by Hugh Walpole
He stood on the edge of the pavement, he made a step forward and at that moment there arose, as it were from the very heart of the ground itself, a stout and, to Henry’s delicate sense, a repulsive figure.
She was a woman wearing a round black hat and a black sealskin jacket; her dress was of a light vivid green, her hair a peroxide yellow and from her ears hung large glittering diamond earrings.
To a lead of the same bright green as her dress there was attached a small sniffing and supercilious Pomeranian. She was stout and red-faced: there was a general impression that she was very tightly bound about beneath the sealskin jacket. Her green skirt was shorter than her figure requested. Her thick legs showed fairly pink beneath very thin silk black stockings; light brown boots very tightly laced compressed her ankles until they bulged protestingly. All this, however, Henry did not notice until later in the day when, as will soon be shown, he had ample opportunity for undisturbed observation.
His gaze was not upon the stout woman but upon the child who attended her. Child you could not perhaps truthfully call her; she was at any rate not dressed as a child.
In contrast with the woman her clothes were quiet and well made, a dark dress with a little black hat whose only colour was a feather of flaming red. It was this feather that first caught Henry’s eye. It was one of his misfortunes at this time that life was always suggesting to him literary illusions.
When he saw the feather he at once thought of Razkolnikov’s Sonia. Perhaps not only the feather suggested the comparison. There was something simple and innocent and a little apprehensive that came at once from the girl’s attitude, her hesitation as she stood just in front of Henry, the glance that she flung upon the Piccadilly cauldron before she stepped into it.
He saw very little of her face, although in retrospect, it was impossible for him to believe that he had not seen her exactly as she was, soul and body, from the first instant glimpse of her; her face was pale, thin, her eyes large and dark, and even in that first moment very beautiful.
He had not, of course, any time to see these things. He filled in the picture afterwards. What exactly occurred was that the diamond earrings flashed before him, the thick legs stepped into the space between two omnibuses, there was a shout from a driver and for a horrible moment it seemed that both the girl and the supercilious Pomeranian had been run over. Henry dashed forward, himself only narrowly avoided instant death, then, reaching, breathless and confused, an island, saw the trio, all safe and well, moving towards the stoutest of the flower-women. He also saw the stout woman take the girl by the arm, shake her violently, say something to her in obvious anger. He also saw the girl turn for an instant her head, look back as though beseeching some one to help her and then follow her green diamond-flashing dragon.
Was it this mute appeal that moved Henry? Was it Fate and Destiny? Was it a longing that justice should be done? Was it the Romantic Spirit? Was it Youth? Was it the Spirit of the Age? Every reader of this book must make an individual decision.
The recorded fact is simply that Henry, hatless, muddy, battered and dishevelled, his books still clutched beneath his arm, followed. Following was no easy matter. It was, as I have already said, the most crowded moment of the day. Beyond the statue and the flower-woman a stout policeman kept back the Shaftesbury Avenue traffic. Men and women rushed across while there was yet time and the woman, the dog and the girl rushed also. As Henry had often before noticed, it was the little things in life that so continually checked his progress. Did he search for a house that he was visiting for the first time, the numbers in that street invariably ceased just before the number that he required. Was anything floating through the air in the guise of a black smut or a flake of tangible dust, certainly it would settle upon Henry’s unconscious nose: was there anything with which a human body might at any moment be entangled, Henry’s was the body inevitably caught.
So it was now. At the moment that he was in the middle of the crossing, the stout policeman, most scornfully disregarding him, waved on the expectant traffic. Down it came upon him, cars and taxi-cabs, omnibuses and boys upon bicycles, all shouting and blowing horns and screaming out of whistles. He had the barest moment to skip back into the safe company of the flower-woman. Skip back he did. It seemed to his over-sensitive nature that the policeman sardonically smiled.
