Afterwards he was quite unable to get a taxi. Other people got them, but he was always a few seconds behind the other fellow. He stood on the edge of the pavement with an air of nice and patient futility. And, suddenly she laughed.
“Let’s walk.”
Delightful idea! They walked, and now and again she would break into a whistling. The lilt of a particular song was in her head and in the movements of her young body.
“Gracie gave the glad-eye.
To every little ladd-ie.”
She whistled, and Scarsdale, trying to put himself in tune with her, attempted to pipe the refrain, but found his rendering of it flat. But how happy she was! Almost she seemed ready to dance along the pavement like an irresponsible urchin footing it to the sounds of a barrel-organ. She was in an urchin mood, and he did not know it. Inwardly she was addressing him as “Old Solemn Face”, and making a mock of his futile attempts to secure a taxi. She waggled her sleek young hips, and the insolent youth of her laughed and rebelled.
How young she was!
He looked at the yellow lights and the blurred darkness where the stars should be, and felt flattered that she should be so happy in his presence. True, he did not quite understand her physical vivacity. He would have liked to be equally young with her, but somehow he could not keep in step. The self-consciousness of the forties trailed soberly beside her.
He said, “We must have another night like this.”
“O, rather!”
Her splurge into irony was lost upon him. And so they came to Chelsea and to Spellthorn Terrace, and he stood with his hat in his hand at her gate, and was devout and chivalrous.
“Hope you’re not tired?”
Tired? What a soft egg he was! Tired! Why, had he been real he would have snuggled her forcefully into that dark house, and suddenly that which was male and female in them would have clung and kissed and pressed body to body.
“O, not a bit. You’ve got a long way to go.”
“Things to think over. Thank you for them. Good night, Julia.”
She gave him a flat hand, and left him and let herself in. She banged the door. Good lord! O, good lord! What a futile, fribbing, starched old thing he was! He bored her; he bored her excessively. And she went upstairs to her room, groping her way, and switched on the light, and felt herself suddenly in the very worst of tempers. Instead of his face she seemed to be looking at a pink and white slip of paper, his cheque. O, damn that cheque. The obligation itself had begun to bore her. Her gratitude yawned.
She removed her hat.
“I suppose he’ll come here regularly once a week—for years.”
She shook out the black blur of her bobbed hair. O, confound it! He was too much of a boiled shirt. She couldn’t stand his coming and sitting and making sheep’s eyes at her, and saying nothing that mattered. Why couldn’t he be interested in real things? Books about super-souls, the bright “celestials,” a cosmic consciousness! Good lord! What was youth in the world for? She undressed with her own impatience, and got into bed with it, and then realized that she had forgotten to turn out the light.
She sleeked out swiftly like a young animal and pushed the switch. Yes, somehow she would have to turn him out like that. But how? There was that damned cheque. She would have to get busy and pay off that loan.
But did he expect her to pay him back?
What did an old idiot like that expect?
2
During those summer weeks Scarsdale worked furiously at his novel. He rose at six in the morning, boiled a small kettle on a spirit stove and made himself an early cup of tea. The open window of his sitting-room offered him no distractions at that hour, and the milkman’s rat-rat and call and Miss Gall’s collecting of the milk caused him no irritation. The sky was either blue or grey, the square peacefully wet or peacefully sunny.
After breakfast he worked again till twelve, either upon the novel or upon articles and reviews, for an editor was sending him a few books to review. These review copies were doubly blessed, in that he could sell them afterwards and coin a few shillings. The novel grew, it was a longish book; in one month he wrote more than fifty thousand words. And he was sure that the work was good; he had discovered himself and his craft. Or was it that the war had let loose in him a humanity that poured itself out profusely? The illusion of his great inspiration grew as the book grew, nor did he realize that his interpreting of life was like his wooing of Julia, a piece of sensitive and self-conscious sentimentalizing.
