Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  “Buy back?”

  “It’ll cost you less that way.”

  “What about you?”

  “It would suit me best.”

  “To buy all these things yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think that we’ll be going to a house where these things’ll be any use,” she said. “I’ve just heard from Gavin. He’s lost all his money.”

  “You mean…”

  “He doesn’t say how much we’re going to have. But we’ll be very poor for a little while, he says. I suppose that means quite ordinary lodgings somewhere. Anyhow, nowhere big enough for all this. So you see, Edward…”

  Her smile was very sad, and very sweet. It went to Edward’s heart in the way that once her smiles had done. She was so dainty, so frail. It was monstrous that she should have to know the indignity and discomfort of mean lodgings.

  “But you can’t, you mustn’t!” he cried. His voice was husky with emotion. He rose from his chair and came across to her. He seated himself beside her. Limp and appealing her hand lay open on the sofa’s edge.

  “You mustn’t,” he implored. “You mustn’t.”

  She smiled sadly.

  “What else is there for me to do? I’m a very helpless, very useless person that’s got to be looked after. Since that’s a job that nobody else seems anxious to be bothered with…”

  “Nobody else?”

  “Well, my dear, who else is there?”

  She was so frail, so pathetic. The lot awaiting her so cruel. That she whom he had so loved, for whom he had been so proud to arrange a worthy setting; that she should become poor and ill-dressed and needy. Pity, and remembered feeling evoked in him an emotion that nearly stifled him.

  “Who else! You can ask that, after our years together!”

  “Our years together. But how else can I ask it when you let me go like this?”

  “Let you go…”

  Her free hand fluttered in the air despairingly.

  “What else have you done? You find a young man kissing me at a dance. You don’t ask how or why. You just say to him: “If you want her, take her.’ What am I to think except that you’re happy to be rid of me?”

  “My darling…”

  “Well, and aren’t you?”

  Her eyes were swimmingly soft and melting; her shoulders were swaying to him, her lips were trembling. The thought was intolerable that never again would those eyes grow soft for him, those lips part beneath his kisses.

  “But it was you, I thought, who was wanting to be rid…”

  “My poor silly.”

  She laughed happily. It had proved easier than she had thought.

  §

  That night she wrote to Gavin. It was a long and very tender letter. There was no one, she said, who would mean to her what he had meant. Their loving of each other would be a secret altar at which daily and nightly she would worship. But life must be faced practically. She could not, no, she could not, let him ruin his life for her. For that, she assured him, was what marriage at such a time must be. A wife would be a drag when he needed all his energies. Under any conditions she could not have allowed him to ruin his life like that. As it was, well, he was just not to worry about her. She had had a long talk with Edward. He had seemed so broken-hearted, so desperate at the thought of losing her that she had not known what might happen to him if she deserted him. He had urged her so pathetically, so pitifully, to return, that in the end she had thought it would be better for all of them if she did.

  “And so,” she had concluded, “our dream must be one of those dreams that are not destined to be realised.”

  He was not to forget her, though; she would never forget him, never. In time, perhaps, when wounds were healed, they would be able to meet again and talk.

  It was a very touching letter.

  Gavin Herriott read it through three times; then locked it away in the small upper drawer of his writing-desk. It was a letter to which he would very often turn, he thought, for comfort and encouragement.

  §

  I do not fancy, however, that he has very often wound the key in the lock of that upper drawer.

  Within a very few minutes the door knocker of his flat had been loudly rattled; and “I’m afraid,” Olivia Sergeant was remarking cheerfully, “that I’ve rather put you in the soup with that advice of mine.”

  Gavin smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid you have.”

  “And Muriel Jamieson as well.”

  “Well,” he hesitated; he did not know quite how he was to explain Muriel Jamieson’s position. “You see…” he began.

  Olivia interrupted him.

  “What, has she managed to scramble out?”

  “Not that exactly.”

  “But she’s out of it?”

  “She’s out of it.”

  “And you’re in it all alone?”

  He nodded.

  Olivia laughed merrily.

  “Poor Gavin. Is it very hot there?”

  “Hot enough.”

  “Not so hot, though, that you wouldn’t feel a bit insulted if a friend, a girl friend who felt that she had treated you rather badly in a good many ways was anxious to make up for it, and wanted to lend you enough money to help you scramble out? No, I don’t think it’s quite hot enough for that, is it, Gavin Herriott?”

  Her voice was mocking, but her eyes were the reverse of mocking. They were tender and affectionate as he had never before seen them.

  “No, not quite hot enough for that,” she said; “for a friend at least. But if it were from a wife. Perhaps you wouldn’t feel quite so insulted if the offer came to you from a wife.”

  She was smiling now. There was something in her eyes that made any reply impossible for him. He stood gaping; so foolishly that she clapped her hands excitedly.

  “Oh Gavin darling, you look so sweet, so surprised and so astonished. Are you really going to tell me that in this twentieth century I’m the first girl that’s ever proposed to you? I am? Really, I am? How delicious. And you don’t know what to say, and it’s all so sudden, and you want time to think…”

  But she did not finish. The flow of mockery had been stifled breathlessly.

