The Complete Short Stories (16 page)

It was seldom that Mrs
Jan Cloote opened the door of her own apartment wide enough for anyone to see
inside. This was a habit of the whole family, but they had nothing really to
hide, that one could see. And there Mrs Jan Cloote would stand, with one of the
girls, perhaps, looking over her shoulder, wedged in the narrow doorway, and
the door not twelve inches open. The hall was very dark, and being a frugal
woman, she did not keep a bulb in the hall light, which therefore did not
function.

One day, as I came in, I
saw her little shape, the thin profile and knobbly bun, outlined against the
light within her rooms.

‘Sh-sh-sh,’ she said.

‘Can you come in tonight
for a
little
cup of tea with the others?’ she said in a hushed breath.
And I understood, as I accepted, that the need for the hush had something to do
with the modesty of the proposed party, conveyed in the words, ‘a
little
cup
…’

I knocked on her door
after dinner. Maida opened it just wide enough for me to enter, then closed it
again quickly. Some of the other lodgers were there: a young man who worked in
an office on the docks, and a retired insurance agent and his wife.

Isa, the schoolgirl,
arrived presently. I was surprised to see that she was heavily made up on the
mouth and eyes.

‘Another troopship gone
down,’ stated Isa.

‘Hush, dear,’ said her
mother; ‘we are not supposed to talk about the shipping.’

Mrs Jan Cloote winked at
me as she said this. It struck me then that she was very proud of Isa.

‘An Argentine boat in,’
said Isa.

‘Really?’ said Mrs Jan
Cloote. ‘Any nice chaps?’

The old couple looked at
each other. The young man, who was new to many things, looked puzzled but said
nothing. Maida and Greta, like their mother, seemed agog for news.

‘A lot of nice ones, eh?’
said Maida. She had the local habit of placing the word ‘eh’ at the end of her
remarks, questions and answers alike.

‘I’ll say, man,’ said Isa,
for she also used the common currency, adding ‘man’ to most of the statements
she addressed to man and woman alike.

‘You’ll be going to the
Stardust!’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Won’t you now, Isa?’

‘The Stardust?’ said Mrs
Marais, the insurance agent’s wife. ‘You surely don’t mean the nightclub, man?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Mrs Jan
Cloote in her precise voice. She alone of the family did not use the local
idiom, and in fact her speech had improved since her Somerset days. ‘Why, yes,’
she said, ‘she enjoys herself, why not?’

‘Only young once, eh?’
said the young man, putting ash in his saucer as Mrs Jan Cloote frowned at him.

Mrs Jan Cloote sent
Maida upstairs to fetch some of Isa’s presents, things she had been given by
men; evening bags, brooches, silk stockings. It was rather awkward. What could
one say?

‘They are very nice,’ I
said.

‘This is nothing,
nothing,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, ‘nothing to the things she could get. But she
only goes with the nice fellows.’

‘And do you dance too?’
I inquired of Greta.

‘No, man,’ she said. ‘Isa
does it for us, eh. Isa dances lovely.’

‘You said it, man,’ said
Maida.

‘Ah yes,’ sighed Mrs Jan
Cloote, ‘we’re quiet folk. We would have a dull life of it, if it wasn’t for
Isa.’

‘She needs taking care
of, that child,’ said Mrs Marais.

‘Isa!’ said her mother. ‘Do
you hear Mrs Marais, what she says?’

‘I do, man,’ said Isa. ‘I
do, eh.’

From my room it was
impossible not to overhear all that was going on in the pawnshop, just beneath
my window.

‘I hope it doesn’t
disturb you,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, with a sideways glance at her two elder
daughters.

‘No,’ I thought it best
to say, ‘I don’t hear a thing.’

‘I always tell the
girls,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, ‘that there is nothing to be ashamed of, being a
PB.’

‘PB?’ asked the young
clerk, who had a friend who played the drums in the Police Band.

Mrs Jan Cloote lowered
her voice. ‘A
pawnbroker,’
she informed him rapidly.

‘That’s right,’ said the
young man.

‘There’s nothing to be
ashamed of in it,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘And of Course I’m only down as a PB’s
wife,
not a PB.’

‘We keep the shop
beautiful, man,’ said Maida.

