by Ursula Bloom
‘Oh well, we all have something,’ Miss Helstone would end brightly, ‘if it isn’t one thing it’s another,’ and off she would go.
Then, an hour and a half later, Hugo would get his hat and his coat and would trek to the bus, with a crowd already waiting at the corner of Fleet Street, umbrellas dripping if it were a wet day, collars up if it were a cold one. There would be the scrimmage when a bus came; the immense self-satisfaction if you managed to scrape on to the little platform, the feeling of utter frustration if the conductor pushed you back to the kerb to wait for the next. The tube in the rush hours, the pushing and contriving, the petty cheating, the standing in the stifling carriage to emerge at King’s Cross, where everybody seemed to be rushing for trains, all at once, all thinking only of themselves. If he was very tired there would be anxiety as to whether he could get a seat; getting it, and feeling triumphant yet guilty if it meant that a girl was amongst those standing. There was the annoyance if he didn’t get a seat, and had to stand, clutching at the hat rack when the train came to a sudden halt, swayed this way and that all the time.
A whole lifetime lay before him, a lifetime of this. He supposed that he would learn how to bear it, but he didn’t know how.
He sent Muriel a Christmas card when the time came, choosing it laboriously out of a tray at Woolworth’s marked fourpence. It was a large card with a picture of a lady in a crinoline, thoughtlessly stepping into a miniature coach, much too small for her, but quite undisturbed by her physical disability, and smiling to a gallant gentleman (whether swain or coachman, the card did not differentiate) who was bowing to her. There were some tasteful pink roses, and a little silver frost to give the lie to any wrong impression as to season that the roses might have implied. He put it in an envelope and dispatched it. In return a genteel card arrived, largish with a yule log, a piece of holly, a couple of waxen hands meeting in a fond clasp, and a most unsuitable text. On the strength of it, Hugo wrote to Muriel again one desultory February day, imploring her to reply, but this brought no answer, and he came to the conclusion that she was a very bad correspondent. It was disappointing, he considered, because he had liked her and it was a pity that a friendship should end like this just because she couldn’t be bothered. Then an idea took root in his brain.
Really it was Miss Irwin who gave it to him, though he would have loathed to admit it. She was an ardent week-end cyclist, A ‘roadster,’ she said, belonging to a club, and having a gentleman friend in the same club. She showed Hugo a photograph. The friend had hairy legs and baby socks, he wore the most shocking pair of shorts and an American sweat shirt, and was one of the nastiest-looking little ticks that Hugo had ever seen. Miss Irwin took cycling holidays, and Hugo decided that when the summer brought him his holiday he would go back to Hindhead and sleep in the loft with the smell of hay, and the fir trees beyond the window, and the moon like a golden nail-paring. He would meet Muriel. He felt for her only friendship, but because his life was so lonely, and always had been, he could not afford to lose a single friend.
Before the summer came, however, something had happened to him.
At eighteen Hugo fell in love.
In the village there was a solicitor who occasionally came to see the Blairs. Mr. Alfred Long and his wife Ada were very ordinary middle-class people with minds that a match-box could have accommodated with surprising ease. James Blair did not usually encourage friends, but the Longs being professional people, he felt that he derived a certain social uplift from them, so encouraged them to the extent of an occasional dinner, and subsequent boring evening.
At Easter he asked Alfred and Ada to dine, and they explained that their niece Wynne Morgan would be with them, so she had to be included. The Longs were an unglamorous couple. He was tall and thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the despised ‘parson’s nose’ on a recently plucked boiling fowl; he had a dome-shaped bald head and pince-nez; Ada Long wore flowered frocks, little capes and over-strapped shoes; she pattered about, and had noticeable trouble with her false teeth. The cameo brooch would never die in Ada’s lifetime. Hugo expected that the niece would be equally serviceable, either the kind that has thyroid trouble, or the slenderer but equally unattractive sort that has acne.
