Scarsdale arrived at the end of Spellthorn Terrace. The little houses saluted the lover in him. He approached No. 53, and not till he was within five yards of Julia Marwood’s gate did he appreciate the presence of a figure outside the selfsame gate. Two or three people were looking out of windows, and a couple of amused maids stood on the doorstep of a house across the way. For Scarsdale’s glance was directed obliquely at the front window of No. 53, and he was in the act of pausing at the gate when he realized that other presence.
Its black hat was a little awry. It had very blonde hair, and a complexion of adventitious richness, and its blue eyes had the angry, flaring wideness of intoxicated frenzy. For the moment it was inarticulate, holding to the iron rail of the gate, but when Scarsdale drew up in embarrassment, it addressed him.
“And who the b—y hell are you?”
Scarsdale, perplexed but always the gentleman, raised his hat. Could a man be more polite and conciliatory?
“Excuse me,—I happen to be—”
Drunk she might be, but even so she was quicker than Scarsdale in grasping a situation. She stared him in the face; she observed his bunch of roses; she swayed slightly as though her knees were made of some gelatinous substance. She gave out an ugly, strident laugh.
“Calling on Julia, are you? Take my tip, m’dear, and keep out of it. She’s—a—a—”
Scarsdale stood there looking shocked and embarrassed. Who the devil was the woman, and what was she doing occluding this sacred gate? He tried conciliation, tact.
“Yes, I’m calling on Miss Marwood.”
The woman mocked him.
“I’m calling on M—Marwood. Nice girl. I’ve been—been calling on her—too. But if you ask me—she’s a blasted—”
She broke again into ferocious laughter, and swaying towards Scarsdale, made a grab at the roses.
“Flowers, dam’ silly. Dam’ fools—men.”
Half the roses came away in her hand, and she flung them into the front garden of No. 53, and gave a kind of self-adjusting swagger, and laughed in his face.
“Dam’ fool.”
She passed him. She pulled herself together, and went with a careful yet blatant haughtiness down the centre of the pavement, and as she went she called loudly upon the world. “Taxi, hi, taxi! I want a taxi. Where—the—Taxi, taxi!”
Scarsdale felt a little overwhelmed. He stood irresolute and enormously self-conscious outside Julia’s gate. He became aware of other people, faces at windows, the two maids on the opposite doorstep. Half the red roses were still huddled in his hand. For the moment he did not know what to do, either with them or with himself.
2
But to publish and advertise his hesitation in the face of the whole street was impossible, as impossible as the behaviour of that most unpleasant woman. His ardour recovered itself, and became the shield-bearer of a chivalrous compassion. He opened the gate, and ascended the steps, and rang, but he kept his back to the street and to the windows across the way.
There had been some irresolution in his pressing of the bell, a tentative reaching out towards that other presence in the house, an awareness of No. 53 embarrassments. Might she not be annoyed, humiliated? He stared at the brown surface of the door, and suddenly it opened, and disclosed her to him. She stood there with a kind of sombre calmness.
He raised his hat, and his eyes were apologetic and appealing.
“I’m sorry—I—”
She looked beyond him to the two maids on the opposite doorstep. Her nostrils quivered.
“Come in.”
She was abrupt and he understood her abruptness. She made way for him to enter, and he entered quickly with a kind of consoling and consenting flexion of his long, loose body. She closed the door, and made a sign with her hand that he should go into the room on the left. He went, and she followed him. They sat down, he on the sofa, she on one of the red plush chairs. He was still holding his hat and the surviving roses.
She said, with that same air of sombre calmness,—“Yes, that was my mother.”
Scarsdale looked at her and then looked away. He placed his hat and the roses on the hard surface of the sofa. His love for this young girl took to itself a sudden compassion. He wanted to say things to her, gentle, generous, comforting things. He thought, “How calm she is, how splendid.”
He picked up the roses and laid them down again.
He said, “I understand. One of the tragedies. I feel on your side about it, absolutely.”
She sat with her hands on her knees, and looking out of the window. Both her face and her figure had a stillness.
“One can’t help these things. One’s born to them. But that’s no reason why one shouldn’t protest.”
“Of course.”
She seemed moved to talk to him, and he wanted to listen, to fill himself with a sense of their new and precious intimacy.
“This house hasn’t been what you’d call heaven. Not what you would call nice. Well, you have seen—”
“I’m sorry. But I want you to understand.—You can tell me.”
She gave him one of her still, dark glances, and turned again to the window.
“When my father went away—I found I had to fight for it. All sorts of beastliness,—those two. The war seemed to strip some people. They were just animals, but not clean like animals. My mother—went with men, anything in khaki.”
She paused. Her face had a stark fierceness, and he marvelled. She seemed to sit there confronting all that was vile and rotten and deplorable in life; she both confronted it and vanquished it. He adored, and dreamed, and marvelled.
“I think you are wonderful.”
She did not seem to hear him. She went on.
“Some things make one mad. Or they make you feel sick. Father knew. I had to try and keep things going. There was Harry. Harry is clean. I like things clean. And father knew. That’s why he did what he did before he was killed.”
