“Well, it’s a cheerful house. Any supper left?”
She was aware of something in her daughter’s eyes, a secret, triumphant gleam.
“Yes. I thought you had had supper.”
“You would. Iron rations.”
Julia’s right hand moved. It slid forward and rested on her thigh and from its white fingers the end of a key protruded. Her mother’s blue eyes fastened upon that piece of metal. She understood that she was being shown it. Her large handsome face grew flaccid. Her mouth hung open.
“You—”
The girl appeared to nod her head.
“I’m turning in now. I’ve told Bob that if he comes home after ten he can stay outside.”
She stepped back into the passage, and quietly drew the door to after her. It closed with a soundless finality, and Mrs. Marwood sat staring at it. Her face had a suffused, red muteness. Almost she looked like a woman on the edge of a spasm of coughing, and about to extrude some irritant substance. But no sound came from her. She stood up, snatched at the pins that fastened her hat to the sofa, and putting the round black head of one of the pins into her mouth, sucked it. Her teeth bit on the steel shaft.
“The young—!”
But the explosion was noiseless. She sucked the head of the pin, and her eyes stared.
3
Julia’s alarum was set to wake her at half-past six, and when it sounded she would lie on her back for a quarter of a minute, and then with one swift movement and swish of the clothes get herself out of bed. For she was a young woman of affairs. She had housework to do, and breakfast for herself and the two boys to prepare before her day’s work at Messrs. Jimson & Stent, who were estate agents. Before the war James Marwood had been Mr. Jimson’s confidential clerk, and when Marwood had gone to the war, his daughter had taken his place. She had understudied her father for a month. Mr. Jimson, a little, fat, pallid man with a worried manner and a squeaky voice, had accepted the war’s inevitable improvisations.
“We’ll get along as best we can. Miss Marwood will be one of our impromptus.”
Mr. Jimson was musical, with a taste for light opera, but Julia as an impromptu had startled his musical ear. She had seated herself at her father’s desk in the office of Martagon Terrace and in six months she had developed into a dark young symphony full chorded and confident.
But on this particular morning she allowed herself to lie for a little while and contemplate the ceiling, a white sheet upon which her consciousness projected its thoughts and plans. No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace was not the house of yesterday and she arose and looked in that bottom drawer as though to assure herself that the black box was in its place. She knocked on the wall as a hint to Harry that it was time for him to get up. Her window showed her a broken sky with patches of blueness and clouds alight with fingers of gold. An old pear-tree in the narrow back garden was still afire with leaves of amber and maroon, and from its brilliant branches yellow flakes slanted noiselessly to earth.
Julia shook out her vigorous hair. The day was full of a feeling of movement, and as she sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on her stockings she thought for a moment of the man who had brought her that packet of letters. She was grateful to him, but casually so. She had thought Scarsdale quite old, older than her father, a queer and rather ineffectual old stick, but likeable. She dressed quickly. She knocked at Harry’s door before going downstairs.
“Getting up?”
“O,—rather.”
Her voice changed when she spoke to her younger brother. Harry was different from all the other people in the world; he was hers. She went downstairs and began to pull up blinds and draw back curtains, and on the hard sofa in the sitting-room she discovered a dishevelled figure still grossly asleep, collarless and tousled, with the hearthrug for a coverlet. Her brother Bob! Also she noticed that a window-pane had been broken.
She looked at Robert with an ominous, still hostility. So he had broken in at some scandalous hour and in a state to be satisfied with the sofa. She did not wake him. This house was a house of realities, however ugly and merciless they might be, and she closed the door on the roue of seventeen whom the war had provided with a precocious insolence and too much money. She knew that she was going to cleanse the house of some of its realities. She was all for reality as she saw it, but not for reality as it was exhibited by Robert and her mother.
