The Sacrifice Read online

  ‘They were not Londoners. Mrs Guyatt’s husband had been a merchant in British Guyana. She was married there and Ellen was born there. Guyatt had retired and come to live in London about five years before and he had died within a year of arriving. The house was theirs, but she wanted to sell it and go back to British Guyana. The climate did not suit them here and she did not like the people much. The only thing was that Ellen did not want to go back just yet. She had an idea that she might be cured if she stayed in England. It was her father who had put that notion into her head. That’s why he had insisted on coming to London when she wanted to stay in Guyana.

  ‘I asked if there was not some hope of treatment doing something for Ellen. Mrs Guyatt merely sighed and made a brief moaning sound that might have indicated something more than utter despair, but not much more. Whether the girl was having, or had had any treatment I could not clearly ascertain just then.

  ‘We had been there nearly an hour when I at last managed to stir Shirley. I think I really felt a good deal of compunction in dragging her away, because she had obviously done the child so much good. Ellen had been starry-eyed with happiness and then, when we got up, the anxiety and pain and fear in her face were almost more than I could bear to look at.

  ‘She seized Shirley by the hand and implored her. “You will keep your promise, won’t you? You will come again. You will! You will come and show me those movements! I shall die if you don’t come again, now.”

  ‘Shirley laughed and promised over and over again, and as I turned at the door, following Mrs Guyatt into the hall I saw her bend and kiss Ellen.

  ‘At the outer door I fumbled for something to say, more than a mere thank you and goodnight, for I did not expect to see either of them again. I said something, then, about hoping that Ellen’s trouble might not prove incurable after all.

  ‘ “Oh!” Shirley exclaimed, “We must do something for her! I must find out where you can take her. There’s wonderful treatment nowadays, you know. . . .”

  ‘Mrs Guyatt tightened her lips and shook her head: she looked so stern and reproving and firmly resigned that Shirley’s voice trailed away.

  ‘ “No man can do anything for her!” Mrs Guyatt said in a firmer tone than she had used that afternoon.

  ‘ “Oh, you don’t know . . .” Shirley said rather feebly.

  ‘ “I know!” she said. Then she bent her head and said something that astonished and outraged me.

  ‘ “It is a just judgement on me. I bore her against the Lord’s wishes. She must suffer until the general mingling of bodies.”

  ***

  ‘It shocked Shirley less than it did me.

  ‘ “Her mother’s got religion, of course,” she said, later that evening. “That’s why she won’t let her come to the theatre, I expect. She could come. She can get about a bit, and she wouldn’t have to walk far. Someone could carry her up the stairs from the foyer.”

  ‘I asked if she were sure it was her mother who wouldn’t let her come. Had Ellen said she wanted to come to the theatre?

  ‘Shirley looked at me as if she thought I had missed the point of the whole affair. “My poor dear Con,” she said, “do you really mean to say that you haven’t grasped that that is precisely what the kid does want? What do you think she was talking about all afternoon? She’d give all the rest of her miserable life to see me dance just once. I don’t know whether you can feel what that means. What’s any critic’s opinion worth against appreciation like that? It makes me feel humble and unworthy. Oh, its not just the flattery. It’s not what you think at all. Good Lord, no! I’ve got a leveller head than that. After all, what can she know about my dancing when she’s never seen me? There are plenty of other people to tell me just how good or bad I am, and plenty of other people to say flattering things if I care to listen to them.’

  ‘ “Well, what is it then,” I asked.

  ‘Shirley shrugged her shoulders. She was not prepared to explain herself if I was too obtuse to divine her meaning. “Dancing is something more than the dancer,” she said. “Not everybody understands that, even among those who can dance. But Ellen understands it.”

  ‘I suppose I was nettled by the imputation that there was something in dancing that was above my head. It seemed to me sheer nonsense. “I just don’t believe that any child of fifteen is capable of a sham-intellectual attitude like that,” I said. “She’s a clever little beggar, and all the sharper for being a cripple. But she just envies you your beautiful figure and your legs. She’d like to be you, but as she can’t she does the next best thing, that is, gets you to take notice of her. It’s you who’re flattering her and serving her vanity if anything.”