‘Have you seen it?’ Mrs
Jan Cloote asked me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, there’s nothing
to see inside, really,’ she said; ‘but some PB shops are a sight enough. You
should see some of the English ones. The dirt!’

‘Or so I’m told,’ she
added.

‘They
are
very
rough-and-tumble in England,’ I admitted.

‘Why,’ said Mrs Jan
Cloote, ‘have you been inside one?’

‘Oh, yes, quite a few,’
I said, pausing to recollect; ‘… in London, of course, and then there was one
in Manchester, and —’

‘But what for, man?’
said Greta.

‘To pawn things,’ I
said, glad to impress them with my knowledge of their trade. ‘There was my
compass,’ I said, ‘but I never saw
that
again. Not that I ever used the
thing.’

Mrs Jan Cloote put down
her cup and looked round the room to see if everyone had unfortunately heard
me. She was afraid they had.

‘Thank God,’ she said; ‘touch
wood I have never had to do it.’

‘I can’t say that I’ve
ever popped anything, myself,’ said Mrs Marais.

‘My poor mother used to
take things now and again,’ said Mr Marais.

‘I dare say,’ said Mrs
Marais.

‘We get some terrible
scum coming in,’ said the pawnbroker’s wife.

‘I’m going to the PB’s
dinner-dance,’ said Isa. ‘What’ll I way?’ she added, meaning what would she
wear. The girls did not pronounce the final ‘r’ in certain words.

‘You can way your
midnight blue,’ said Greta.

‘No,’ said her mother, ‘no,
no, no. She’ll have to get a new dress.’

‘I’m going to get my hay
cut short,’ announced Isa, indicating her yellow pigtails.

Her mother squirmed with
excitement at the prospect. Greta and Maida blushed, with a strange and greedy
look.

At last the door was
opened a few inches and we were allowed to file out, one by one.

Next morning as usual I
heard Mrs Jan Cloote opening up the pawnshop. She dealt expertly with the
customers who, as usual, waited on the doorstep. Once the first rush was over,
business generally became easier as the day progressed. But for the first
half-hour the bell tinkled incessantly as sailors and other troops arrived,
anxious to deposit cameras, cigarette cases, watches, suits of clothes, and
other things which, like my compass, would never be redeemed. Though I could
not see her, it was easy to visualize what actions accompanied the words I
could hear so well; Mrs Jan Cloote would, I supposed, examine the proffered
article for about three minutes (this would account for a silence which
followed her opening ‘Well?’). The examination would be conducted with utter
intensity, seeming to have its sensitive point, its assessing faculty, in her
long nose. (I had already seen her perform this feat with Isa’s treasures.) She
would not smell the thing, actually; but it would appear to be her nose which
calculated and finally judged. Then she would sharply name her figure. If this
evoked a protest, she would become really eloquent; though never unreasonable,
at this stage. A list of the object’s defects would proceed like ticker tape
from the mouth of Mrs Jan Cloote; its depreciating market value was known to her;
this suit of clothes would never fit another man; that ring was not worth the
melting. Usually, the pawners accepted her offer, after she ceased. If not, the
pawnbroker’s wife turned to the next customer without further comment. ‘Well?’
she would say to the next one. Should the first-comer still linger, hesitant,
perplexed, it was then that Mrs Jan Cloote became unreasonable in tone. ‘Haven’t
you made up your mind yet?’ she would demand. ‘What are you waiting for, what
are you waiting for?’ The effect of this shock treatment was either the swift
disappearance of the customer, or his swift clinching of the bargain.

Like most establishments
in those parts, Mrs Jan Cloote’s pawnshop was partitioned off into sections,
rather like a public house with its saloon, public and private bars. These
compartments separated white customers from black, and black from those known
as coloured — the Indians, Malays and half-castes.

Whenever someone with a
tanned face came in at the white entrance, Mrs Jan Cloote always gave the
customer the benefit of the doubt. But she would complain wearily of this to
Maida and Greta as she rushed back and forth.

‘Did you see that
coloured girl that went out?’ she would say. ‘Came in the white way. Oh,
coloured, of course she was coloured but you daren’t say anything. We’d be up
for slander.’

This particular morning,
trade was pressing. A troopship had come in. ‘Now
that
was a coloured,’
said Mrs Jan Cloote in a lull between shop bells. ‘He came in the white way.’

‘I’d have kicked his behind,’
said Isa.