Neither he nor his father were to know that Ada’s only sister had married a gentleman from California, closely connected with films in the Theda Bara, Maurice Costello days, and that the daughter had been born in Hollywood, and had not become acquainted with Max Factor for nothing! Into the Blairs’ drawing-room she stepped at Ada’s heels, tall, willowy, blonde by monthly contract with her hairdresser, and most divinely so! She was twenty-three, her startlingly black lashes up-curling, crowning pure violet eyes. She wore a cyclamen frock cut dead plain, her only trimming being an enormous bunch of violets at the throat.
She gave Hugo one look, and that look penetrated his callow youth into his soul and made him a man. Ada and Alfred were such very nondescript people, and their minds were so definitely match-box that Wynne Morgan was all the more astonishing. Before he could stop himself he knew that his mouth had gone dry with admiration, that he was watching her far more closely than he had ever watched a girl before, and that he felt strange. She sat herself beside him, five years his senior and old in the wiles of the world.
‘You must find this place dull?’ she said. ‘Say, what do you do with yourself?’
‘I work in my father’s office.’
‘Is it amusing?’
‘Not very.’ He could not trust himself to tell her the truth.
‘In America you’d be going places and touching the high spots. Harvard, Yale, baseball, all that. Doesn’t it make you sore?’
‘No, I was at college, now I’m working for my living.’
‘How much d’you get paid?’ She was plain-spoken, with all the directness of the American, razor-sharp, and he was acutely conscious of his own bluntness. He stared at her; until to-night he had been a child, now he was on the threshold of manhood, a magnificent estate, with strange longings, plunged through with deep thrusts of emotion, or poignancies and pains, and unbearable pleasures.
The meal was a simple one, because James Blair did not believe in elaborate menus. A roast chicken, a queen’s pudding, good red wine; he chose his cellar always carefully. Afterwards they played Bridge; he refused to play Contract, and disliked it very much if he lost at Auction. Wynne did not play, she sat strumming at the piano instead, choosing strangely sweet music, suggesting the tenderness of passion and the romance of fulfilment.
Hugo was too young to know that she was doing all this on purpose, that she was bored, and delighted in exploiting his own youthfulness, and making it respond to her. He could not attend to the game because his senses were so disturbed, and once he revoked, bringing his father down on him vehemently. He was terrified that the feelings, entirely new to him, would be noticeable and that unconsciously he would become a laughing-stock.
The evening passed, the room misty with smoke, and censed with the dry smell of James Blair’s best brandy. Then the guests left. It was maddening that Hugo could not think of an excuse to see Wynne home, but he would be superfluous with Alfred there, with his old bald head and the small eyes behind the pince-nez.
James Blair waved them off and came in from the porch, with its stained glass and chaise longue and the shelf for the geraniums. ‘Well, I saw you looking at that girl,’ he sneered. ‘It’s wonderful what a good pair of legs can do to turn a young man into a calf lover.’
Hugo could think of nothing to reply. He wanted to be biting and cynical, but he had no words.
‘Take my advice, leave women alone. They’re no damn good.’ He did not say good-night; he stumped off up the stairs, and slammed the bedroom door.
The words ‘calf love’ hurt, and all the more because they were true. It was calf love.
Hugo went to the office next morning in a state of dither. He thought about Wynne the whole way up in the train, and wa
s ashamed that he couldn’t stop himself. How delicious it would be to take her into his arms, to kiss her, to fondle her, and to talk to her! He thought about her all the morning, and crossing London, and walking up Ludgate Hill. It was a cold spring day with primroses in the shops, and a bitter rain falling, so that you could see the drops, almost like sleet.
In the office Ebenezer Minch had a bad head cold, and his nose had turned a port wine puce, which looked droll in his yellow face. But he would insist that nothing was the matter with him; he felt quite all right; no, he wouldn’t go home.
‘No, he’ll stop here and give it to us all, the old toad!’ said Miss Irwin indignantly. She always got colds badly, and it was all very well people saying that they were three days coming, three days here and three days going. It was all twenty days with her, and lucky then if she could shake it off and not get saddled with her beastly catarrh.
