“I have the thousand lying at my bank.”
She had mortgaged No. 53 for £500 and with Scarsdale’s cheque the thing was done.
“But it’s without precedent. At your age.”
She did not say that all innovations are without precedent. Youth conceives itself to be original. She kept to the realities.
“Any fault to find with my work?”
He hadn’t. He sat and peered at her. For she was reality, assiduous and capable and calm. She knew the business from A to Z. Also in his secret soul he knew that his grip had slackened while she had increased the pressure of her strong young hands. She had remedied his evasions and his delays. The snap had gone from him and he knew it. He had found himself inclined to dawdle with the morning paper and to leave all the detail of the day’s work to her. He had not quite realized how inevitable she had become until he had felt her fingers on his throat.
He twiddled the gold cross on his watch-chain.
“Well, sub rosa, Miss Marwood. Your interest in the business must be—well—that new word—camouflaged.”
“You don’t want my name to appear. Why not?”
“Isn’t that policy? Are interests identical. You are rather young.”
“We always are. Jimson & Marwood. But then—of course—”
She mused a moment, and the smile that arrived was bright and hard.
“A middle-aged business. Most of the old jossers would expect to see themselves here. Whiskers.”
She glanced at Mr. Jimson’s sharp and polished chin.
“All right. You can have it in the partnership deed that my name shall not appear officially for three years. How’s that?”
He nodded.
“Very sensible of you.”
“Call it cunning. When you’re young you want to look older than you are, and when you get to fifty you’re in a funk about looking it.”
Now, how did she know that?
“Think so? Why?”
“Father used to dye his hair. Poor old dad, he thought nobody knew. He used to keep the bottle locked up.”
Mr. Jimson felt that her cool glance was resting on his own thin and sandy thatch.
“Indeed! Well, a man may have reasons, very good reasons. Then, I take it that you want the business put through some time this year.”
“At once.”
He clicked his tongue and tried to be facetious.
“Dear, dear,—this is hustling! Well, we had better get the lawyers in. But—really—”
He passed a hand over his hair.
2
Scarsdale locked up Julia Marwood’s receipt in the black and gold cashbox that he kept in one of the drawers of his writing-table at Canonbury Square. This was a precious and a sacred document, and from it a perfume emanated that got itself mingled with the smell of roses and the freshness after rain. He had been soaked as to the trousers, and had arrived in Miss Gall’s house with squelching boots and a little whimper of vague dissatisfaction. The interview had lacked warmth, yet how could he complain when his pose had been that of a gentleman in a white nightshirt carefully shading even the flame of a chaste candle.
“Good night, my beloved.”
He did wish that he had not bumped into that gate. And here was Miss Gall exclaiming, and reaching for his wet umbrella as though it were a dead and dripping fish!
“O, Mr. Scarsdale, you look like a dog that’s been in the Serpentine.”
The simile displeased him, for his dignity, like his boots, was feeling rather waterlogged.
“Thunder shower. Couldn’t get a taxi. Nothing to worry about.”
He went upstairs, and after looking at that precious document, locked it away in his cashbox.
But with the morning he woke to the freshness after rain, and to an ice-blue sky, and his mood moved with the weather. He opened his window wide and looked out upon a square that was all washed and burnished. Almost it had the smell of the country, and the grass in the garden was wet and scintillant. All was well with the world. His mood urged him to walk to the city, and not to crowd it ungraciously into some bus or tramcar, and he walked and thought of his Julia. His muse was that of Herrick, but without Herrick’s wantonness.
He transmuted her into music. He tinted the memory of the previous evening, and yet left it virgin snow. Of course that first meeting between them after the giving and receiving of mere cash had been delicate and full of a mutual embarrassment. She had her pride. Her petals were sensitive. They had been shy of each other, but inevitably so, and her shyness had the delicious chill of a cold, bright morning in May. He remembered her putting her mouth to the roses. Yes, the next occasion would be less embarrassing for them both, but it would behoove him to respect her pride. He must hold himself in. He would make her understand and trust him so that her young pride should not need to frown.