When he recovered from his indignant agitation there was of course no sign of the flaming feather. At the next opportunity he crossed and standing by the paper-stall and the Pavilion advertisements gazed all around him. Up the street and down the street. Down the street and up the street. No sign at all. He walked quickly towards the Trocadero restaurant, crossed there to the Lyric Theatre, moved on to the churchyard by the entrance to Wardour Street and then gazed again.
What happened next was so remarkable and so obviously designed by a kindly paternal providence that for the rest of his life he could not quite escape from a conviction that fate was busied with him! a happy conviction that cheered him greatly in lonely hours. Out from the upper Circle entrance to the Apollo Theatre, so close to him that only a narrow unoccupied street separated him, came the desired three, the woman and the dog first, the girl following. They stood for a moment, then the woman once more said something angrily to the girl and they turned into Wardour Street. Now was all the world hushed and still, the graves in the churchyard slept, a woman leaning against a doorway sucked an orange, the sun slipped down behind the crooked chimneys, saffron and gold stole into the pale shadows of the sky and the morning and the evening were the First Day.
Henry followed.
Around Wardour Street they hung all the shabby and tattered traditions of the poor degraded costume romance, but in its actual physical furniture there are not even trappings. There is nothing but Cinema offices, public houses, barber shops, clothes shops and shops with windows so dirty that you cannot tell what their trade may be. It is a romantic street in no sense of the word; it is not a kindly street nor a hospitable, angry words are forever echoing from wall to wall and women scream behind shuttered windows.
Henry had no time to consider whether it were a romantic street or no. The feather waved in front of him and he followed. He had by now forgotten that he was hatless and dirty. A strangely wistful eagerness urged him as though his heart were saying with every beat: “Don’t count too much on this. I know you expect a great deal. Don’t be taken in.”
He did expect a great deal; with every step excitement beat higher. Their sudden reappearance when he had thought that he had lost them seemed to him the most wonderful omen. He believed in omens, always throwing salt over his left shoulder when he spilt it (which he continually did), never walking under ladders and of course never lighting three cigarettes with one match.
Some way up Wardour Street on the left as you go towards Oxford Street there is a public house with the happy country sign of the Intrepid Fox. No one knows how long the Intrepid Fox has charmed the inhabitants of Wardour Street into its dark and intricate recesses — Tom Jones may have known it and Pamela passed by it and Humphrey Clinker laughed in its doorway — no one now dare tell you and no history book records its name. Only Henry will never until he dies forget it and for him it will always be one of the most romantic buildings in the world.
It stood at the corner of Wardour Street and a little thoroughfare called Peter Street. Henry reached the Intrepid Fox just as the Flaming Feather vanished beyond the rows of flower and vegetable stalls that thronged the roadway. Peter Street it seemed was the market of the district; beneath the lovely blue of the evening the things on the stall are picturesque and touching, even old clothes, battered hats, boots with gaping toes and down-trodden heels, and the barrow of all sorts with dirty sheets of music and old paper-covered novels and tin trays and cheap flower-painted vases. In between these booths the feather waved. Henry pursuing stumbled over the wooden stands of the barrows, nearly upset an old watery-eyed woman from her chair — and arrived just in time to see the three pursued vani
sh through a high faded green door that had the shabby number in dingy red paint of Number Seven.
Number Seven was, as he at once perceived, strangely situated. At its right was the grimy thick-set exterior of “The City of London” public house, on its left there was a yard roofed in by a wooden balcony like the balcony of a country inn, old and rather pathetic with some flower-pots ranged along it and three windows behind it; the yard and the balcony seemed to belong to another and simpler world than the grim ugliness of the “City of London” and her companions. The street was full of business and no one had time to consider Henry. In this neighbourhood the facts that he was without a hat and needed a wash were neither so unusual nor so humorous as to demand comment.
He stood and looked. This was the time for him to go home. His romantic adventure was now logically at an end. Did he ring the bell of Number Seven he had nothing whatever to say if the door were opened.
