He found himself scribbling on the envelope.
“In vino veritas.”
Yes, but both his wine and his red ink were mystical fluids. He was going to dip his pen in life and extract reality.
He filled a pipe and lit it, and pulling at it softly, re-read the story. He had discussed the story with Eleanor. He had asked her to criticize it, and to tell him just how and where the climax was at fault.—She had gone on with her sewing. “I don’t think the girl would have done that.” He had asked her to tell him just what the girl in the tale would have done, and when she had given her version, a voice in him had cried, “Of course.” He had seen it instantly, the rightness and the inevitableness of the ending. But why had he not seen it before?
Yet did that matter? He saw it now. The ending capped the tale as convincingly as Eleanor’s red hat crowned her head. He very much admired that red hat of hers, for the colour of it contrasted with the whiteness of her skin, even as this red ink stood out upon the paper, but more crudely so. Quite an original idea this producing a manuscript in red. Or was it just a whim, a provocation, a strange stimulus, like the smell of De Quincey’s apples?
He wrote, but at the end of the first day he tore up the two and a half pages, for the prose had a jerkiness and a rigidity, and it did not satisfy him. He went out and walked. He was vaguely dissatisfied, he had felt balked; he had encountered a sense of resistance. His imagination was stiff in the knees. Yet he was to learn that this very sense of resistance was to be a kind of mystic wall within himself over which he would have to climb into that other world of seeing and understanding. It was to save him from a dreadful facility, from collecting the obvious and the easy as the press-gang collected men.
While warming his hands in front of the fire it occurred to him to reflect upon their uselessness. They did so little beyond manipulating a razor and fastening buttons and raising food and drink to his mouth, and setting words on paper. Somewhere he remembered coming across the phrase “Frustrated Hands”. It recurred to him, and with a suggestive significance. Was it right and essential that a man should use his hands upon the stone and timber of life, and that mere words were empty symbols lacking reality? He stood up and looked round the room; he realized that the supper-things were still on the table and waiting to be washed up and put away. Eleanor was upstairs, turning down the beds.
He was moved to action. He found a tray and collected the cups and plates, the spoons and forks and knives, and carried them into the scullery. He made his first attempt at washing up.
She came downstairs and discovered him at the sink. He looked at her whimsically.
“Thought I would have a shot at this, Eleanor. Seems to me, a man’s hands ought to be of some use, not mere scribbling machines.”
She stood and watched him for a moment. He was very deliberate and careful. He used the glass-cloth almost as though he were applying a silk handkerchief to a piece of valuable glass.
“Easier to break things than one would have thought. I nearly dropped a plate.”
She suffered him to complete the ritual.
5
In much the same delicate and deliberate way he completed his story. It was a pattern in red ink upon white paper, and when he contemplated it he realized that the creation possessed a quality that all previous work of his had lacked. It was like a circle; it had no jagged points and crumpled edges. A sense of the inevitableness of certain human happenings permeated it like blood.
He had the tale retyped, and to pay for the typing he sold half a dozen books to a dealer in the Charing Cross Road. He delivered the typescript in person at the offices of the Golden Magazine. His letter to Arthur Raymond bore the date of the new year, January 1, 1924. He walked all the way back to Astey’s Row, and saw a red sun set and impress strange patterns of light upon that stretch of water beyond the Canonbury Road. He stood for half a minute under the great plane tree, and wondered at life.
Arthur Raymond’s letter came to him three days later. It was quietly enthusiastic. He accepted the tale; he offered Scarsdale thirty guineas for it; he suggested that Scarsdale should submit other stories.
And Scarsdale sat at his window, and waited for Eleanor to return from Highbury Terrace. He was happy. Never before had he known such happiness as this, thankfulness, joy, tenderness, a sense of escape from some deep pit. Life was renewed in him.
She came to the gate as the dusk was falling. He stood up; he went out into the passage. The door opened.
