She wanted the unusualness explained to her.
“Just how?”
“Perhaps because I liked him. Not a pound of flesh man, and at the same time not soft soap. If they take one tale—”
“They’ll take others.”
“Well, I hope so.”
She mused. To the multitude, money is the dire reality, and he had never once spoken to her about money, his need of it, his resources, and for that very reason she suspected that his resources were growing like his clothes, rather threadbare. She was conscious of compassion, nor was it a mere negative kindness; it had hands and a heart, and a part of herself was hurt by it. Because he could be hurt so easily, and something in her winced, and was ready to run out as to a child, though he was so much more than a child. He was man, rather forlorn and helpless, both futile and fine. He was the sort of lovable fool who would rather sell his shirt than owe the world anything.
But she was a quietist, deep water, no chattering brook.
She said, “I’d go on working just the same. You’ll write even better stories than that.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Scarsdale waited a month, and though his funds were running low, hope remained with him. He knew that editors can be very deliberate, and that Raymond was a busy man, and that his silence might be significant. The tale had not been returned, and he could infer that either Raymond had put it aside for acceptance or for further consideration.
He watched the post, and so did Eleanor Richmond. These editors were dilatory creatures. She wished that Mr. Arthur Raymond could see Scarsdale’s anxious eyes.
On the first of November in the grey on the morning the tale returned. The long white envelope slid through the letter-box and fell with a kind of dismal flop upon the hall floor. Mrs. Richmond picked it up, and carrying it into the sitting-room, stood by the window to examine the envelope. She saw Golden Magazine printed in the left-hand top corner. There could be no doubt about it. The tale had been returned.
She felt shocked. He would be so terribly disappointed and depressed, and her impulse was to ward the blow off, to put herself between him and this unhappiness. But what could she do? She had to place the thing on the table beside his breakfast tray, and leave him to find it there.
She heard him come down the stairs. It was time for her to leave for her day’s work at Highbury Terrace, but on this November morning Astey’s Row held her, and Highbury Terrace could wait. She sat down on a chair in front of the kitchen fire. The news might be better than she feared.
Scarsdale had seen that long white envelope, and suddenly all desire to eat had gone from him. He had a sinking feeling. He slit open the envelope, and drew out the typescript of the tale; it had a letter attached to it, a personal letter from Arthur Raymond. He read it.
“Dear Mr. Scarsdale,
“I have read your tale with a good deal of interest, and I have had it reported on by two members of my staff. May I be frank? There is some arrestive and vivid work in the story, but in our opinion the latter half falls away. It does not convince. I am not quarrelling with the theme, though it is one that requires a delicate touch.
“Perhaps you might be willing to rewrite the second half of the story, and to submit it to me again.
“Yours truly,
“Arthur Raymond.”
Scarsdale felt sick. He poured himself out a cup of tea and gulped it. He was not angry; he had ceased long ago to be angry over the return of a manuscript. The reaction was so complete that he read into Raymond’s letter that which was not there. It was a rejection, though kindly conceived. And they had kept him waiting more than a month.
He gulped more tea. He looked at the rashers of fried bacon, and his stomach squirmed. It was a sick void overweighted with reality. In a week or two he would have no money to pay for rashers of bacon. Rewrite that tale? Good God, he felt incapable of writing another word. He was a burst bag, utterly defeated, hopeless.
He tore Raymond’s letter across, and going to the table by the window, dropped the pieces into the waste-paper basket. He sat down at his table, and stared blankly at the red buildings opposite. Everything else looked grey. He felt cold, most horribly cold. A pipe would have made him sick.
Rewrite half that tale. He could not do it. It would take him a fortnight, and then there would be more waiting. And again the tale might come back to him. He crumpled. He sat there and confronted reality, or what he took to be reality. He was done for; he was ashamed. In a week or two he would have no money.
He might pawn a few things, or sell his books.
O, yes, stave off the inevitable, indulge in a last kick or two like a rabbit in a snare. Shameful, surreptitious wrigglings.
But she would know.
