The Way Back
Rather more than two thousand miles away Major Grant was probably buttonholing another friend. “It’s just how you look at it,” he would say; “the fellows are always bragging about Paris, but I say England’s good enough for me.” He used to visit a brothel in Savile Row; there were scenes of luxurious abandonment in close proximity to the select tailors. He would ring up on the phone and make an appointment, “Three this afternoonlittle’ then explain rather guardedly what he wanted, guardedly because you never knew when the police might listenin and to procure a woman was a criminal offence. “Young,” he would say, “mind it’s young”; “Fair or dark?” the maid would say at the other end and sometimes Major Grant replied “fair” and sometimes “dark”, according as his passion urged him at the moment towards his fair or dark angel. Then it was as well to add a few details, “Something rather lean,” and in another mood, “Curved but not too curved.” He didn’t, he told me, find the place very satisfactory; shop-girls and nursery-maids adding a little to their wages on the slant were pitiably lacking in finesse. I think it was the theatre rather than the play which exercised its fascination over Major Grant; he liked the idea of ordering a woman, as one might order a joint of meat, according to size and cut and price. There was a wealth of dissatisfaction in his indulgence; he knew the world, and all the time he took his revenge for the poor opinion he had of it. Presently he shifted his custom to an address in Hanover Street, and faded out of my knowledge, though occasionally the old voice came to me insinuatingly across the Corner House tables. “Like a pig in a poke. That’s what I enjoy. Never know what you are going to get.” “And if they were not quite up to mark?” “I take what comeslittle’ the voice would say, “I always accept ‘em.”
“Having to construct something upon which to rejoice.”
Miss Kilvane lived in the Cotswolds in a strange high house like a Noah’s ark with a monkey-puzzle tree and a step-ladder of terraces. The rooms were all tiny and of the same shape, like the rows of rooms in an advertising exhibition or in the brothel quarter of an eastern city. The rooms were packed with china ornaments, like Staffordshire and Woolworth pieces and Goss presents from Bournemouth. She was a follower of the Regency prophetess, Joanna Southcott, had a manuscript collection of her” prophecies, two counterpanes the prophetess had made, seals and locks of hair and a Communion glass engraved with little ludicrous symbolical figures. She was old and innocent and terribly sure of herself; she took down Joanna’s life from the ghost’s lips. At tea a mouse ran backwards and forwards in a cupboard behind Miss Kilvane’s back; I could see it moving through a crack, between the tins of rather dry biscuits. The old lady, with clear pale-blue eyes, wore an old-fashioned dress of faded mauve and horn-rimmed glasses; in the drawing-room there was a portrait of Joanna, china ornaments, antimacassars on horsehair chairs, a wireless set and a Radio Times. She spoke with complete confidence of the millennium which would come in the next fifty years; she described it in mundane detail. “I have always wanted to see Jerusalem.” She showed me her volumes of manuscript, prophecies taken down by Joanna’s servant, sometimes in doggerel verse. “Impostors can copy the prose,” she said, “but not the poetry. People go away and think they can write like that too. Gentlemen send me the strangest sensual verses.” She spent a long time looking for someone to publish her life of Joanna. She made her way down Paternoster Row and saw a publisher’s office called Sion House; it really looked, she said, as if inspiration had brought her to the right place. She told a man behind a counter that she had brought the manuscript of Joanna’s life and he went away and never came back. “It’s the worst snub I’ve ever received,” she said, but nothing could deter her. She was so innocent and in a way she was so worldly; she printed the life at her own expense; she founded a press to do it. Maori followers of Joanna sent her a motor-car, but she couldn’t learn to drive it; it lay in a garage in the village. A pity; it would have been useful, for since the Lindbergh Baby Case (she kept her old clear horn-rimmed eyes sharply on the world) she had made the discovery that even babies could be “sealed” for Joanna. Her companion was in the north at the time sealing babies. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, turning over the Radio Times. Before I left she sold me a pound of tea “from my plantations”; she meant she had some shares in the company; she thought I would like it; the blend was very soothing. It was hot in the small shut rooms and the mice were restless. I climbed down the terraces to the road, past the monkey-puzzle tree, and she watched me go, perched up beside the Noah’s ark with the lonely convictions she shared with the Maoris. She had been made to pay two hundred pounds for her relics; the printing press had passed out of her hands; but she had an immense conviction of success. ‘They tell me the movement is making great progress in the Oxford colleges.”
Mr. Charles Seitz was the son of a doctor. He was born in Bombay two years before the Mutiny and he died in 1933 frozen to death in a cottage on a bed of straw. He was the kind of figure that attracts legends. Even his real name was lost in common speech, so that he was known among the Campden villagers as Charlie Sykes, as he padded down the High Street bent double under a weight of incredible rags, clutching a tall stick, his bearded Apostle face bent to the pavement, his eyes flickering sideways, aware of everyone who passed. He was suspiciously like a stage madman; he played up to strangers, bellowing and shaking his stick, so that they edged away a little daunted. Sometimes in summer he went berserk in the market-place, shouting and shaking all alone in a desert of indifference; no one took him seriously, least of all himself. He earned money from Americans with Kodak’s, snapped picturesquely in front of the ancient butter market.
There were two rival stories of how his madness started. One was romantic, an unhappy love-affair. The other was probably the true one, that his brain gave way from overwork for a medical degree. Once an inhabitant of Campden spoke in his hearing of an operation; Charlie Sykes,beating his chest, described the operation in detail. That was how he would speak, gruffly and disconsolately, beating his chest. He had a grudge against God. “There He is,” he said to me, “up there. We think a lot about Him, but He doesn’t think about us. He thinks about Himself. But we’ll be up there one day and we won’t let Him stay.”
He had an extraordinary vitality. There was a time when five men could not hold him, and once when two policemen tried to arrest him at Evesham for begging, he flung them both over a hedge. He walked several times a week into Evesham; it was eight miles each way by road, but he didn’t go by road. He knew every gap in every hedge for miles around, and once two men camping in a field above Broadway woke up to see his face in the tent-opening. “Naughty,” he said and disappeared.
He had banked several hundred pounds which he never touched. The only work he ever did, after his reason went, was cattle-droving. He begged, if that word can be applied to his friendly demands, “Now, what about potatoes? Or a cabbage? Well then, turnips? What have you done with all that dough you had yesterday?” I never saw him in a shop, but on Friday mornings he toured the dustbins in the long High Street, turning over their contents in a critical unembarrassed way like a lady handling silk remnants on a bargain counter.
His cottage in Broad Campden had two rooms with one broken chair and a pile of straw in the corner and sixteen pairs of old shoes. He stopped a sweep in the village once and asked him to clean his chimney, repeating the one word, “Shilling-shillinglittle’ The sweep began to clean, but he couldn’t finish, in the airless room and the appalling stench. But the stench didn’t keep out the cold of a hard winter, and when a policeman broke in because no smoke had him seen from the chimney, he found Mr. Charles Seitz frozen to death on his straw in the upper room. They didn’t care to undress him; he was so verminous that the fleas jumped on them from his wrists; they put round his shoulders the web with which coffins are lowered into the grave, and dragged him head first down the stairs. Then they crammed him quickly into his coffin, rags and all, and nailed him down. It was terrible weather for grave-diggers, the ground hard enough for an electric drill six inches down.