In the kitchen overlooking the narrow garden and the brilliant foliage of the pear-tree, she filled the kettle, put a match to one of the rings of the gas stove, and took the breakfast cloth from the table drawer. She was aware of them as her cloth, her table. She heard Harry on the stairs, and her sense of new power and of possession exulted. The boy came in, buttoning up his page’s jacket. His face had a brightness.
“What’s on, Ju?”
“On?”
“Yes, grub.”
She could smile at Harry. She knew that with an unshocked soul she would give him Bob’s breakfast ration of bacon. If love could not boast of favouritism what was the use of love?
“O, the usual. There’s some margarine.”
“Your turn, Ju.”
“I don’t fancy it.”
He set about helping her, getting down the plates and cups and saucers from the dresser, and her dark glances touched him. He was such a clean, happy child, sensitive, affectionate. Never was it necessary to inspect his neck, or to be suspicious as to the use of a toothbrush, whereas Bob was a sloven, flashy and unclean. Certainly young Robert worked at a garage, but oil and grease and black smudges seemed to adhere to him naturally, as did other greasinesses. And the soul of Julia gave thanks for Harry’s cleanliness, for his bright eyes and for the way he looked you in the face. Harry consoled and reassured her; he was worth while; he saved No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace from being hopeless.
As she placed four rashers of bacon in the frying-pan she confronted the reality of Harry’s row of buttons. He carried them with a boyish debonairness, but that did not reconcile her to the buttons. Money had to be earned, but it might be earned with a difference.
“I say,—there’s some jam.”
“Secret. Not for Bob.”
She admonished him playfully with the fork.
“Just a dessertspoonful. Lock it up.”
She felt exultant; she wanted to laugh. The bacon began to sizzle in the pan, and it, too, seemed merry. But her gaiety had a fierce edge to it. She kept glancing at her brother.
“Boots all right?”
“O, quite, Ju. But I’ve got a hole in my socks.”
“Put them out to-night.”
He was a good child; he seemed to understand that clothes had to be taken care of and that thoughtless devastations had to be remedied by his sister’s hands. He had a kind of wisdom, and he was not too old or too awkward to be kissed.
So they breakfasted together, while Mrs. Marwood remained abed, and Robert continued to sleep on the sofa. Julia had turned the key on Bob, and already she was proposing to turn the front-door key on him finally and relentlessly. He was a dirty young animal, and being somehow wise to the ways of the young male, she had taken care that Harry should not be soiled by contact with his brother. All the same, she wanted Bob out of the house; he could go and wallow elsewhere on his four pounds a week.
Harry helped her to wash up the crockery. He could handle a glass-cloth daintily.
“What about mother, Ju?”
“O, she’ll be down later. Time you buzzed off, my dear.”
“Right-o.”
She unlocked the front door for him and saw him off, and then she unlocked the other door and surprised Bob in the act of sitting up with his hair flopping, and his socked feet protruding from under the hearthrug. She eyed him with disrelish. Her only concern was to make sure that this young man was not late at his work; she did not want him sacked and on her hands.
She said: “Nice person you are. You’ll pay for that window. Get up.”
He glowered at her.
“Hallo
Jujube. What about breakfast?”
“You can get your own breakfast, or go out and get it.”
“Aw,—sulks!”
She left him. Always she had a feeling of being soiled and cheapened by an altercation with this lout. She might have few illusions, but she was fastidious about her realities. Some people seemed to tarnish life even as they left smears on brass handles and on linoleum and tablecloths. Having many things to do, and liking them done cleanly she had no use for messy and inconsiderate people who left trails of untidiness and slimy selfishness behind them.
She went upstairs and made Harry’s bed and her own, and dealt with the slops. Then she put on her hat and coat, and slipping her father’s will into the little fibre attaché-case she carried with her to Martagon Terrace, she set forth upon the day’s adventure.
