Read Short Stories 1927-1956 for Free Online Page A

S.S.C.’s basin, and – with my fingers – did my hair in his glass. I even caught myself beginning to undress – sheer reluctance, I suppose, to go back and face another cataract of verbiage.
     
    To my astonishment a log fire was handsomely burning in the grate when at length I returned to the study, and Mr Bloom, having drawn up two of his voluminous vermilion armchairs in front of it, was now deeply and amply encased in one of them. He had taken off his spectacles, and appeared to be asleep. But his eyes opened at my footstep. He had been merely ‘resting’ perhaps.
    ‘I hope,’ was his greeting, ‘you found everything needful, Mr Dash? In the circumstances …’
    He called this up at me as if I were deaf or at a distance, but his tone subsided again. ‘There’s just one little matter we missed, eh? – night attire! Not that you wouldn’t find a complete trousseau to choose from in the wardrobe . My secretary, in fact, was inclined to the foppish. No blame; no blame; fine feathers, Mr Dash.’
    It is, thank heaven, an unusual experience to be compelled to spend an evening as the guest of a stranger one distrusts. It was not only that Mr Bloom’s manner was obviously a mask but even the occasional stupidity of his remarks seemed to be an affectation – and one of an astute and deliberate kind. And yet Montrésor – in itself it was a house of unusual serenity and charm. Its urbane eighteenth-century reticence showed in every panel and moulding. One fell in love with it at first sight, as with an open, smiling face. And then – a look in the eyes! It reeked of the dubious and distasteful . But how can one produce definite evidence for such sensations as these? They lie outside the tests even of Science – as do a good many other things that refuse to conform with the norm of human evidence.
    Mr Bloom’s company at a dinner-party or a conversazione ,shall we say, might have proved refreshingly droll. He did his best to make himself amusing. He had read widely – and in out-of-the-way books, too; and he had an unusual range of interests. We discussed music and art – and he brought out portfolio after portfolio of drawings and etchings to illustrate some absurd theory he had of the one, and played a scrap or two of Debussy’s and of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit to prove some far-fetched little theory of his own about the other. We talked of Chance and Dreams and Disease and Heredity, edged on to Woman, and skated rapidly away. Hedismissed life as ‘an episode in disconcerting surroundings’, and scuttled off from a detraction of St Francis of Assisi to the problem of pain.
    ‘Mr Dash, we fear pain too much – and the giving of it. The very mention of the word stifles us. And how un-Christian!’
    The look he peeked down at me at this was proof enough that he was intent only on leading me on and drawing me out. But I was becoming a little more cautious, and mumbled that that kind of philosophy best begins at home.
    ‘Aye, indeed! A retort, a retort. With Charity on the other side of the hearth in a mob-cap and carpet slippers, I suppose? I see the dear creature: I see her! Still, you will agree, even you will agree that once, Mr Dash, the head has lost its way in the heart, one’s brain-pan might as well be a basin of soap-bubbles. A man of feeling, by all means – but just a trace, a soupçon of rationality, well, it serves! Eh?’
    A few minutes afterwards, in the midst of a discourse on the progress of human thought, he suddenly enquired if I cared for the game of backgammon .
    ‘And why not? Or draughts? Or solitaire ,Mr Dash? – a grossly under estimated amusement.’
    But all this badinage, these high spirits were clearly an elaborate disguise, and a none too complimentary one at that. He was ‘keeping it up’ to keep me up; and maybe, to keep himself up. Much of it was automatic – mere mental antics. Like a Thibetan praying-wheel, his mind went round and round. And his attention was