And suddenly he had a horror of her knowing, of realizing him as a futile, shabby creature, one of the absurd failures, the sort of fellow who opened cab-doors and carried sandwich-boards. Good lord, not that! He had the raw edge of his self-regard. He was not going to let her know. He was not going to explain or to excuse.
He got up suddenly. He was strangely jerky and inco-ordinate in his movements. He found himself in the passage taking down his hat and coat; he went out; he had meant to close the door quietly, but somehow he banged it. There was silence.
She invaded that silence; she explored it. She found his cup half full and the bacon untouched, and the typescript of his story lying on the table in the window. She glanced at the waste-paper basket, saw the white halves of the letter, and extracted them.
She read Raymond’s letter.
Her face had a sudden sorrowfulness. She mused.
2
Highbury Terrace expected her, and having cleared away Scarsdale’s unfinished breakfast, she went to her day’s work. She was troubled, and beyond margins that were calculable and easy. Her quietude had been invaded, and yet she was not resenting the invasion. The thing had happened. She found that she was not just sorry for Scarsdale, nor was her pity half-patronage; on the contrary she felt herself involved with him in this obscure and petty disaster. Women may have qualms over an old cab-horse going to the slaughter yard, and yet allow that such things have to be, but those little details, the half-emptied cup and the untouched bacon, had moved her in other ways.
She worked. That morning she polished the walnut and mahogany furniture in the Highbury Terrace dining-room, and it was very beautiful furniture, a Queen Anne bureau and wig-table, a Sheraton sideboard and chairs, knife boxes, a wine cooler, a late Georgian table. Craftsmen had had their joy in the making of this furniture, and to her there was a joy in adding to its lustre. She was made that way. Things came to her when she was at work, things about Scarsdale, his feelings and hers, the sudden impulse that had made him leave his breakfast, and hurry out.
He was hard up. She was sure now that he was desperately hard up, his poor resources bitten to the quick. He was the kind of man who would—But her intuition paused there. She knelt with her polishing cloth pressed against one of the drawers of the sideboard. She looked shocked, intense. Yes, the kind of man who would do something desperate.
At a quarter to one she broke her usual routine. She went back to Astey’s Row. She had a feeling that she would find the house empty, and she did so. The typescript of his tale lay where he had left it. He had not been back.
Thinking that Scarsdale might return at his luncheon-hour, she made herself some tea, and ate bread and cheese, but he did not return, and at two o’clock she walked back to her work, and all that afternoon her hands felt heavy.
The dusk was settling when she came again to Astey’s Row. There had been a frost, and the great plane was dropping its leaves; they lay palely patterned on the pavement, and as she entered the Row a falling leaf almost touched her face. Lights were being lit, but to Eleanor Richmond all those other lights were mere anonymous and strange faces. A child’s memory had emerged and associated itself with the present, a picture of Christ crowned with thorns, a picture that had hung in a rather dark corner of a Dorse
tshire parlour. The eternal outcast, the rejected. This emotional linking up of Scarsdale and the Christ might seem fantastic and feminine and of no more significance than the falling of a leaf, but she was in a mood for such mysticism. She was more than London and the Essex Road, and the windows of model dwellings. If the blackbird’s song is a mere mechanism, so was her mood. A leaf was more than a leaf.
She came to her gate and paused. The windows did not welcome her; they were dark, but she could say to herself “He may be in the kitchen.” She let herself in, and the darkness and the silence met her, and suddenly she was aware of a sinuous soft shape rubbing against her legs. It was the cat.
She spoke to the cat.
“Poor Tom all alone.”
She made her way into the kitchen and lit the gas. She had things to do, but before she took off her hat she explored the darkness of the sitting-room. The light of a match showed her the pale shape of Scarsdale’s tale still lying there on the table.
She had certain things to do. She lowered blinds and drew curtains, and relit the kitchen fire, and prepared tea. She set cups and plates for two, and sat by the fire for an hour waiting for Scarsdale to return. She had begun to wonder whether he would return. She began to envisage possible happenings, the tragedies of impulse, the wounded perversities of a man badly hit. Despair! But what was despair? After all, that letter of Raymond’s held out hopes; she had not read it as Scarsdale had read it. He had rushed off like a passionate and bitterly disappointed child, but there would be more in his distress than in the anguish of a child. He was at the end of things. It was as though he had tossed the last coin, and the call had been against him.