“Eleanor, my tale’s been taken.”
She closed the door gently, while feeling that some other door had opened. His voice had a resonance, a happy pride, but it spoke to her in other ways.
“Spen,—I’m so glad, so very glad.”
It was dark in the passage, and suddenly she found that he had got hold of her hands; he was kissing them, the hands of a woman who worked.
“O my dear, it’s you who helped me to do it.”
One of her hands freed itself and rested on his head.
“We’ve done it together, Spen. I’m so glad.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Scarsdale’s became a familiar figure in Astey’s Row and not only in Astey’s Row, but also in the Essex Road, though in Upper Street it was more anonymous. That winter he wore a loose, coffee-coloured overcoat and a faded blue scarf, and under the brim of a rather floppy black felt hat he showed to the world a kind of pensive pallor, and a brightness of the eyes. His figure had a singularity; it was intensively individual; it differed. It moved with a length and a loose leisureliness along pavements, pleasantly shabby, yet somehow suggesting colour and curiosity. Most obviously it did not belong to a shop or an office. It caught the conventional glance and puzzled it.
Moreover, Scarsdale’s figure was always diverging. He would stop to stare. He indulged in what he had come to call “Intelligent gaping”. He watched every sort of obscure activity, the trivial incidents of the streets, a hawker with a barrow, women gossiping, young men and girls, a carter unloading a van, people getting on and off buses, people in funny shabby motor-cars, children, shop windows, a man polishing the windows of a pub. He was as inquisitive and as interested as an urchin, because in writing about life he had discovered life and all its amazing and queer suggestiveness. The streets lived. If some old fellow picked cigarette-ends out of the gutter, Scarsdale picked them up with him in the spirit.
He wrote, he walked, he sat on seats. He became a specialist upon seats and their occupants. He found them more catholic and useful than the reading-room at the British Museum, for on the seats in Highbury Fields he discovered people who used or had used the reading-room of the Bulk in Bloomsbury. He had ceased to be solitary sitter upon seats. Almost, he sat on them with a purpose, though his pragmatism was not self-conscious and self-confessed, for he found those seats significant.
He did not take down books from a shelf, he took down people. He discovered the cameraderie, the clubbishness of this sitting world, its astonishing variousness, its unexpected qualities. Mostly the sitters were elderly men; most of them were shabby; some were hairy and belonged to the order of the rag-bag. They did not sit upon the tails of a nice and conventional dignity. They sat and spat and read and talked and smoked, and ate things out of bags and screws of newspaper. They discoursed upon the most unexpected matters, while looking like the world’s discarded scarecrows. A superficial shabbiness might conceal strange learning. Scarsdale met among them an Oxford don who would roll off Greek verse with a sonorous, dreamy persistence. An old fellow with no collar lectured him on bimetallism. There was a strange, starved creature with his hair in a fringe who was obsessed by Debussy.
In Highbury Fields on a seat in the main walk, and not far from the bathing pool, Scarsdale discovered “Smith”. He christened the man Smith, for he never heard the other fellow’s name. Smith was a tall, thin, gentlemanly person with bright eyes and a little hungry smile, who came and sat on a seat and ate his luncheon out of a paper bag. They met daily
; they chatted. Smith’s whimsical wisdom was a plant that had had to live on air, and his black coat and trousers suggested that they were carefully brushed and put away directly the work of the day was done.
Scarsdale never discovered where Smith lived. Most of the sitters upon seats were reticent on this particular subject, but this obscure gentleman did impart to Scarsdale some of his secrets, and in Scarsdale’s consciousness there grew a picture of this quiet, sensitive, courageous creature. Smith had been this and that. He had worked as a barman, a bookie’s tout, a taxi-driver, a dishwasher in a restaurant. He had crowded all these activities into the years since the war. He had been submerged, and he had come up spluttering and fighting. He had his inspiration.
“You can’t chuck your hand in, you know, when you have got kids.”