At twelve o’clock he went out, ostensibly to lunch. He bought an apple at a greengrocer’s, and a couple of scones or rock-cakes at a confectioner’s, and with slightly bulging pockets made his way into Highbury Field. He had a particular seat on the further side, and usually he possessed this seat in solitude. His lunch cost him fourpence. He saved money, maintained appearances, and supposed that he deceived Miss Gall. If it rained he went out with mackintosh and umbrella, and lunched on the same seat under his travelling tent. He gave a few crumbs to the sparrows, and threw the core of his apple away into a shrubbery.
He enjoyed these simple lunches, the open air, and his comparative solitude. He felt like a boy eluding the conventions, and consummating an adventure upon a bottle of ginger-beer and a bun. He meditated, he dreamed dreams. He dreamed of Julia, and of a little white house—say—in Pelham Crescent, and of marriage as a bachelor in the forties may dream of marriage. The body of his romance he handled delicately. He had a fondness for the words—“Beloved”—“Madonna.” He dreamed about his novel. He dreamed about the number of editions of it that might be printed. The novel was to be his great gesture. It would reveal things; it would be the dramatic drawing back of a curtain; it would reveal him to Julia. His fancy swaggered gently, boyishly, absurdly. Spenser Scarsdale the novelist; Spenser Scarsdale the philosopher; Spenser Scarsdale the interpreter of the great heart of humanity. He saw his success as a garland of orange blossoms; he saw himself placing it upon Julia’s head; he saw Julia looking up at him with the annunciation of love and wonder in her eyes. He saw himself her great man, Cyrano revealed.
He smoked a pipe. Then he got up and walked, but before leaving the Fields he deposited his crumpled bun-bag in a receptacle for waste paper. It was a meticulous and nice gesture, a salute to a Victorian orderliness. He walked till half-past three, up streets and down streets; he looked into shops; he observed houses and little shabby front gardens. Sometimes he would walk as far as Finsbury Park. He had his suburban days and his city days. He wore out a great deal of shoe leather. He was the sentimentalist collecting an artificial realism.
Some time before four o’clock he returned to Canonbury Square. He had his tea. He lit a pipe and sat down at his table. He added more pages to that tremendous novel. Almost he brandished a sword and shouted, “Julia, glory!” He thought that he had Miss Gall kindly and comfortably deceived.
3
But Miss Gall was not deceived. Women are not deceived by the Scarsdales of this world, the men with thin necks and faces, and ungreedy eyes. In her youth Miss Gall had been deceived by a round-headed man with waxed moustaches and a shiny forehead and breath of a yeasty staleness.
Miss Gall observed the details and the minutiæ of Scarsdale’s daily routine. She had to have eyes for a speck of cabbage left adhering to a plate, or for dust on the hall table.
No letters arrived for Mr. Scarsdale. That is to say he received no more than one or two a week, and usually they flopped heavily upon the doormat, and the postman’s rat-rat sounded like a contemptuous “That’s that.” These fat envelopes were addressed to Mr. Spenser Scarsdale in his own handwriting. Manuscript returned with regrets.
Also, there was the evidence of Mr. Scarsdale’s shoes. He had three pairs, but one of them was out of action with a crack in the leather. Yet another pair were worn down at the heels and needed soling. It could not be that Mr. Scarsdale was careless, for in the old days he had been a little fussy about wet feet, and on Sundays he would go out looking v
ery much the gentleman.
Miss Gall spoke to him on the subject of shoe leather.
“Excuse me, sir, but your shoes—”
“Shoes?”
“They need attention, sir. Shall I take them to the cobbler’s? There’s a shop in the Essex Road.”
“Thanks, if you would.”
Sometimes, when he was out walking and she had seized the opportunity of dusting his room, she would stand and look at the manuscript of his novel. It was very neat and clean, with very few erasures or alterations. She would read a few lines of it, and she would think—
“Will anyone pay him for that?”
She had a worried scepticism. Pages of paper neatly scribbled over looked so quiet and unobtrusive, and the age blazed upon hoardings and squawked through the large trumpets of gramophones. All the successful things seemed to make a noise or to suggest immense activity. There were jazz-bands and motor-buses. And on the picture-posters lovers kissed with immense and active zest, face glued to face. The age shouted and hooted. Even the motors eructated. And Mr. Scarsdale was such a quietist.
