Nightmare

As Mr Knayle’s car disappeared from her view round the curve of Downview Road, once more the gramophone blared triumphantly the long-drawn closing note of ‘I can’t give you anything but love, Baby’. The needle slid off the record and the abrupt succeeding silence aroused her from her never-wearying contemplation of the passing traffic. But the disturbance caused her no resentment, though for two hours past, without intermission, at intervals of a few minutes, precisely similar disturbances had called her away from her window. Jamming a cigarette between her full, bedaubed lips, she flitted with hurrying eagerness out of the kitchen and along the little central corridor of the flat to where the gramophone stood on a small landing or platform at one side of the three steps descending from the corridor to the hall-door. Having started the needle once again upon its pilgrimage over the worn record, she wound up the instrument recklessly and then stood for some moments listening, her bold hazel eyes narrowed to exclude the smoke of her cigarette.

She was a slim, shapely girl of twenty-four or five and, despite her hardy allure, her powdered skin, and her salved lips, a noticeably good-looking young creature, obsessed by her own personal appearance, inefficient and lazy, equipped with the mentality of a Dunpool slum-child of ten, and possessed by a never-flagging determination to extract a bit of fun from life. At that moment, as has been said, despite the unavoidable monotony of the means, she was extracting a quite satisfying bit of it. As she stood listening, blissfully unaware of the grim fate whose scissors were already opening above her sleek little head, she smiled with vivid pleasure.

Stooping to the gramophone again—it rested on the bare boards of the little landing, whose carpet had been rolled back—she laid a finger against the edge of the record, increasing and relaxing its pressure alternately. The melody dissolved into hideous ululations, wailing and howling in dolorous insanity. She laughed softly while she continued this manipulation for a minute or so and then climbed over the balusters—relics of the former interior staircase of the house, removed at the time of the conversion—which enclosed the landing on two sides. Bracing herself, she sprang into the air and descended upon the boards with her full weight. The hollow, echoing reverberations which resulted—for the flooring beneath her high-heeled shoes consisted merely of match-boarding—widened her smile. She reproduced it with deliberation half a dozen times, then wound up the gramophone again, restarted the needle, climbed back over the balusters and, crossing the passage, entered the flat’s sitting-room.

In there Marjory Prossip, a heavily-built, sullen-faced young woman of thirty, sat bent over the construction of a silk underskirt. She turned her large, elaborately-waved head as Agatha entered and rose silently from her chair. For a moment of preparation the two faced one another in the middle of the room, then, together, they sprang ceilingward and descended upon the carpet with a violence which set the windows a-rattle. This athletic feat having been repeated several times, Miss Prossip reseated herself with her work and Agatha returned humming to the kitchen, pausing along the way to start the gramophone once more. No word had passed between them. Agatha had not troubled to remove her cigarette from her lips.

For five minutes, measured by a clock upon which she kept a watchful eye, Miss Prossip plied her needle industriously. She rose then and, joined by Agatha, hopped on one foot along the corridor, into a bedroom at the end of it, around the bedroom three times, and then back along the corridor to the sitting-room, where, rather blown, she resumed her sewing. No slightest change of expression manifested itself in her sulky, sallow face while she performed these curious gymnastics, which she executed with the solemnity of a ritual. In the agile Agatha, however, the awkward heaviness of her broad-beamed superior evoked a special gaiety. As she hopped behind Miss Prossip’s labouring clumsiness, she giggled happily.

Another five minutes passed and again Agatha entered the sitting-room, having again attended to the gramophone. Miss Prossip arose and faced her silently. Then, together, they sprang ceilingwards.

