He asked, ‘Do you know how much your mother paid for the boat?’
‘Yes, Guv’nor, three and sevenpence-’apenny. It was marked on the sail.’
Hugo felt in his trouser-pocket, where he knew he had fourteen shillings and six pence, and took out two half-crowns. ‘Here you are,’ he said awkwardly, ‘you’ll be able to buy yourselves another boat—perhaps a better one—when the shops open again.’
The children opened their mouths and stared at him. Then the one who hadn’t yet spoken said, ‘Cor! But, Mister, you can’t spare all that. We’ve each got a bob. If you give us ’alf a dollar, we’ll have enough.’
Hugo said grandly, ‘No, you’d better have half a crown each. I’ve been lucky this Christmas. Here you are.’ He bestowed his largess, avoiding contact, so far as he could, with the two grubby hands that accepted it. ‘Golly, you’re a real gent, you are——’ But he was already hurrying away.
The experience both shook him and exalted him. He felt like a nervous god, and hoped that his newly acquired divinity would at least endure throughout the afternoon. There was something consoling about the episode. Talk of ugly children—both the boys were repellent. One had a discharge from his nose, and the other a sore in the middle of his cheek. Their ears were filthy, and despite the keen wind they smelt as if they slept with their clothes on and wetted their bed. Yet it was possible to be sorry for them and be fond of them. Miss Tredennick had said that love was supposed to make people blind. But could it not also bring enlightenment?
He would have liked to sit down and try to think things out, but it was too cold, and he continued to walk, though a good deal more slowly. The sight of the tall, leafless trees, with their upper branches tossed backwards and forwards, gave him a pleasure that was new to him. Their strength and their resilience seemed to be his. Whatever was to happen, this was one of those days selected by fate to be a landmark in the emotional history of a life-time. One may sink back afterwards and say, ‘My word, how soppily romantic I was that afternoon!’, but one has been changed and enriched, brought nearer maturity—nearer to death, perhaps. These are moments when the soul stands outside the flux of time, if the body cannot, and Hugo’s imagination—though less articulate than this epitome of what it brooded upon—almost carried him to a dimension in which the ticking of clocks is an irrelevance.
Then happily—or unhappily—his practical nature reasserted itself. And he thought, ‘If I walk right round the Serpentine, as I should like to, I shall be much too tired to enjoy the party. And I shall be late for it,—even later than Miss Tredennick would recommend.’ And he went home.
[4]
Exhausted with his climb up eight flights of stone stairs, he leant against the cream-distempered wall, dizzy, breathless and frightened. What had now become of that god-like force which had entered into him while he walked among the trees between the Round Pond and the Serpentine? (O that he could have stayed there and prolonged that moment of vision for ever!) Meanwhile, the longer he waited for his strength to come back, the feebler he felt. His legs began to tremble, and he wondered how soon he would be unable to stand. There was nothing for it,—he must either go back, a crestfallen failure, to Ten Pollitt Place, or ring the bell at once and hope that they’d offer him a chair as soon as he was inside.
He rang the bell—it was one of those clockwork bells that go off alarmingly an inch or two from your hand—and a woman opened the door. She was thin and pale, with high cheek-bones and large greenish eyes which looked as if they might easily break into tears. She reminded Hugo a little of Mrs Fawley, except that she was much taller. She held the door almost shut, while she studied him in the dim light of a bulb hanging over the staircase. Then she opened it fully and said, ‘Oh, you must be Mr Muller. Bert doubted if you’d come, with all our stairs, and being away from your mother on Christmas Day. Come in,—you’re welcome.’ She showed him into a narrow passage, opened a door on the right and called, ‘Bert—here’s Mr Muller.’ The room seemed full of people and their voices made a terrifying hubbub. Then Bert, looking very clean in his smart blue suit, with his red hair smarmed close to the sides of his head, strode out, took hold of Hugo’s two hands, shook them vigorously and said, ‘A happy Christmas! It’s good to see you. Let me take your coat. Come inside.’ Introductions began. ‘The wife—but you’ve met already. My sister-in-law, Mrs Rintoul—Mr Rintoul—Alec, Ian, Jennifer—they’re all Rintouls too—Mrs Bentley—she’s another sister-in-law—and the little ones there are Alice and Pansy Bentley—Billy Bentley—Mrs O’Donovan—Moyra O’Donovan—neighbours of ours—this is Hugo Muller, a friend of mine. Tea will be ready in about ten minutes.’