Fleet Street was its usual self. Scarsdale passed along Fleet Street without being aware of its inwardness or its outwardness. He was five minutes late. He was putting his long legs at the wooden stairs that somehow suggested that legions of cats had been sharpening their claws upon the woodwork for the last hundred years, when the office boy bobbed out of his box.
“Mr. Scarsdale.”
“Hallo.”
“Mr. Taggart left word. Wants to see you first thing.”
Scarsdale went up the stairs and along the dark corridor until he came to the two panels of frosted glass in Mr. Taggart’s door. He opened the door. He saw the usual figure black and bulging at its untidy table. Taggart was writing a letter. He did not look up.
“That you, Scarsdale?”
“Yes.”
“Shut the door, will you.”
Scarsdale closed the door, and as he did so something clouded his mood, like the unrolling of a blind. He looked at Taggart and realized that the bunched, sombre figure had put down the pen and was examining its finger-nails. As usual they were of an unpleasant blackness, and in that moment of time the thought came to Scarsdale that Taggart was not conscious of his finger-nails. Those little, unbrushed crescents were not even symbolical. The room itself had a gloom, the shadow of some inevitable shabbiness.
“Just a few words. Don’t suppose they will surprise you. We’re closing down.”
Scarsdale said “Oh,” and his mouth seemed to remain open after moulding the roundness of the sound.
“The Sabbath is dead, dead as—”
Taggart could find no simile to describe the deadness of the religious journal. He gave a little, irritable glance over a fat black shoulder at Scarsdale’s motionless figure.
“Last issue. We have decided to carry on the books. Shan’t need you now. No doubt you expected it.”
To Scarsdale the silence was like a hole in a door into which he was trying to insert a key.
“Closing down—now?”
“Of course. We’ve lost enough money. I warned you.”
“It’s rather sudden. You mean—”
“There’s nothing for you to do. I’ve written you a cheque, to cover your salary to the end of the month. Also, here’s a formal letter. Wise to have these things on paper.”
He turned in his chair and confronted Scarsdale. He held out the envelope.
“Cheque’s inside. Got anything in mind?”
Scarsdale had many things in mind, so many things that no single impression was able to emerge. He had a feeling that there was a part of Taggart that gloated. But why?
He took three steps forward and accepted the envelope.
“No, not for the moment. A few private jobs. Find something all right. Am I to understand that I am free—now.”
Taggart swung back to his table.
“Well, unless you want to sit on your backside for the next ten days doing damn’all.”
“I see.”
Taggart had picked up his pen and was hunching himself for the day’s labour, and Scarsdale with a sudden, sensitive blinking of the eyes, went out of the room and down the stairs into the street.
3
He walked all the way back to Canonbury, and until he arrived in the familiar square he did not realize himself as a man with a tired pair of legs. St. John Street, Upper Street, the Essex Road had been mere slits in the objective happenings of a shabby world through which his consciousness had slid like a train in a tube. He had been sacked, and the expulsion had shocked and frightened him, though he should have been prepared for the eventuality. As much as by anything he had been astonished by his own blindness.
But here was Miss Gall’s front door, a brown door that needed repainting, and he was feeling in his pocket for his latchkey when his impulse to open the door was stayed. He remembered certain things, his happy mood of the morning, rain, Julia, and the smell of roses, Taggart’s black finger-nails, the shabby wooden stairs down which he had lumbered. The machine had extruded him, and as he stood staring at Miss Gall’s door his sensitive self shrank from it.
For somewhere behind that door he would meet Miss Gall. She would look at him with surprised, short-sighted eyes. She would ask questions.
“What, back, sir! Not feeling ill—I hope?”