4
Martagon Terrace diverged from the King’s Road. It was old Chelsea, if not quite porcelain, and the office of Messrs. Jimson & Stent had adapted the front of No. 8 Martagon Terrace to the business of real estate. Two broad windows and a glass door abutted on the pavement. Mr. Jimson and his wife lived in the house above, which was of the Dickens period, dark brick and white window sashes, though the interior had to conform to Mrs. Jimson’s ideas upon art.
Julia Marwood had a key of her own and could let herself into the office. Usually she arrived about a quarter to nine, in time to open the wire letter basket attached to the door, and to deal with the morning’s mail. She sat at a flat-topped desk in the right-hand window, and screened from the street by yellow muslin blinds. Mr. Jimson sat at the desk in the other window when he was not conducting some private affair in the inner office. Mr. Stent was dead. An inarticulate youth in spectacles completed the firm’s staff, for Messrs. Jimson & Stent were not in a large way of business.
After three years in this Chelsea office Julia Marwood had absorbed all that there was to be learnt about the selling and letting of houses. Also she knew much that needed knowing about Mr. Paul Jimson. The most significant and suppressing fact was that he was afraid of her. He had not been afraid of her father; there had been occasions when he had been impolite to Mr. Marwood and his clerk had swallowed the affront with an air of sombre sulkiness. But Mr. Jimson in his most fussy and worried moments had never been impolite to Julia.
For the truth was she would not lie. Had she considered this peculiarity of hers impersonally she would not have counted it a virtue. Her obstinate exactitude resembled some physical idiosyncrasy, like a loathing of fat, or a distaste for vinegar or people with pale eyelashes. It was part of a kind of personal fastidiousness, a kink in the fibre of her pride, and very early in their business relationship Mr. Jimson had found his adroit ankles entangled in the tethering rope of her veracity. There had been an argument about the state of the drains in a certain house and Mr. Jimson had shown an inclination to skip delicately and imaginatively over unsalubrious realities. Miss Marwood had pulled him up.
He should have disentangled himself and got rid of her, but he didn’t. Like most people who deal in embellishments and inexactitudes, his moral courage was shaky when challenged. He had not regarded Miss Marwood’s presence in the office as permanent; her father would return. Moreover, she really was a very reliable young woman, tactful and thorough; she could handle people; she was amazingly mature for her age; she did not suffer from lapses and temperamental instabilities. Mr. Jimson respected her, which was another way of saying that, as a rather circuitous person, he was afraid of her directness.
Julia unlocked the office door of No. 8, placed her attaché-case on her desk, hung up her hat and coat behind the screen in the corner, and removed the morning’s mail from the letter basket at the door. She began the day’s routine as she always began it. The lid of the typewriter was removed; a feather duster was whisked over the desks and letter-trays and files. Then she sat down to deal with the letters, knowing that at five minutes to nine Bates would enter, remove his bowler hat, and rub his very large boots vigorously on the doormat.
“Good morning, Miss Marwood.”
“Good morning.”
His devoted spectacles glimmered at her shyly. He blushed. He was as unfinished and as awkward as his boots, and a suppliant at her more decided feet. He was given to self-conscious clearings of the throat, and sudden, fatuous smiles.
“Rather dull this morning.”
“Much as usual.”
She was abrupt with Bates. She suppressed him, for spectacled and nervous devotion in a closed compartment measuring some fifteen feet by twelve was apt to be a nuisance. There was no room for it. She passed him the letters to be entered up.
Then Mr. Jimson arrived from the inner office, half screened by the morning paper which his wife would not allow him to read at breakfast, and Julia saw him as a neat little pair of grey and black striped trousers, a sleek small head, and a pair of pince-nez perched on a long, thin nose. Mr. Jimson was both musical and ritualistic; he attended St. Ethelburga’s Church in South Kensington, and wore a little cross of gold dangling from his watch-chain. He had a trick of fingering that cross, especially so when he was engaged in mellifluous persuadings and reassurings. It was as though he displayed it as a hall-mark. When fingering it most nervously Julia knew that he was on the edge of inexactitudes.