Hugo couldn’t work. He sat in his office, and he thought about Wynne Morgan, and couldn’t concentrate. When his father sent for him at midday, he had no idea how the letters stood, and admitted it.
‘You’ll have to do your work or get out,’ said James Blair, ‘no wet nurses here. No nonsense mooning about girls. Get the Romeo stuff out of your head.’
Hugo went into the Lyons at one, but he couldn’t eat. He was thinking of Darjeeling, and green tea, and the Velvet Tips, which could not be obtained these days, and more, a very great deal more, about Wynne Morgan.
He sat down at the same old table. Nowadays the waitress had got to know him, and kept him a place by tipping a chair drunkenly forward against the marble slab. She greeted him always with a friendly, ‘Here y’are.’
‘Well, and what is it to be?’ she asked, ‘the hot-pot’s good to-day.’
He did not feel like food. Always before he had looked forward to his midday meal as being a break, and he would study what he would have, steak and kid., or stewed mutton, or sauerkraut. He was still young enough to feel his mouth water at the prospect of food, and his stomach expand. But to-day he did not fancy it. He took the hot-pot only because she suggested it, and had hard work to get through it. He did not know what ailed him but had the unhappy knowledge that it wasn’t a curable sickness, it was love.
The waitress noticed. ‘You’ve probably got a cold coming. It does put you off your food,’ she said. ‘I’d have a nice strong black coffee if I were you.’
‘All right.’
He watched the girls round him, clerks like himself, stenographers, all workers in offices. Before he could stop himself he was comparing them, and his wits were sharpened by the difference. These home-made jumpers, some with an attempt to smarten themselves a bit more by a gay choker, or a collar, or a bow. Nothing like that bunch of violets last night. Nothing simple and direct and appealing as that had been. Others hadn’t tried, monotony and the urgent need of giving one’s best to one’s job had soured ambition. How different from Wynne! But then she was different from any other girl in the world, and when he came to think of her, he knew that he could hardly bear it, because the whole of his body was inflamed, and became breathless, as though he stood on an enormous height, or saw before him some tremendous adventure before which his spirit was appalled.
In the afternoon he tried to work, but made mistakes and was aware that Ebenezer recognised them and knew that something ailed him, so he invented a plausible headache. This meant that Miss Irwin, came in and proffered some of her aspirin; she always kept a little screw-top bottle in her bag in case she ‘came over queer’, as she sometimes did when out with her roadster boy friend. Having skilfully parried the offer of aspirin from Miss Irwin, Hugo had to cope with the extra strong cup of tea, made specially for him by Miss Helstone, so black that it tasted like cascara.
Later he went home.
About the pale light of the spring evening there was the first hint of better days ahead; the wind was still cold, coming down Ludgate Hill to the corner of Fleet Street, and catching him as he stood by the magazine shop there. But in that wind was the whisper of spring meadows, and streams illuminated by the brass gold of marsh marigolds, the sound of young lambs, and that torch to the young man’s fancy, which is love.
Even in the weary train with its load of tired people slumped into their seats, his racing pulses went on. He got out at the home station; a haze lay about the thickening crowns of the elms in the yard, and the thorn hedge bore already its first suspicion of green. The thrushes were singing. As he stepped out into the yard, he heard someone call to him from a small car, brought to rest by the kerb. Wynne was sitting there in a Lagonda coupé.
‘Hello there! I’d a hunch you’d be on board this train. Come for a drive?’
How beautiful she was! Her hair swept up in wings, her bright eyes with the dark lashes, and her trim suit. She drove resolutely, with complete mastery of the car, and she took him up on to the hill above the village, where the rooks were nesting in tall dim trees and making a great noise. The red ploughed lands were spread beyond and ridged like newly combed hair, and the peewits flew over them. He could hear lambs in the distance.
‘It was good of you to meet me,’ he said, and then with a sudden impulse, ‘I’ve been thinking of you all day.’