He might be suffering from a temporary absence of stomach, but he did not wish to meet Miss Gall for the moment. He could not tell her that he had been sacked, and that his existence depended upon casual hack-work and the fortunes of a half-finished novel. He turned away from the door, repocketed the key, and walked along the left-hand side of the square. He wanted to sit down, and there were seats in the garden, but the garden was near to Miss Gall. For suddenly he had felt himself responsible for Miss Gall. His problem was her problem, the problem of an obscure and elderly woman who lived on the letting of rooms. Miss Gall seemed to raise herself in the centre of his consciousness like a statue erected to the memory of all lone and needy women.
He thought, “What a damned fool!”
But even when a man may be feeling his damned foolishness he will know that there have been justifications. Julia had been his justification. Well, and why not? Where was his knightliness? If he had been showing off was he going to crumple up when a gentleman with black finger-nails called his bluff? He walked in the direction of Highbury. He arrived in the respectable, Victorian shade of Highbury Grove. The shade reminded him that the sun was shining. Obviously. He himself cast a shadow. He would sit in the sun and think.
He made his way into Highbury Fields, and avoiding the flickering shade of poplar trees he searched for and found a seat in the sun. He needed the sun and he needed solitude, and he had the seat to himself. The uproar of the streets was stilled for him, though it clattered not far from his elbow, and from some summer space rose yet another uproar, that of children at play. It occurred to him to wonder why they were not at school. Then a pigeon cooed. Surprising sound! A couple of young nursemaids passed with prams. “I’m not taking any lip from you, I says, and I walked straight out of the ’ouse.” These voices did not coo, but Scarsdale was not paying any attention to them, for he had voices of his own.
He supposed that for the last three months he had been dreaming a dream, and that Taggart’s uncleanly hand had knocked loudly on the door. Hurriedly and with a slight sense of bewilderment he had arisen, and had found that his romantic clothes had been transmuted into realities. He was reclothing himself in the realities. But what was reality? The light of the lamp you carried about inside you? You saw life by the light of your own particular lamp.
A voice said, “Well, go on dreaming.”
But was it a dream? He was in love with Julia. He was writing a novel. He thought it a very good novel. He had delivered himself of a great gesture, and such gestures could not be recalled.
“I can’t tell her—now. I shall have to keep up the illusion—until. But why should it be an illusion?”
And suddenly he felt hungry. He left his seat, and going in search of a shop he found a confectioner’s. He bought a couple of penny buns and had them put in a paper bag by the young lady behind the counter. He returned to his solitary seat in the sun and ate his buns. Half a dozen sparrows joined him, for the sparrow is the greatest of opportunists.
4
Presumably, there is no great sustenance in a couple of penny buns, nor can they be considered stimulating, yet Scarsdale felt better after he had eaten those buns. He had masticated something. He sat and was warmed by the sun, but he was not persuaded to reflect upon universal. Transcendentalism, Darwinism, Behaviourism, Relativity are for the man who has a good meal inside him, and leisure to sit in a chair. Scarsdale reflected upon life’s particulars. His categorical imperative was the need for earning a living. The grim “Thou shalt labour” was for him as for the multitude, and that is the one universal that matters.
But he was the lover. He did not wish to doff his spangled cloak and to put away the symbolical plume. If you consented to wear nothing but a bowler hat, you became a bowler hat. Youth understands this, or feels it in the blood, and goes hatless as a protest. And Scarsdale’s particular adventure desired to be perpetuated; it would have its bun and eat it; it would wear the disguise and make a mystery of things.
He did not see himself as he was, but as he wished to be. He looked at himself in the mirror of illusion, as most men do, until they come to that final wisdom, and few are those who come to it. He was still upon the stage, a dreamer, parading a gentle egotism.
Now, what was the situation? He still had some two hundred pounds at the bank, and securities worth another four or five hundred. He had been discharged from the staff of a derelict magazine. He had written thirteen chapters of his war novel. Why not dare the adventure, prove himself something better than a literary hack? Fame and Julia! Out—good sword! Let the plumes wave in the wind. His two hundred pounds, carefully husbanded, would last him a year. He would write, he would write like a hero, a Prometheus, a thrower of bombs. Heads up! Two buns in a paper bag! Nonsense. Dinner at Claridge’s with Julia wearing furs.