Some time later Mr Knayle had the curiosity to make some enquiries about Miss Prossip. He learned that she had always been regarded by people who knew her as of perfectly normal intelligence and general behaviour, had been educated at the local High School, (a celebrated one) where she had been considered by her mistress a rather clever girl, if somewhat difficult and moody, was passionately fond of music and played the violin with talent, and, in general, had been considered a perfectly normal and sensible person. Mr Knayle himself had frequently encountered her in the front garden and exchanged ‘good mornings’ and ‘good afternoons’ with her. His personal estimate of her, until the outbreak of the present hostilities, had been that she was a perfectly sane, if exceedingly unattractive, young woman. Slightly more intent observation of her, in the course of the past few weeks, had afforded him no reason to revise this opinion. Nothing that he ever subsequently learned about her or her family history ever afforded him the slightest reason to revise it. And so the fact is to be accepted that Marjory Prossip was an intelligent, well-educated, well-behaved, industrious, quiet girl of thirty, an accomplished violinist, and very fond of the kind of music which abhors tunes and never says the same thing twice.

3

In the sitting-room of the first-floor flat, directly beneath those four prancing feet, Simon Whalley sat at a small oval table near the open windows. He was tallish, black-haired, grey-eyed, like Mr Knayle, clean-shaven, in his middle-forties and rather noticeably thin. The well-cut lounge suit which he wore fitted him excellently and yet had the effect of having grown a size too large for him. On the table were an ash-tray, half full of cigarette ends, and a writing-block. Three sheets had been detached from the block and lay crumpled-up on the carpet beside his chair—a severely un-easy chair, imported from the dining-room. On a fourth sheet, beneath the carefully-written heading ‘CHAPTER XVII’, he was drawing with a fountain-pen a design of intricate and perfectly unmeaning arabesques.

Over this task, which had occupied him for the past half-hour, he was bent in concentrated absorption, thickening a curve here with nicety, rounding off an angle there, finding always a new joining to make or a new space into which to crowd another little lop-sided scroll or lozenge. At regular intervals, automatically, his left hand removed a cigarette from his lips, tapped it against the ashtray and replaced it. Whenever he lighted a new cigarette from the old one, his eyes made a curiously methodical and concerned journey round the room, beginning always at the window-curtain to his left hand and travelling always round to the armchair, which stood just beside the oval table, at his right. As they made this circuit slowly, they examined each object upon which they rested with an anxious intentness. From the armchair they glanced always to a small, stopped clock on the mantelpiece and then returned, slowly and reluctantly, to the writing-block.

The room was a large, rather low-ceilinged one, quite charming to the cursory eye with its biscuit-coloured wall-paper, bright carpet and curtains and rugs and chintzes, rows of dwarf book-cases, easy chairs and bowls of roses. It was sufficiently high up to escape serious molestation by the noise of Downview Road’s voluminous summer traffic. Its windows looked out across the road, over the wide, pleasantly-timbered expanse of Rockwood Down. It was a friendly, cheerful, comfortable room, and Whalley hated it and everything in it with a hatred that was all but horror.

As he sat elaborating his futile design, his mutinous brain, refusing stubbornly to perform the functions which had once been its delight and relief, persisted in exploring, for the hundredth-thousandth time, the emotion of nauseated distrust and apprehension which the room now evoked in him whenever he entered it or even looked into it. No aim directed this vague, depressed analysis; no satisfaction or hope of remedy resulted from it. It proceeded always, however, he had observed—for it had long ago become a subconscious activity, so persistent as to attract his uneasy attention—along the same line.

It began always with the furtive, secret dinginess and decay that underlay the room’s superficial brightness and freshness—began, oddly, always with the same window-curtain.

Pretty curtains. But they had been up for two years now. When you shook them you found that they were thick with dust. They had faded a lot. There was a small tear in the left-hand one, at the bottom. Bogey-Bogey’s work.

The windows. It must be two months at least since the windows of the flat had been cleaned. Seven-and-six … but they must be done. A nuisance, the window-cleaner, in and out of the rooms with his bucket and his sour-smelling cloths and his curious watching eyes. And then there was that broken sash-cord. And the cracked pane.

The roll-top desk. Lord, what a litter it was in! All those pigeon-holes … full of dust and rubbish. What an uncomfortable brute of a thing it was to sit at. Much too high and too narrow. And your legs were always cramped. He had paid fourteen pounds for it, and had never succeeded in writing a sentence at it …

The chintz covers. They had faded badly, too. All of them wanted cleaning, especially those of the armchairs, which were perfectly filthy …

A leg of that arm-chair wanted repairing.

