“See, that’s the cam-shaft.”
They bent over the crankcase together, and his right arm was round her waist.
“There’s a sort of bump.”
“Yes, that’s it. A cam is a kind of boss on the shaft. As the shaft revolves, the boss lifts the valve tappet. The valve tappet gives the valve stem a push. Got it?”
“Think so.”
He gave her things to clean, valves, valve-caps, sparking-plugs, but he would not let her touch the magneto.
“Not yet, old thing. Bit tricky.”
She was as mild as milk with him over the magneto. She sat on an upturned sugar-box, and watched him busy with the magneto on another sugar-box. She watched his eyes and his hands, and the way his hair grew, and the shell-like moulding of his ears. Everything about him was good to her. She did not think of Harry, at least not as she had thought of him a month ago. Of Scarsdale she thought not at all.
Her new high priest explained the magneto to her, and she listened deeply and gravely to the new mechanical mysteries. Her seriousness seemed to amuse him. He put out a sudden black finger, and imprinted a little smudge on her chin.
“What about it?”
“Bad Tiger.”
She called him Tiger. She took his ear and pinched it, and stole a brown silk handkerchief and wiped her chin.
“No spots on me, young man.”
Their prattling would have puzzled a previous generation. They did not discuss matrimony, but the date when Brooklands Track would be reopened, and when Messrs. Millman & Co., would be able to deliver his new racing car. They were mutually exasperated by the post-war delays and disabilities. They talked of the bungalow he thought of building down at Byfleet. He had plenty of money, and that was part of youth’s new credo. Money was one of the essentials, money and mechanism.
“You’ll take me around Brooklands.”
“I—don’t think.”
But she was quite determined about it. Moreover, she was to be no mere passenger, a picturesque attachment to the male. She saw herself driving a racing car round Brooklands Track high up on the banking. She had the hundred-miles-an-hour spirit.
“I shouldn’t flinch. I’m young. I’m not nervy.”
“Yes, you’re it all right. But I might do the flinching.”
“Don’t be silly. If I can watch you doing stunts—”
“No, some things are different.”
But other things were the same as they have always been and will be. There were the seat cushions and a couple of rugs, and the key of a coach-house door could be used from the inside. Other mysteries were consummated in the darkness. Afterwards she would hold his head down on her shoulder.
3
In the September dusk Scarsdale found Chelsea like a painted cabinet into which he had put away memories, little pieces of china of rose and of blue, shepherds and shepherdesses, Dresden, Sèvres, Bow and Bristol. Some of the shops were open, some closed. The soft blue of the dusk was burred with gold, and the trees of Spellthorn Gardens seemed to stand in a stillness as of dark water. Scarsdale strolled. He had a feeling that it was to be his last night in Chelsea, and that the little painted figure of his love would be shut away behind glass. His mood had no haste in it, and no anger. On the pavement of Martagon Terrace he stood under one of the plane trees, and looking at the windows and fascia board of the office, thought to see the name of Marwood there. But it was not there, and he wondered. He wondered how she had used the money. But did it matter? Of course it did not matter. His gesture had passed like a shadow moving across one of the white muslin blinds.
He walked on. He came to the florists; it was open and spaciously lit, though its colours were crowded, asters purple and rose, marigolds, flame-coloured phlox, pots of resida, boxes of brilliant blue lobelia, cabbages piled in the background, baskets of beans, grapes, grapefruit, apples. It made him think of a huge casket into which had been tumbled sacksful of precious stones. A big woman in black seen bending with her hands in a basket of apples, had a face like a huge carbuncle.
He came to Spellthorn Terrace. He had not walked twenty yards along it before he realized that the car was there. Its tail-lamp glowed like the tail of a glow-worm, and the light splashed on the red sheen of the body. Scarsdale crossed the road, and continued along the opposite pavement. The windows of No. 53 were dark, and he was moved to think of that wet October night nearly a year ago, and of his search for the Marwood house. Was it less than a year ago? But how absurd! Time was nothing; it was life crowded into an hour or a day that made you either Harlequin or Pantaloon.