Bert’s wife suggested that Hugo might like to spend the interval with the Rintoul boys, who were playing with a new train. He would far rather have surveyed the company and the room, which was festooned with a criss-cross of paper-chains and chinese lanterns and had a big bunch of mistletoe hanging down from the oxidised chandelier in the middle of the ceiling, but Mrs Rintoul took charge of him and pushed him towards a corner, where her sons squatted over their toy. (Hugo recognised the model at once. Twenty-seven and nine. He had seen it in Garrows, and in the toyshop further down Parkwell Road. There was a cheaper set at nineteen and three and a more expensive one at forty-eight shillings.) The two boys displayed no interest in him at all, but Jennifer Rintoul and Moyra O’Donovan who had joined the group, plucked at his sleeve and kept showing him their dolls. Then Billy Bentley came up with a cardboard box. He was a sturdy little boy of eight, with thick, straight black hair and black eyebrows which met on the bridge of his nose. He said, ‘I’ve been given a pirate’s dress. Would you like me to put it on?’ Hugo, whose nature was attuned to any latent abnormality, hesitated and then said, ‘Yes, I should.’ Billy said, ‘If we do play pirates, I’ll have to take all your money and cut your throat.’ Then Hugo suggested, not without malice, that pirates might rob trains as well as ships, and pointed to the self-satisfied Rintoul boys whose little engine was still performing patient figures of eight. ‘Gee, that’s an idea,’ said Billy, with glistening eyes. But at that moment Bert’s voice rang out, ‘Come on all, tea’s ready.’ Then Mrs Rintoul, who was the wrong sort of motherly type, and whose body seemed to exude a greasy smell which Hugo found almost nauseating said, ‘You sit by me.’ But Bert’s wife came up and rescued him, and said that the greatest stranger must sit beside her,—‘though I shan’t have much time to make conversation with you, as I shall be kept busy dishing up.’
In Bert’s household, tea meant much more than tea, and Hugo shuddered as he thought of the Christmas dinner he was supposed to eat that night with his mother and Magda in the quiet of Number Ten. But the food was good. There were hot sausages, sardines, shrimps, winkles (and pins, with which to prick them out of their shells), crumpets, paste-sandwiches, jam sandwiches, currant bread-and-butter, fancy cakes of all colours and a big Christmas-cake with a snowman on the top and Hugo, who had been too much on tenterhooks to make a good lunch, found his appetite again and gave way to it, though he couldn’t match the capacity of the other young people.
Bert’s wife did her best to talk to him, and asked him where he went to school. He told her rather reluctantly that he went to a tutor. And what was he going to be, when he grew up? He wasn’t sure, but he rather liked the idea of becoming an artist. At this point, Billy Bentley, who had been following the conversation closely, said, ‘Oo! And paint people when they’re bare?’ His mother, who overheard, declared loudly that he was a rude, dirty-minded boy. Hugo blushed and said, ‘No, I meant landscapes.’ Then he turned to Bert’s wife and added quietly, ‘Though I did a sketch of your husband the other day, while he was busy outside our place.’ ‘No, did you really? You must let us see it.’ ‘Oh, but I couldn’t. I haven’t shown it to anyone at all. It wasn’t a good likeness.’ He blushed still more deeply and continued, ‘I might be able to improve it, if you could lend me a photograph of him.’ Bert’s wife said that her husband ha
d never sat for a photograph since they were married, though of course she’d got some snaps of him. A friend of theirs had taken quite a number only last summer, when they were having their holiday at Westgate. Now, wouldn’t he have another slice of cake?
Soon, everybody began to pull the crackers, examine the little novelties and trinkets inside them, read the mottoes and put on paper-hats. There was a call for round games, which Hugo dreaded, but the Rintoul boys said they’d rather play with their train and Billy was eager to show himself off in his pirate’s costume. The girls formed a quizzical little group near Hugo, but he kept his distance and waited till he saw Bert coming out of the kitchen. Then he made a dart, and said, ‘You promised to show me what our house looks like from your window. Do you think I could see it now?’
Bert answered, ‘We’ll have a try,’ and drew back the curtains. ‘There, that’s where I make it. The big building on the right is Garrows’ warehouse. You see those two tall chimneys to the left of it, in line with that window down there with the red blind? There’s a gap in the roofs, just to the left of them. . . .’