The rain last winter found its way through the wall up there, above the fireplace, cracked the plaster, and stained the paper. That watercolour below the stain had begun to mildew and blotch …

The fireplace would have to be seen to before the autumn; its back had burnt out, and a lot of the tiles had cracked. The chimney must be swept, too, before the autumn. That would mean that the whole room would have to be turned topsy-turvy in preparation for the sweep and cleaned right out when he had finished. A woman would have to be got in to do that job. Ten shillings. And the room unusable for the whole day.

The carpet. All right until you looked closely. Then you saw that it was dotted all over with little stains and thickly covered with Bogey-Bogey’s hairs. It would have to come up and go to the cleaners, also. And one couldn’t use the room without a carpet.

The Crown Derby set on the Welsh dresser. Thick with dust. A two hours’ job to collect it, piece by piece, and carry it out to the kitchen and wash and dry it and carry it back and arrange it on the dresser again. He had smashed a cup last time he had done that job, three or four—no, it must be six months ago—before last Christmas—and spoiled the set. Clumsy brute, always smashing things. It had worried him ever since, whenever he had looked at it, to think that the set was a cup short.

The portable … God, how he hated the wireless now—the fatuous voices of the announcers—the maudlin, insatiable music … Music … God—

All those infernal dusty, stale, useless old books. Three or four hundred pounds worth of rubbish—one probably wouldn’t get five pounds for the lot if one tried to sell them and get rid of them. Neither he nor Elsa had opened one of them for years. And what a business it had been moving them about. What a business it would be when they would have to be moved again. And they would have to be moved again.

The settee. Ruined by the dog’s paws. That must be re-covered—for the dog’s paws to filthy again.

The rugs. All faded, all soiled and stained and ragged at the fringes. More work for the cleaners.

That armchair. The springs gone and a castor off. He had been intending to fix that castor for over a year.

Expense—disturbance—trouble. And all for nothing. Everything was wearing out—going. Nothing would stop its going. In a few months, after all that fuss and upset, everything would be dirty and dingy again—older—shabbier. Hopeless to try to keep things decent with clouds of dust coming in from the road all day long and a dog messing about from morning to night and no servant. Hopeless—mere waste of time. Time—God, how the time flew away. The sitting-room alone took a couple of hours to do—even scamping the job. And next morning it looked as if it hadn’t been done for weeks.

And yet one couldn’t live in a piggery—one couldn’t allow Elsa to. All those confounded things must be cleaned. All those confounded small jobs must be done and paid for.

For that matter, the room would have to be done up very soon—ceiling, wallpaper, and paintwork. All of them were in a bad way, and would be definitely shabby if they were let go until the spring. If the sitting-room was done, the passage and the bathroom would have to be done at the same time. One job must be made of the lot—one upset. More argument and discussion and difficulty with that surly, tricky brute of a landlord—more worry. Probably he would refuse again to do the work. Even if he did consent to do it, it would mean all sorts of nuisance—the greater part of the flat out of action—workmen about it all day long—noise, smells, mess. Elsa and he would have to sleep and meal at an hotel or somewhere. More expense. And one or other of them would have to be about the flat while the workmen were in it. Lord, what a nuisance.

How pretty the room had looked when they had settled down in the flat two years ago. How sure he had felt, that first afternoon in April, 1929, when he had seated himself at the just-delivered roll-top desk, that, in that friendly, comfortable, peaceful work-room, his brain would come back again, tranquilly and obediently, to the playing of its old tricks.

That damnable, cheerful-faced clock on the mantel-piece. How many hours of bitter defeat and impotent self-reproach it had hurried away, eagerly, irrevocably. For two years of hours, each a little swifter than the last, each a little nearer to panic-speed, it had hustled him and bustled him and mocked his flurry and his failure. Cursed, smug thing … Extraordinary how loud its faint tick had grown—how long he had failed to detect its power to irritate and distract him—how instant had been the relief when, one afternoon six weeks or so back, a sudden impulse had caused him to jump up from his table and stop it. On that afternoon he had written nearly a whole chapter—the chapter which for over three months had refused to begin itself. In the following three weeks he had succeeded in writing four more chapters, turning out four thousand words a day, still with some difficulty, but regularly. The spell had seemed broken at last. For that brief space the sitting-room had worn again the guise of its old encouraging friendliness. He had taken to hurrying in there after lunch, leaving Elsa to wash up unaided.

