The Interval

== THE INTERVAL ==
=== By Vincent O'Sullivan ===
From The Boston Evening Transcript 1917
Mrs.
Wilton passed through a little alley leading from one of the gates which are
around Regent's Park, and came out on the wide and quiet street. She walked
along slowly, peering anxiously from side to side so as not to overlook the
number. She pulled her furs closer round her; after her years in this damp seemed very
harsh. Still, it was not a fog to-day. A dense haze, gray and tinged ruddy, lay
between the houses, sometimes blowing with a little wet kiss against the face. Mrs.
Wilton's hair and eyelashes and her furs were powdered with tiny drops. But
there was nothing in the weather to blur the sight; she could see the faces of
people some distance off and read the signs on the shops.
Before the door of a dealer in antiques and
second-hand furniture she paused and looked through the shabby uncleaned window
at an unassorted heap of things, many of them of great value. She read the
Polish name fastened on the pane in white letters.
"Yes; this is the place."
She opened the door, which met her entrance
with an ill-tempered jangle. From somewhere in the black depths of the shop the
dealer came forward. He had a clammy white face, with a sparse black beard, and
wore a skull cap and spectacles. Mrs. Wilton spoke to him in a low voice.
A look of complicity, of cunning, perhaps
of irony, passed through the dealer's cynical and sad eyes. But he bowed
gravely and respectfully.
"Yes, she is here, madam. Whether she
will see you or not I do not know. She is not always well; she has her moods.
And then, we have to be so careful. The police--Not that they would touch a
lady like you. But the poor alien has not much chance these days."
Mrs. Wilton followed him to the back of the
shop, where there was a winding staircase. She knocked over a few things in her
passage and stooped to pick them up, but the dealer kept muttering, "It
does not matter--surely it does not matter." He lit a candle.
"You must go up these stairs. They are
very dark; be careful. When you come to a door, open it and go straight
in."
He stood at the foot of the stairs holding
the light high above his head as she ascended.
* *
*
The room was not very large, and it seemed
very ordinary. There were some flimsy, uncomfortable chairs in gilt and red.
Two large palms were in corners. Under a glass cover on the table was a view of
. The room
had not a business-like look, thought Mrs. Wilton; there was no suggestion of
the office or waiting-room where people came and went all day; yet you would
not say that it was a private room which was lived in. There were no books or
papers about; every chair was in the place it had been placed when the room was
last swept; there was no fire and it was very cold.
To the right of the window was a door
covered with a plush curtain. Mrs. Wilton sat down near the table and watched
this door. She thought it must be through it that the soothsayer would come
forth. She laid her hands listlessly one on top of the other on the table. This
must be the tenth seer she had consulted since Hugh had been killed. She
thought them over. No, this must be the eleventh. She had forgotten that frightening
man in 
who said he had been a priest. Yet of them all it was only he who had told her
anything definite. But even he could do no more than tell the past. He told of
her marriage; he even had the duration of it right--twenty-one months. He told
too of their time in --at
least, he knew that her husband had been a soldier, and said he had been on
service in the "colonies." On the whole, though, he had been as
unsatisfactory as the others. None of them had given her the consolation she
sought. She did not want to be told of the past. If Hugh was gone forever, then
with him had gone all her love of living, her courage, all her better self. She
wanted to be lifted out of the despair, the dazed aimless drifting from day to
day, longing at night for the morning, and in the morning for the fall of
night, which had been her life since his death. If somebody could assure her
that it was not all over, that he was somewhere, not too far away, unchanged
from what he had been here, with his crisp hair and rather slow smile and lean
brown face, that he saw her sometimes, that he had not forgotten her....
"Oh, Hugh, darling!"
When she looked up again the woman was
sitting there before her. Mrs. Wilton had not heard her come in. With her
experience, wide enough now, of seers and fortune-tellers of all kinds, she saw
at once that this woman was different from the others. She was used to the
quick appraising look, the attempts, sometimes clumsy, but often cleverly disguised,
to collect some fragments of information whereupon to erect a plausible vision.
But this woman looked as if she took it out of herself.
Not that her appearance suggested
intercourse with the spiritual world more than the others had done; it
suggested that, in fact, considerably less. Some of the others were frail,
yearning, evaporated creatures, and the ex-priest in had something terrible and condemned in
his look. He might well sup with the devil, that man, and probably did in some
way or other.
But this was a little fat, weary-faced
woman about fifty, who only did not look like a cook because she looked more
like a sempstress. Her black dress was all covered with white threads. Mrs.
Wilton looked at her with some embarrassment. It seemed more reasonable to be
asking a woman like this about altering a gown than about intercourse with the dead.
That seemed even absurd in such a very commonplace presence. The woman seemed
timid and oppressed; she breathed heavily and kept rubbing her dingy hands,
which looked moist, one over the other; she was always wetting her lips, and
coughed with a little dry cough. But in her these signs of nervous exhaustion
suggested overwork in a close atmosphere, bending too close over the
sewing-machine. Her uninteresting hair, like a rat's pelt, was eked out with a
false addition of another color. Some threads had got into her hair too.
Her harried, uneasy look caused Mrs. Wilton
to ask compassionately: "Are you much worried by the police?"
"Oh, the police! Why don't they leave
us alone? You never know who comes to see you. Why don't they leave me alone?
I'm a good woman. I only think. What I do is no harm to any one."...
She continued in an uneven querulous voice,
always rubbing her hands together nervously. She seemed to the visitor to be
talking at random, just gabbling, like children do sometimes before they fall
asleep.
