Scarsdale picked up his pipe and proceeded to light it.
“If he comes here again—But I don’t suppose he will come here again.”
He held the flame of the match to the bowl of his pipe. He had a feeling that she was pleased with him. He was pleased with himself, surprised and delighted with himself. Almost he felt grateful to the little cad in the bowler hat. Almost he loved him.
Chapter Twenty-four
Scarsdale began to write.
Not that the inspiration came to him easily. Far from it, because he was writing differently, and not with the glib, conventional niceness of the Canonbury Square days. Something had happened to him. The rabbit in the snare had had the loop of wire removed, and just as on Martinsell Hill it crouched and was absorbed in the business of breathing, while its bloodshot, swollen eyes reflected reality. So, Scarsdale made his first tentative movements; he trotted his first few yards, and crouched again with ears laid back. He was free. Something had happened. No longer did he feel wired to a peg, and paralysed.
On the contrary he was conscious of feeling sore. The soul of him hurt like a hand that aches when the blood flows again freely after exposure to cold. He had come into a warm room. A mystic might have said that his spirit had re-entered the womb of a woman and been born again.
He felt an urge in him, a painful urge. Life itself had a kind of rawness. He was conscious of being hurt and impeded in the midst of a new sense of struggle. He sat down at his table as though he was afraid of it; he bit hard at the stem of his pipe; he twisted his legs; he was moved to curse. Noises distracted him, the shouting children over the way, the trams in Canonbury Road, the hooting of motors. But his very distractions aggravated the urge in him. He was raw, alive, a creature clawing its way up out of a dark hole toward a point of light.
He wrote.
He read what he had written, and tore it up, and began again.
The stuff seemed so crude, and yet it had a quality that had been lacking in his neat, highbrow prosings. It was like raw meat, but it was meat, not mere wood pulp. He had a most strange feeling as of being in a glass case, and able to see things happening outside the case, and he wanted to break through and become part of the things that happened. He wanted to be and to describe, and in being to be able to express. His pen seemed to peck at the glass like the beak of a bird. For life had suddenly become vivid, fruit, colour, flesh, perfume, greenness. He wanted to get at it, and as yet he was only pecking at a surface. He was conscious of inward effort, thwartings, irritations, hope and despair. The thing was there, if only he could get at it. There was something in himself to be got at and expressed. He felt that he had to get at it or die. He knew that he had to sweat and dig at the thing with his naked hands, for the labour was more than mere labour. He was working against time. He was working against the inevitableness of future shame and submergence. He knew now that if he failed there would be no Mrs. Richmond.
Early in the morning she would pick those pieces of torn paper out of the waste-paper basket, and straighten out some crumpled fragment and read it. She knew nothing about literature, which was a virtue, but she knew a great deal about life. She knew how things happened. She knew what people did and did not do, what they felt, what they said. She knew how the pot boiled and the fire burned. She was reality.
And these scribblings of his were both real and unreal. Sometimes, when she read the words that he had written she saw nothing but words, but sometimes she saw things happening. Almost he made her think of a child trying to draw, though the child was a middle-aged man, groping and clutching his way toward reality. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was getting nearer to it, that he would tear the conventional cloth away and uncover the white body.
He, too, was different; he had been different since that evening when he had hustled the man in the bowler hat out into Astey’s Row. It was as though the successful manhandling of a little cad had revived his confidence. His long, loose figure had been fitted with a new spring. Every evening between six and seven he went out and walked, and sometimes she watched him start off along the Row. He walked as though he had an object in view; he looked younger, more resilient.
Also, she observed that the pages of manuscript upon his table were accumulating. He still tore sheets in half, but a balance remained in his favour. He was writing a short story; she read his short story, page by page as it arrived. It was not like life as she knew it,—but it was getting nearer to life. As she expressed it to herself, “There’s too much sugar icing on the cake”, and she wondered why he plastered on this confectionery stuff. Why not be content with good sultana or sponge?
Also, she observed his economies, and found that they caused her little twinges of compassion. He went out and bought himself scones or buns for lunch; she discovered the crumbs, and the paper bags that had been crumpled up and dropped into the waste-paper basket. She supposed that he had to be careful, and she did not quarrel with his carefulness, for her nature did not run to waste. She supposed, too, that he had private means. He paid her regularly.
She spoke to him about his lunch.
“What do you do for food in the middle of the day?”
He treated the question with assumed casualness.
“O, just buy something. Doesn’t stop my working.”
“Yes,—I’ve seen the bags. From Gadder’s in the Essex Road. Buns.”
He echoed her softly.
“Buns. Yes, and why not?”
“Much better let me leave you out some bread and cheese.”
He agreed with her that bread and cheese would be more wholesome and sustaining.
She did not like masterful men, or rather—she preferred a man who exercised his masterfulness upon things and not upon people. The square jaw, the shiny and energetic face, the shallow, pragmatical eye did not attract her. As a woman who had come to cherish the sanctuary of her self, she would have resented the interference of the too active male. Scarsdale’s shyness entered her house on quiet feet. She liked to be alone at times during the day, alone with herself; and a man child who could play happily by himself suited her temperament. She liked Scarsdale’s shyness, his way of looking at her, his ungreediness. When he was in the house the house remained hers and the same.