She sat quietly waiting with the cat on her lap. The clock ticked. The silence of the little house should have been reassuring, a calm hand laid upon her shoulder. “Don’t be so silly. He’s just upset. He’s the sort of man to take things rather too seriously.” Yes, but that was her justification; her sensing of the situation; her appreciation of Scarsdale as a man who would take life like a sudden cup of poison. She sat and waited. The clock struck seven.
She put Thomas down on the hearthrug, and taking the kettle from the stove, filled up the teapot. She filled it for two, as though by filling it for Scarsdale as well as for herself she would be exerting some mysterious pull upon him. He might be quite near, loitering in the Row. So strong was her feeling that he was quite near to her that she went to the front door, and out through the little garden to the gate. The night was very still save for the sound of the traffic in the Canonbury Road.
She stood there like a country woman at a cottage gate far away in some valley. She did not see the lights across the way. She called as she might have called to a man loitering in a lane.
“Mr. Scarsdale, tea’s ready.”
No one answered her. She waited awhile, and then turned and went in, and her forebodings seemed to quicken in her as she closed the door. She had her meal, cleared it away, washed up, and sat down with her sewing. She sat there sewing until midnight. He did not come back to her.
She put her work away and went out once more into the garden. She called to him, “Mr. Scarsdale”, and her voice had a kind of secrecy. It was for him alone. It was like the breathing of the wind in the branches of the plane tree.
She went in and closed the door and stood in the passage. He had some reason of his own for not returning to her. She groped for it; it seemed very near to her, part of her, something inside her that struggled to be expressed. And suddenly she felt that she understood. He had gone away because there was a bitterness in staying; because he was just what he was.
3
It might have been said of Scarsdale that for a period of forty-eight hours he was not quite sane, but since a man’s sanity is taken for granted provided his conduct does not offend against the social order, Scarsdale’s crisis passed unnoticed. He walked; he sat quietly on a seat in the Embankment Gardens, and he remained there for hours, a sack of self-abasement. His bony knees stuck out, but the rest of him had a crumpled flaccidity. Already he had the appearance of one of those derelict figures that attach themselves to seats in the public parks and gardens. His mood was one of morbid self-abasement, a variant of the shamefulness that overwhelms those who suffer from strange and unclean delusions. He was not quite a man; he was a sort of sexless, shabby failure; he had no power to possess or to plead. His one privilege was the right to disappear.
He had disappeared. He was not going back to Astey’s Row; he had no right there. He found that he had a horror of being despised by the woman who—to him—symbolized woman. He and his silly bunch of bananas! He sat there and supposed that he had always been a mild and preposterous fool, a slippered person, the sort of man whom no woman could stomach. He remembered a character in one of Thomas Hardy’s books referring with scorn to that sort of dusty, precise, unconvincing male.
Apathy! Yes, he was conscious of apathy, a kind of miserable torpor. What was going to happen? He did not know and he did not care. He made no claim upon life; he would not even claim the possessions left at Astey’s Row; Mrs. Richmond could sell such of them as she pleased. And some absurd quip of the mind introduced into the field of his consciousness the figure of his trouser-press. Yes, probably she would sell that trouser-press.
He sat. He did not want to eat anything; he did not want to move. Dejection glued him to the seat. He did not notice any of the other people who came and sat beside him. Life seemed very far away; he did not belong to it.
But even a melancholist cannot sit for ever. That most patient part of his body will complain, and Scarsdale’s glutei grumbled, for he was a bony creature. He got up to walk, and having put the mechanism of himself into motion, it continued to move, for the physical part of him was cold. It uttered mute reproaches against Scarsdale the man, and like a patient ass it ambled along, vaguely conscious of appetizing smells. It carried Scarsdale into Voysey Street, and in Voysey Street Scarsdale’s consciousness was brought by a peculiar coincidence into contact with the outer world. He found himself looking at the broad, black back of a man who was walking in front of him; he seemed to recognize it, and also the short, stocky neck and the grey Homburg hat. It struck him as strange that the back of a neck should be so familiar, and then the man turned to the right and entered the doorway of a shop, and Scarsdale saw him for a moment in profile. It was Mr. Bartlet of Canonbury Square.
