They dropped Netta off at her flat, and he and Peter got out at the station. He went to the coffee stall with Peter and ate sandwiches with him. Peter bought some sandwiches in a bag, and they said good night. Then, trembling with the cold of the night and his fear, he tracked Peter along the Earl’s Court Road and saw him go to Netta’s flat. Peter let himself in at the front door with the big key which Netta gave you when you went shopping for her.
He saw a light behind Netta’s curtains. So that was that. He wanted to hang about, but it was too cold. They were warm and comfy for the night, and he wasn’t going to hang about in the cold. They had left him out in the cold. The long, warm, spring evening had ended in deathly cold at two o’clock and he had to get to bed. He had his hangover to face in the morning.
Chapter Two
The odd thing was that that hangover was not as predicted. When he awoke and remembered, instead of groaning pain he had a funny feeling of calm, of release. He had a feeling only of having behaved well and wisely in drink for once. He had kept his head: he had not given himself or his dignity away: he had established a perfect alibi. They knew nothing: he knew everything. In an odd, inverted way, he felt top dog.
But there was something else, too. There was a sense of release from Netta. By giving herself to Peter she had made herself something other than what she was before – something cheaper, more human, more bestial, less agonizingly inaccessible. Inaccessible to him, of course, but not inaccessible. Instead of being jealous of Peter, he was in a manner grateful to him: he had brought her down to the sordid level of Peter – and on that level she did not hurt so much. She wasn’t violets and primroses in an April rain any more: she was a woman in bed with a nasty man in Earl’s Court. Good for Peter.
Could this mood hold? Was he what they called ‘disgusted’, and had he a chance of getting out of love with her now?
To his surprise it had seemed for a little that there was a possibility of this. He went round and met them that morning, went and had drinks at the ‘Black Hart’, and amazed himself by his coolness. He looked at them both as he talked to them; he thought of what he now knew about them; and all he was aware of was the change in the quality of his feelings towards Netta. She was still lovely; he still wanted her: but now he didn’t want her in the same mad, adoring way. He wanted her only in the way that Peter (and the other men on whom she had no doubt bestowed her favours) wanted her. She was something to be had by men, and as such he could do without her. Or so he believed.
Indeed, after a few drinks that morning, his soul began to smile to itself. It smiled both at this change in his feelings and at the secret knowledge he had of the real facts. He was happier than he had been for months. He was cheerful, almost sparkling. He bought most of the drinks, rallied the sick and repentant Mickey, looked Netta in the eye, and challenged Peter at darts. ‘You’re in very good form this morning,’ Netta said. And this made him smile inwardly all the more, for it showed how completely he had succeeded in hiding his new knowledge from their sight. It was beyond even Netta’s shrewdness to know that he was cheerful because he had found out that she had slept with another man.
He believed, that cheerful morning, that he was through with this filthy gang, that before long he would be rising from this sad circle in hell in which he had been condemned to wander so long. And although, when the evening came, he was no longer cheerful, and had to try and quell the first sickening pangs of physical jealousy and outraged pride, he still contrived to believe that something good, not bad, had befallen, and a few drinks put him right and made him cheerful again.
Eerie days followed. He made a point of going round and drinking with them, of seeing them as much as ever – of behaving normally. Only in such a way could he preserve, for the time being, his secret and his pride. But he found, as he had hoped he would, that the longing as it was before, the old sense of having to hang dog-like on her doorstep, was beginning ever so faintly to fade. He would find himself not ringing her up for forty-eight hours or more, he would find himself staying up in Town all day, he would find himself going to the Kensington movie of an evening without consulting anybody, and walking back down the Earl’s Court Road and having a cup of tea at the coffee-stall and going to bed.
Then one day, more or less by accident, he got a copy of David Copperfield out of the Kensington public library. He had read it years and years ago, and he thought he might try it again. He took it as a good sign that he could even think of reading again, and the experiment was a huge success. He became absorbed in the long book, which almost robbed his life of its bleakness and loneliness in the warm sunny days which followed. The warmth of the weather and David Copperfield seemed to conspire together to give him peace of mind. He would sometimes go to bed at nine o’clock, before it was dark, and read David Copperfield.
Chapter Three
He began to feel better in himself, to think of taking a ‘holiday’, of going somewhere and getting some bathing and golf. He began to think of health and sobriety as a practical proposition. Among other things he noticed that his ‘dead’ moods had been less frequent recently, and he thought this might be because he was drinking less and not leading such a rackety life. He had had an awful bout of those moods round about and just after Christmas – in fact, they had really begun to scare the life out of him – but now, with the warm weather and David Copperfield, they seemed to be passing away.
There were some days when he thought about Netta scarcely at all, and some days when he thought about nothing else. That was all over, he told himself, but he had to go on seeing her and Peter to save his pride and dignity. And he didn’t know whether he was lying to himself, and just seeing her because he still couldn’t keep away from her.