  ‘All Shirley said was, “Rubbish!”

  ‘I have no doubt that Shirley continued to get letters from Ellen, but she did not show me any more of them. She had become rather touchy on the subject, perhaps because she was well aware, though she wouldn’t admit it, that there was something wrong and ridiculous in her cultivating a close friendship with a girl so much younger than herself and with whom she had absolutely nothing in common.

  ‘Because that is what it soon amounted to. She seemed actually to prefer going to that dismal, stuffy, old house in Clapham when she had a free afternoon or evening to going out with any of the other girls from the theatre, let alone me.

  ‘She did not tell me much about her visits. The mention of her new friends was all too likely to start us bickering if not actually quarrelling. I began in fact to wonder sometimes whether our sharing lodgings was quite such a good thing as it had seemed in the beginning. It was some economy for both of us, of course, but our allowances from the money our father had left for us were fairly generous and we could have managed each on our own without difficulty. Still, I felt some elder-sister responsibility towards Shirley and though there were times when I thought it would be a relief to be on my own, I would not suggest it.

  ‘Shirley didn’t manage to overcome Mrs Guyatt’s objection—if it was hers—to taking Ellen to the theatre before the ballet in which she was dancing ended its run. Instead, she took her shoes and practice clothes and demonstrated the elements of dancing at the house.

  ‘I made no comment when Shirley told me this, but I did revert, I remember, one night that spring to Mrs Guyatt’s religious objections to the theatre. I couldn’t quite believe in them. After all, the few puritans who still believe that the theatre is wrong don’t approve of dancing anywhere, even in their own homes. Mrs Guyatt, I thought, was probably of Spanish origin, and it seemed more likely to me that her religious background was Roman Catholic.

  ‘What led me to ask Shirley was the fact that Shirley herself seemed to have been impressed by Mrs Guyatt’s religion. As far as I know she hadn’t taken the faintest interest in religion since she was confirmed. But she was not a rationalist or an atheist by conviction, she was just ignorant. Still, she would normally have been repelled by what she would have called the “cant” of any of the churches or sects that made moral judgements on things she was interested in, and so I was curious to know why she was less intolerant now towards Mrs Guyatt’s beliefs.

  ‘ “What is her religion?” I asked her.

  ‘ “She’s a Harburian,” Shirley said.

  ‘I asked what on earth a Harburian was, but Shirley couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell me. All that the name suggested to me was one of those dreary little sects of extreme nonconformists who creep into tin tabernacles in back streets of industrial towns on Sunday afternoons and work off their indigestion by dwelling on the hell that everybody but themselves is going to get when the Lord lets loose His wrath.

  ‘I looked the word up in the encyclopaedia, but couldn’t find it. I asked some of my friends and they had never heard of it either. Then I remembered a certain lecturer in Botany—he’s a professor now—who was one of these genial know-all persons whose hobby was collecting every kind of useful and useless information: you know, the sort of man who loved general knowledge quizzes and brain-trus
ts and that sort of thing. I got hold of him one morning at the University and said, “Mr Wallace, can you tell me what the Harburians are?”

  ‘It was like giving sixpence to a child outside a sweet shop.

  ‘ “Harburians? Harburians, eh? Now that’s interesting. Now let me think a moment. Harburians. What does that suggest to me? Wait a minute. Ah! That’s it! Trinidad! Trinidad, Jamaica and British Guyana. I heard about them when I went on the Edinburgh University expedition to the Caribbean. What do you want to know about them?”

  ‘ “Well, what sort of sect are they, if they are a sect?”’

  ‘He grinned. “You’ve caught me out, really. I tried to look them up, but there aren’t any references. All I can tell you is that they get their name from an American called Lord C. Harbur who started a one-man mission in the West Indies in about 1870. He was a complete crank, of course and I think he ended by going native in the jungle somewhere and growing a beard down to his knees and settling all theological problems once and for all by announcing that he was God and that was that. I don’t think he left many followers behind, and the few there are would be in the British possessions. The Church suppressed ’em in the other territories, though they were quite harmless, I imagine.”