The man’s face suggested effort, strain, and yet his eyes had a kind of inward happiness. He made Scarsdale think of a fellow climbing endless stairs with a box on his shoulder, doing things beyond his strength, and yet finding the doing of them good. At the time when Scarsdale met him, Smith had contrived to possess himself of a job with possibilities. He was managing the local branch of a big concern that sold furniture and household gear on the instalment system. He kept a little pocket-book in which—among other things—he recorded the ebb and flow of the weekly takings.
He would bring it out and study it as though it was the most eloquent book in the world.
“Twenty-three pounds up on last week.”
Scarsdale could reciprocate. He too made confessions.
“That’s good. I had another tale accepted yesterday. Does your job ever make you think of climbing stairs?”
Smith’s thin face had a moment of fierceness.
“By God, doesn’t it? With something clawing at your heels, and trying to pull you down again. I seem to have been climbing stairs for years.”
Scarsdale smiled.
“If we ever get to the top—I wonder what it will feel like?”
“To be able to sit still, my dear chap, and get a breather!”
Scarsdale liked the man. He admired the courage behind that little, thin, starved smile, the restraint of those long-fingered hands picking frugality out of a bag. Smith’s credo might be a very simple one, and Smith himself no intellectualist, but the spirit of the man mattered. His history was an epic of the shabby streets and of the crowds’ scuffle. And the inspiration came to Scarsdale. Why not write a book on Smith, and on the struggles and sorrows of Smith? Here was reality sitting on a seat, and waiting to be rendered into prose.
Scarsdale fell to the theme, or rather—he rose to it. He knew that he had gripped life, and that to write the story of John Smith,—gentleman—would be a fascinating business. The urge in him was sudden and strong and inevitable. He would produce what the world calls a human document. He was inspired; he wanted to hurry home and put Smith on paper; he felt that he would grow to love the Smith of his own creating. He did not think either of the public or the critics; he thought only of Smith. The days were far ahead when Mr. Paul Verulam,—stuffed with jealousy to the level of his yellow teeth,—would declare in print that “The stuff was not literature”, and that both Scarsdale and his Mr. Smith were sodden sentimentalists.
This happened in the spring of the year, and Scarsdale hastened back to Astey’s Row, and knew that his urge was to tell Eleanor about it. Almost he wanted to tell the great plane tree about Smith, and to talk Smith to Thomas the cat. It was a Friday and he found woman preparing for the great domestic ceremony of the year. To-morrow she would spring-clean.
Whatever Eleanor chose to do was right, and Scarsdale, remembering the exertions of a year ago, assumed that he was to be her partner.
“I’ll help. Suppose we get up early.”
But with a kind of grave finality she informed him that his co-operation would not be needed. She poured out his tea.
“I’m having a woman in.”
“But can’t I—?”
“No. You had better go out for the day.”
She was mysterious; pragmatical, but mysterious, and for the moment he put Smith aside and gave his attention to her order. Why wouldn’t she let him help? And he was to go out for the day, and escape the dust and the disorder. But he had a feeling that there were other principles involved, and that she had some reasons of her own, and that he ought to be able to react to them. Now, what exactly did she mean? Did she consider that the beating of carpets was not his job, that it was not dignified, or did she think that he was not equal to it? Of course, the situation was intimate and subtle, but his essential shyness still stood outside a kind of sacred circle. She was a superlative creature, she was woman, she was the woman; her implications were inevitable, but Scarsdale himself had not yet come to the point of regarding himself as inevitable. He remained the diffident creature, the boy in his late forties. He had written and placed four stories in the last three months, and his income promised to be nearly two hundred pounds a year. He carried inside him a kind of blind and devoted humility. Eleanor was a miraculous person. Here was the veritable Madonna of the Peach Blossom, and he sat and gazed. He was most absurdly innocent. Somehow he did not realize that Astey’s Row was not peach blossom.