‘Listen to Isa, eh!’
giggled Maida.

‘Isa’s the one!’ said
the mother, as she rushed away again, summoned by the bell.

This time the voices
came from another part of the shop set aside from the rest. I had noticed, from
the outside, that it was marked OFFICE-PRIVATE.

‘Oh, it’s you?’ said Mrs
Jan Cloote.

‘That picture,’ said the
voice. ‘Here’s the ticket.’

‘A month late,’ she
said. ‘You’ve lost it.’

‘Here’s the fifteen bob,’
said the man.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It’s
too late. You haven’t paid up the interest; it’s gone.

‘I’ll pay up the
interest now,’ he said. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘we’re old friends and you
promised to keep it for me.

‘My grandfather painted
that picture,’ he said.

‘You promised to keep it
for me,’ he said.

‘Not for a month,’ she
said at last. ‘Not for a whole month. It was only worth the price of the frame.’

‘It’s a good picture,’
he said.

‘A terrible picture,’
she said. ‘Who would want a picture like that? It might bring us bad luck. I’ve
thrown it away.

‘Listen, old dear —’ he began.

‘Out!’ she said. ‘Outside!’

‘I’m staying here,’ he
said, ‘till I get my picture.’

‘Maida! Greta!’ she
called.

‘All right,’ he said,
hopeless and lost. ‘I’m going.’

A week later Mrs Jan
Cloote caught me in the hall again. ‘A
little
cup of tea,’ she whispered.
‘Come in for a chat, just with ourselves and young Mr Fleming, tonight.’

It was imperative to
attend these periodic tea sittings. Those of Mrs Jan Cloote’s lodgers who did
not attend suffered many discomforts; rooms were not cleaned nor beds made;
morning tea was brought up cold and newspapers not at all. It was difficult to
find rooms at that time. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

I joined the family that
night. The Marais couple had left, but I found the young clerk there. Isa came
in, painted up as before.

There was one addition
to the room; a picture on the wall. It was dreadful as a piece of work, at the
same time as it was fascinating on account of the period it stood for. The date
of this period would be about the mid-1890s. It represented a girl bound to a
railway line. Her blue sash fluttered across her body, and her hands were
raised in anguish to her head, where the hair, yellow and abundant, was
spreading over the rails around her. Twenty yards away was a bend on the
rail-track. A train approached this bend, full-steam. The driver could not see
the girl. As you know, the case was hopeless. A moment, and she would be pulp.
But wait! A motor car, one of the first of its kind, was approaching a level
crossing nearby. A group of young men, out for a joy-ride, were loaded into
this high, bright vehicle. One of them had seen the girl’s plight. This Johnnie
was standing on the seat, waving his motoring cap high above his head and
pointing to her. His companions were just on the point of realizing what had happened.
Would they be in time to rescue her? — to stop the onrushing train? Of course
not. The perspective of the picture told me this clearly enough. There was not
a chance for the girl. And anyhow, I reflected, she lies there for as long as
the picture lasts; the train approaches; the young mashers in their brand-new
automobile — they are always on the point of seeing before them the girl tied
to the rails, her hair spread around her, the ridiculous sash waving about, and
her hands uplifted to her head.

On the whole, I liked
the picture. It was the prototype of so many other paintings of its kind; and
the prototype, the really typical object, is something I rarely have a chance
of seeing.

‘You’re looking at Isa’s
picture,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.

‘It’s a very wonderful
picture,’ she declared. ‘A very famous English artist flew out on a Sunderland
on purpose to paint Isa. The RAF let him have the plane and all the crew so
that he could come. As soon as they saw Isa’s photo at the RAF Headquarters in
London, they told the artist to take the Sunderland.

‘He put Isa in that
pose, doing her hair,’ Mrs Jan Cloote continued, gazing fondly at the picture.

I said nothing. Nor did
the young clerk. I tried looking at the picture with my head on one side, and,
indeed, the girl bore a slight resemblance to Isa; the distracted hands around
her head did look rather as if she were doing her hair. Of course, to get this
effect, one had to ignore the train, and the motor car, and the other details.
I decided that the picture would be about fifty years old. Undoubtedly, it was
not recent.

‘What do you think of
it?’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.

‘Very nice,’ I said.

The young clerk was
silent.

‘You’re very quiet
tonight, Mr Fleming,’ said Maida.