“Money out of that!”
It seemed ridiculous.
And then there was the question of his shirts, and not only of his shirts, but of his pants and vests and socks. Miss Gall did a great deal of surreptitious darning, spectacles on nose, sitting under the gas-jet in the kitchen. But frayed cuffs could not be darned, and those young women at the laundry were terrors. Or was it the machinery? The teeth of the age tore and mangled people like Mr. Scarsdale and their linen.
“He’s so—so soft spoken, poor dear.”
For she had her own picture of Spenser Scarsdale. He was so long and thin and gentle. There were days when his eyes looked a little frightened. They were like the eyes of an animal that hears something predatory following upon its heels. Miss Gall thought that he was looking thinner and more grizzled. His nose looked bigger. He ate less. She noticed that he smoked his tobacco to the dusty stuff that accumulates in the bottom of a tin. In the old days he had tipped that dust into the china bowl into which he threw spent matches.
4
A leaf prematurely fallen from a tree is no more missed than a pebble dropped from the edge of a cliff, and if the war taught the world anything it taught it to grow accustomed to the disappearance of a face. Men vanished, just as Scarsdale vanished for a while from the little groove of a journalist’s routine. No one missed him. There was too much hurrying water in the stream, and the banks were too crowded.
No one asked, “What’s become of old Scarsdale?”
But a certain Mr. Shelby, a publisher, meeting Taggart at lunch, asked him a question.
“Wasn’t Scarsdale with you?”
“He was. Had to get rid of him. Perfectly useless. You know him?”
“O, slightly. Had a letter from him yesterday. Wants me to read a novel.”
Taggart dabbed mustard on a piece of rump-steak. His digestion had improved.
“Sort of chap who would write a novel. Last refuge of the damned and the destitute. Going to read it?”
“I suppose so.”
“Sure to be dashed rot.”
For, in the commercial scramble the finer details of life are lost or blurred, and no one saw Scarsdale sitting on his seat in Highbury Fields eating buns out of a bag and feeding the sparrows. No one watched him putting on his best suit after lunch on Sundays, and walking to catch a bus opposite Highbury station. Cyrano dressed to the part, but a very lean Cyrano with slightly anxious eyes. If he had to give a shilling to the bus conductor he counted his change carefully. Sometimes he carried flowers, and his gloves were of washleather. In Chelsea he had the air of belonging to the fortunate class that has no need to worry about the change out of a shilling. To the maids across the way he was Julia’s beau, and if not quite Beau Geste, a gent and well dressed. Obviously he was a chocolate soldier, a bouquet boy. He stood on the steps of No. 53 with his trousers well creased. They were kept pressed for the occasion under the mattress of his bed.
Though, to Julia Marwood flowers were mere foolishness. She had no feeling for them, and a flower-shop was merely a splash of bright colour in the decorative scheme of things. Scarsdale’s floral offerings embarrassed her; she would grip them firmly by the stalks, and dispose of them unsympathetically in any old vase. She could not smile and say, “How lovely!” for she was not finding it easy to smile at Scarsdale. He came and sat and gazed and talked. He talked about the war, and the war was to her a memory of bad, old things. He fooled with Harry, and she found herself irritated by their fooling and by their friendliness. Harry encouraged these visits, and they were beginning to exasperate her. Whenever she saw a cheque she seemed to be gazing at the particular cheque with Scarsdale’s signature upon it.
On Sundays she and Harry sat in the garden under the shade of the pear-tree. Sunday was very much hers; she stayed in bed till nine, and in the afternoon she liked a deck-chair and a magazine, and a sleek feeling of relaxation. She had to work very hard during the week, and she was working harder than ever now that she was the secret partner. She did not want to get out of her chair for anybody, or to have to be bright to a man who sat and looked at her as though she was a super-wedding-cake in a shop window.
On that very hot Sunday in August the door bell rang earlier than usual, and she was feeling drowsy.
“O, damn!”
Harry, prone on his stomach with a book under his chin, turned on one side and looked at her.
“It’s Mr. Scarsdale.”