She smiled faintly.
“He owned this house; he had put his savings into it. He left the house and the furniture to me, everything. I understood what he wanted. Well,—I turned those two out.”
She observed him for a moment, and saw that he was wholly on her side. He nodded his head.
“What courage.”
“Was it? Well, you see! It seems one has to cut things with a knife. No use messing about, or putting up with other people’s messiness. So beastly and wasteful and futile. I might have put up with Bob if he had left Harry alone,—but he was—O, well, let’s leave it at that. I just got a broom—so to speak—and swept the mess out.”
Again Scarsdale nodded his head.
“You were right. It hurt you. O, yes,—it hurt you horribly. I know. I’m glad you have told me this. I’m most awfully proud and grateful. Yes, proud.”
He gathered his hat and the roses, and suddenly stood up. He felt, somehow, that if he stayed he would be creating an anticlimax.
“I had come to ask you to go out one evening. Dinner and a theatre. Perhaps you will. I’d feel it—the greatest honour.”
He moved a couple of steps and placed the roses gently on a table where Marwood’s photograph stood framed in silver.
“A tribute to both of you.”
She stood up, sombre and watchful. She was aware of his ardent eyes, and outstretched hand.
“Anything I can do? Tell me.”
She hesitated. Her eyelids quivered momentarily.
“No. Thank you so much.”
“You’ll tell me, if I can? You know I mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Good night. I won’t worry you now.”
She went with him to the door. She appeared to be absorbed in some sudden, muted musing. Her forehead wore the slight pucker of a frown. But she smiled at him abruptly if vaguely as he went out with a devoted, backward glance at her.
“Julia, good night.”
“Good night.”
3
Scarsdale walked. He was full to the lips wi
th a feeling of exultation and of pity, and he walked without knowing or caring whither he went. Time was an illusion, and when he found himself by the river this miraculous evening seemed to link itself to that other evening when he and Julia Marwood had strolled together in the dusk. He felt happy. Never before had he known such happiness, for had she not uncovered her soul to him, and allowed him to come so very near to her during those most strange, intimate moments. She had shown him the real Julia Marwood, courageous, heroic, putting ugliness and humiliation out of her house of dreams.
He leant against the parapet and watched the sunset. His face had a rapt look. A tug passed with its strings of barges, and the summer water was troubled, and almost the wall seemed to tremble with its plashings. He beheld a beauty, even in buildings sacred to commerce. Everything was beautiful because of the love that was in him, and with a beauty other than the voluptuous bloom on the grape.
Yes, how strangely did life’s happenings intermingle, and like the pieces of a puzzle, slip into their places. He could imagine a great hand ordering the plan, because his own particular human plan was shaping so happily. Almost he felt grateful to Mrs. Marwood for providing him with that opportunity. Yes, he was grateful to her. She had given him his occasion. The sun went down. The river seemed to cover itself with a blue, vapourish dusk. Lights appeared stealthily. People passed and repassed behind Scarsdale’s back, and their voices and their footfalls were no more to him than the little sounds audible and yet not heeded in some solitary place. He was like a man leaning over a gate on the edge of a wood. And then, gradually and insensibly a little restlessness possessed him; he could not say why or how. The voice of some strange bird singing plaintively in the dusk. It was poignant and disturbing, and suddenly he knew that he wanted to go back to Spellthorn Terrace. He was not satisfied. He was urged and persuaded by the lover’s devoted discontent. He had not done enough or said enough; he had been too careful, too conscientiously correct. He ought to have done more, said more. Something that he had remembered about her soft and sombre face came back to him with a suggestion of appeal.
Had she expected more of him?
The doubt was like the bite of a snake. It instilled into him new, sweet poison, a more devotional madness. He turned from the river, and crossing the road began to walk towards her home, and the nearer he came to it the more sure he felt that she needed him. There was to be more of this miraculous night.
He arrived outside her gate. The front of the house was in darkness, but he seemed to know that she was there. He climbed the steps and rang the bell, and waited with his face towards the door. His expectancy was inspired. She needed him; she would understand his return.
The door opened, and she was there, and her dark young figure was part of the dusk.
He said, “I had to come back. Somehow—I felt that I had not done enough.”
She showed no surprise. It is probable that she was aware of his emotional exultation without understanding the depth or the compass of it. She hesitated for a moment, and then with a consenting silence she let him in.
“Harry back yet?”
“No.”
She led the way to the front room, and they sat as they had sat before, he on the sofa, she on one of the plush-covered chairs. The blind was up, and the room and its furniture a mere shadow of itself. Scarsdale saw his roses still lying on the table, their colour lost in the effacing dusk.
He said, “I have been down by the river. It was wonderful. On such a night things come to one. It seemed to me that there must be something—something—I mean—that I can do. There’s Harry, of course, and that will have to be settled, but it’s about you that I have been thinking.”
She was so still that she seemed part of the darkness, but her face was visible to him. It made him think of a soft, white light. Her silence was like herself, to him infinitely mysterious and yet somehow right. She was like nature at night, a wood, a garden, dim, expectant, waiting.
