It was an irony, suitable for contemplation by moralists and others prone to award life’s prizes and detention certificates, that one crooked deal did more for this decent, honest man than all his virtues put together. That money in the mantelpiece saved Georgie. It kept up his spirits, it enabled him to control his feelings in all manner of humiliations, it gave him the confidence without which he might well have missed the next great step in his life.
Chapter 6
The war of 1914, which might have been the next great step for Georgie, passed him by. Called when it was nearly two years old, he was graded C3, and left to run his business. It is possible, though in no way certain, that in the long run he would have found a girl to arouse his manhood and make him fall in love. Yet there are many who undergo no such experience, and believe themselves incapable of it.
Georgie, who had no idea what love between man and woman could be, might well have written off all that side of his life as a loss, and anaesthetized himself to suffer as little as might be from the marriage into which he had been tricked. Fortunately, life reached out and touched him before he had managed to numb his feelings.
Georgie met Ruth in a manner which is exceedingly familiar in fiction, probably because it happens so often in real life.
When Grace sent him on errands, he had formed a habit of dropping in for a cup of coffee at a little teashop near the centre of the town. It was an unobtrusive, forlorn little teashop, the sort of place to which the Georgies of this life by nature gravitate; clean, cheap, slightly shabby, and anxious to please.
The place was crowded on this occasion, and Georgie, who usually had a table to himself, was sharing one with a small, neat, fair-haired, inconspicuous girl who was making a meal of poached egg on toast, sweet biscuits, and tea. She had beside her a violin case, the last object one would expect to commend a girl to Georgie. It did, however, at once secure his attention. He noticed her shyness when he sat down, watched her now and then while she was occupied with her food, and presently found himself contrasting her small, shapely hands, her manners and her gentle appearance with those of the other girl whose acquaintance he had made when she was carrying a violin case.
The waitress brought the girl her check, and it happened.
Georgie did not at first perceive her trouble. Set off by his thoughts, he had gone far from his companion into some long dream of which he could have given no account. These dreamy blanks were habitual with him now. He had to be on guard in the shop, or about the house, where they were too often ripped apart by Grace’s impatient, rasping cry. Here, in the café, he could muse unchecked; if muse was the word for a suspension of his faculties, an unawareness of the world around him, his refuge from conscious life.
Into this trance shivered vibrations of distress, as if a window pane had sprung a score of cracks. Georgie came to, and realized that the girl in front of him was searching agitatedly in her handbag. With instant sympathy, he saw her pull herself together, and school herself to explore calmly and systematically. It was no good. A sudden flush came over her face. She bit her lip, and looked about four years old.
Shy though he was, Georgie could not sit there and do nothing. He leaned forward, and smiled into her troubled grey-blue eyes.
“Lost something?”
“My purse,” she breathed, in an unbelieving whisper, more to herself than to him. “It’s gone!”
“Maybe you left it at home?”
She gulped, and shook her head.
“I had it with me. I know, because I bought something in Skardon’s, before I came in here.”
“Better go back, and see if anyone’s found it.”
She stared past him.
“I—I think someone must have taken it.” Her eyes met his. “I stopped to look at some things at a counter near the door, and when I got out into the street my bag was unfastened. The catch does slip sometimes. Yes. That’s it.”
He didn’t try to argue with her belief.
“I hope there wasn’t much in it.”
“Just over sixteen shillings.”
“I say, that’s bad. I am sorry.”
His heart had gone out to her, both for the amount and the accuracy with which she gave it.
“Yes. Meantime I haven’t a penny. To pay for my lunch.”
It was a dismayed statement, not an appeal. He knew that beyond question or doubt. And, because of it, he waited before offering to help.
“Do they know you here? In the shop?”
“No. I’m in a new situation, close by. I’ve never been here before.”
She looked as if she were going to cry.
Georgie reached over gently, and, before she realized what he was doing, took the bill.
“Let me see to it for you. I come here regularly. You can pay me back next time you come. Please.”
A struggle arose in her face. Georgie smiled into her eyes. There had come over him a wonderful sense of authority and peace.
“Please,” he repeated. “I’ll give you my address, if you like.”
“It’s you that should have mine.”
“I’ll do without it,” he told her. “I’ll trust you.”
He saw a gleam of relief in her eyes, that he hadn’t tried to find out where she lived.
“If you tell me your address,” she said, “I can come and pay you back to-morrow.”
Still smiling, Georgie shook his head.
“Better not. I work in a shop.”
“I see.” She blushed, and looked past him. “You really do come here, often?”
“Quite often.”
“At this time?”
“And others. I’ll be here to-day week.”
“So will I.”
Suddenly, she smiled into his eyes. Then, as if shocked at herself, she became formal, almost distant. She picked up her bag, and made ready to go.
She had taken a couple of steps towards the door when he called her back.
“Yes?”
She was on the defensive now, scared, anxious to be gone. Georgie pointed to the handbag.
“Get that catch seen to.”
