Old Wine and New

by Warwick Deeping

  “Now, remember, no buns and bananas.”

  “I’ll remember. And Thomas has a saucer of milk twice a day.”

  “Thomas will ask for it. He’s much more greedy than you are.”

  He gave an almost soundless laugh.

  “Thomas has a better appreciation of reality.”

  The tram carried her away, and Scarsdale returned to Astey’s Row and let himself into the empty house. He had work to do, but when he sat down at his table and took up his pen, his thoughts began to wander. They followed Eleanor Richmond, as though in removing herself from Astey’s Row she had taken other keys away with her, and left him either locked in or locked out, and though he rallied himself—“Come now, get on with the job,” his consciousness refused to concentrate. Because, it was borne in upon him that Mrs. Richmond was reality, reality supreme in the spirit, and in the flesh, and now that he was so completely alone he realized with sudden fear the infinite significance of her. But why was he afraid? He sat with his elbows on the table, and with level eyes stared at the red building opposite. He did not see it as a red building. He was visualizing other realities.

  How much money remained to him? Unless he earned more money his resources would come to an end. How many weeks were left to him? Somewhere about the end of October he would find himself derelict so far as ready cash was concerned. He Would not be able to pay her for his board and lodging.

  A seedy sponger?

  Yes, that was why he felt afraid. Either he would find a market for his stories or persuade someone to employ him, or he would have to leave Astey’s Row. He had had to leave Canonbury Square, but Eleanor Richmond was not Miss Gall. Inexorable indictment! He pressed his hands to his head. He wanted to stay. Good God, how much he wanted to stay in this funny little old house. He had grown into it. He had felt happy in it. It was like no other house that he had known. It was teaching him things.

  Eleanor Richmond! Yes, he realized now—But just what was it—? Julia Marwood over again? And suddenly he pushed his chair back and got up, and wandered about the room with a queer smile on his face. His hands sank into his trouser pockets. Julia and Eleanor? But the difference? New wine and old; youth, crude and greedy, woman in the ripeness of her wisdom. Raw April, wide-eyed June.

  He trailed round and round the little room, moving slowly and silently as though the physical part of him walked in its sleep. But Julia would never have been Eleanor, and Eleanor was not Julia. Dark women, both of them, but how different in their darkness. What a mystery? And why was it that he knew and felt so sure, and realized that the real tragedy of life might be upon him? To fail, to lose, to disappear. To become—just rubbish. And he was afraid, most terribly afraid, dry throated and chilly with fear, while something in him clenched itself. He sat down again in his chair.

  2

  But this book? He had drawn out a scheme for the first ten chapters, but of what use would a book be in the crisis that was upon him? It would take him months to complete this novel, and even if the amazing thing should happen, and a publisher should accept it, he would have to wait many more months before he would receive a penny. A book would be too ponderous and slow a vehicle. He needed something lighter and more swift upon which to escape.

  Short stories? Or better still a long short story. As an obscure scribbler he might receive three or four guineas for a short story, but for a tale of some twenty thousand words they might pay him twenty or thirty guineas. Twenty pounds! He could live for two or three months on twenty pounds. Twenty currency notes, added to the sum he had left, would carry him on till Christmas.

  Well, he would write a long short story, something dramatic and human, and he gathered up the sheets upon which he had begun to map out the framework of his novel, and put them away. He lit a pipe, and got out his notebook in which he had jotted down possible themes for short stories. He read them through, but not one of them piqued him. No spark crackled in the dark void of his consciousness.

  He sat and stared out of the window. He fidgeted. He found himself watching sparrows, or people passing in the Row, and he got up and pulled down the blind. But his head was as empty as the house, and almost he could hear the heart beats clicking in it as he could hear the clock ticking in Eleanor Richmond’s kitchen. Confound that clock! But no, it was her clock, and he sat on and on, and his imagination was like a groping hand feeling for something in the darkness, yet when no live inspiration came to him he grew restless. This restlessness expressed itself physically. His chin tickled; the chair assumed an unsympathetic hardness; his right shoe felt too tightly laced. The white sheet of paper tantalized him. He began to be afraid of the emptiness and the silence of his self.