He went on.
“You have been so wonderfully brave. You must have suffered. And you have worries, anxieties. Isn’t there anything that I can do to help?”
The stillness of her white face enthralled him.
“There might be.”
“Tell me.”
Again she was silent, obdurately so.
“Do tell me. Between us there can be understanding. Is it money?”
She remained rigid.
“I’d rather not—”
“Then it is money? Do tell me. There’s no shame in being in need of money. You’re proud. O, yes, I know that.”
Her head made a slight movement as of consent.
“I’m as proud as—o—well—as proud as myself. Besides it isn’t always for one’s self, is it? But just now—it happens that I have my chance, and if I could take it I should see a chance for Harry.”
He was leaning forward in the darkness.
“Tell me. Everything.”
She told him and to him her telling of the thing suggested effort, the overcoming of a beautiful reticence. Her words were transfigured into symbols; everything was transfigured, the room, its dead furniture, the greyness of the window. She had her chance and could not take it! she wanted it for Harry. O, beautiful, tantalizing, exasperating opportunity! Five hundred pounds! He listened and exulted. He had the money, five hundred pounds, seven hundred pounds, eight hundred pounds. He heard her voice going on, and the words were meaningless; it was her voice and its message that mattered. She was confessing things to him, trusting him.
“But—of course—it’s impossible. One realizes that.”
He came back to the solid, exquisite reality, her dim face, the hard sofa, the faint perfume of roses.
“O, no, not impossible. I can let you have the money. If only you’ll deign to use it.”
There was silence. It suggested to him breathlessness, confusion. He was aware of behaving confusedly. They were out in the passage together, and she was very close to him, and he was groping for the door handle. Something was urging him to hurry, to efface himself and his exultation; to remove the mere casual man from the presence of the loved one. Almost he stammered.
“It’s all right, Julia. Don’t worry, don’t thank me. I’m the grateful one. Why, it’s quite easy. No, I’m not that sort of cad. You understand, my dear, don’t you? It’s a beautiful thing to be able to help.”
He got the door open. His hand touched hers. It was warm; it gripped his fingers.
“I can’t believe it.”
“O, yes, quite easy. I’ll arrange it. Don’t worry.”
He nearly missed his footing on the steps, and in going out he bumped against the gate.
4
The stars were out, and Scarsdale had gone less than thirty yards from Julia Marwood’s gate when he heard quick footsteps following him. She overtook him; he heard her call him by name.
“Spenser.”
She had an air of breathlessness. They stood together under the shade of a young tree. Her face seemed to float in the darkness.
“I ought not to have told you that. It wasn’t fair.”
He put out a shy hand and touched her shoulder.
“Dear, I am the one man you should have told. Don’t worry. It has made me very happy.”
She was motionless, tense, her eyes looking away and beyond him. She made no physical response to that touch of his, though she had been conscious of it as a caress.
“I’ll pay you back. And of course I’ll pay you interest.”
His eyes were visible to her in the darkness.
“Not one penny. Not one single penny.”
“But I must. It’s so wonderful and generous of you.”
“My dear, it’s one of the most selfish things I have ever done. It’s making me very happy. Don’t worry.”
He touched her shoulder again, and with a quick movement of the head she let her cheek rest against his hand.
“I’m not worrying. Good night, Spenser.”
�
��Good night.”
He stood and watched her go back to the gate of No. 53.
Chapter Twelve
Scarsdale opened the centre drawer of his desk and took out a cheque-book.
In the course of some fifteen years he had saved about a thousand pounds, and his investments had worn the familiar faces of a little family of children. Always he had been a careful fellow, and had parcelled his small capital into lots of a hundred or two hundred pounds, and all gilded at the edge. He had bought Colonial Government stock, and English Corporation stock, and he had known to a day when the dividends would arrive.
He had glanced at his pass-book. His balance stood at £739 4s. 7d. It had been swollen by such items as “Sale of £200 Western Australia 3½—£173 4s. 9d.” His Brighton Corporation stock and his War Loan had shared in this slaughter of the innocents. Quite half his capital had been poured out to colour the romantic flood.
And yet he felt no qualms. He sat at his window on that summer evening, and the sky was as rosy as the cheque beneath his fingers. He looked out into Canonbury Square and saw it as half sunlight and half shadow, a place where children played, a friendly face, a garden in which love walked.
He dallied over the writing of the cheque. He had decided that the posting of a cheque would be more delicate and decorous than the passing of notes. You handed notes to some ambiguous and shadowy fair lady, but this was a classic occasion. “Pay Julia Marwood—five hundred pounds. Spenser Scarsdale.” He took trouble in writing it, and his signature was more gaillard than usual, for he was conscious of making a dramatic gesture. He had no qualms. He was being magnificent and magnanimous, displaying power, and that cheque walked in brocade and lace with a glitter of “orders”, girt with a sword.
He decided that he would post the cheque to her. That too would be a more delicate and sensitive rendering of the romance, and he smiled as he wrote the letter.
“Dear Julia
“Never have I signed my name with more pleasure. I am very grateful to you for allowing me to do this thing.
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