He walked on slowly as far as Spellthorn Square, and then turned and strolled back. So, youth went to youth as the poets have said, but in these later days was it not generation at play with generation? They understood each other; they asked for the same toys. And then he happened upon the most unexpected of figures, though its unexpectedness was in its placing, for here was Harry standing upon the edge of the pavement and looking across the road at the windows of home.
“Hallo, Hal!”
The boy looked sharply up at Scarsdale, as though life had put him on guard.
“Oh, it’s you!”
“I’ve just been seeing friends. No, I’m not coming in to-night. How’s Julia?”
Harry’s eyes were fixed on the red car.
“O, Julia’s all right.”
His set face expressed many things. He may have realized the inevitableness of the red car, and the superfluousness of a small and sensitive person. O, yes, Julia was all right, and that confounded chap was always in the house, so teasing and so friendly, and so confoundedly at home. And what did Mr. Scarsdale think about the revolution, and the sudden redness of Julia?
But both of them were made to gaze at the lower window of No. 53. They saw the light switched on, and Julia at the window. She pulled down the yellow blind, and her shadow was upon it, and suddenly another shadow joined hers. They merged into each other, remained so for a moment, and then disappeared.
Scarsdale made a movement as of easing his hat.
“Well,—I’ll be getting along. Good night, old lad.”
Harry was still looking at the window.
“Good night.”
Scarsdale walked hurriedly away. He had had a feeling that Julia’s brother was wanting to blub, and was hating himself and other people for being mixed up in this emotion.
4
Back at Canonbury Square Scarsdale removed the Japanese screen from the grate, struck a match and lit the fire. It was an extravagance on a fine September night, but a fire may have other uses than the mere production of heat. Scarsdale’s fire was both a symbol and a furnace. He routed out his cashbox and produced from it the receipt that Julia Marwood had given him. He sat down in front of the fire. It was burning with enthusiasm. Holding Julia’s acknowledgment between thumb and first finger, he allowed a flame to lick and kindle it, and when the piece of paper was well alight he let it fall into the flames.
Scarsdale sat and watched the fire. How much poorer and how much richer he might be, he was unable to say. Life flickered uncertainly like those flames. And presently he heard Miss Gall’s footsteps on the stairs. She came softly to his door and stood there, and then just as softly went away.
Part Two
Chapter Eighteen
Scarsdale was forty-six.
He was a little thinner, more bent about the shoulders and greyer at the temples. His brown eyes were more prominent, and more full of a kind of a liquid anxiety, a gentle mistrust of life. When he sat in his office chair his shoulder-blades showed up sharply, and the back of his neck was traversed by a vertical groove.
For two years or so he had held the minor post of assistant editor with the publishing house of Hurst & Storey in King Street. He saw other men’s books through the press, and performed any hack-work that was required of him. He shared the room at Hurst & Storey’s with three other men who were creatures equally obscure and precarious. He received three hundred pounds
a year and a fortnight’s holiday.
He continued to lodge at Miss Gall’s. For three hundred days in the year his routine was the same, save that on Saturdays, he sailed home to Canonbury five hours earlier. He stepped off Miss Gall’s doorstep at the same hour each morning; he was sedulously precise and punctual, for he was one of the many thousands who are afraid, and to whom a lapse may be so final. He walked to Highbury Corner and caught a bus. He walked very fast, with an occasional little sharp turn of the head as though he were looking back over his shoulder at something that pursued him. In the bus he sat, if he obtained a seat, with his feet together and his hands resting on his thin thighs, and his eyes looking straight ahead. Leaving the bus at the top of the Charing Cross Road he walked urgently toward King Street. Almost he was like a pea rolling in a groove.
It never occurred to him to ask the question, “What would happen if I turned round and walked in the other direction?” He knew what would happen. He was a shuttle going to and fro. He could not travel in any other direction. That was not permitted. He belonged to the crowd that poured into the city and poured out of it, like soot emptied from one bag into another. He could not suddenly say to himself, “I will go on the river”—or “I will lie and dream on the hills”. He could say that on Saturday afternoons or on Sunday, but on Sundays he felt too tired, and too unadventurous. He lay in bed till nine. He read the Sunday paper. He pottered, and the day pottered with him.