"I wanted to explain--" hesitated
Mrs. Wilton.
But the woman, with her head pressed close
against the back of the chair, was staring beyond her at the wall. Her face had
lost whatever little expression it had; it was blank and stupid. When she spoke
it was very slowly and her voice was guttural.
"Can't you see him? It seems strange
to me that you can't see him. He is so near you. He is passing his arm round
your shoulders."
This was a frequent gesture of Hugh's. And
indeed at that moment she felt that somebody was very near her, bending over
her. She was enveloped in tenderness. Only a very thin veil, she felt,
prevented her from seeing. But the woman saw. She was describing Hugh minutely,
even the little things like the burn on his right hand.
"Is he happy? Oh, ask him does he love
me?"
The result was so far beyond anything she
had hoped for that she was stunned. She could only stammer the first thing that
came into her head. "Does he love me?"
"He loves you. He won't answer, but he
loves you. He wants me to make you see him; he is disappointed, I think, because
I can't. But I can't unless you do it yourself."
After a while she said:
"I think you will see him again. You
think of nothing else. He is very close to us now."
Then she collapsed, and fell into a heavy
sleep and lay there motionless, hardly breathing. Mrs. Wilton put some notes on
the table and stole out on tip-toe.
* *
*
She seemed to remember that downstairs in
the dark shop the dealer with the waxen face detained her to shew some old
silver and jewellery and such like. But she did not come to herself, she had no
precise recollection of anything, till she found herself entering a church near
.
It was an unlikely act in her normal moments. Why did she go in there? She
acted like one walking in her sleep.
The church was old and dim, with high black
pews. There was nobody there. Mrs. Wilton sat down in one of the pews and bent
forward with her face in her hands.
After a few minutes she saw that a soldier
had come in noiselessly and placed himself about half-a-dozen rows ahead of
her. He never turned round; but presently she was struck by something familiar
in the figure. First she thought vaguely that the soldier looked like her Hugh.
Then, when he put up his hand, she saw who it was.
She hurried out of the pew and ran towards
him. "Oh, Hugh, Hugh, have you come back?"
He looked round with a smile. He had not
been killed. It was all a mistake. He was going to speak....
Footsteps sounded hollow in the empty
church. She turned and glanced down the dim aisle.
It was an old sexton or verger who approached.
"I thought I heard you call," he said.
"I was speaking to my husband."
But Hugh was nowhere to be seen.
"He was here a moment ago." She
looked about in anguish. "He must have gone to the door."
"There's nobody here," said the
old man gently. "Only you and me. Ladies are often taken funny since the
war. There was one in here yesterday afternoon said she was married in this
church and her husband had promised to meet her here. Perhaps you were married
here?"
"No," said Mrs. Wilton,
desolately. "I was married in ."
* *
*
It might have been two or three days after
that, when she went into a small Italian restaurant in the Bayswater district.
She often went out for her meals now: she had developed an exhausting cough,
and she found that it somehow became less troublesome when she was in a public
place looking at strange faces. In her flat there were all the things that Hugh
had used; the trunks and bags still had his name on them with the labels of
places where they had been together. They were like stabs. In the restaurant,
people came and went, many soldiers too among them, just glancing at her in her
corner.
This day, as it chanced, she was rather
late and there nobody there. She was very tired. She nibbled at the food they
brought her. She could almost have cried from tiredness and loneliness and the
ache in her heart.
Then suddenly he was before her, sitting
there opposite at the table. It was as it was in the days of their engagement,
when they used sometimes to lunch at restaurants. He was not in uniform. He
smiled at her and urged her to eat, just as he used in those days....
* *
*
I met her that afternoon as she was
crossing , and she told me
about it.
"I have been with Hugh." She
seemed most happy.
"Did he say anything?"
"N-no. Yes. I think he did, but I
could not quite hear. My head was so very tired. The next time----"
* *
*
I did not see her for some time after that.
She found, I think, that by going to places where she had once seen him--the
old church, the little restaurant--she was more certain to see him again. She
never saw him at home. But in the street or the park he would often walk along
beside her. Once he saved her from being run over. She said she actually felt his
hand grabbing her arm, suddenly, when the car was nearly upon her.
She had given me the address of the
clairvoyant; and it is through that strange woman that I know--or seem to
know--what followed.
Mrs. Wilton was not exactly ill last
winter, not so ill, at least, as to keep to her bedroom. But she was very thin,
and her great handsome eyes always seemed to be staring at some point beyond,
searching. There was a look in them that seamen's eyes sometimes have when they
are drawing on a coast of which they are not very certain. She lived almost in solitude:
she hardly ever saw anybody except when they sought her out. To those who were
anxious about her she laughed and said she was very well.
One sunny morning she was lying awake,
waiting for the maid to bring her tea. The shy sunlight peeped through the blinds.
The room had a fresh and happy look.
When she heard the door open she thought
that the maid had come in. Then she saw that Hugh was standing at the foot of
the bed. He was in uniform this time, and looked as he had looked the day he
went away.
"Oh, Hugh, speak to me! Will you not
say just one word?"
He smiled and threw back his head, just as
he used to in the old days at her mother's house when he wanted to call her out
of the room without attracting the attention of the others. He moved towards
the door, still signing to her to follow him. He picked up her slippers on his
way and held them out to her as if he wanted her to put them on. She slipped
out of bed hastily....
* *
*
It is strange that when they came to look
through her things after her death the slippers could never be found.
==
Category:Evening Transcript
Category:O'Sullivan