The Slaves of Solitude

by Patrick Hamilton

  ‘Is she downstairs now?’ asked Miss Roach.

  ‘Yes. But that doesn’t matter. Let’s go out together alone.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  And this was true. At first she didn’t know. Then she realised why this was. Her pride would not allow her to put herself into competition with such a woman. Presumably, it was now within her power to go out with the Lieutenant alone and to win him back. But nothing could make her do it. It was beneath her even to score off that woman.

  And how was the poor Lieutenant to understand this? What a muddle, what a muddle!

  ‘Don’t you like me any more?’

  ‘Yes. Of course I like you. I like you very much.’

  ‘Then let’s go out together.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to.’

  ‘Aw – come on,’ said the Lieutenant, and tried more emphatically to kiss her.

  ‘No. You must leave me alone,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I want to be left alone, that’s all.’

  ‘Aw, come on!’

  ‘No. Leave me alone. Please leave me alone. Really!’

  ‘Aw, I don’t understand you. You’ve got me beat. It seems to me you’re acting all feminine.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve no doubt I am. But I want to be left alone. Go on. Leave me. I want you to leave me. Will you leave me? Please.’

  There was a pause in which the Lieutenant looked at her.

  Then, ‘Aw, hell,’ he said, and with a look of anger such as she had never seen on his face before, he rose and left the room.

  3

  And so that was that! There, through the door and out of her life, it all went – the Lieutenant, his Laundry, his inconsequence, his habit of drinking too much, his failings, his niceness, his kissings in the dark, her little ‘romance’ and renewed interest in life because of him, all.

  The trouble was that she liked the man, would, indeed, if he had approached the matter in a proper and serious spirit, probably have been willing to marry him. He was stupid over certain matters, of course, and he drank too much: but who could blame a man in such circumstances – so far from his own home, and in the shadow of such peril as awaited him when the second front began – for drinking too much? The drinking probably accounted for his inconsequence, and back home, in Wilkes Barre or whatever it was, he was no doubt a normal and excellent citizen.

  If the conversation which had just taken place had taken a different turn, might the situation have been retrieved? No. Nothing would have altered her decision not to go out that night. Her hatred of that woman exceeded in power any fondness she might have or develop towards the Lieutenant. To have allowed herself to become her ‘rival’, to have put herself in the position of competing with her, of gaining here or losing there (and in view of the Lieutenant’s inconsequence she might well lose anything she gained at a moment’s notice!) – this would be to violate the holiest of inner sanctuaries of pride and dignity, and was quite beyond her. It had to be as it was.

  And, of course, it would never be possible to explain this to the simple-minded Lieutenant, who would no doubt, to the end of his days, think that she had behaved childishly, pettishly, in a feminine and ridiculous way. He would probably, indeed, accept the solution, which had obviously already been suggested to him by Vicki, that she was consumed with jealousy and hatred – the jealousy and hatred of the prim ‘English Miss’, the prude, the soured spinster! Well – let him think it – she didn’t really care enough about him to mind.

  Why had life treated her thus, and how had fate contrived to land her in this grotesque, fantastically, wickedly false position? It was, in a manner, a sort of accident, one of those tricks which life just plays. The evil mind of the German woman was not wholly responsible for what had happened. The trouble had begun on that first night when the three of them had gone out together, and that had been a pure accident. Vicki’s name had somehow cropped up on the telephone and somehow she had been invited, without the conscious volition of either the Lieutenant or herself. What would have happened if her name had not cropped up and she had not been invited? Might the whole course of events not have been different?

  Impossible to say. Impossible, also, to do anything about it now. The Lieutenant had gone, and the door was closed.

  4

  The Lieutenant and Vicki were absent from the house and dinner that night, and Mr. Thwaites was quieter.

  But there was still the gleam in his eye of the child who was going to break his toy, and Miss Roach was more than ever conscious of the imminence of climax and storm.