A vague curiosity was aroused in Scarsdale. He paused by the window of the shop, and saw that it was a chemist’s, but not quite a chemist’s in the orthodox sense, for it catered for the new philosophy of adventure with economy. It sold rubber goods as well as patent medicines and soap and tooth-brushes. A label pasted on the window advised the passing male to take “Viroids”. Also, it offered to the interested and the discerning a little library, and when Scarsdale read the titles of those books he had a moment of whimsical bitterness. Obviously, he had missed his inspiration. “What a Wife Should Know.”—“Sex and Health.”—“Strange Nights in Paris.” It occurred to him to wonder whether Mr. Bartlet had entered the shop as a purchaser, and he waited, but Mr. Bartlet did not reappear, and when Scarsdale elected to stand close to the shop door and look through the plate-glass panel, he saw Mr. Bartlet hatless behind the counter. He had a proprietary air; he was wagging a finger at another man who assisted.
Scarsdale strolled on. His melancholy had taken to itself a little tinge of bitterness. This man Bartlet knew his public, and having set out to supply the new age with certain products of industry, as a merchant he had prospered. Yes, Mr. Bartlet himself suggested the smell and the resiliency of rubber; he was an elastic person; he could adapt; he was like a well-filled hot-water bottle. His neck was rubber. Hence prosperity and Paris, and a motor-car and week-ends at Brighton with a bright little lady who appreciated the physiological values of Mr. Bartlet’s shop.
Scarsdale walked, and he continued to walk until his protesting body persuaded his legs to carry him into an A.B.C. He sat and drank a cup
of tea and ate a scone and butter, and then—once more he walked. The dusk came down, and his body pleaded with him; it asserted that it was tired; it wanted to sit down or to lie down. It compelled Scarsdale to make the discovery that the streets of a great city were bitter because the man in the street was not permitted to sit. The very climate was unsympathetic toward the sitter; you could not squat on the kerb, for it was not done, and the traffic saw to it that etiquette was reverenced. Doorsteps were out of bounds. A penny ride in a bus lasted such a little time. Scarsdale tried the parapet in Trafalgar Square; but after five minutes its aggressive coldness satisfied him that he was no Australian soldier and that the month was November. He went on walking, and once again his body protested. It begged him to consider the realities; he could not walk all night; it objected to sitting on an Embankment seat, even if the police chose to be kindly blind. It said that it wanted to lie down; it wanted to be warm and to go to sleep.
Piccadilly Circus. Red, green, and yellow lights coming and going like smiles on professionally pleasant faces. Scarsdale stood in the recessed doorway of a boot and shoe shop, and felt bewildered. His legs ached; his eyes had begun to ache; the very Circus seemed to revolve, going round and round with its human figures and faces and its traffic. He wanted to lie down, to get away into some dark corner by himself. But how and where? The separatist in him remained prejudiced. If he had glimpses of Rowton House and Salvation Army Shelters he could not bring himself to accept some cubicle or a bed in a dormitory, the communal blanket and the tin basin. He had seen such places; as a journalist it had been a part of his business to explore such places, and he had written approvingly upon them, but now that the issue was personal, his secret soul refused to enter. At least, not yet, and between him and such last refuges lay the river.
He had thought of the river, or rather it had insinuated itself into his consciousness as something large and shadowy and flowing, a kind of soft grey bed into which you threw yourself and sank. It would be so easy provided that the whole of you would consent to sink and to forget, and not begin suddenly to struggle. He had sat and wondered about such an experience. There would be the wilful leap, the falling, the impact, water, wetness, a smothering. But what then? Supposing the body refused to submit, supposing it fought to live? Supposing the tired and consenting soul had to fight both body and river?
Old Wine and New Page 29