Adam & Eve & Pinch Me

by A. E. Coppard

Eternally at the porch tired cabhorses drooped and meditated, while the drivers cut hunches of bread and meat or cheese or onion and swallowed from their tin bottles the cold tea or other aliment associated with tin bottles. There was always a smell of dung at the entrance, and an aroma of shag tobacco from the cabmen’s pipes curled into the nave whenever the door opened for worshippers. Inside the church Hardross ushered his friend to a seat that he could watch from his organ loft. There were few people present. He borrowed a lead pencil from a choir boy, and while the lesson was being perfunctorily intoned, sounding like some great voice baffled by its infinitely little mind, he scribbled on a sheet of paper the questions he was so eager to ask; what was her name and things like that:

How can we communicate? May I write to you? Will you to me? Excuse the catechism and scribble but I want so much to know you and grab at this opportunity.

Yours devotedly
John Hardross

When he looked up her place was empty; she had gone away in the middle of the service. He hurried home at last very perturbed and much abashed, for it was not so much the perplexities of intercourse, the torment of his dilemma, that possessed him now as a sense of felicities forbidden and amenities declined.

But his fickle intelligence received a sharp admonitory nudge on the following evening when he espied her sitting in the same place at church for all the world as if she had not deserted it on the evening before. Then he remembered that of course she couldn’t hear a thing—idiot he was to have invited her. Again she left the church before the close of the service. This for several days, the tantalized lover beholding her figure always hurrying from his grasp.

He pursued the practice of the deaf and dumb alphabet with such assiduity that he became almost apt in its use; the amount of affection and devotion that he could transcribe on finger and thumb was prodigious, he yearned to put it to the test. When at last he met her again in the hall he at once began spelling out things, absurd things, like: “May I beg the honour of your acquaintance?” She watched this with interest, with excitement even, but a shadow of doubt crept into her lovely eyes. She moved her own fingers before him, but in vain; he could not interpret a single word, not one. He was a dense fool; O how dense, how dense! he groaned. But then he searched his pockets and brought out the note he had scribbled in church. It was a little the worse for wear but he smoothed it, and standing close by her side held it for her perusal. Again his hopes were dashed. She shook her head, not at all conclusively but in a vague uncomprehending way. She even with a smile indicated her need of a pencil, which he promptly supplied. To his amazement what she scribbled upon the page were some meaningless hieroglyphs, not letters, though they were grouped as in words, but some strange abracadabra. He looked so dismally at her that she smiled again, folding the paper carefully ere she passed on up the stairs.

Hardross was now more confounded than ever. A fearful suspicion seized him: was she an idiot, was it a mild insanity, were those marks just the notation of a poor diseased mind? He wished he had kept that letter. God, what a tragedy! But as he walked into the town his doubts about her intellect were dispelled. Poof! only an imbecile himself could doubt that beautiful staring intelligence. That was not it; it was some jugglery, something to do with those rooms. Nothing was solved yet, nothing at all; how uncanny it was becoming!

He returned in the afternoon full of determination. Behold, like a favourable augury, the door by the console table stood open, wide open. It did occur to him that an open door might be a trap for unwary men but he rapped the brass knocker courageously. Of course there was no response—how could there be—and he stepped inside the room. His glance had but just time to take in the small black piano, the dark carpet, the waxed margins of the floor, the floral dinginess of the walls brightened by mirrors and softened by gilt and crimson furniture, when the quiet woman, his Diana, came to him joyfully holding out both her hands. Well, there was no mystery here after all, nothing at all, although the elder lady was out and they were apparently alone. Hardross held her hands for some moments, the intensity of which was as deeply projected in her own eyes as in the tightness of his clasp. And there was tea for him! She was at her brightest, in a frock of figured muslin, and sitting before her he marvelled at the quickness of her understanding, the vividness of her gestures, the gentleness with which she touched his sleeve. That criminal suspicion of her sanity crowned him with infamy. Such communication was deliciously intimate; there came a moment when Hardross in a wild impulsive ecstasy flung himself before her, bowing his head in her lap. The quiet woman was giving him back his embraces, her own ardour was drooping beautifully upon him, when he heard a strange voice exclaim in the room: “God is my help! Well then!” A rattle of strange words followed which he could not comprehend. He turned to confront the elder woman, who surveyed them with grim amusement. The other stood up, smiling, and the two women spoke in finger language. The newcomer began to remove her gloves, saying:

“It is Mr. Hardross then. I am glad to meet. There is a lot of things to be spoken, eh?”

She was not at all the invalid he had half expected to find. She removed her hat and came back a competent-looking woman of about fifty, who had really an overwhelming stream of conversation. She took tea and, ignoring the girl as if she were a block of uncomprehending ornament, addressed herself to the interloper.