He smiled as he said it, and, after a second’s hesitation, she flashed back her own smile, conspiratorial, like a schoolgirl’s. Then she was gone.
It would be impossible to assess what this encounter did for Georgie. He had something real to dream about now, and often through the week he dreamed about the girl and her lost shillings, wondering how hard the loss would hit her, and what shifts she would be put to, to make it up. He reproached himself for not having offered her a larger loan, yet he knew that she would never have accepted, and that any such offer would have scared her off altogether and convinced her that he was up to no good.
When the day came round, Georgie was in such a state, first on Ruth’s account, and then for fear Grace should stop him from going on the regular Tuesday errand, that he nearly undid himself, incurring her anger for clumsiness and absentmindedness. However, she went no further than to grumble, and let him go, a few minutes later than usual.
Georgie saw Ruth as soon as he came in sight of the teashop. Either she was intending to meet him outside, square her debt, and not come in, or she wanted to make sure that they could sit together. He prayed it was the latter, and, to help providence, hid in a doorway until she had walked some little way past the entrance. Then he hurried to the teashop door, and took care, by pausing just outside, that she saw him as she turned round.
Georgie went in, still pretending not to see her. He stood by the cash desk as if looking over the tables for a friend, caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, and turned as if to go out again, meeting her in the doorway.
An old hand could not have managed it better. Before Ruth knew what was happening, she was at a table against the wall, with Georgie sitting opposite, beaming on her in such unconcealed delight that all her defensive resolutions melted away.
It was a long lunch, and a long talk, broken only when Georgie looked up and caugh
t sight of the clock.
“Gracious. I must be going, or I’ll get into trouble.”
They grinned at each other like surprised children. The surprise got them over what to such inexperienced creatures could have been an awkward hurdle. They wanted to meet again, but had not reached the stage where plots and plans are made without shyness. Now, in their hurry, they arranged the next meeting so naturally that neither could remember who spoke first.
It was one of many. Ruth was well brought up, as decent, as well behaved and honest a girl as could be met in a month of Sundays. She had abundant misgivings about this new friendship, made in flat contradiction of all the maxims so anxiously instilled into her by the aunt who had brought her up, and by the nuns at the convent school. They were trebled when Georgie told her he was married. Yet all fears seemed unreal in face of Georgie’s simplicity and gentleness and candour, and when she heard the full story, told without reserve, her heart ached and glowed for pity.
After five or six meetings, Ruth, young though she was, and quite unpractised, knew and faced the fact that she loved him. Georgie did not yet know that he loved her. All he knew was that his stolen meetings were the light and the joy of his life, that here at last was someone to whom he could talk and unburden himself in the way that all his life he had dreamed should be possible; and that, if for any reason he were stopped from seeing Ruth, he would not want to go on being alive.
Ruth was the more grown up of the two, the better realist, the stronger character. But, as the weeks went by, Georgie began to grow up, and the time came when he too knew that he was in love. The realization came to him very suddenly and very simply. Of all people, Grace helped it. Despite the fact that most of her energies were turned to making money, a part of her apprehension unconsciously divined that something was going on. Her awareness never reached the level of suspicion, but took the form of making her assert her right to Georgie and demand his attention. These ugly jolts on the bodily level gave Georgie a chance to focus what was hitherto vague and idealistic, like the radiance kindled in the mind of a boy by a girl he steals glances at in church. It was not that Georgie deliberately kept himself from thinking of Ruth as a woman of flesh and blood. He did not need to try. The injury done him by Grace, the forcing of an unawakened power, had driven instinct so far away that the first stirring of real love failed to link up with it. “That,” for Georgie, meant Grace; and Ruth was Grace’s opposite.
But Grace’s sudden fitful expressions of desire helped to put things straight. They revolted him much worse now because they challenged something far stronger than apathy or distaste. Though he did not know it, Georgie’s instincts were dedicating themselves to the girl he loved. Outraged by Grace’s attack, they dragged the whole situation before his consciousness, and suddenly, in bed, as the nearby clock struck four, he opened his eyes to feel instinct geared to purpose, and know himself a man.
The storm of emotions that flooded him broke out in sensations more common in a woman. Georgie woke in the grip of no overmastering urge to possess, but of an ache to lose all separateness. A preternatural sense of himself, articulate, in every part of his body, bewildered him with its detail, yet did not divide his consciousness. The sensation was all-satisfying till his mind tried to grasp it. Then at once it dissolved into a series of images, each so inadequate that he rejected it as soon as it took shape. It was as if a network, apprehensive as a spider’s web, yet warm with living blood, could feel acutely in all its threads and every one of their intersections, but all the time relayed a single syllable to a single centre. Then a stroke of light turned everything to pain. His body was a far-flung ache, vibrating with the desire to receive and to communicate; as if a power station at every centre of feeling throbbed in its urge to send out an electric impulse and welcome the balancing impulse from outside.