But Hugo couldn’t follow the indications, and Bert brought down his head to the level of Hugo’s and found that the lower line of vision was interrupted by some buildings in the foreground. He said, ‘Let me lift you up,’ and putting his hands under Hugo’s armpits, raised him high in the air, till his head was even higher than Bert’s.
‘Now can you see it? Garrows’ warehouse—the chimneys—the gap. . . .’
It was a clear, bright night, and by good fortune a brilliant light in an uncurtained window in one of the houses lying at right-angles to Pollitt Place, shone across the intervening backyards and gardens and enabled Hugo to recognise Number Ten.
He clapped his hands like an excited child, and said, ‘Yes, I can, I can! I can see the window of Miss Tredennick’s sitting-room and the haunted room in the roof. Oh, don’t put me down yet,—unless I’m too heavy.’
Bert laughed. ‘What, you too heavy? You forget the kind of things I’m used to lifting,—up and down steep iron or wooden steps—and very rickety some of them are too. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed the steps at Number Seven in your street. They’re dangerous, they are. The Council ought to see that they’re put right. . . .’
He went on talking, as if to make it clear that the burden of Hugo’s body was too slight to be thought of. But Hugo wasn’t listening. Letting himself rest limply against Bert’s broad, strong chest, he was filled with a rapture, such as Ganymede, nestling in the divine eagle’s warm down, must have felt on the skyward journey. Chimneys and spires seemed to bow like reeds, clouds parted and strange aerial vistas revealed themselves to his ecstatic gaze. Then he sighed with such an intensity of joy, that Bert, who thought that the height must have made him dizzy, put him down gently, pinched his cheek and said, ‘You quite all right?’ Hugo was too full of emotion to speak, and looked up at him so strangely that Bert was uneasy. Then Hugo said huskily, ‘Oh, that was lovely. Oh Bert, do promise me you’ll let me come here again—when it’s quieter—and—and——’ Bert said, ‘Sure. Now here’s Moyra who’s saved a cracker to pull with you.’ The girl sidled up archly and Bert left them together.
At half-past seven, when Hugo had made his farewells to the general public, and was saying goodbye to Bert, who had come out on to the landing to see him off, he produced a packet containing three handkerchiefs from his coat pocket and said, ‘I brought you this little present. I know I ought to have brought one for your wife, as well, but I will, as soon as the shops are open. I’ll bring it round.’ Bert patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, sonny. It’s been nice having you here. Now take the stairs gently. They’re nasty things to have a tumble on. Bye-bye.’ They shook hands. Hugo said, ‘Goodbye—and thank you so very much,’ and began the long descent from cloud-capped Olympus to the grimy plain.
Half-way through his Christmas dinner at Number Ten, he suddenly had to leave the table and go and be sick. It was more the result of nervous strain and excitement than of over-eating. His mother was filled with sympathetic alarm, but Magda, who was worn out with work and worry, couldn’t help saying, ‘Well, what can you expect, if you let him go to the kind of house where they have winkles for tea!’
[5]
As the clock in the Fawleys’ drawing-room was striking ten, Dorothy said to Robert, ‘Very well. For goodness sake go and repair that musical-box, if that’s your idea of a happy Christmas-night. But please don’t pretend you’re doing something useful. Nobody’ll want to hear it when it is mended. As I’ve told you before, all this show of using your hands is simply an excuse for not using your brain. But go along. I’m too tired to argue with you.’