  She went to bed early that night, and managed to get to sleep by ten o’clock.

  At half-past ten she was awakened by Sheila, and had to go down in her dressing-gown to the telephone.

  She imagined she was to answer a Lieutenant again in drink, but this was not so. The call was from Guildford, and the news was that her aunt was seriously ill. This news was conveyed by a Mrs. Spender, the friend with whom her aunt had been staying ever since she had left Thames Lockdon.

  Miss Roach asked if she should go to Guildford at once, but Mrs. Spender thought this unnecessary. She should, however, hold herself in readiness, and Mrs. Spender would phone her again tomorrow.

  Among other things, then, she was probably going to lose the only living relation of whom she was fond and with whom she kept in touch. In this manner the season of goodwill came, for Miss Roach, to an end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  1

  BUT the climax did not actually occur until a few days later, when it was least foreseen, and on a Sunday night, and in the dining-room. And it was not at all the sort of climax which Miss Roach had anticipated.

  On the Saturday night Miss Roach had returned at a late hour from Guildford, where she had found her aunt unconscious and almost certainly about to die within a week. Over-tired, she had spent a practically sleepless night.

  Before the storm occurred there was as little atmosphere of storm as there could possibly have been – as there could possibly have been, that is to say, in a room in which Mr. Thwaites, Vicki Kugelmann, and Miss Roach were sitting together.

  The gale of Christmas had blown itself out: the Lieutenant, as was his habit, had vanished completely: deathly dullness and boredom gripped the house, whose guests looked at the end of the year, and the beginning of the next, with misery and stupefaction.

  At Mr. Prest’s table there was a newcomer, a small, thin, dried-up old lady called Mrs. Crewe. Mrs. Crewe’s presence added to the reigning stupefaction.

  Mr. Thwaites had spoken little throughout the meal, and, of course, while he remained silent, no one else had spoken.

  It happened at the end of the meal, a minute or so before they were due to rise. If they had risen a minute or so earlier it would almost certainly never have happened at all.

  Miss Roach never remembered exactly how it was led into. Mr. Thwaites, who had been listening in to the news before dinner, was discussing the war and post-war problems.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Thwaites, summing up. ‘A complicated world we live in, my masters.’

  Whenever Mr. Thwaites alluded thus to the world in general terms, calling it ‘funny’ or ‘strange’ or ‘wicked’, he always said ‘My masters’ afterwards.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vicki, and that curious tone was in her voice again. ‘A very complicated world . . . A very complicated situation altogether.’

  Miss Roach knew exactly what she was getting at. This was ‘Yes, Peace – and understanding’ all over again. Her suggestion behind the stress she laid upon the complication of the situation was as clear as day. She meant that the world was in a state of complication owing to misunderstanding generally, and of Nazi Germany in particular.

  Now Miss Roach was not going to stand for this. She had made up her mind she was not going to stand for this. She could stand, and had stood, practically everything from this woman, but s
omehow this was the one thing she did not mean to stand.

  She hesitated, and then spoke in a calm, off-hand, and quite good-natured way.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that it’s so complicated.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Mr. Thwaites, sharply, and with the old bullying look, ‘ “It’s not so complicated.’ ”

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I just don’t think it’s so complicated, that’s all.’

  ‘I know. You said that,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘But I want to know why.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Go on,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I just think it’s quite simple, that’s all. It’s a simple conflict between all that’s decent and all that’s evil – and it’s simple, that’s all . . .’

  There was another pause, and then Vicki made the remark which, blowing up the ammunition dump, disclosed the amount of ammunition stored away.

  ‘Simple, perhaps,’ she said, ruminatingly, ‘to people with simple minds . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Roach. ‘Only complicated, actually, to people with simple minds – or people with distorted minds.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Vicki, ‘we had better not talk international politics.’

  ‘No, perhaps we’d better not,’ said Mr. Thwaites, looking at Miss Roach as if to say that Miss Roach had better not, anyway.

