go on his rounds, even more attentively and systematically than he usually did: Who goes there?
Qui
vive
?
How fortunate that this was so clearly not an occasion for electric light; since it is not only the most
execrable
of illuminants to be ‘mental’ by and in, but, owing to pure prejudice, Mr Asprey had refrained from having it installed in his ancestral home.
He might be in the nature of an introvert, but he was not a spy on himself. He had always enjoyed using his eyes, but seldom with the intention of showing anything or anybody up. He abhorred ‘high lights’.

He withdrew the key, groped his way into the house, lit the candle which he had left ready in its old dish-shaped brass holder on a table, and shut the door. For a few moments he stood listening to the tardy and stentorian
Now-then:
Now-then
of his grandfather’s clock, then made his way to the back parts of the house and down the worn stone steps into the kitchen quarters. What mice were abroad at once scampered away with alacrity to warn their housemates that he was approaching: a few sluggish cockroaches were departing at leisure with the same tidings. Mr Asprey scanned them an instant to make sure that they were real – aware at the same moment of the surmise that his next abode might be frequented by another species of vermin – then glanced about him. Everything was prepared. Everything was in order. That, of course, was Emily’s doing.

Half the long speckless deal table was covered with a charming chequered tablecloth; the mound under the tea-cloth was without doubt a loaf of bread; the milk was creaming; and there the toast-rack, and the butter in its almost lordly dish. A conical coffee-pot dominated the neighbouring stove, for in spite of silly antiquated aversions, Mr Asprey had been unable to evade gas. And two plump new-laid eggs stood side by side in their cups upon a plate. From their calm featureless faces they openly surveyed Mr Asprey, and he them. Human existence, they seemed to be preaching,
resembles
an egg. In spite of a myriad apparent replicas it is unique,
self-contained
. Break the shell, you cannot repair it again. Some eggs are good, others are horrid. The stale are an affliction to God and man. And not every specimen need necessarily harbour a chick. And as he stood thus quietly looking, he was also listening. It was as though the vacant house over his head were an echoing shell, and he its hermit crab.

Otherwise there was no reason to linger here; none whatever. Well, he would ascend to the attics and, room by room, proceed slowly down again. The actual order mattered little, except that it is perhaps the doors of a house that should be examined last. They are the usual way out, and in.

Stair by stair went up poor weary Mr Asprey; but, come to the attics, made no attempt to enumerate, or to individualize the many Emilys and Adas who had occupied them each in turn. He had always prided himself on being by intention at least a righteous master. He had never deliberately thought of Emilys or Adas as being of else than flesh and blood. He knew we are all human.

Nonetheless he could clearly recall one or two of whose felicity when they were under his roof he now felt a little uncertain. And in retrospect even a discourtesy may seem a crime. Nor, he noticed, had he hitherto been aware
either that his last Emily had had no mat on her old oilcloth, or that her ewer was chipped; that a castor was wanting to Ada’s bed and that there was no fire-grate in her room. Pampering, oh no! But he
might
have
inquired
, Are you quite happy here? And if he
could
stay on a little, he would see that their successors … Alone on this uppermost landing close under the roof – a trickle of water ding-donging there like funeral bells in the old lead cistern bespeaking a leaky tap below – he could see into either attic just as he pleased. Each in turn, he solemnly bowed to them – it was the most he could manage – and went on.

As fleeting a look into the lumber room also sufficed. It would never do to botanize long there! But at the closed door of the room at the foot of the top staircase he paused indeed. It had been of old his nursery; and he was aware how easy it is to be otiose concerning one’s early years. One is so seldom in retrospect a Child of the World. He opened the door and looked in – high fender, coloured pictures in their maple frames,
rocking-horse
, box of bricks. What dreadful emblems objects may become! And although, with that inward eye of his, which had recently been so active, he saw for a vivid instant his old nurse sitting beside the empty grate – slippered feet, stooping head, and clicking needles all complete – she
immediately
vanished. And instead, he was looking at a small boy, who was now exactly as far away in time as she was; though much further away in most things else.

He was sitting in a bare empty-looking room at a desk, stained with ink, and scarred with letters cut in the wood; and out of his blue eyes and plain face, pen between fingers, he was gazing through the window and over the low brick wall beyond it. It was a spring day out there in the meadows, and the towering clouds with their scarves of rain had but just drifted from over the face of the sun. So that at this moment the whole scene was lit – bright grass, green-beaded trees, tumbling stream – with a miraculously radiant panorama of delicate light. Mr Asprey didn’t look at things like that now, or rather no April morning ever enravished him like that now. His psychic skull must have contracted. It was as if all things were lovely if only you
could
see them – and in the proper light.

Yet in the very midst of this ecstatic reverie of looking, this inky boy – he realized – knew how intensely unhappy he was. He was homesick; he was a muff; he was being kept in; and he deserved to be. Nonetheless, at sight of the child, Mr Asprey had become aware of a peculiar compassion.
Unhappy
the creature might be, but there was no sign that he knew that he himself – whether unhappy or not – would soon be gone for ever. Also, Mr Asprey was even more perfectly confident that in that young distant mind there was not a vestige of regret that when its owner grew up to be a man he would remain childless. How odd then that at the precise moment when
he was abandoning his house for good, he should suddenly be convicting himself of the charge of deliberate heirlessness! To be leaving positively no one behind him who might some day be doing as he was doing now – well, he did not at all enjoy the look of the black cap that topped the bewigged, long, grey, thin-nosed judicial countenance already engaged in trying his case. Black cap apart, even the severest judge upon the bench, glancing up at his prisoner, may nod with a cold, ‘Be calm, take your time; I am
listening
. One word even yet might put you right.’

This in mind, Mr Asprey promptly took his little notebook out of his pocket – battered and dingy after more than eleven months’ wear – and jotted down: ‘Secure as soon as may be a natural, pleasant young woman, quiet, non-temperamental, easy, happy-looking, and in need of a good home – to ensure a son and heir. Leave her practically everything. This appears to be rather urgent.’ It appeared to be so urgent that Mr Asprey added his initials:
A.A.A.
Even in the act of writing he noticed, too, but did not stay to consider it, that a quite definite young woman for this purpose had emerged out of the groves of memory, was now in his mind’s eye. But since he could not have been more than eight years old when she stole his heart away, not even a line in the Agony Column of
The
Times,
that had so little to do with time absolute, would now be likely to have any effect. It was a pity. He was afraid it was now too late to be doing even ‘his best’.