This was the climax of a dreadful day. Their expedition to Hackfield had been a more wretched failure than even Dorothy could have anticipated. She had found their self-satisfied hostess and her plump, ineffectual husband so petits-bourgeois—she was fond of the adjective—that they hardly seemed real, while the guest of honour, a purse-proud, middle-aged man, who was some sort of a relation of theirs, really appalled her by his vulgarity. He was uncouth in person and loud in voice and made all general conversation impossible. He either delivered himself of dogmatic opinions, for which no one had asked, or paid gross compliments to a dumb but dimpled tennis-playing young woman who had been asked to join the party for his benefit. To Dorothy he was almost pointedly rude, when he didn’t ignore her, and said before dinner (as they called the meal) was half over, ‘You can keep your central London. It’s a well-known fact—and I have it on the authority of two leading doctors in Halifax—that anyone who lives there more than five years suffers from liver-trouble. Why, you’ve only to look at a Londoner to see that at once. Do you suppose this charming young lady here would look as she does, if she spent her days cooped up in Oxford Street?’ Nor was it long before he found the one chink in Robert’s somewhat thick-skinned good humour. He named two leading trade unionists and said they ought to be shot as traitors to their country and their Queen,—a remark which Robert, with his Leftish bias, couldn’t take lying down. An embarrassing wrangle followed, and Dorothy was dismayed to find her husband behaving almost as badly as the stranger. ‘Any man who doesn’t see that the whole capitalist system is on the verge of collapse, is a blithering idiot.’ In vain their hostess said soothingly, ‘Well, well, it takes all sorts to make a world.’ The two men became more and more abusive to one another, and Dorothy, whose bread had always been buttered on the Right side, began to give a grudging sympathy to the North-countryman. But she soon withdrew it, after Robert had gone with their host (as she knew they would) to the garage, and she was forced to sit and listen to the stranger’s elephantine gallantries, not one shaft of which came her way, or the stream of practical advice poured out by her hostess. ‘I always say that if there’s a pipe-smoker in the house, net curtains ought to be washed every fortnight.’ (If Dorothy had heard this observation in Garrows, it would have delighted her, whereas, heard at 92, Nettlebed Grove,—with herself as its target—it made her want to scream.) As the dreary minutes dragged on, the room became chilly. Her hostess was a believer in lots of fresh air and stingy fires. And when at last the two men came back from the garage—she noticed a big smear of oil on Robert’s trousers—she had to wait while they went and washed themselves and her hostess made them a cup of tea. She was almost hysterical when she had to say ‘thank you for a thoroughly delightful afternoon’.
But her troubles were not yet over. She and Robert had barely walked a hundred yards in the direction of the station, when she ricked her ankle stepping off a kerb. Although the injury wasn’t crippling, her progress was painful and she suggested to Robert that he should go back and ask if he could borrow the car. He shook his head and said the car was still out of action. ‘What, after all that time you spent fussing over it?’ Robert said gloomily, ‘I’m afraid so. I knew it was the coil right from the start, but Tom was so sure it
was the carburettor that I gave way. Here, let me take your arm. Put as much weight on me as you can.’ But the close physical contact, though it made walking easier for Dorothy, gave neither husband nor wife any kind of pleasure.
When at last they were in the train,—after hanging about for a quarter of an hour on the draughty platform—Dorothy said, ‘So those are the sort of people you’d like us still to have for our friends. Thank goodness we don’t live in the suburbs any longer.’ ‘I must say,’ Robert agreed, ‘that Bessie’s cousin was a blot on the landscape. In fact, he’s a living argument for the immediate raising of death-duties to ninety-nine per cent,—not to mention a——’ Dorothy interrupted him petulantly. ‘For goodness sake don’t start all that again. We heard plenty of it at luncheon. I felt quite ashamed of some of the very silly things you said. I wasn’t only thinking of Bessie’s cousin, I was thinking of that insipid young woman, and Bessie and Tom,—the whole frightful set-up of Nettlebed Grove and all those other roads round it and the third-rate people who live there. That’s where, if you had your way, I’d be spending my life. Thank God I got you to cut adrift from all that. The reminder of it that we’ve had to-day still makes me shudder.’
For a few minutes, Robert was too angry to speak. Then he made up for his silence by saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with Bessie and Tom, who are old friends of mine, even if you don’t think them good enough for you. If it comes to that, what friends have you made, since we came to the Pollitts? You haven’t a single one in Pollitt Place, or the Square or the Crescent or within a mile of us. Do you suppose that if you were in trouble, any of our neighbours would stir a finger to help you? Of course, they’ll talk about you behind your back and spy on you. Do you remember that night when you broke a pane of glass in the sitting-room window, and all the curtains twitched across the street and fifty faces peeped out between the chinks? That’s all our neighbours are good for. So far as I can see, all you get out of living where we do, is being within easy walking distance of Garrows. What do you know of the social life of London—if there is such a thing any longer? Why, you were hard put to it to make up the numbers for to-morrow’s party. You talk as if you’d refused a dozen classy invitations for lunch to-day. Be honest. What would you have done, if Bessie and Tom hadn’t invited us? Sat indoors, I suppose, and waited in the hopes that some Duchess would ring you up and ask you to join her at Claridges!’
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