And then this damnable, idiotic, maddening trouble with the Prossips had begun—just when there had seemed at last, a hope …

He turned his head towards the door of the room. A thick portière was drawn across it and, actually, the sound of the gramophone was a faint and remote whining. No portière, however, could shut out its real torture, the malice of its persistency; for Whalley’s ears that faint, distant whine was a savage, raucous clamour, hammering at their drums. For a little space he remained, half-turned in his chair, listening to it with rigid intentness. Then, as a heavy thump shook the ceiling above his head he flung down his pen furiously, sprang to his feet, and stood with both hands clenched before his face, glaring upwards.

The paroxysm of anger passed almost instantly—before a second thump followed the first. But he remained for a space surprised by its violence and by its sudden complete obliteration of his self-control. It had produced in him for a moment an absolutely novel sensation—a sensation of being on the point of surrendering his will and his consciousness to some overpowering, hostile, dangerous force. A little like the sensation when one was just about to surrender to an anæsthetic—but much more violent—much more eager to leave behind all the things one knew. A dangerous sensation. For a moment he realised he had been upon the point of shouting—bellowing like a mad animal. He discovered that his legs were trembling a little at the knees and that his hands were still raised absurdly in the air, clenched in front of his face. When he dropped them he looked at them—he had a trick of looking at his hands—he saw that their palms were moist with perspiration.

Ridiculous. Grotesque. Shaking legs and sweating hands. That sort of thing would never do. That sort of thing, he must remember, was just the sort of thing those sluts upstairs hoped he would do—allow the business to get on his nerves and shout and slam doors and bang things about. Thank Heaven he hadn’t shouted. Shout? Good God, he had never shouted at anyone in his life. All along, since this annoyance had begun, he had kept a close watch on himself, a tight grip on his temper. He had gone out of his way to shut doors quietly, to speak more gently to the dog. No slightest symptoms of resentment, he flattered himself, had rewarded those idiots in the top flat for all their trouble. No doubt they kept watch up there, too—listened—always hoping for some sound of anger or retaliation. Well, they had waited in vain—they would wait in vain.

Now, why on earth had that one particular thump had that strange effect upon him. They had been thumping and banging away up there for nearly three weeks now. He had heard hundreds of thumps. At least a hundred times a day, he supposed, he had heard a thump somewhere above his head. There—they were at it again now. But he was able to smile now—felt no anger whatever, merely an inclination to yawn. Yet that one particular thump, no louder than the rest, had swept away from him all knowledge of himself save a desire to shout madly. Funny. Too many cigarettes, probably. The afternoon was stuffy. And, of course, the thing had been going on for three weeks now.

The fountain-pen had rebounded from the surface of the table when he had thrown it down and, falling on the carpet had marked it with a small inkstain. An agitated dismay seized him. He clucked, hurried to the roll-top desk, reduced its disorder to chaos with searching hands, found at last a small piece of blotting-paper in a drawer and hurried back to go down on his knees over the stain. The ink had soaked into the pile of the carpet swiftly, however, and the blotting-paper proved of little avail. He picked up the pen with another cluck, and examined its nib solicitously. It had been Elsa’s first gift to him on the first day of their brief engagement—a pledge of the victorious future it was to have won for them. He smiled wryly as he rose to his feet again; there had been no victories.

Luckily, the pen had escaped damage. Laying it on the table, he tore off the bescrawled sheet of the writing-block and, having collected the crumpled debris from the carpet, rolled the result of his afternoon’s work into a ball and dropped it dejectedly into a waste-paper basket. One more afternoon gone—one more defeat—

Thump.

Furiously his face, its pallor flushing darkly, jerked upwards towards the ceiling. He shouted ragingly, ludicrously.