  It was the two-against-one business that got Miss Roach. If it had not been for that she might still have kept her temper, which now she lost completely.

  ‘And were you suggesting,’ she said, looking at Vicki, ‘that I’m a person with a simple mind?’

  ‘I think, perhaps,’ said Vicki, ‘that we’d better not talk about international politics.’

  ‘That’s not the point—’ began Miss Roach, but Mr. Thwaites cut in.

  ‘No, I think we’d better not,’ he said, glaring at her threateningly.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the point—’ began Miss Roach, and this time Miss Steele cut in, in a last moment bid to avert total calamity.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s never wise to talk about politics – is it? I quite agree with Miss Roach, as a matter of fact – but it’s never wise to talk about them.’

  ‘No,’ said Vicki, ‘we had better leave politics to those who are qualified to talk about them.’

  There was another fearful pause.

  ‘Are you suggesting by that,’ said Miss Roach, ‘that I’m not qualified to talk about politics?’

  ‘Really,’ said Vicki, appealing to Mr. Thwaites, with a little smile, ‘she is in quite A Pet – no?’

  ‘Or are you suggesting,’ said Miss Roach, ‘that you are more qualified than I?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Vicki. ‘I have travelled a little about the world, you know.’

  ‘I think it’d be better if we went upstairs, don’t you?’ said Mrs. Barratt, but nobody answered her, and nobody showed any sign of going upstairs.

  ‘And does that mean,’ said Miss Roach, ‘that I have not travelled about the world?’

  ‘Really,’ said Vicki, ‘I do not know about your travels. All I know is that you are not altogether – what shall we say? – cosmopolitan in outlook? No?’

  ‘I think we’d better go upstairs,’ said Mrs. Barratt.

  ‘Yes, I think we had,’ said Miss Steele. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘And does being cosmopolitan in outlook,’ said Miss Roach, ‘mean that you think things are so complicated that you support the Nazis in all the murder and filth and torture they’ve been spreading over Europe, and still are?’

  Miss Roach knew that she would regret what she was doing, that she should really stop. But she could not do so. That use of the word ‘cosmopolitan’, with its cunning reversion to the ‘English Miss’ theme, had goaded her beyond recall. She was also amazed by her own courage. The reason for this was the fact that the argument was at root impersonal. If this had been a quarrel over the Lieutenant, she might have been suspected, or suspected herself, of self-interest. But it was not: it was an argument about the guilt of Nazi Germany. And she just wasn’t going to let the woman get away with it!

  ‘Really,’ said Vicki, again appealing to Mr. Thwaites, ‘she is very rhetorical – is she not?’

  ‘Very,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘And there’s no need to bring nationalities into it.’

  ‘I’m not talking about nationalities,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I’m talking about Nazis.’

  ‘And there’s no need,’ said Mr. Thwaites, ‘to insult a German woman in her own—’ Mr. Thwaites stopped himself just in time. He had, in his confusion of mind, been going to say ‘in her own country’. But this, although it sounded so good on the surface, wouldn’t do. In her own country was exactly where the German woman was not, and Mr. Thwaites had the wit to see this before finishing his sentence.

  ‘I’m not insulting anyone,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I’m just not going to have remarks made like this when people are dying all around us for what they think’s right.’

  Miss Roach realised that this was rhetorically and logically a little feeble, but she could do no better.

  ‘Do not mind her,’ said Vicki, and looked at Miss Roach. ‘She is really quite A Pet. She is really quite A dear!’

  ‘If you go on calling me a pet,’ said Miss Roach, ‘and if you go on calling me a dear – there’s going to be trouble!’

  ‘I think we’d better go upstairs,’ said Mrs. Barratt, and rose. Mr. Thwaites rose too.