  This would not do. Sitting and sitting in a room with the blind down! His restlessness took control of the situation. It suggested that if life would not come to him in this empty room, it was because he should be setting out in search of life. And the spark was kindled. He rose and pulled up the blind, and wandering into the passage, looked at the half-closed door of the sitting-room kitchen. Something seemed to beckon him in. He entered, and upon the table he saw a white cloth covering some objects. He raised the cloth and found that Mrs. Richmond had left out half a loaf of bread, cheese and butter, and the heart of a fresh lettuce. His lunch.

  Why should she have troubled?

  He felt touched, and more than touched. A deep and devout tenderness began to glow in him like a sunrise, and in feeling this emotion the void in him was filled. The over-tense strings were slackened. He went and took down the Bible from the bookshelf and opened it at the fly-leaf and read the two names. Eleanor Mayhill. Eleanor Richmond. He found himself wondering whether she ever read this ancient book. But did it matter? Some women were of the age of Rachel and of Ruth, red earth, inevitable.

  He put the book back and stood looking at the various objects that represented her, and then an impulse moved him to go quietly up the stairs and to open the door of her bedroom. He did not enter it; he stood on the threshold and gazed. It seemed to him that he breathed in the human reality and the mystery of her. This room was so clean, so simple. The white quilt covering the bed and drawn up over the pillow had been washed before she went away.

  He stood with his hands together. Almost he seemed to be praying to the soul of woman, invoking the spirit of the place. His eyes grew tranquil. It was as though a hand had been passed over his face and had smoothed out the troubled lines. He felt that something had been renewed in him.

  Courage.

  Silently and deliberately he closed the door of her room and redescending the stairs, took his hat from a peg and went out.

  3

  He had a most strange feeling that something was going to happen. But what could happen? He turned down River Street and into the Essex Road. He walked along the Essex Road in the direction of Upper Street. The Essex Road was just the Essex Road on a hottish day early in August, mildly perspiring and full of multitudinous and obscure activities. Butter would be feeling the heat, and flies invading the butchers’ shops, and fish smelling a little more fishy. Could salvation come to him by way of the Essex Road?

  He walked as far as Islington Green, and here in the V-shaped space were seats under the shade of trees. The seats were somewhat full, and mostly their occupants were shabby old men, but Scarsdale found a place between a man in a smeary frock-coat and an old lady whose black bonnet looked too small for her large grey head. They edged up and made room for him. They sat. There was silence. The whole seat sat and stared; it supported August apathy and so many pairs of vacant eyes. Occasionally the man in the frock-coat sat up and spat. The elderly woman in the bonnet grew oppressed. She heaved; she glanced at her neighbours; she sighed. And suddenly she addressed herself to Scarsdale, and her remark sounded preposterous and irrelevant.

  “It ain’t exactly the weather for sheep’s head, but I’ve got the money on me.”

  Scarsdale gave her a dubious look. The intimacy of the remark was rather baffling.

&
nbsp; He said, “Sheep’s head. O, yes, I don’t think I have ever eaten sheep’s head.”

  Her vacant eyes widened. What innocence!

  “Not,—really? Now isn’t that coorious! Whenever I feel down I says, ‘Em’ly, you go and buy a sheep’s head.’ There ain’t nothing to touch a sheep’s head—to my way of thinkin’.”

  Scarsdale nodded politely. Indeed—a remarkable confession. He had not explored the virtues of the head of a sheep.

  “This hot weather—”

  The man on his right spat viciously.

  “Only thing that got’s a drink, sir, is your shirt. I haven’t got the price of a wet on me.”

  He looked at Scarsdale out of leering, sodden eyes, but Scarsdale appeared to be interested in watching a passing bus.