He got up. He walked back to Canonbury Square. He inserted his latchkey into the lock, and opening the door came upon Miss Gall with a duster pinned over her head, aproned, brushing down the stairs.
Almost she had the air of a woman surprised in her petticoat.
“O,—Mr. Scarsdale,—really—!”
He smiled upon Miss Gall. He smiled upon her as from a great height. He accepted his responsibility for Miss Gall, and wore it as Hercules wore his lion’s skin.
“That’s all right. Home rather early. I should like some tea at four if you can manage it.”
“Tea at four.”
“Yes. Press of work. As a matter of fact I have ceased to be connected with the Sabbath. Other interests.”
He went up the stairs on long and optimistical legs, and Miss Gall gave her dust-pan a tilt, and felt troubled. For whatever you did life was so full of dust and trouble.
Chapter Fourteen
About that time Scarsdale went to see “Cyrano” played. For the sake of economy he had a seat in the gallery, but his soul was very much upon the stage with the flamboyant Gascon. He was hungry and heroic with him in the trenches at Arras. For, in a sense, Cyrano’s case was very much his own, though there was no raw pink and white boy to be pushed like a prawn into the net of sex.
Scarsdale could echo the Gascon, though his nose was not so enormous as Cyrano’s, for he carried with him to Spellthorn Terrace the airs and inspiration of a great gentleman who could write poetry and refrain from kisses. He spread the cloak of his fine sentiment at his Julia’s feet, and was at times a little puzzled by her lack of animation. Almost she looked sullen. She possessed one of those large, dark, handsome faces that settle like milk in a pail when no excitement stirs it.
He visited her once a week. He was a mixture of playful gravity and tender politeness. Always he seemed to sit or stand at a little distance from her. He would talk books, or the theatre, or about the war. The war still obsessed him. He brought her a copy of one of George Russell’s books, and left it with her, and the mysticism of George Russell was to
Julia like a score by Debussy offered to a child with a tin trumpet.
She gave the book five minutes, and discarded it with a gesture of scorn.
“What stuff!”
Nothing happened in it. The book was very much like Scarsdale as she saw him, nebulous, ineffectual, ceremonious, vague, a man who did nothing, a man without hands and organs, a fribbler. Her attitude towards Scarsdale was undergoing a change. He bored her. He had no grip. He could not talk about motor cars, or money, or real estate.
Even on an occasion when he took her to the theatre they were at cross purposes. He had asked her to choose the piece, and she had selected a musical comedy; Scarsdale had not seen anything of the sort since his “Geisha” days. He bought two “upper circles,” and his impression was that Julia was not pleased with the seats.
She was not. She had expected dress-circle or stalls. A man who could produce cheques for five hundred pounds had no right to be careful on such an occasion. She was a young woman who was beginning to take herself very seriously, for Scarsdale had aroused her sexual self-consciousness. She had become aware of herself as a very puissant and important creature, woman, the one and only woman in the world. She was aware of her effect upon men. They looked at her in the street. She was beginning to say to herself, “How very important I am. How they do want to do things for me.”
She remarked, “It’s very stuffy up here.”
Scarsdale was troubled.
“Shall I try to change the seats?”
“No use. House full.”
But she did approve of the piece. It was highly coloured, and vulgar and tuneful. It ogled the audience. It was well-fleshed and sensual. She grew quite animated; she laughed, while Scarsdale wondered. He was glad that she was enjoying it, but how did she manage to enjoy it? It filled him with a kind of dazed weariness. It was so full of stupid nudities.
“Quite good music.”
“Topping.”
He bought her chocolates. He could not afford to buy her chocolates, but that was a Cyrano touch. She ate his chocolates with relish, popping them between her firm young lips. She disposed of an amazing number of chocolates. Scarsdale ate two.
Old Wine and New Page 15