She understood his shyness, but not the whole of it. She understood his sensitive, and rather ineffectual hands, but to her they had ceased to be ineffectual. She understood his little awkwardnesses, the gentle timidity of this tall, unaggressive creature who was so loth to hurt people, and who was so easily hurt.
His approach to her was hesitant.
At seven o’clock she heard the front door open and close. He hung up his hat, and entered the front sitting-room, and stood by the table, turning over the pages of manuscript. He wandered out again into the passage, hesitated, and then he approached her door.
“Mrs. Richmond.”
“Yes?”
“May I come in?”
He smiled at her defensively.
“Wonderful evening. I’ve been watching them playing tennis in the Fields. You ought to come out sometimes.”
“I might.”
He sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, and picked up the cat. Thomas was growing accustomed to these blandishments. He reposed upon Scarsdale’s chest, supported by an arm, his head on the man’s shoulder. Scarsdale’s other hand passed gently over the cat’s head and back, and Thomas purred.
“There’s something right about a cat in a house. Comfortable creatures.”
She was mending a pillow-case, and her calm eyes looked across at him from under the darkness of her hair.
“There are cats and cats.”
“Just as there are men and men.”
“Naturally.”
2
He had persuaded her to go out with him. It was an evening in June, and the great plane tree at the end of Astey’s Row stood serenely still against the sunset. It was flecked with touches of gold, and as Mrs. Richmond passed under it she look
ed up into the hollows of its mighty crown. She passed under that tree each day in summer and in winter, and being a woman she was friends with that tree, and knew its moods and the manifestations of its varying expressions. Very few people noticed the tree. It was too aspiring for the level gaze of the crowd, or for a glance that hugged the flat earth.
Scarsdale saw her look up at the tree, and it seemed to him that her face grew strange and dreamy. The large, dark, liquid iris of each eye absorbed the light. And at her feet the Canonbury Road was clamorous and crowded. A tram clanged its bell behind the stupid, scrunching bulk of a heavy cart, and behind the tram two shabby Ford vans hooted impatiently. Contrasts. This woman with her large, calm, dreamy face, and this highway full of mechanical futility, noise, and shabby haste.
He said to her, “It seems strange, doesn’t it?”
Her eyes came to earth. She smiled.
“Do you ask yourself that question?”
“O,—often.”
“What’s it all for? What does humanity get out of it?”
“Yes, and that old tree. Do you know I have watched people, and hardly a soul ever looks up at this tree.”
“Too busy.”
“But it shouldn’t be so, should it?”
In Highbury Fields there were other trees, but trees less old than the great plane of Astey’s Row, and he and Mrs. Richmond, who as a child and a young girl, had looked out each morning over English parkland and high woods and hills, could give thanks to this open space for the sake of its greenness. The trees and the grass did their best, but it did occur to her that the Fields had been dealt with by a draper who had taken a tape measure and reeled off so many yards of gravel and grass and iron railing, and had added trees and shrubs by way of embroidery. A utilitarian space for dogs and children, a “Lung” as the journalists love to call it. And behind her stood those austere, gracious houses with their windows looking at life so steadfastly. Being a woman, she could love and understand the soul of a house, were it in Highbury Terrace or in a Dorset valley.
She was wearing a black suit and a red hat. Like most dark women she looked her best in black. It set off her height and her carriage, the whiteness of her skin, and the large and liquid calmness of her eyes. And Scarsdale was aware of the red, white and black; he was aware of her shoes and her gloves, and of the way her black hair made a shadow under the red brim. She had beauty, a quiet, capable comeliness that is not sudden and obvious, and for that very reason is all the more inevitable.
Looking across the grass to the rows of trees in the middle distance, she asked him a question—
He leaned back with one arm over the back of the seat.
“Have you been working to-day?”
“Yes,” and with a slow smile he added, “That sort of work must seem queer to you.”
She was silent for a little while.
“Well,—I don’t know. I remember a man who used to come and paint in the country where I lived. He painted the mill, and the woods, and the fields by the river. I suppose writing is something like painting.”
“You used to watch him?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you think of his pictures?”
Again she remained silent, and her face had for him a mysterious stillness.
“They were real pictures.”
“Real.”
“I mean—you could look at them and see all the things that you knew, and yet he made you see them—differently.”
“How—differently?”
“You seemed to see all around and into them. You saw things in a way—as you hadn’t seen them before. He’d taught himself to see the trees and the water—and the clouds.”
“They were real to you.”
“Yes, reality. Just as you might go into the Essex Road and take the real people there.”
3
She had given him a word. Reality. He took it back with him to Astey’s Row, and looking out of his bedroom window at the rows of lighted windows in the model dwellings beyond the open space that had once been river, he realized that each room over yonder contained a fragment of reality. They were little boxes full of life. The foliage of the old trees hid some of the windows, and imposed upon that formal and utilitarian façade moments of mystery. Yes, life was both mysterious and real, and through the eyes of a woman he was endowed with a new perception of reality. The people in the Essex Road.