Then one day, when Peter was away in Yorkshire, she phoned him up (she phoned him up!) and asked him to come round. She had had a threatening and semi-blackmailing letter from a small dressmaker, and she wanted him to help her. He went round and saw the woman and settled the matter out of his own pocket. That evening she gave him some drinks in her flat, and let it be seen that he might take her out to dinner if he cared. He took her out. She did not insist on Perrier’s and they went to a small, cheap place in Soho.
It had been fatal, of course. He had tried to think that it hadn’t been, that it hadn’t set him going again, but he knew by now that it had. Sitting opposite her in that little, quiet place, was like the old days – those three weeks just after he had first met her, when he had fondly imagined that she had no background, no drunken mob, no Peter behind her. She was wildly, wildly, lovely that night. He looked across the table at her, and she was violets and primroses again. He couldn’t help it. He just couldn’t be bothered about Peter and what he knew. Peter was away – a thing of the past – or at any rate not of the immediate present – and Netta was Netta again.
Then there was one remark she had made which had set him going. He couldn’t remember the context, but he could remember the words exactly. ‘On the contrary, my dear Bone,’ she had said, you’re very much more presentable these days.’ That had set him going. He took it back to bed with him that night, and it haunted his nights and days. Was it possible that if he pulled himself together, if he smoked and drank less, he might still have a chance of getting her? If Peter had had her, why shouldn’t he? She was to be had, after all. Couldn’t he be a man, and pull himself together, and get her? Not that he really wanted her immediately in that way. He wanted to have her for ever, to love and marry her and live in the country. But if he could get her that way, that would be the first step, that would be something. Besides, if he could get her that way, he might fall out of love with her. Things happened like that.
He began to dream and scheme again, and that meant that he went back to drinking.
He finished David Copperfield, and did not take it back to the library and followed it up with Martin Chuzzlewit as he had planned. The David Copperfield period was over.
Then the big day came when he bumped
into Johnnie Little-john – a very big day. He didn’t exactly know why he was so happy after meeting Johnnie again – but he was lighter in heart than he had been for years. It wasn’t just because he was fond of Johnnie, or because Johnnie reminded him of the old days: it was something more than that. It was the feeling that perhaps he had a friend now – a real friend – that he had a background.
It was always Netta who had had the background before, and he who had been isolated – an interloper in her alien and scornful mob. It was always he who had been utterly alone against many, he who had been made the errand-boy, the man to get the sandwiches, the dumb butt of their unfriendly wit. But what if he had had a friend of his own all the time, a background to rival and hold its own against Netta’s? What if, after all, he had sources of intimacy and entertainment elsewhere – a circle from which she possibly was excluded and in which he was accorded full human dignity and respect? It was a healing thought, and he very soon made up his mind that Netta and Johnnie must meet.
And what a clever, impressive, prosperous friend, too. He got the shock of his life when he learned that Johnnie was up at Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott’s. He knew the secret awe in which Netta – the seldom-awed Netta – held his firm. He knew that she was to a certain extent chasing the famous Eddie Carstairs (who, God be praised, didn’t seem to be having any). He remembered that scene in Perrier’s. That was why she haunted Perrier’s – just to try and accidentally meet Eddie Carstairs. And here he had a friend who was in the firm! – a friend who was a personal friend of Eddie Carstairs, who must meet and talk to Eddie Carstairs every day of his life! He would show her! He would show her he had some friends – and some pretty useful and high-up ones, too.
Why, he might be the means, through Johnnie, of getting her in with the firm, of getting her a job. That would be too funny, after all that had passed. How would Peter like that? He must keep Johnnie up his sleeve. There were astonishing possibilities if he only kept his head. It seemed that fate, for once, had perpetrated a kindly instead of a dirty trick, and, out of the blue, had put a weapon into his hands.
Weren’t things taking a turn for the better? Hadn’t she said ‘On the contrary, my dear Bone, you’re very much more presentable these days’, and hadn’t he got this new weapon, this new resource and dignity in Johnnie?
Then, last night, the thing had happened – Johnnie and Netta had met – and he had of course spoiled everything by getting drunk. Just at the time when he wanted to keep sober, he had got drunk. He had been so mad with joy, having Netta and Johnnie together, drinking and apparently liking each other: it had been so exquisitely novel and pleasurable a sensation to have a presentable and by no means unimpressive friend to show to Netta, to be, as it were, alongside of him as two to one against Netta – that he simply couldn’t stop himself getting drunk. And then, when Brighton was suggested, and Netta had said she would go, he had gone crazy. He had thought, last night in drink, that all his troubles were as good as over, that Netta, by consenting to come away, had opened a new heavenly era of some sort.
He must have made an awful fool of himself; and he hoped to God he hadn’t shocked or disgusted Johnnie: it would be a nice thing if he lost his best friend now he had found him.
