Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

The Unusual Morning

One is liable day by day to a great many different kinds of surprises; but few persons can have known two in the same morning quite so unusual and diverse....

I was sitting in my room, writing, when a new and mysterious sound caught the ear. It came apparently from the heart of the wall, near the chimney, and was such a sound as in the dead of night would lay an icy hand on the heart. Since it was broad day I had courage and stood by the fireplace waiting. It grew louder and louder, nearer and nearer, and at last culminated in a scurry and clatter in the fireplace itself, from which there emerged a robust, testy, and exceedingly embarrassed starling. After looking round in dismay, he blundered across the room and settled on the highest row of books, where, secure in his altitude, he stared at me and collected his wits. I, too, collected mine and realized that my destiny was, as ever, prosaic. For I thought instantly of an American poet on the one hand, and on the other an English lady, a friend of mine, both of whom under similar conditions achieved romance. For when a bird visited Edgar Allan Poe in his study it was a raven, dark not alone with the sable hue of night but with mystery and fate, and when my friend awoke not long since in her room in a beautiful Wiltshire manor-house, what did she see brooding musically on the frame of an Old Master that hung on the opposite wall but a dove—emblem of peace and sweetness and everything that is fortunate?

How different my luck! A starling.... Of all the fowls of the air, would one not close one’s house to a starling first and foremost? Yet the only visitor from that so near yet so strange world of birds that ever came to me was this, the least poetical, least attractive.

That was the first surprise. For the understanding of the second, which occurred only an hour later, I must explain that this house is on a road which, almost immediately the gate is passed, ceases gradually to be a road at all, first declining to a cart-track, and then dwindling to nothing but a footpath or bridle-path up a South Down of extreme steepness. This means that when, as sometimes happens, a motor-car rushes past, we smile in our beards and await with stoicism and amusement the groanings and shrieks of agony that indicate that a mistake has been made and that a reluctant vehicle is being turned by an angry chauffeur in a space far too narrow for it. On the morning of which I write a car rushed by in the usual way, but as it did not at once return I assumed that the party were not uninstructed, but had come here by intent for a picnic, as has once or twice happened—lobsters’ claws and other alien and sophisticated débris having been found on the turf; and so thinking I forgot them. An hour later, hearing the engine throb in the accustomed manner, I knew that the picnic was over, and again forgot them.

A moment after, however, I was called out into the garden by a series of shouts and whistles, to discover that the car had come to a stop for the very sufficient reason that it was on fire. A motor-car at any time is still—to me—a strange object, but to find one in full blaze close to the gate is really a shock. You must have seen it to appreciate it. There it stood, enveloped in flames, while leaning against the wall, with his head cooling at the bricks, was its dejected owner. “What a calamity! What a calamity!” was all that he could say, as he surveyed first the burning wheels, and then his blackened hands, and then me. “There’s nothing to be done, nothing,” he added.

But I did not wait; at least it was worth the effort of saving, and we brought water in every variety of vessel and hurled it over the conflagration. Here we were wrong, for by watering flaming petrol one simply increases the area of the fire. Having learnt this, we bent all our strength to getting the car a little farther along the road, away from the seat of danger, then hurling the water over it once more. This done, it was soon extinguished, and the owner and driver had an opportunity to explain.

“Such a thing has never happened to me before,” he said. “All these years and no accident. I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best. Nothing of the kind has ever happened to me before.”

Meanwhile he had been joined by his friends, two cool and collected ladies, who, all unconscious of the catastrophe, had been engaged in the least incendiary of pastimes—photographing the church—and they added their persuasions to our invitation to him to come in and consume restoratives.

Misfortune handled him curiously. No, he said, he would not drink, would not eat, did not want to wash, hated the idea of resting. And all the while, as he was thus affirming and surveying his blistered hands, he was approaching nearer to the table in the garden on which refreshments had been placed. Vowing he would never sit, he sat; declining the decanter with increased vehemence, he tilted it into his glass; abjuring cake, he conveyed a piece to his mouth. He then refused to drink any more, and was actually reaching out for the decanter as he spoke. Finally, he said that he had not the least desire to smoke, and took a cigarette. This was the last of his apostasies, for to the blackness of his hands he adhered. And all the while, at intervals, he was assuring us that, long as he had driven a car, he had never previously had an accident in his life. Never! “I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best.... Nothing of the kind ever happened to me before....”

That is the story. They were soon gone; the car, a scorched ruin, was pushed into a neighbouring shed to await the repairers; and nothing remained of the incident save a black place in the road and a waste patch where grass had been. Life resumed its routine.

But why, when he came to give me his card, should I discover that he now lived in a house in which, as a child, some of my happiest hours were spent? No need for that added touch of coincidence. Why? He might as easily have inhabited every other house in the world. Here you have the prodigality of chance.