Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read Free Page B

low, flat parts of the village street. At the Ship Tavern, where we drink what is left to drink these days, I went with some friends and we talked about old times as you do when there are high storms and fine music in the wind; and we drank a good deal, sitting there in the long kitchen till near closing time; when suddenly everybody looked to the door which had swung wildly open.
    ‘God bless my soul,’ said an old fisherman, ‘ ’tes the first time in nigh thirty years I see Bob Starling come in here.’
    I said nothing, but watched him. I was aware that I was drunk, in a sort of guarded drunkenness, prepared for anything, knowing this was the night I would get the story I wanted, and didn’t want. He stood in the dark passage between the bar and the kitchen, and he asked, so quietly that it could hardly be heard, for a double whisky. Doubles aren’t served now in this almost liquorless corner of England; he had to be content with a single. Drinking it at one nervous quick gulp he asked for another. I watched. He was a most extraordinary figure, in a long dirty leather jacket reaching nearly to his knees, his long thin legs in brown corduroy trousers much too short for him, which showed black woollen socks, full of holes, and made his feet seem huge. Over the leather jacket he had a mackintosh cape; on his head a yellow sou’wester cap tied under the chin, that gave his sharp ruddy face a babylike innocence. I thought he should be sitting in a pram dressed just as he was, sucking a dummy or playing with a rattle.
    The second whisky went as quickly as the first. He asked for a third and was refused. He could have beer, he was told. But no, he didn’t want beer. Out he went, with no sign of recognition to a soul, giving only a peering, darting look round the kitchen, as though he were looking for somebody; out he went and the door swung to and fro behind him, letting in a shivering snarl and twist from the wind.
    Everybody started to chat about him. But suddenly, in my curiously alert condition, driven by the subconscious voice who commands most clearly under the stimulus of alcohol, I leapt up from my seat, snapped good night to my friends, and swung out of the door as though a pistol had shot me forward. Across the square, where the moon plunged from a continent of massed clouds, I could see him. He was going quickly up the cliff path, towards his own cottage, in that forward-leaning pensive walk of his, his great feet most oddly delicate, like a ballet dancer wearing enormous clogs. I got just behind him; then slackened my speed. He was muttering. ‘The tide’ll bring him back. It’s a seventeen-foot tide, like it was then, and it’ll throw him back, God help me.’
    I nearly ran back to the Ship. I confess I was, for a few seconds, frightened. What had I stumbled upon? Leaning over the wall of the slipway I looked down to the harbour, which seemed to have come adrift in a churning mass of muddy sea. The night was roaring and howling, the wind playing havoc with slates and tiles and anything it could snatch. Dustbin lids clattered along the cobbled alleyways. Waiting there, gathering strength from the gale, I lost sight of old Starling. Had he gone up the Green Steps to his cottage? I didn’t know. But suddenly I found my legs again and a new zest for life within me. When huge winds blow, either you must skulk with your face turned to the wall like a cornered rat; or else you must let the wind take you and blow you where it will. With enough liquor inside me, I felt suddenly mad, wild and very young. I had almost forgotten about old Starling. All I wanted to do was to soar up the cliff path like a rocket, charge round the corner, bellow some insult at the windows of a cottage where lived a rigid nonconformist family I disliked (and who disliked me), race recklessly up the dark slippery steps and find my way to the long slopes above the town and the harbour where you can watch the moon or the sun in a great