  ‘Don’t bother about her,’ he said, putting his napkin into his ring. ‘They always say hell knows no fury like a woman scorned.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, Mr. Thwaites?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Mr. Thwaites, and began to move towards the door.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Roach, who had also risen. ‘Will you please tell me what you mean? What woman has been scorned?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘I know what’s been going on. I’ve got eyes in my head.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Miss Roach, and to prevent Mr. Thwaites leaving, she put her hand on his arm. ‘And what has been going on? Will you tell me, please?’

  ‘All right, let a fellow go upstairs, will you?’ said Mr. Thwaites, and pushing her hand away, he left the room and began to climb the stairs. Miss Roach followed him out.

  ‘Will you please tell me what you mean, Mr. Thwaites?’

  ‘All right,’ said Mr. Thwaites, climbing the stairs. ‘Don’t you bother. It’s not the first time a woman’s been cut out. It’s not the first time a woman’s had her nose put out of joint by another. It’s not the first quarrel about a man!’

  ‘Will you tell me what you’re talking about, Mr. Thwaites?’ said Miss Roach, following him up the stairs. ‘What woman has been cut out by what other woman? What man are you talking about?’

  Mr. Thwaites had now reached the landing.

  ‘Oh – a certain gentleman in uniform,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘You haven’t got to pretend you don’t know.’

  Miss Roach had now also reached the landing, which was well lit (Mrs. Payne having recently permitted the reintroduction of electricity on this floor), and they were facing each other.

  ‘Do not mind her!’ cried Vicki, from below. ‘She is quite A pet! She does not bother me!’

  ‘I think we’d better stop all this – don’t you!’ cried Miss Steele, also from below.

  ‘Will you tell me what man you mean, Mr. Thwaites?’ said Miss Roach.

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s bother about the man,’ said Mr. Thwaites, with his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘If you didn’t bother about men so much you’d be a lot better, wouldn’t you? That’s your trouble. You’ve got the men on the brain, my worthy spinster dame, haven’t you?’

  ‘Mr. Thwaites. Will you explain yourself, please?’

  ‘And just take one tip of mine, will you?’

  ‘Yes. What tip, pray?’

  ‘Leave ’em alone at a certain age, will you? Let ’em
be over eighteen. If you must go after ’em, let ’em be over age. People see what’s going on, you know. Leave ’em alone until after a certain age!’

  There was a silence. For a moment Miss Roach did not realise what he was talking about. Then, with the sudden realisation that he was alluding to the Poulton boy, Miss Roach lost control. With the realisation of his implications, with the memory of her walks with the Poulton boy, of their innocence and simplicity, of the glad, sad, maternal feelings which she had felt towards the boy as he had unfolded his ambitions, with the idea of gossip of such a kind having arisen in regard to such a relationship, Miss Roach lost control. The filth of the suggestion seemed like filth reeling round in her own head and blinding her.

  ‘How dare you say that!’ she heard herself saying in a black mist, and she pushed out her hand, violently, half to strike Mr. Thwaites, half to throw the filthy suggestion out of her way.

  After that she did not quite know what happened. Mr. Thwaites, with his hands in his pockets, staggered backwards. Having his hands in his pockets he was unable to balance himself properly, and the next moment he had fallen down and was sitting up against the wall.

  Miss Roach looked at him, and he looked at Miss Roach.

  She felt Vicki brushing past her.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr. Thwaites?’ Vicki was saying. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘She Pushed me!’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘She Pushed me!’

  ‘Are you hurt?’ said Vicki, but all Mr. Thwaites would reply was ‘She Pushed me.’

  Mrs. Payne had now arrived on the scene.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ said Mrs. Payne. ‘Are you hurt, Mr. Thwaites?’

  ‘She Pushed me,’ said Mr. Thwaites, now exchanging his original tone of horror and surprise for a tone of incredulous awe.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Roach. ‘And I’ll Push you again if you say things like that!’

  Mr. Thwaites was now on his feet again, supported each side by Mrs. Payne and Vicki, and gazing at Miss Roach.

  ‘So you Pushed me, did you?’ he said. ‘You’ll pay for that, Dame Roach!’