She did not say, “Damn Mr. Scarsdale.” What she did say was, “I’ve got a headache. I feel awfully cheap. I don’t want to see anybody.”
Harry looked at her. He looked at her with the strangely wise eyes of sixteen.
“I ought to go and tell him, Ju.”
“No, don’t. He knows other people in Chelsea.”
“He’ll feel rather hurt, you know.”
“Well, go and tell him. I’ll go and lie down upstairs. You two can have tea in the garden.”
But Harry did not go. He rolled back upon his tummy, and stared at the book without reading it, and Scarsdale, after loitering self-consciously upon his Julia’s doorstep, persuaded himself that no one was at home. He closed the gate, glanced half-apologetically at the windows of No. 53, and walked away.
Chapter Fifteen
Harry was both old man and child, and he saw things as few lads of sixteen see them. He saw what Scarsdale wanted, and he was not offended. He was sorry for Scarsdale.
“Mr. S. is sweet on Ju.”
Sensible fellow! There was a rightness in a man falling in love with Julia, but only in a particular sort of way, and Harry understood Scarsdale’s way of falling in love. It was the boy’s way, the first adoration, the miraculous hour. Harry had had his first stormy passage on the sea of sex, disgusting revelations in the person of Brother Bob. “O, you wait till Julia gets a fellow.” But Bob and his nastiness had been extruded, and Harry’s white rage against sexual savagery had been put to sleep. But he understood love as some children do. He understood Scarsdale, and just why Scarsdale looked at Julia as he did, and was shy of her. He was not jealous of Scarsdale.
But Julia! What did Julia want? That was quite another problem. It was obvious to Harry, that Julia did not want Scarsdale, and that she was bored with him, which seemed a pity. For old Scarsdale was such a decent chap, a gentleman; the “Ponsonby Hotel” had taught Harry to distinguish between the genuine article and the fake. But to Harry his sister was a mystery; he divined in her a mysterious, secret creature who moved darkly even in the midst of the day’s domestic dulness, casting a strange shadow. There was something in his sister that he feared, without being able to say why or how. Sometimes, he would look at her when she was cutting the bread or putting coals on the fire, and wonder. Was she his Julia? And what was that other Julia? And why did he sometimes feel shy and mute in her presence, as though there was in her a something that was disastrously strange and cruel?
Harry did not know. There were moments when he felt like a little, whimpering boy, and he wanted to rush at Julia and hug her and be hugged.
“You are my Ju, aren’t you?”
He wanted to keep Julia as she had always been to him, a creature protective and tender, the sexless mother. And there was this other Julia that perplexed him, and fretted his faith in the changeless and clean familiarity of her. His devotion was very real, and that was why he understood Scarsdale’s way of looking at his sister, and was not hurt or disturbed by it.
So, too, on that empty day when the door of No. 53 was not opened to him Scarsdale went away disturbed and disappointed. They had expected him, and yet when the bell had remained unanswered he had been attacked by a sudden feeling of self-depreciation. He had walked down to the river and sat on a seat in the Embankment gardens close to the bust of the Sage of Chelsea. He had decided to wait for an hour before going back to Spellthorn Terrace. But he had not gone back. His feeling of frustration had remained.
He was writing the last chapter of his novel. His romance waited for its climax. He felt the need of a compelling gesture, especially so after the debacle in front of Julia’s closed door. It was both absurd and strange that a man should discover failure in the face of a mere piece of painted deal. But the thing had happened. It was as though he had divined, while standing on that doorstep, the unknown Julia, the dark and terrifying young stranger in the house, and had flinched and allowed his will to be frustrated. And by what? By an absurd and trembling self-consciousness, a silly, blushing self-abasement? What was there for him to fear in Julia Marwood?
His novel was being typed, and the typing of it would cost him eight pounds and a few odd shillings. The sum worried him, but when the clean pages came back to him in the middle of the week, and he sat down to read and correct the typing, his confidence returned. The book struck him as amazingly good, vivid, human, and compelling. It was his. He decided to send it to Messrs. Shelby & Drake at the end of the week. Shelby had written to him promising to give the book sympathetic consideration.
Old Wine and New Page 16