But her decree was final. He accepted it, though its significance eluded him. He was just a little bothered and puzzled. He had come by the knowledge that hands are to be used, and that frustrated hands make for a feeling of futility. In his odd way he had taught himself to be a domestic creature, and Mrs. Richmond allowed him his usefulness; she allowed him to make his own bed and clean his own shoes, and to help her with the washing up.
But why would she not allow him to move furniture and to take up carpets, and to beat them in the front garden?
He filled his pipe. He said, “All right. I’ll go out for the day.”
She put coal on the fire, and he watched her. Was there any other person in the world who could put coal on the fire as she did? And suddenly he began to tell her about Smith.
“I think I’ve got an idea, rather a human idea, for a book—I mean. It’s about a man I met in Highbury Fields.”
She sat down and listened to his exposition of Smith. She listened with interest. She watched his face.
“Do you see the idea, Eleanor? Just the life of plain Smith, quite simple and human and real.”
Her hands smoothed her skirt.
“Well,—that’s worth writing about, Spen. About real people. You do it. More your job than spring-cleaning.”
He was both pleased and perplexed.
“But spring-cleaning’s just as real, Eleanor.”
“O, yes, for me. But you might make a great story of that. You can do it.”
He wanted to get up and kiss her, but he had not yet arrived at the realization of the fundamental reality that his miraculous woman wanted to be kissed.
2
They breakfasted early, and to his surprise and puzzlement Scarsdale found that his breakfast had been laid in the sitting-room, and that he was to take it alone. Already, a lady in a cloth cap was busy rolling up the rugs and linoleum in the kitchen. Scarsdale heard her in action, and emitting a nasal bleating. She asked questions.
“The gen’leman’s goin’ art?”
Mrs. Richmond was monosyllabic.
“Yes.”
“ ’E don’t look very strong. What’s ’e do fer a livin’?”
“Mr. Scarsdale’s an author.”
“Aufor! Writes for th’ papers?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ’e don’t seem t’grow fat on it.”
There was the sound of a door being closed, and the lady’s twanging voice was muffled, but apparently it could not be suppressed even by Mrs. Richmond’s brevity. Scarsdale finished his breakfast. He felt rather superfluous, and in a mood to escape from that intrusive voice. It did not belong, and he had resented its remark upon his lack of adiposity either in body or in possessions. He lit his pipe, and observed that the sun was shining, and s
uddenly his mood was for the open air and for some spaciousness that eschewed houses. Smith and he were parted for the day so far as paper was concerned. He fetched his black felt hat and his coffee-coloured overcoat, and went out. A voice prompted him, suggesting that a tram would carry him within a hundred yards of Waterloo station, and that from Waterloo station trains ran. He took his tram. He travelled down to Hampton Court and spent the day there, a meditative and musing day, for his problem was not Smith. It had a domestic flavour. What was the mysterious inwardness that he had divined in Eleanor, this mood of non-consent, her refusal to allow him to whack carpets?
Snobbery? No, there was no snobbery in Eleanor Richmond, and as he strolled in the grassy spaces between the tilting-yard and the tennis-court, where the trees were powdered with green and the grass was full of daffodils, he saw Eleanor apart from Astey’s Row. She belonged to the country, to hills and valleys and the open sky. She had dignity, that strange, natural dignity that is like the beautiful poise of a stag or the composure of a cat. Also, her dignity was a quality of the soul; it enabled her to make the most commonplace acts appear gracious and beautiful.
And being what she was, so unlike one of the crowd figures, those things of gristle and of sinew with their unfinished faces and their dead eyes, she yet could move among the crowd with a silent and singular rightness. She was straight where the woman in the cap was crooked, woman among the apes. Yes, apes, though good apes. And suddenly he seemed to discover the ape in his secret self, the chattering, busy, picking creature. Yes, he could imagine an ape squatting and whacking a carpet. There might be that in her which willed him to be otherwise.
Old Wine and New Page 33