And what did it all amount to? Nothing, of course. It was all drunken blah, and it would probably be in bad taste, bad drinker’s etiquette even to mention Brighton to either of them again. It just wasn’t done to take such things seriously the next day.
Or were they serious? He would have to phone Johnnie to find out. Netta, of course, would never come, but he might have a night by the sea with Johnnie. Not that he felt like it. With a head like his he didn’t know how he was going to get out of bed, let alone go to the sea.
He wished he wasn’t such a miserable man. He drew closer to the white cat and stroked its fur. It would soon be time to get up, if he wanted any breakfast, and he had to make himself eat.
He heard the chambermaid creaking and clanking about outside on the landing, and, from dim distances all over the hotel, the hissing of taps turned on, mysterious gurglings in pipes, the running of h. & c. in the bedrooms of his sober, God-fearing fellow-guests. The dynamo in the white cat, again receiving electrical power from the motion of his hand, again began to purr. It was day.
Chapter Four
When George Harvey Bone telephoned her at eleven o’clock, Netta Longdon was still asleep.
After a night of drinking, she would invariably wake up about half past five in the morning, put on the light and read magazines or newspapers for about two hours, and then fall into a second sleep until eleven or twelve.
She lifted the receiver and hazily heard George saying something about Brighton. She heard him saving that it seemed to be off, because Johnnie (that, she remembered, was the name of the little man they were out with last night) had just phoned him to say he couldn’t make it after all. She had, of course, a ‘head’, and she couldn’t be bothered to listen to him.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’m asleep now. Come round and talk about it when I’m awake.’
George then said he would come round some time after twelve, and she put down the receiver and went to sleep again. She woke again about half an hour later, and, brooding dully about various things, remembered that she had invited George to come round to her flat in about half an hour’s time. She did not usually let George into her flat in the morning, and she wondered why she had made an exception this time. Her mind then went back to the night before, and she realized, dimly, that she had obeyed a correct instinct in allowing him to come round and see her.
Netta Longdon thought of everything in a curiously dull, brutish way, and for the most part acted upon instinct. She was completely, indeed sinisterly, devoid of all those qualities which her face and body externally proclaimed her to have – pensiveness, grace, warmth, agility, beauty. Externally this Earl’s Court sleeper-on, this frequenter of film agents’ offices was of the type depicted by the poet Byron.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes…
One shade the more, one ray the less
Had halt impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation. She had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action, and the circumstances of her early life had seemed to render both unnecessary. ‘spoiled’ from the earliest days because of her physical beauty: made a fuss of, given in to, beset with favours, the fulfilment of her desires going ahead at roughly the same pace as their conception, she had become totally impassive: thought and action were atrophied. Having no inherent generosity (as George perceived), having no instinct to ‘spoil’ or make a fuss of anything in return, she had become like a fish.
Alternatively, she had become like a criminal. Lacking generosity she lacked imagination, and in her impassivity had developed a state of mind which does not look forward and does not look back, does not compare, reason or synthesize, and therefore goes for what it wants, in the immediate present, without taking into account those considerations, moral or material, which are taken into account by non-criminal or normally provident members of the community.
When Netta awoke this morning she was aware that she was feeling decidedly sick and giddy, that she had a ‘head’: but she did not relate her ‘head’ to the night before – to the fact that she had got drunk. Nor was she capable of connecting her present feeling of illness with the future: she had no idea of preventing a recurrence of such a fee
ling by making an attempt not to get so drunk again. She simply suffered it in a vacuum – as a habitual crook, who spends his entire life in and out of jail, suffers prison bars.
Not that Netta, half atrophied as she was in regard to conscious thought and action, was incapable of living her life or fulfilling the greater part of her desires efficiently. She might get her way more or less unconsciously, but it would be with considerable precision, in much the same way as a somnambulist will step over obstacles and have regard for his own vital interests generally. When she had told George to come round this morning, she had not at the time known why she had done so. There was, however, an excellent reason. The time had come when she had to get some money out of him, and because of all that Brighton chatter last night, when he had talked himself into a money throwing mood, the time was ripe.
The same dull, fish-like style of thought which she brought to bear on the local exigencies of-life characterized her attitude to her existence generally. She was not without ambitions; she was steering a course of a sort; but dimly, without any fervour or coherence. She had at one time hoped to make good at films: she still vaguely hoped to do so: but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty. That was how she had got whatever jobs she had in the past, and that was how her frigid, inelastic mind conceived of getting them in the future.
Again, she was not without passions. She was, for instance, intensely dissatisfied with her present mode of life – and that might be said to constitute a sort of passion in itself. But also she was not without physical passions: she liked rich and comfortable surroundings, she liked drink, she even liked men. But even here she was without any driving force or power of coordination. She went on suffering sordid surroundings, she got drunk and went with men as it were accidentally, without plan, as opportunity or inclination offered.
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