  ‘I asked him what their doctrines were.

  ‘ “Pansomatism,” he said, and giggled when I gasped. “Don’t be ashamed of not knowing what that means. I invented it. It was the best word I could think of to describe what I heard about their doctrine. You know the idea of Brahma—a Universal Soul into which all individual souls may eventually be absorbed? Well, the Harburians go one better and believe in a Common or Universal Body, that is to say that not merely is all matter ultimately the same substance but that individuals of all species are related parts of one physical whole; and they believe in some sort of actual material fusion of species and genera. Quite mad of course. Darwinism read backwards. Now that shows you the value of making private mental indexes, doesn’t it? I shouldn’t have remembered that if I hadn’t invented a word for it.”

  ‘He wanted to know why I was asking. I told him that it was simply that I had heard them mentioned in connection with someone who had come from British Guyana.

  ‘ “Yes, that’s one of the places for them, if there really are any left. The mountains of British Guyana. Lord C. Harbur announced his corporeal identity with the Deity after assimilating, as I understand it, the animistic beliefs of the remoter Indian tribes.”

  ‘I didn’t know how serious Mr Wallace was, or, if he was serious at all, how accurate what he told me was. But, taking it at its face value, it did seem to shed some light on Mrs Guyatt’s beliefs, and I didn’t very much like the light it shed.

  The thing that tormented me at the time was whether I was not worrying myself quite unnecessarily and being the interfering and over-solicitous big sister. I’d always prided myself on looking at things scientifically and never giving way to intuitions or making judgements without having evidence, but here I was, taking a strong dislike to the Guyatts and disapproving of Shirley’s friendship with them without having the slightest evidence to show that they were anything other than they appeared to be; I mean, dimly respectable people whose income had dwindled, but who were trying to cling to some standard of English middle-class life and to conceal, out of pride, both their shabbiness and the daughter’s physical deformity.

  ‘Assuming that that was the right view of them, what in the world Shirley could find to attract her in their dismal existence I could not imagine. But it was clearly no business of mine.

  ‘Yet it nagged at me. I thought I would, after all, like to take one more look at Ellen and her mother. I carefully refrained from saying anything about them that Shirley could object to for a week or two, and then, when she casually said she was going to see them the next Sunday, I showed an interest and more or less invited myself to go with her. Shirley didn’t show that she welcomed my company, but she didn’t actually say she didn’t want it.

  ‘Shirley took a small suitcase with her—without telling me what she had in it. When we got there she opened it and produced a frilly classical ballet dress. Ellen, who had not even looked at me, was enormously excited. The hall, I noticed, was cleared of the little furniture that had been in it before; the parquet floor had been polished, and the blinds of the windows that lit the hall from the stair-well had been raised to let the afternoon sunshine in; it was clear that an exhibition had been arranged.

  ‘Mrs Guyatt, it seemed, had some of the music from the productions that Shirley had been dancing in the last winter. She went into the drawing-room, where the piano was. Ellen seized Shirley by the arm and, hopping on her crutch, pulled her across the hall.

  ‘ “Oh, I want to see you put it on. Don’t go upstairs. Come and put it on in my room,”’ she begged, and Shirley allowed herself to be led away.

  ‘I followed them. I couldn’t have said why, but I wanted to see Ellen’s room. There was a short passage behind the stairs at the back of the hall, leading to the kitchen and the back door, and, opening off the passage was a room furnished as a bedroom for Ellen. She couldn’t manage stairs by herself, of course.

  ‘Shirley and she went in. I stood at the door. I don’t think Ellen had noticed that I had followed.

  ‘It was a fair-sized room, possibly intended for a morning-room when the house was built. Two windows side by side in one wall looked on the garden at the side of the house. They were shut and a big fire burning in the grate in the opposite wall was making the room much too hot.