Standing there with the paper spread, his little feet close together, he reminded Julia of a lectern. With his head slightly on one side, he looked at her over the top of the paper. His scrutiny was always polite and faintly anxious. He had a way of pursing up his lips. Had he not once advised her—“Miss Marwood, always be polite—but firm.”
He rustled the paper.
“Excellent news. These Huns—”
He seemed to invite her to be truculent. She should remember her poor father, and exult with him. The barbarians were broken.
Her handsome pallor was confronting other destinies.
“Nothing of importance this morning, sir.”
She called him sir. It helped to keep the official furniture properly adjusted. She had more than a feeling that she was indispensable to Mr. Jimson. He had grown fussy and careless and worried, a strange combination of qualities, but then man was a strange creature. Julia’s study of the male had uncovered in him profundities of moral cowardice. Besides, she knew so much.
She said abruptly but quietly—“Do you mind if I have an hour off this morning? Private business, sir.”
Mr. Jimson looked at her suspiciously, with his head still more on one side. Was she contemplating taking another post, a more lucrative post?
“By all means. Miss Marwood. Something personal?”
“Quite. I want to consult my lawyer.”
Chapter Four
There were a few leaves left to fall, though the grass of that French orchard was stippled with them. But no wind moved. A faint mist hung in the air, and the sky was of an unbroken greyness, while in the ditches dead leaves floated in brown water. There was a great stillness over everything.
Scarsdale had wanted to be alone and in this little, deserted orchard he had found solitude, a silence that covered the horizon like the canopy of cloud. He was off duty; he had walked out of the shabby little French town that had emerged from four years of tyranny and terror, and had taken the road between the poplars, but its very straightness had depressed him. He had a yearning for secret things and places, some corner where he could be alone, and by a Calvary he had come upon a lane looping its way between hedges towards groups of trees. After standing a moment at the foot of the Calvary and looking at the desolate face of the Christ, Scarsdale had followed the lane and found this orchard.
November 11, 1918.
It was the afternoon of that most strange day, strangest of all days to the men who lived through it, a mere date in the calendar to the younger generations.
Scarsdale wandered about the orchard. A few yellow leaves drifted down, and seen through the dark fretwork of branches the grey horizon had a smoky blueness. He was alone and he was restle
ss; it was as though a little shiver of freedom stirred in those silent trees, like the shiver of spring divined even in the restfulness of winter. He stood and stared. It seemed to him that the whole world stood and stared, and with an incredulous, still face, listened for the sounds that had ceased. Peace. No more guns, no more agonies in the mud, no more fragments of humanity laid upon bloody stretchers.
Yet the solemnity and the significance of this sudden silence affected him personally. As a little centre of consciousness under that grey sky, he was aware of himself and of man as man, millions of human particles congregated into a crowd, a vastness and yet a unity. The war had stripped him, and in this orchard he felt stripped a second time, raw, and naked and new born, and somehow yearning for the comfortable old clothes of his pre-war self. Like thousands upon thousands of other men he wanted to be back in the old days, dressed in the old habits, immersed in the old job.
He watched a leaf fall. It floated, seemed to hesitate, touched the grass, and lay still. Was there anything symbolical in the fall of a leaf? Was that his idea of the future, to touch the soft grass and lie still? What of the spring, the surging of the sap?
And suddenly he felt himself troubled by a strange unrest. He had come out here to be alone, to escape from the crowd, and this solitude had become a clamour. Questions! Such obvious questions, and yet so baffling and disturbing. Going back after the war! Was there ever a going back? What would happen? These millions of men returning in a tawny crowd to a civilization which had been subtly brutalized, tarnished, cheaply gilded. Could so crude a thing as organized murder go on for years, and the world remain none the worse for it?
He was aware of a feeling of chilliness, something like fear. Or was it that he was fey, a sensitive, a little more wide-eyed than other men? What was there to fear?
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