  §

  Within a very few hours I had heard the story eagerly gabbled by a very bright-eyed Olivia.

  “All I can say is that you’re a remarkably fortunate person,” was my first comment.

  “Darling, don’t I know it!”

  “A complete fluke.”

  “A deserved one.”

  “If you call it deserved to get a man back after letting him go like that.”

  “Brought him back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Olivia gurgled.

  “Do you really believe I just sat there waiting on the off chance of his coming back to me, such an off chance, too, after I’d made up my mind I wanted him? My darling silly, do you think that shipping show would have gone smash unless someone had persuaded Uncle George that his niece’s happiness depended on his letting a young man who’d put money into it lose that money? Angel, can you see me sitting down on the off chance of all that happening?”

  “You mean to say that you induced Uncle George to change his mind and not buy up that business?”

  “Of course I do. What I want I take; I couldn’t see any other way of taking it.”

  “You must have been very certain of your man.”

  Olivia laughed; this time very knowingly.

  “That wouldn’t have helped me much. It was the other woman that I was certain of.”

  Chapter V

  The historian of the future describing the nineteen-twenties as a succession of strikes, collapsing currencies and revolutions, will picture it as an unhappy period to have been alive in. But in point of fact for the majority of human beings the main stream of life, the business of dying and being born, of loving, quarrelling, conciliating, misunderstanding; of alternating success and failure followed such a course as it had followed through
the centuries.

  Those few whom the tide submerged were exceptional; were, strictly speaking, as much war casualties as those invalids who will spend the remainder of their lives in hospitals. Certainly John Chagford is, now in his thirty-fifth year, who in point of years should have the best of life in front of him, but who is and who knows himself to be a failure, with the best of everything at the back of him.

  §

  Perhaps it was his own fault. Perhaps it would have been a little different if there had been no war: if he had finished his public school education and gone up to Oxford; if he had not been allowed during his most critical years the indulgence of his most casual fancies; if he had not been flung back at the age of twenty-three into civilian life with expensive tastes, an impaired health, no money beyond his wound pension and gratuity, and no particular qualifications to put upon the market. It may be it would have come to the same thing anyhow: that failure was predestined for him. But this at least has to be conceded, the dice were loaded heavily against him. To-day at the age of thirty-five an ex-captain, an ex-public schoolboy, he lives in his parents’ home on an income of £125 a year, with no prospects.

  One hundred and twenty-five pounds is the extent of his wound pension: a pound of which he hands to his parents every week for washing, board and lodging; a pound is spent on himself, in tube fares, lunches, cigarettes; the remaining shillings are set aside for such extra expenses as dentists, doctors and new clothes. He leaves the house every morning at half past nine and does not return to it till six. He spends the day searching for employment and in trying to qualify for employment.

  His efforts have ceased to be wholehearted. For manual labour he is by his wound unfitted. He has taken courses in journalism, short story writing, book-keeping, typing and shorthand. He is now learning Spanish in the hope of a private tutorship. His parents have been very good to him. They lost a great deal of their money when the French currency was depreciated. They have financed his various enterprises and paid for his correspondence courses. His presence at home is an expense. They have done what they can do. They can do no more. He must fend for himself now. Which is the last thing that he can do. He has lost faith in himself. Though he talks about “a ship coming home,” he suspects that nothing ever will turn up and that were it to, he has been unemployed so long that he would be incapable of turning it to profit.

  He hardly sees any of his old friends. You cannot afford to when you are living on a pound a week. People forget you unless you are in their crowd. He exists; just that. But he might be content existing if now and again he were not shaken into an appreciation of everything that he has lost. If now and again his presence on some war-time or immediately post-war calling list did not bring him an invitation from the world he has ceased to know. He could be content were it not for that. When things are lost, it is as well to forget you ever had them.

  “Why do you go?” I asked him.

  He pouted.

  “It’s hard to refuse invitations. It’s so long since one’s been anywhere. It’s only afterwards…”

  Afterwards, when he had begun, because he could not afford a taxi, the long walk back from Belgravia to Hampstead.

  I could visualise that walk.

  It is well enough for the first mile or so. It is a warm clear night. It is pleasant to walk through the deserted London streets, his mind a crowded picture, echoing with the sound of music, laughter, and tinkled glasses. It is the first dance he has been to for two years. The first time he has worn a tail coat for seven months. His old zest for life came back to him as he climbed the long flight of stairs and saw beyond his hostess the eddy of revolving couples. How little it had changed; this world of display and ornament. How quickly he can slip back and find his place in it, there where he indeed belongs and whence he has been too long absent.

  What a relief it had been after the long months of close discomfort to be among well-dressed men and women, to hear again the accents of prosperity, to meet people of his own class, to be recognised by old friends and old acquaintances: to hear talk of Lords’ again, and Ranelagh and Goodwood. He had been transported suddenly to a state of feeling he had thought to have left long ago behind him. He felt young again dancing with that girl in the red georgette frock, the light brown shingled hair, and the hesitation that was half a stammer in her voice. Why not, after all? Is not thirty-five the prime of life?