‘I guessed maybe you would.’ She accepted him simply. He supposed that she knew that he was in love with her. Quite calmly she asked, ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’
He did want to, but a disturbing shyness stopped him. He was angry to find himself reddening, and his cheeks began to sting with the colour. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said.
‘Think so?’
‘I’m sure of it. Lots of people must have told you that. Heaps of them.’
‘Naturally,’ and then, ‘aren’t you going to kiss me?’
He leant towards her nervously, and touched her cheek naively. He had never kissed anybody in his life save Emily, and he didn’t include her. Wynne smelt of flowers, and her cheek was soft.
‘There!’ She turned and pulled his face towards her own, kissing him on the mouth. One half of him liked it, the other was ashamed. How could she do it? The feel of her mouth was like the feel of the full cabbage roses which as a child he had smelt on the lawn; they were soft and plushy with dew. She must know that it made him dizzy and elated and miserable all at once.
‘You’re lovely,’ he said.
‘And am I dull? It’s foul staying with my uncle and aunt on location. They’re dumb. I’m so bored.’
She patted his knees in a friendly and engaging way, and now he was helpless. All day he had been thinking to himself what he would do if a God-given opportunity like this occurred. But in the dreams he had dreamt, he had been a hero instead of going mute.
‘Well, it’s no good feeling this way,’ said Wynne, ‘we’ll go home.’ And she started the car again.
He had no idea if he had offended her, or if she were tired of him. He felt callow. Very young. Helpless. She dropped him at the end of the road at his own request, because he did not want his father to see them together.
That was the Easter week-end.
On the Thursday he left the office knowing that he would not have to be back until the Tuesday. Also, even greater joy, his father was going to Bournemouth. It was very rare for James Blair to go away from home, because he preferred his own easy chair, and his own environment, but he had been asked down to Bournemouth to stay with an old friend. James Blair was peculiarly friendless, and could only count on one lifelong friend. Horace Minter was a tall, gaunt man, much like a raven, with fever-bright, avaricious eyes, and occasionally he asked James to stay. At Easter Bournemouth was pleasantly mild. Although he did not harp upon it openly, James was always much disturbed about his own health and he had an old-fashioned faith in an occasional trip to the South coast. The fact that the holiday was being offered to him for nothing added considerably to the advantages. He had left for Bournemouth from the office at midday on the Thursday, full of complaints about the trip in a full train, yet refusing to t
ake the car on to a crowded road. When Hugo returned, it was to the empty home.
The garden looked serenely beautiful in the falling sunshine as he turned in at the gate. Grape hyacinths and polyanthus snuggled under the bleak trees, and the yellow, pale sun filtered through the ashy branches of the walnut. He had got until Tuesday! He would be able to move about in the home without fear of interruption, or of comment, all these days away from that hateful tea office. It was escape, escape in the happiest form. He would ask Wynne to tea, he thought, he would send a little note, though before this was ever sent, Wynne herself had appeared, standing looking rather guilty in the porch, but with eyes brilliant. She knew that James Blair was away, she never missed anything. It was the hour before dinner, and already Hugo had had time to get over the turmoil of the day at the office, and to throw off the fretfulness, revelling in the thought that he had all this time ahead, and alone. Yet not alone. There was Wynne.
She kissed him before she left.
All the time she was with him, he kept on wondering whether she would. Although he sat there talking to her, he found that he was unable to concentrate, because he kept on thinking about it. Would she just get up and go, or linger? Then, quite against his will, he would recall how like a full-petalled rose her mouth had been. How soft! Then she did kiss him after all.
He could not sleep that night. He wanted to sleep, and always hitherto he had just slept, thinking of it as something that came, a child born of the night, something inescapable. It wasn’t inescapable, it had been shattered by the most disturbing emotional force that had ever come into his life.
They met next day, and as they had arranged went primrosing, because her aunt had promised to get some to send to the rectory for the church decorations. They tramped across a field where the wheat was just spiking in little green blades through the dark earth. They crossed full ditches high with water and weed, and marigolds which were almost too bright, and then they sat in the wood after they had gathered their primroses. The birds sang and he knew that she was wonderful.