No sooner was he aware of this urge than a second lightning flash showed him its object. With a pang that almost made him cry out aloud he knew that his body was his own, and that Ruth’s was hers, and felt the energy that linked them together. It happened above the plane of the sensual, and beyond the range of normal imagination. He seemed to have no part in causing it. It seemed to be taking place outside his mind, yet all of him was involved in it.
Nothing in his life had prepared Georgie for such an experience, much less for its next development. He had no means of guessing its dangers. By a caprice of nature the perception he was receiving deepened to a level reached only in abnormal states of mind or after special training. His manifold sensations sharpened to a single exquisite pain, he felt their two bodies dissolving one into the other. For an instant of agonized realization Ruth’s body was as much his as his own. Then neither was distinct. They were one.
Such an experience held several dangers. From two of them Georgie’s simplicity protected him. A third he was to realize presently. Where some people are left bitterly unhappy in the knowledge that real life has nothing so complete to offer, and others accept the vision as a fact and become enervated, so that they make no effort to live by its light, Georgie was stimulated and inspired. When he came to, his first realization was that he loved Ruth with all his heart and soul. This was enough to keep him luminously awake for an hour or so, floating on a sea of happiness. Surely, surely, love was just this, the fusion of one’s whole being with another’s.
With a whimpering sound Grace shifted in her sleep, and stretched out a bony arm. Furious, Georgie drew away to the furthest edge of the bed, his whole body rigid with offence. By an involuntary movement Grace had soiled his happiness.
Up to this point it would not have been true to speak of a conflict in Georgie’s mind between Grace and Ruth: he had kept them apart. Now, however, they were placed in opposition. Georgie was a man, albeit a most unpractised one, and like any man in love he was overcome by an urge to do something about it. Yet what could he do, in a situation that rendered him practically helpless?
The way in which his wits began to work on the problem might perhaps have been foreseen. Love intensified his qualities, including the practical side of his nature. He made up his mind about the order in which to tackle his difficulties. Characteristically, he turned his first thoughts to the possibility of making himself independent of Grace.
Thus he began to concentrate on his one asset, his small but secret hoard. The secret of the mantelpiece grew in his mind from a talisman, a moral support, to a vital means of escape. It was still a secret, even from Ruth. Fruit of a shady deal, it was the one thing he had not brought himself to tell her, for fear she should turn away from him.
He would tell her, he promised himself, as soon as any prospect arose of their going off together. His mind had got that far now. He had no sooner come to the conclusion that something must be done than he decided what to do. He did not yet know how Ruth would receive such a suggestion. Things she had said, when they had talked about other people, showed that she had strict views on what was right and what was not right. He said nothing to her as yet, therefore: he so basked in her warmth and affection that he did not dare risk disapproval.
In the meantime, lest Grace notice anything and grow suspicious, he behaved with anxious circumspection at home and in the shop. Most of the customers had given up hope for him long ago. They treated him now as a mere assistant: the worst were openly contemptuous. None sought him any longer as an ally against Grace over credit or any other matter. As for the secret customers who came to the back door after hours—and there were more of them now—he took care to keep out of their way. He did not want to know who they were.
Grace, for her part, bothered less and less. She hardly troubled to mention her imaginary relative, but went off without explanation when and as she pleased. This suited Georgie, save for the odd occasion when he was tied to the shop instead of being sent on some errand. He and Ruth knew each other’s time-table and itinerary by heart now; almost any off time could be used to good advantage. He was careful, therefore, to ask no questions and show no surpr
ise.
He showed surprise one morning, though, when, instead of going herself, Grace sent him on the monthly visit to the main wholesaler in the city. This meant catching the nine o’clock train and not getting back till half-past seven. Georgie wondered at this sudden disinclination for a trip to which she usually looked forward, but he was in no position to argue. Saying that she did not feel well, and that anyway there were things she wanted to see to in the shop, she pushed him off with an unusually lavish spending allowance, and precise written instructions which robbed him of all responsibility and made him a mere messenger.
Sent out like this, and with no chance anyway of meeting Ruth that day, Georgie relaxed and even mildly enjoyed himself. The business part was the least pleasant. The man he had to see looked in amused curiosity at his customer’s husband, and obviously thought him a poor fish.
“Clever woman, Mrs Bagshawe,” one of the partners told him. “Anyone’d have to start damned early in the morning to get the better of her.”
They didn’t like Grace, though. Georgie, with the clear intuition which hardship had developed, saw that as clearly as if they had chalked it up on the wall. There was even a hint of sympathy for him as her husband.
When Georgie got back, the shop was shut. There was a light in the living room. He went in, prepared to give an account of his day. For the first couple of seconds, he did not see what had happened. Then, as if it gaped and cried to him, he turned and saw.
The mantelpiece was gone. It had been ripped out bodily. Where it had been, around and above the fireplace, glared livid scars of plaster.
Georgie could not speak. He could hardly breathe. Open-mouthed, his face a stiff mask, he made a gesture with his hand towards the place.
Grace was reading the evening paper. She looked up, and saw his stare.
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