The Other Passenger (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by John Keir Cross

Author:John Keir Cross [Cross, John Keir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, weird fiction, Horror, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9781943910977
Google: eDFHtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2017-12-11T23:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

MYSTERIES

. . . and each thing has its parasite—even the mole. There is a special flea for moles—the mole flea. And there is a strange destiny for mole fleas—they too are blind . . .

Macfarlane’s Natural History

Amateur Gardening

Tuesday, 18th April. In the train. Now that I’ve started, am actually in the train, it’s different. I feel better. If the simile wasn’t impossible, I’d say it was like coming out of a tunnel into the sunshine. But when did the tunnel begin? So long ago that I can’t remember—can’t remember what it was like before. No more than a few disconnected images—Jenny and I on the beach at St. Andrews with those monstrous breakers at our feet, the sound of a portable gramophone coming thinly down from the dunes—the Ride of the Valkyries I remember—fantastically irrelevant: Jenny and I at a concert in the Albert Hall—Mahler, it was . . . but what did I care about Mahler? I could only feel her warmth beside me, could only hear her breathing through those slightly parted lips, could see nothing but the movement of her fingers on the arm of her chair. Jenny and I at tea in her flat—toasted muffins, tea always that shade too sweet, fantastic little cakes from the French baker at the corner, the Cézanne that was always crooked, the piano, the books—oh, all those books, a little dusty, packed tightly together. Jenny and I at a party, Jenny and I at the theatre, Jenny and I at the cottage . . .

Later. I had to stop there. We reached a station and someone got out—stumbled over my legs. But I’d got to a pause anyway. That phrase—“Jenny and I at the cottage.” Too significant—painfully. Something that stabs and hurts. How one’s life—one’s whole life—can cluster round one image, one phrase. A phrase like that. And I have to force myself to face it. Those two things coming together—an immense moment. Too immense, really—for me. Look at me, after all. Clerk, twenty-eight, with literary ideas and ambitions. An occasional article in the magazines, two novels, half a dozen poems (unpublished), a diary (slightly Katherine Mansfield) and—well, let me be honest—two score letters or so to friends that I hope they’ll keep . . . That, and the garden.

The garden. That’s the big thing. How I’ve struggled over all those years to get my cottage and my garden! The advertisements, the useless journeys to see half-fallen hovels, the agents, the landlords and then at last, at last . . .

It’s all over now. All that gross and fantastic nightmare—it’s finished. There’s only the garden now. To have wanted only this one thing all my life—it seems all my life—to have wanted it as madly as I have wanted it, and now to be on my way—finally on my way! . . .

I wonder—shall I think of her there?—because she has been there? And will it spoil it? Will those two things, those two parts of me, cancel each other out? No.

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