The neighbourhood was not suited to his romantic soul. The shop opposite to him declaring itself in large white letters to be the “Paris Fish Dinner” and announcing that it could provide at any moment “Fish fried in the best dripping” was the sort of shop that destroyed all Henry’s illusions. He should, at this point, have gone home. He did not. He crossed the road. The black yard, smelling of dogs and harness, invited him in. He stumbled in the dusk against a bench and some boxes but no human being seemed to be there. As his eyes grew accustomed to the half light he saw at the back of the yard a wooden staircase that vanished into blackness. Still moving as though ordered by some commanding Providence he walked across to this and started to climb. It turned a corner and his head struck sharply a wooden surface that suddenly, lifting with his pressure a little, revealed itself as a trap-door. Henry pushed upwards and found himself, as Mrs. Radcliffe would say “in a gloomy passage down which the wind blew with gusty vehemence.”
In truth the wind was not blowing nor was anything stirring. The trap-door fell back with a heavy swaying motion and a creaking sigh as though some one quite close at hand had suddenly fainted. Henry walked down the passage and found that it led to a dusky thick-paned window that overlooked a square just behind the yard through which he had come. This was a very small and dirty square, grimy houses overlooking it and one thin clothes-line cutting the light evening sky now light topaz with one star and a cherry-coloured baby moon. To the right of this window was another heavily curtained and serving no purpose as it looked out only upon the passage. Beside this window Henry paused. It was formed by two long glass partitions and these were not quite fastened. From the room beyond came voices, feminine voices, one raised in violent anger. A pause — from below in the yard some one called. A step was ascending the stair.
From within voices again and then a sound not to be mistaken. Some one was slapping somebody’s face and slapping it with satisfaction. A sharp cry — and Henry pushing back the window, stepped forward, became entangled in curtains of some heavy clinging stuff, flung out his arms to save himself and fell for the second time within an hour and on this occasion into the heart of a company that was most certainly not expecting him.
II
He had fallen on his knees and when he stumbled to his feet his left heel was still entangled with the curtain. He nearly fell again, but saved himself with a kind of staggering, suddenly asserted dignity, a dignity none the easier because he heard the curtain tear behind him as he pulled himself to his feet.
When he was standing once more and able to look about him the scene that he slowly collected for himself was a simple one — a very ugly room dressed entirely it seemed at first sight in bright salmon pink, the walls covered with photographs of ladies and gentlemen for the most part in evening dress. There were two large pink pots with palms, an upright piano swathed in pink silk, a bamboo bookcase, a sofa with pink cushions, a table on which tea was laid, the Pomeranian and — three human beings.
The three human beings were in various attitudes of transfigured astonishment exactly as though they had been lent for this special occasion by Madame Tussaud. There was the lady with the green dress, the girl with the flaming feather and the third figure was a woman, immensely stout and hung with bracelets, pendants, chains and lockets so that when her bosom heaved (it was doing that now quite frantically) the noise that she made resembled those Japanese glass toys that you hang in the window for the wind to make tinkling music with them. The only sounds in the room were this deep breathing and this rattling, twitting, tittering agitation.
Even the Pomeranian was transfixed. Henry felt it his duty to speak and he would have spoken had he not been staring at the girl as though his eyes would never be able to leave her face again. It was plain enough that it was she who had been slapped a moment ago. There was a red mark on her cheek and there were tears in her eyes.
To Henry she was simply the most beautiful creature ever made in heaven and sent down to this sinful earth by a loving and kindly God. He had thought of her as a child when he first saw her, he thought of her as a child again now, a child who had, only last night, put up her hair — under the hat with the flaming feather, that hair of a vivid shining gold was trying to escape into many rebellious directions. The slapping may have had something to do with that. It was obvious at the first glance that she was not English — Scandinavian perhaps with the yellow hair, the bright blue eyes and the clear pink-and-white skin. Her dress of some mole-coloured corduroy, very simple, her little dark hat, set off her vivid colour exquisitely. She shone in that garish vulgar room with the light and purity of some almost ghostly innocence and simplicity. She was looking at Henry and he fancied that in spite of the tears that were still in her eyes a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth.