  “Thirty-five,” she had said to him. “L-life’s only beginning for a man at thirty-five.”

  He wonders whether he will ever see her again. They have danced three times and there has sprung up between them one of those sudden inexplicable attractions that carry one further in half an hour than do most friendships in three years. She was the first girl he had noticed as he hesitated in the passage between the ballroom and the stairs. As their eyes met there passed between them one of those glances that recognise and accept the existence of an age-long intimacy. “I must get to know that girl,” he had told himself.

  Well, and he has. They have danced together. She has given him her address. He has promised to ring her up. But there is no happiness in the memory of that promise as his walk lengthens to its second mile. It was all very well for him to dream there in the sound of music. But that is over now. He is walking back the long five miles to Hampstead because he cannot afford a cab. He had better look things in the face and accept himself for what he is.

  His elation passes. He is tired, physically and emotionally. He sees very clearly how impossible it is for him even to begin to think that between himself and such a girl any relationship is possible. You can have no social place where you have no economic place. You cannot know that kind of girl if you have not the money to spend on her and the clothes to wear with her.

  For a moment he allows himself to picture how good, had he money, life might still be to him. Early the next morning he would ring her up. When could he see her? he would say. She would be in at six, or a little earlier. That evening he would ask her if she would come one day soon and dance with him. She would smile and thank him and say “Yes.” Soon, very soon, he would find himself in love with her. He knew that: you always did know, the first time you saw a person, whether you were destined to fall in love with them; could tell, too, whether they would respond. And this girl would. He knew that. If only he had a position; if only he had money.

  But he had no money, and he had lost the capacity for earning it. And because he had lost it, that world of light and sweetness was closed for him. They told you that love was not for sale. But it was. Everything was for sale. Only some things were not stuck in shop windows with a price affixed to them.

  The last mile of his walk grows very long and very wretched. By the time he has reached the front door of the sad dingy little house that is his home the clouds in the east have begun to whiten. The chill hour between dawn and sunrise has begun to throw its grey mantle over London. How often at such an hour in the past has he not leant, chill and damp, against the traverse of a trench, watching the blurred line of the shell holes grow distinct. “I was happier then,” he tells himself. Happier stumbling down the slippery steps of a front line dug-out than he is here climbing the stairs to bed. He was in the race then. He had not lost caste.

  He is thirty-five years old. He has probably another forty years to live. He has his pension. He will not starve.

  §

  People such as Fay Morton and John Chagford are as much war casualties as those permanent invalids who will never know the use of their limbs again. But they are exceptions. For the vast majority life through the nineteen-twenties ran very much as it would ordinarily have done. To the historian periods are marked by battles, revolutions, acts of parliament; but for the inhabitants of a period those years are marked by the personal dramas of birth and death; of love, lost or won; of ambition, realised in whole or part. Those with an instinct for success and happiness, succeeded happily. Those who were born to failure and unhappiness failed unhappily. It is only the very weak
and the very strong who cannot adapt themselves to an environment. The vast majority make the best of circumstance; or the worst, according to their natures. The war did not create; it telescoped events. Universal problems were merely given another setting; their processes were quickened, so that women achieved an independence that their mothers had not expected for their grandchildren, so that youth came to the responsibileities of manhood with its teens unpassed; so that middle age trod over-swiftly on the heels of youth. Europe is very full to-day of men old before their time. I can scarcely realise for example that Martin Paul is still in the early forties; an age at which men are held to be at their prime.

  He is grey-haired, and double-chinned. His long, almost hooked nose is lined with a network of red-blue veins. He walks slowly, with a stoop. His voice is slow-toned, slow-measured. It is hard to reconstruct from the picture he presents to-day the young Oxford graduate who came during my last term at a preparatory to give scholarship candidates five weeks of specialised intensive coaching. He was the ideal of my boyhood; as “the tail-up-er” had been the ideal of my childhood. He was everything I dreamed I might become. His hair was the most exquisite thing that I had ever seen. It was long, dark, glossy; it was parted down the centre and brushed straight back. He used brilliantine; and while he corrected my Latin verse I would watch the light glint on its shining surface. Sometimes, very occasionally, one strand would detach itself from the solid cake. I would gaze fascinated, at the way the small hairs would form a kind of bridge between the sleek curve and the rebel strand. He wore, as was the fashion then, very low stiff double collars with the ends rounded and cut away. His tie would be pulled tight into the smallest imaginable knot, from which the grey liberty silk bunched like a flower over a white poplin shirt. His socks invariably matched his ties. His smartness was, however, confined to his extremities. For he wore faded and unpressed grey flannel trousers, and a Norfolk jacket, victimised by smoking. Whenever he was not in form or in the dining-room a pipe was in his mouth. At the last possible moment before going into form he would knock his pipe out against his heel. More than once the red hot bowl set a light to his pocket during class. The contrast that his hair, socks, ties and collars made with his coat and trousers was fascinating but tantalizing. I longed to see him in evening dress. He was a good scholar, and a good teacher. Had I been less dazzled by his personality, I fancy I should have got a scholarship that summer. But I was far too engrossed with his appearance to listen to what he was trying to teach me.