‘Stop it! Stop it, blast you! Stop it, I say!’

4

In the top flat, as if upon an awaited signal, Bedlam had broken loose. Trampling feet were charging from room to room; doors were banging; furniture was hurtling about; a whistle was screaming; a tray was beating like a war-drum; a bucket was rolling backwards and forwards along the passage. For just an instant after he had realised in stupefaction that his own voice had uttered those three cracked, strangled cries, Whalley had hoped that the noise of the traffic might have drowned them. There had been just an instant of silence save for the traffic and the whine of the gramophone. But then exultant triumph had burst forth above him, preluded by a first long-drawn blast of the whistle. The whistle was new. The enemy had made special preparation for the celebration of victory.

As he stood at the centre of the room, dismayed by his folly, he heard the handle of the door turn and saw the portière ruck and sway inwards as the door opened a little beneath it. He made no movement to draw it aside; for the first time his eyes were unwilling to meet Elsa’s. Lest she should edge her way in, he wiped his face hurriedly with his handkerchief in a vague attempt to obliterate its disturbance. His voice essayed bored amusement.

‘Having rather a field day upstairs, aren’t they?’

‘Beasts. Did you call?’

‘Call? No.’

‘Oh, I thought I heard your voice.’

‘No.’

It was his first lie to her—curt and clumsy. He eyed the portière uneasily, glad that it hid him from her clear, steady gaze. There was no suspicion in her voice when it spoke again, but it waited just too long before it did so. She knew that he had shouted, and that he had told her a lie.

‘You can’t possibly work with that awful row going on. Let’s take Bogey for a walk before tea.’

‘It’s going to rain. It’s raining already. Besides, I must do the kitchen.’

‘But you did it not a week ago, dear. Don’t bother about it today. Let’s chance the rain and go out.’

Yes. She had heard him shouting like a lunatic. He was certain now. Well, bad enough that she should know that he had shouted, but …

He hurried to the portière, pulled it aside and saw the slight, adored figure framed in the aperture of the partially opened door. Her unfathomable, enfolding smile fell upon his ruffled spirit like morning sunlight and banished all its anger and defeat and bitter self-reproach. He caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately before he blurted out his confession.

‘Yes. I did call out. I shouted up to them to stop—like an infernal ass.’

She patted his arm, offering him just excuse.

‘It really is rather awful this afternoon. But we’re going to keep on laughing at it, aren’t we, dear? Let’s go out. The kitchen can go for days still, quite well. And it’s such a job.’

He hesitated, for a moment disposed to yield. But just then, startlingly, the offensive upstairs developed a new activity. Behind Elsa, as she stood facing him in the passage, was the little landing—corresponding to that upon which the Prossips’ gramophone rested—covering in the well of the former staircase. Two of its sides were fenced in by surviving balusters, the other two by ugly partitions of painted boarding, the handiwork of the jobbing contractor who had carried out the ‘conversion’. One of these partitions formed the back of the Prossips’ coal-cellar, the greater part of which descended into the Whalleys’ flat. This frail wall, consisting of a single thickness of match-boarding like the landing’s floor, had suddenly been assailed by a wild bombardment, alarming in its abrupt violence. There was no need to speculate as to the nature of the enemy’s ammunition; each furious blow upon the boards was followed by the unmistakable sound of broken coal falling. Already, where the tonguing of the boarding had split away in places, tricklings of black dust had begun to find their way through, to fall upon the rug covering the Whalleys’ landing.

They stood for a little while staring at this visible invasion which, trifling as it was, held an outrage infinitely more acute than the total volume of all the outrageous noises which had assailed their ears during the past weeks. Elsa laughed at length. But for the first time her sense of humour had failed her, and her laugh was, she knew, a failure.

‘Idiots. Well, they’ll have plenty of slack for the winter. I must rescue my rug.’

She stole on tiptoe to the landing and rolled back the rug out of danger, then stole back to him. ‘I shan’t be a moment getting ready.’

Her husband did not appear to have heard her. He was still staring at the trickling coal-dust with a frowning, calculating absorption that made her catch at his hands anxiously.