He heard Eleanor Richmond go to her room and close the door, and to him that other room in Astey’s Row was mysterious and sacred. His thoughts were not the thoughts of the casual lover. They did not sidle in and gloat over shoulders and breasts, and the white amplitudes of the female shape; they stood outside her door and wondered; they were like the imaginings of a sensitive, idealizing boy. And yet they were real. He saw sex symbolized. It was the Dea Mater and the Beloved. It was that other sacred self in a London back room, woman putting a match to the fire, busy with endless simple things, serving reality while remaining the mother of man.
He went to sleep with the word “Reality” written in letters of white upon the dark page of his consciousness. He got up in the morning with it, and pulled up the blind and saw trees, brick walls, iron railings, paving stones, people. Thomas the cat was sitting under a bush, watching the sparrows. Footsteps came and went along the Row, and Scarsdale was conscious of a queer feeling of excitement. He was like an alchemist to whom some magic formula had been revealed; he wanted to hurry down into his workshop, and try the thing out in crucible and retort. He heard his jug of hot water placed softly outside his door.
He thought, “Why should she do that for me?”
Yes, why should she do all the things she did? Why did the sun rise, why was a plane tree a plane tree, why did it cast a shadow? Why could he not cast reality upon paper just as that tree patterned its shadow on the ground?
He washed and shaved and dressed, and even these familiar activities had a freshness. He went downstairs and into the sitting-room and picked up a sheet of manuscript. Words strung together, sentences. But the effect was indistinct and blurred, and suddenly he seemed to see just how and why it was blurred. It was not real.
He did no work that morning. He went out and wandered. He walked up and down the Essex Road. He watched an old woman buying a cabbage and potatoes and a pound of onions. He listened to the conversation between her and the greengrocer’s assistant. Their voices had a human flavour, almost they spoke of Cabbages and Kings. There were other women with bags. There were the butchers’ shops, red meat and sawdust, and oddments in trays, and a lad hacking at some lump of flesh with a cleaver. There were the grocers’ shops, tubs of butter, cheeses, packets of tea, tinned fruit, slabs of cake. He observed two young things outside a draper’s window, pink legs, two little hats poked close to the glass. What was it,—stockings, some feminine thrill? There was the incessant coming and going in roadway and upon pavement, modernity in full flux, noisy, alive. Things seemed different to him. He saw into them and round them just as Eleanor Richmond had seen the painter man’s pictures. The Essex Road was reality.
Chapter Twenty-five
Mrs. Richmond was going away. Each year she allowed herself a fortnight’s holiday, and she was travelling into Dorsetshire to stay with an uncle who had a small farm near Shaftesbury. On previous occasions she had locked up the house, and left Thomas to be cared for by the next-door neighbour, though Thomas was very well able to look after himself. This man creature was different. She had presumed that he too would be able to remove himself to the seaside or the country, but when she broached the matter he looked troubled.
For Scarsdale could not afford a holiday. His resources were running out like sand from the upper globe of an hour-glass, and he was engaged in a furious wrestling match with reality. He was trying to capture reality and to behold it bound hand and foot upon his writing-table. Something that he had seen in the Essex Road had given him an idea for a book.
He was troubled. She was busy clearing away th
e supper-things, and he prodded tobacco into his pipe, and remembered Thomas the cat. He and Thomas were in the same quandary, bachelors both of them. He lit his pipe.
“What about the cat?”
She swept the crumbs from the bread trencher onto a plate.
“They look after him next door.”
“I see. As a matter of fact—”
She stood still, with her eyes fixed upon the back of Scarsdale’s neck. It was not quite so thin as it had been, and she smiled.
“Perhaps you would like to stay and look after Thomas.”
“Could I?”
She saw how eager he was to stay.
“I could picnic, you know.”
“Buns and bananas.”
“O, no. I could go out for some of my meals. And I could look after things.”
“Yes, you could. So, you are not taking a holiday?”
“Not this year. Besides, I don’t need one. You do.”
“Why?”
“O, you work so hard. You deserve every day of it. I’m sure the cat agrees with me.”
He gathered Thomas to his knees; they were rather bony knees, but then the man had a gentle and caressing hand.
Mrs. Richmond did not make use of a taxi. She proposed to carry her green fibre suitcase as far as the nearest tram halt, but Scarsdale modified her plan. She found him waiting on the front steps, and he held out his hand for her suitcase.
“I’m carrying it for you.”
She did not play at piquing him by protesting. She allowed him to take possession of her luggage, but before closing the door she made sure that he had his key. She had discovered that he could be absentminded. Her suspicions appeared to amuse him, and as he held the gate open for her he smiled at her shyly.
“No, not guilty, Eleanor.”
It was the first time that he had called her by her Christian name. She did not retaliate, for the response would have been too obvious, but as they passed under the shade of the great plane tree, she allowed him other indications; her voice had a softness.
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