  ‘The first thing that caught my eye was something fluttering across the windows. Pigeons, I thought; and then I saw that there was a big cage or aviary built outside, against the wall of the house, projecting a good way into the garden and stretching beyond the windows on each side so that the outer wall of the room, with both its windows, made the fourth wall of the cage. In the cage there was a number of birds, chiefly turtle-doves, as far as I could see.

  ‘The room itself was furnished only sparsely. In fact you might have called it decorated rather than furnished, and the decorations were a queer revelation of the world of memory and make-belief that Ellen must have created as an escape from the drab imprisonment of her real life.

  ‘I felt at once that her earlier childhood in Guyana must have contained, for all her affliction, far more colour and excitement than she had ever known since. My second thought was that it was more like a boy’s room than a girl’s. Her little iron bedstead and chest of drawers were pushed away into the far corner beyond the fireplace as if they were tiresome utilitarian things that were suffered so long as they did not take up more space than they absolutely must. The rest of the room was given up to a display of barbaric treasures.

  ‘The floor was covered with matting woven either of rushes or some kind of palm-leaf and painted in chequered patterns of green and red and black, and scattered about on top of the mats were skins of different animals. The walls were hung with an extraordinary assortment of objects: dresses of brocade and embroidery hanging from nails, some cases containing large and gaudy butterflies, pieces of bead-work of all shapes, sizes and colours, long head-dresses made of brilliant scarlet and blue feathers sweeping down from the picture-rail to the floor, bows and spears and hatchets and hideous bits of primitive wood-carving, things that looked like grinning masks with long plaits of black hair, other even more repulsive things—small crocodiles or great lizards crudely stuffed and hanging from strings, contorted by drying and shrinking so that they appeared to writhe out from the walls and paw blindly at the air. There were numbers of leathern bags, fringed and embroidered with beads suspended about the walls, and everywhere bunches of twigs and dust-coloured bunches of desiccated flowers.

  ‘It was those, perhaps, that gave off a certain sickly scent which I had noticed as soon as Ellen opened the door. There were fresh flowers in the room, too, but English ones which could not produce such a heavy, cloying odour. The vases of fresh flowers were placed on t
he only other considerable piece of furniture in the room. That was a dressing-table, though it was so draped and disguised that it had more the appearance of an altar. It stood against the far wall, directly opposite the door; on the matting in front of it was spread the biggest of the skins that lay about—a jaguar skin, I thought. The dressing-table was covered with black cloth which hung down in folds entirely concealing the front of it. The looking-glass had been so draped with black stuff as to leave only a small circle of glass uncovered in the middle; one might have seen a part of one’s face in it, but nothing more. The top of the dressing-table was strewn with little bunches of dried flowers, and besides the vases of daffodils there were several pottery bowls and a pair of heavy silver candlesticks with candles in them; and in the middle was set one of Shirley’s full length studio photographs, framed and surrounded with a garland made of withered herbs.

  ‘I had the time to see all this, because Shirley herself stood staring round, as if she too were seeing the room for the first time, while Ellen was busy fingering and examining the ballet dress.

  ‘There was just one other thing, or rather, collection of things that caught my attention. They were so odd that I was going forward to look at them more closely when Ellen turned round and noticed me. There was a raised shelf on each side of the looking-glass at the back of the dressing-table, and on this shelf were four or five objects about the size and shape of a big Jaffa orange and of a dark reddish-brown colour. They seemed to have features—sunken eyes and protruding cheek-bones, splayed nostrils and slit-like mouths. I could not tell whether they were natural or artificial things: if natural they could only be the mummified heads of monkeys, except that they had lank black hair that was rather horribly like Ellen’s own.

  ‘I had taken a pace or two into the room when Ellen saw me. She thrust the dress into Shirley’s hand and hopped towards me, twisting her head sideways up at me and giving me so venomous a look that I retreated, quite disconcerted, to the passage. She skipped after me with a violent jerk of her body and a clump and creak of her iron brace and heavy boot and slammed the door in my face.