He occupied the same chair in the same room, and sat at the same untidy office table. The three other men who shared the room with him were as familiar and unsensational as the furniture. Their names were Frater, Jeans, and Doble. Daily they made the same remarks and did the same things. Sometimes they hated each other; sometimes they squabbled. Old Frater, with his walrus head and white moustache yellowish at the roots, was the father of the family. He had gentle and humorously sad blue eyes. Little Jeans was a lean, raddled, rat of a man with the skin stretched tightly over his sharp nose, a man whose stomach and chest were concave and were balanced by the backward curve of his thin little legs. Jeans had irritable, red-lidded eyes. He was always whistling and fidgeting, and tilting his chair, or wanting to tell a smutty story. He came into the office each morning like a man who had left a quarrel at home, and had not been able to forget it. His language was peppered.
“Another blasted day! Hallo, Doble, how’s the cold?”
Doble had a thick, lisping voice, and a white and viscous face. He sniffed; he sniffed perpetually. Yet, always and with a kind of pallid passion, he would resent the suggestion that he had a cold.
“Haven’t got a cold, Jeans. It’s my catarrh.”
And Jeans would mimic him, with emphasis on the “cat”. He would make rhymes about it.
“Doble has a cat-arrh
And an antrum full of matt-ah.”
They hated each other did Jeans and Doble. They sat cheek-by-jowl at the same long table, day in, day out, and Doble would sniff, and Jeans dab fiercely at “galleys” with a blue pencil. The room had a stuffiness; it smelt of paper and printer’s ink, and another perfume which Jeans insisted came from Doble’s feet.
They were there together all day, and yet went out and lunched together at a Lyons’. That is to say, the three of them did. Doble brought sandwiches and ate them in the office, for he had five children and a wife who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Often his sandwiches contained cheese, and it was cheese of an aggressive and powerful rankness.
Sometimes Scarsdale would wonder why he lunched with Frater and Jeans, or why they lunched with him. Almost it seemed that they were like three animals who lived in the same hutch, and who moved from one hutch to another, and were so much the creatures of habit that they would have felt chilly and vaguely uneasy without each other. They nibbled together and squeaked together, and Jeans always had the same sort of joke and the same libidinous glance for the waitress. Old Frater’s moustache got itself soiled with egg, or coffee, or prune juice. He was a clean old man, and it troubled him.
Jeans would remark when Frater got out his handkerchief:
“Shave it off, dad. I’ll give you a safety razor for Christmas.”
Scarsdale’s recollections of this period were rather blurred, and inconclusive. The war had been a stormy sunset, and the Julia Marwood affair an illusive and vivid dawn, but the years that followed were for him numb and befogged. They had a greyness. It was as though he had a hard hat pressed tightly upon his head, constricting it and making of him a man of one idea, and causing those brown eyes of his to bulge and look frightened. He suffered from mental numbness; he lived in juxtaposition to Jeans’ vulgarity and Doble’s unsavoury person, and yet the soul of him consented. It had no dreams of escape. It had ceased to dream. It was concerned with keeping itself attached to a particular chair and the salary the chair carried with it.
Occasionally life blew against him like the scent of a flower or a scud of rain, and he was startled. He could remember the day when he had eschewed the Lyons’ lunch, and had brought fruit and walked down to Charing Cross gardens and sat in the sun, and suddenly and without any warning a man on the same seat had cut his throat with a razor. Blood, spurts of blood. After that experience Scarsdale had kept close to old Frater and his humorously sad blue eyes. Then there had been the occasion when some romping imp of a girl clerk scampering down the stairs, had slipped and come tumbling into him, and he had had to catch her and hold her for a moment, a warm, giggling, live thing. Her dark hair had brushed against his face. Then that Spring day in a Sussex beech-wood, with the earth all blue with wild hyacinths under a lacework of young green leaves, and a blackbird singing. Beauty! He had a kind of film over his eyes during those years, though occasionally the film would crack and he would see life with a strange and poignant clearness.