  Slowly the seat emptied itself. The bonnet went in quest of its sheep’s head. The frock-coat perfected a final expectoration and shambled off into a dry world, and Scarsdale was left alone. He sat; he stretched his long legs; he was wondering whether there was a tale to be got out of the bonnet or the frock-coat. The material was not promising.

  He was still groping for a theme when someone else joined him on the seat, a young woman in black. He observed her all the more carefully, because she took not the slightest notice of him; he did not appear to exist. She too sat and stared; she had an ivory skin, rust-coloured hair, and eyes that were so darkly brown that the iris seemed to merge into the jet of the pupil. She looked delicate; she had an air of not belonging to that seat; even her slim legs had a pretty fragility. Yes, she was bothered about something. She had a ring on one finger, and she kept turning the ring round and round with the finger and thumb of the other hand. Scarsdale might have been no more than a sack of shavings. The little pale curve of her chin jutted out.

  He saw her remove the ring. She wrapped it up in a handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief away in her bag. And suddenly she seemed to become conscious of being watched. Her very round dark eyes darted a nervous and protesting glance at him. She got up, and walked quickly away with a kind of fluster of slim black legs.

  Scarsdale followed her, but at a sympathetic distance. He followed her quite a long way; he saw her pause, hesitate, and disappear into a shop. Later he realized that she had vanished into a pawnbroker’s.

  Some sentimental occasion! Whether she had entered that shop to sell or pawn the ring, or what the motive was behind the act were things he could not know. What mattered was that he had observed a human incident and had been made to wonder about it, and in wondering his craft had become alive. Presumably she needed money; she might need it for a man or for a child or for herself. It was a piece of life and in it he realized that he had the elements of a story.

  4

  That fortnight in August passed very slowly, and Scarsdale’s work unfolded itself with an equal deliberation. Reality, the life of a great city, challenged him to set it down on paper. He wanted to describe things as he saw them. He was less easily satisfied than of old; the journalist’s facility had become an abomination. He wrote a paragraph where he would have trilled out three pages. He sat bolted to his chair. He strove for words, words that should fit themselves like a live skin to the warm flesh of his human interpreting. His urge was to be vivid, simple, inevitable, and he found that simplicity was the last and the most terrible of virtues. It was so easy to be flowing and facile and rhetorical, and to skip to the right and to the left, and to shrink those glowing embers. Simplicity was both ice and fire, and as a journalist he had dealt in wood pulp.

  The easy phrase would not carry. For, somehow, when he sat at his table, he seemed to be possessed by another spirit, the inexorable shadow of some other self. There were times when he felt Eleanor Richmond moving in the house, and he would become conscious of what he described as “her rightness of rhythm”. Often he had sat and watched her performing the simplest of acts, filling a teapot, or cutting bread, or moving a chair, and always it had seemed to him that her movements had a beautiful and deliberate precision. When her hand moved to touch or to grasp it had the lightness of a bird coming to rest upon a bough. It seemed to him that one ought to be able to write as Eleanor Richmond moved. He wanted to teach himself to write in that way, so that the word-picture should have the inevitableness and simplicity of some perfectly co-ordinated movement.

  Also, these fourteen days were lonely days. He seemed to have lost the self-sufficiency of the bachelor. He was his own housemaid and cook, and as a maker of beds, he improved by reason of necessity; he tried his hand at frying bacon and at toasting Welsh Rarebit, and becoming more ambitious he attempted scrambled eggs. They were rather too scrambled. And he found that it did not do to put the hot frying-pan down on the kitchen table; that black mark took a lot of erasing. As for the washing of greasy plates, and knowing nothing of the virtues of soda, before putting the plate in the wash basin, he attempted to expedite and simplify the process by removing the grease with pieces of old newspaper. Those fourteen days helped to educate him. He discovered a new respect for the woman who dealt with the debris and the disorder of domesticity.

  But he had an ideal. Eleanor’s house should not suffer by his presence and her absence. He used the carpet-sweeper, he learnt quite a number of things about carpet-sweepers, and how the brushes collected an incredible mess of hair and flocculent filth. With commendable conscientiousness he dusted the sitting-room, and on the morning of Mrs. Richmond’s return he performed a wonderful act.

