Best Short Stories - [5]

Peyton Fahrquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

Joseph Conrad The Tale

Outside the large single window the crepuscular[9] light was dying out slowly in a great square gleam without colour, framed rigidly in the gathering shades of the room.

It was a long room. The irresistible tide of the night ran into the most distant part of it, where the whispering of a man’s voice, passionately interrupted and passionately renewed, seemed to plead against the answering murmurs of infinite sadness.

At last no answering murmur came. His movement when he rose slowly from his knees by the side of the deep, shadowy couch holding the shadowy suggestion of a reclining woman revealed him tall under the low ceiling, and sombre all over except for the crude discord of the white collar under the shape of his head and the faint, minute spark of a brass button here and there on his uniform.

He stood over her a moment, masculine and mysterious in his immobility, before he sat down on a chair nearby. He could see only the faint oval of her upturned face and, extended on her black dress, her pale hands, a moment before abandoned to his kisses and now as if too weary to move.

He dared not make a sound, shrinking as a man would do from the prosaic necessities of existence. As usual, it was the woman who had the courage. Her voice was heard first — almost conventional while her being vibrated yet with conflicting emotions.

‘Tell me something,’ she said.

The darkness hid his surprise and then his smile. Had he not just said to her everything worth saying in the world — and that not for the first time!

‘What am I to tell you?’ he asked, in a voice creditably steady. He was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone which had eased the strain.

‘Why not tell me a tale?’

‘A tale!’ He was really amazed.

‘Yes. Why not?’

These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved woman’s capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels itself to be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to elude.

‘Why not?’ he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he had been asked to give her the moon. But now he was feeling a little angry with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion as easily as out of a splendid gown.

He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly’s flight:

‘You used to tell — your — your simple and — and professional — tales very well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a — a sort of art — in the days — the days before the war.’

‘Really?’ he said, with involuntary gloom. ‘But now, you see, the war is going on,’ he continued in such a dead, equable tone that she felt a slight chill fall over her shoulders. And yet she persisted. For there’s nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman’s caprice.

‘It could be a tale not of this world,’ she explained.

‘You want a tale of the other, the better world?’ he asked, with a matter-of-fact surprise. ‘You must evoke for that task those who have already gone there.’

‘No. I don’t mean that. I mean another — some other — world. In the universe — not in heaven.’

‘I am relieved. But you forget that I have only five days’ leave.’

‘Yes. And I’ve also taken a five days’ leave from — from my duties.’

‘I like that word.’

‘What word?’

‘Duty.’

‘It is horrible — sometimes.’

‘Oh, that’s because you think it’s narrow. But it isn’t. It contains infinities, and — and so — ’

‘What is this jargon?’

He disregarded the interjected scorn. ‘An infinity of absolution, for instance,’ he continued. ‘But as to this another world — who’s going to look for it and for the tale that is in it?’

‘You,’ she said, with a strange, almost rough, sweetness of assertion.

He made a shadowy movement of assent in his chair, the irony of which not even the gathered darkness could render mysterious.

‘As you will. In that world, then, there was once upon a time a Commanding Officer and a Northman.[10] Put in the capitals, please, because they had no other names. It was a world of seas and continents and islands — ’

‘Like the earth,’ she murmured, bitterly.

‘Yes. What else could you expect from sending a man made of our common, tormented clay on a voyage of discovery? What else could he find? What else could you understand or care for, or feel the existence of even? There was comedy in it, and slaughter.’

‘Always like the earth,’ she murmured. ‘Always. And since I could find in the universe only what was deeply rooted in the fibres of my being there was love in it, too. But we won’t talk of that.

‘No. We won’t,’ she said, in a neutral tone which concealed perfectly her relief — or her disappointment. Then after a pause she added: ‘It’s going to be a comic story.’

‘Well — ’ he paused, too. ‘Yes. In a way. In a very grim way. It will be human, and, as you know, comedy is but a matter of the visual angle. And it won’t be a noisy story. All the long guns in it will be dumb — as dumb as so many telescopes.’