He had moments of wakefulness. Perhaps he would become more afraid, or be suddenly nauseated by Jean’s common little soul, or he would feel a wild desire to go down somewhere into a green world and dream. A spasm of liveness passed through him. Life hurt.
Ever and again some such spasm of alarm ran through the house of Hurst & Storey. The machines throbbed uneasily, and the walls suffered tremors. Rumours trickled down the stairs and along passages. The printers were striking, or the packers had been insulted by the general manager. Someone had refused to join a trades union. The management were said to be fed up with the whole silly show, and were proposing to lock out printers, packers, everybody. Gloom prevailed. The whole big building seemed to quiver like a wounded organism. Doble munched his sandwiches sombrely. Jeans swore. “Damn those blasted packers! Always slacking and grousing. Blasted Bolshies!” Yet the packers were just plain, ordinary men disturbed by the spirit of greed that is the Dark Angel of these years of confusion. Greed stood on a soap-box and played the demagogue. It bawled high sounding words. It spoke of wage-slaves, and bloated capitalists, and Lenin, and the class conflict. It proclaimed a fatuous equality.
Old Frater ate his eggs on toast.
“Why can’t they let things alone. You can’t turn turnips into roses by shouting at ’em.”
Egg streaked his moustache and he looked sad.
“Sandys told me something this morning. Not to be repeated. Don’t like it.”
“What’s that?”
Jeans perked up like a little snappy dog.
“Rumour has it that Calder & Pearson are buying us up.”
“O-ho! That means the Martinsides. Damn the Martinsides! They buy up half Fleet Street. Just another bloated rumour.”
Old Frater wiped his moustache.
“More than that I think. Storey has had enough of the class-conscious swindle. Nothing but row-row-row, and interference from outsiders. I shouldn’t blame him if he quitted.”
Scarsdale put down his coffee cup.
“The Martinsides fight.”
“Lord—yes. They can afford to,” and Jeans looked truculent. “If I were the Martinsides I’d call all this Bolshie bluff. I wouldn’
t have a union man in the place.”
Old Frater buttered a piece of bread.
“Amalgamation. That’s the word. We know what that means.”
They did. And for the rest of the meal there was a hard, moody silence. Each of the three were digesting that prophetic word “Amalgamation”. Two staffs would be merged into one; there would be a purging of all that was superfluous. This man would go and that. No one would know. A dreadful suspense would grip the whole building, and especially those men in it who were going grey. Because it was dreadful to become superfluous at fifty, and especially so when you had a wife, children.
Scarsdale, looking into old Frater’s face, saw in the kind blue eyes a kind of frightened, hungry stare. It shocked him. And he thought, “Well, I haven’t any children. Thank the Lord. These aren’t days for having children.”
2
Miss Gall had changed not at all. She had the same long, flat figure, the same high shoulders, and the same little bob of grey hair at the back of her head. Possibly she was less thin of body, and less strained about the eyes, for she had a woman in each morning to clean and make beds and to wash.
Because Miss Gall had let the first floor, and had let it very well to a gentleman who was something in the West End. His name was Bartlet, and though he had lodged with Miss Gall for nearly eighteen months she did not know what his business was. He had an abundance of money, and he paid her regularly; he enjoyed his food, and showed no inclination to hunt half-pennies up and down Miss Gall’s red-edged, account-book.
Scarsdale met Mr. Bartlet occasionally. He was a very cheerful person, shortish, ruddy and well-covered, with a nice fat jowl that was easy to shave. He was compact and yet large and free in his movements. He wore a black moustache that was turning grey. When he happened to meet Scarsdale he would look him straight in the face, and with an air of genial vigour bring out a “Good morning, sir.” He was the sort of man who slapped shoulders, and when in conversation brought his face very close to the face of the other fellow. He spoke with emphasis, and was somewhat declamatory, and had a liking for breaking up his periods with such phrases as—“I would beg to observe, sir—”—“As I was saying—”—“Mark you, I’m just John Citizen”—“Now, for the sake of argument?”
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