  He woke early that morning. He had meant to wake early, and when he saw that the yellow blind was bright with diffused sunlight, he was conscious of excitement. She was coming back. And he had written more than half of his long short story, and he was proposing to wash and whiten the front steps.

  He had seen her do it. He put on an old pair of trousers, and drew his bucket of water and collected a swab and a slab of bath-brick. The hour was six o’clock, and he had every right to assume that he would be able to deal with those steps before Astey’s Row grew wakeful. He opened the front door, and got to work, beginning at the top step and working downwards. He was ambitious for the whiteness of that flight of steps. He became absorbed in the business.

  Two men going upon the day’s affairs caught him upon his knees, sleeves rolled up, and minus one button. They were disrespectfully tickled by the sight. One of them mocked him.

  “What-o, mate! Ol’ woman gone on strike?”

  They went off laughing loudly, but Scarsdale completed the cleansing of his Scala Santa.

  5

  Mrs. Richmond had written him a letter, and in it she had said that she hoped to be home about four o’clock. She had asked him to order in some things for her, bread, milk, a dozen fresh eggs, a couple of pounds of bacon, half a pound of butter, cheese, two mutton chops. He had done this for her; in fact, he had gone out with the marketing bag, and shopped in the Essex Road, and to colour the adventure he had bought two bunches of purple and rose asters and had arranged them in a vase on the kitchen table.

  At half-past three he placed himself at the window of the front sitting-room. He had the kettle simmering and the tea-things laid out. He had put on his best suit. He kept looking at his watch, and his restlessness was such that he could neither sit nor stand for thirty consecutive seconds. And strangely enough he was feeling a little afraid of her home-coming, even while he longed for it. Would she be the same? Might not a fortnight in Dorsetshire have produced some incredible change in her? He was most absurdly nervous, hesitant upon a thread of suspense.

  Supposing some other fellow in Dorsetshire had realized the uniqueness of Eleanor Richmond? He went hot and cold.

  And then he saw her. Reality arrived miraculously at the green gate. She had her suitcase in one hand, a great posy of flowers in the other. He stood for two vivid and momentous seconds absorbing the tremendous reality of her. Then he rushed for the front door and opened it, and stood at the top of the steps, waiting.

  Never had he seen her look so well, so summerlike, wit
h a tinge of brown in her white skin. She came up the path, she smiled; her dark eyes held his. And he stood and absorbed the completeness and the comeliness of her. No, she had not changed.

  He held out a hand for her suitcase.

  “I’m so glad you’re back, Eleanor.”

  “It’s good to be back.”

  She gave him a deep, appraising glance. His gladness could not be concealed.

  “Been feeling lonely?”

  “It wasn’t the same here. Let me take the suitcase.”

  She allowed him to take it from her.

  “You’ve had someone in to whiten the steps.”

  “I did it this morning. I didn’t want you to come back and find them—”

  She held up the posy of flowers, sweet peas and phlox, and a few roses.

  “Smell. Yes, it’s good to be back.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  For two months Scarsdale worked at his short story. It had for its central figure the girl who had come to sit beside him on the seat on Islington Green. The theme was as old as commerce, but into it Scarsdale contrived to breathe a newness, the tang of personality, the frayed realism of the Essex Road. He was beginning to see life, to penetrate it, to be part of it, and what was more his understanding of it was beginning to express itself on paper. He laboured at that tale. He rewrote it no fewer than four times, and then continued to polish his paragraphs. He wanted it to have balance and brilliancy, a vivid compactness, an inevitable simplicity.

  It had some of these qualities. Even its crudities were alive. It was human, green grass, red meat, blue and white sky. It surprised him, for there was that in him which knew that the work was good. He could not say how he knew this, but know it he did. Almost, it was not he, Spenser Scarsdale, who had set these words on paper, but some other intelligence, a shadowy communicator speaking by and through him. Life was that communicator.