“Well, sir?” said the lady in green. She was not really angry Henry at once perceived and afterwards he flattered himself because he had from the very first discovered one of the principal features of that lady’s “case” — namely, that she would never feel either anger or disapproval — at any member of the masculine gender entering any place whatever, in any manner whatever, where she might happen to be. No, it was not anger she showed, nor even curiosity — rather a determination to turn this incident, bizarre and sudden though it might be, to the very best and most profitable advantage.
“You see,” said Henry, “I was in the passage outside and thought I heard some one call out. I did really.”
“Well you were mistaken, that’s what you were,” said the green lady. “I must say —— ! Of all the things!”
“I’m really very sorry,” said Henry. “I’ve never done such a thing before. It must seem very rude.”
“Well it is rude,” said the green lady. “If you were to ask me to be as polite as possible and not to hurt anybody’s feelings, I couldn’t say anything but that. All the same there’s no offence taken as I see there was none meant!”
She smiled; the gleam of a distant gold tooth flashed through the air.
“If there’s anything I can do to apologize,” said Henry, encouraged by the smile, but hating the smile more than ever.
“No apologies necessary,” said the green lady. “Tenssen’s my name. Danish. This is Mrs. Armstrong — My daughter Christina — —”
As she spoke she smiled at Henry more and more affectionately. Had it not been for the girl he would have fled long before; as it was, with a horrible sickening sensation that in another moment she would stretch out a fat arm and draw him towards her, he held his ground.
“What about a cup of tea?” she said. At that word the room seemed to spring to life. Mrs. Armstrong moved heavily to the table and sat down with the contented abandonment of a cow safe at last in its manger. The girl also sat down at the opposite end of the table from her mother.
“It’s very good of you,” said Henry, hesitating. “The fact is that I’m not very clean. I had an accident in Piccadilly and lost my hat.”
“That’s nothing,” said Mrs. Tenssen, as though falling down in Piccadilly were part of every one’s d
aily programme.
“Come along now and make yourself at home.”
He drew towards her, fascinated against his will by the shrill green of her dress, the red of her cheeks and the strangely intimate and confident stare with which her eyes, slightly green, enveloped him. As he had horribly anticipated her fat boneless fingers closed upon his arm.
He sat down.
There was a large green teapot painted with crimson roses. The tea was very strong and had been obviously standing for a long time.
Conversation of a very bright kind began between Mrs. Tenssen and Mrs. Armstrong.
“I’m sure you’ll understand,” said Mrs. Tenssen, smiling with a rich and expensive glitter, “that Mrs. Armstrong is my oldest friend. My oldest and my best. What I always say is that others may misunderstand me, but Ruby Armstrong never. If there’s one alive who knows me through and through it’s Mrs. Armstrong.”
“Yes,” said Henry.
“You mustn’t believe all the kind things she says about me. One’s partial to a friend of a lifetime, of course, but what I always say is if one isn’t partial to a friend, who is one going to be partial to?”
Mrs. Armstrong spoke, and Henry almost jumped from his chair so unexpectedly base and masculine was her voice.
“Ada expresses my feelings exactly,” she said.
“I’m sure that some,” went on Mrs. Tenssen, “would say that it’s strange, if not familiar, asking a man to take tea with one when one doesn’t even know his name, and his entrance into one’s family was so peculiar; but what I always say is that life’s short and there’s no time to waste.”
“My name’s Henry Trenchard,” said Henry, blushing.
“I had a friend once” (Mrs. Tenssen always used the word “friend” with a weight and seriousness that gave it a very especial importance), “a Mr. William Trenchard. He came from Beckenham. You remember him, Ruby?”