He went and looked at the Dutch garden. He insinuated himself into one of the arched gazebos and stared. He saw tulips, myosotis, aubretia, a beautiful nude figure against sombre yews. This exquisite thing was an artifice, man-conceived and man-made, and yet very beautiful in the wilfulness of its order. In the main, man made such a mess of his environment; he seemed to be so satisfied with a utilitarian squalor, and commercial hideousness. But Eleanor Richmond? He could imagine her making of life, the simple happenings of yesterday, to-day and to-morrow, a pattern like this garden. Yes, even in Astey’s Row.
He returned about supper-time to find the little house itself and in order. He had ridden on the top of a bus, and watched the lights blur a soft, blue gloom. He had seen a full moon rise over London. The lady in the cap had departed, and in the sitting-room he found his table and his papers nicely ready for to-morrow.
“Supper, Spen.”
He joined her in the kitchen.
“Everything over, Eleanor?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been amazingly quick.”
She placed a hot dish on the table.
“O, that woman was better than her voice. Where have you been?”
“Hampton Court. Lovely down there.”
He was about to tell her that she should have been with him, and then he understood that—in a sense—she had been with him.
“Daffodils out. Just a little green on the trees. Those places have their uses. Good for the crowd soul.”
She looked a little tired after that day of dust and disorder, and he noticed it. She had forgotten the bread, and she rose to get it, but he forestalled her.
“No, I’ll get it. You sit still. You’ve had a long day. I sometimes wish you wouldn’t work so hard.”
“Work doesn’t tire me, Spen.”
“But you are tired to-night.”
“That woman. The poor, silly soul of her. It’s people who tire one.”
He cut the bread, and for a moment he looked troubled. Was it possible that he tired her? Did she have to bear with a personality that was ineffectual and exhausting? He glanced at her as he held out the bread.
“Yes, people do. The people who won’t let you be your self. And the terrible thing is that a bore never knows—”
He paused, and she was quick to appreciate his hesitation.
“No, you don’t bore me, Spen.”
“Sure?”
“You let me be myself.”
He looked at his slice of bread as though it was too good to be broken.
“Well,—I should be a fool, shouldn’t I?—to interfere with a work of art. Obviously. I’m not quite such a long-legged fool. I’m growing up.”
He stole a glance at her.
“I’m going to start on Smith to-morrow. I have a feeling that Smith is going to be rather helpful. You know—it’s a funny thing, Eleanor—”
She waited.
“Writing about life seems somehow to teach one about oneself. Funny, isn’t it?”
“It might be quite natural. Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Yes, getting at yourself through other people. You know, I’ve got a lot of myself through you. It’s a fact.”
She buttered her bread, and her face had the stillness of inward consent.
“Perhaps it’s mutual.”
He raised his cup, drank, and put the cup down again. He wanted to say certain things to her, and he couldn’t.
3
But Smith was not inarticulate like Mrs. Richmond’s lodger in the presence of Mrs. Richmond, nor would Astey’s Row have suffered from Scarsdale’s inhibitions. It referred to Scarsdale as “the lodger”, and it supposed that Mrs. Richmond and her lodger cohabited. It inferred the obvious. As the lady of the cap put it, “Yus, there be two beds, but that don’t mean anythink. Besides, if she got married agen, suppose she’d lose ’er pension. Dry sort o’ stick too. Not the kind a ‘fellah, I’d chuck two bob a day for. But then, there’s no accountin’ fa’ tastes.” It is more than probable that Mrs. Richmond knew to the last adjective what Astey’s Row said about herself and Scarsdale. Not that it mattered, and yet there was a fastidiousness in her that misliked other people’s dust on her skirt, and resented pawings and intimacies.
Moreover, Scarsdale was absorbed in Smithiana. He breathed and ate and dreamed Smith, and it was admirable and right that it should be so, for she understood the significance of Smith. This strange, shy, hypersensitive lover of hers was wooing her through a book. It was to be his gesture, his justification, his marriage settlement. She was curiously wise as to what was at the back of his shy mind.
He wrote and wrote and wrote. He would come into the kitchen at night with a look of exultation.
“Another chapter, Eleanor. I don’t know what has happened to me. The stuff never came like this before.”
In a way his inspiration paid her homage, but her deep eyes saw not only the book but the man. Sometimes she would wonder at herself and at the way things happened, and at the incalculable why and wherefore, for even a year ago she was quite sure that she would have no more marriage. Marriage could be a messy state, and it involved you with that messy creature—man. It was too dominant and absorbing a business in which an overgrown and conceited boy had to be flattered lest he sulked, and if you did not flatter him some other woman would. Man was such a disturbing, door-banging creature; he interfered with your apartness, and did not even consider that woman might be different in the moods of her aloofness. He wanted everything at once and immediately when the humour was on him. His buttons came off at the most inconvenient moments, and straightway he accused you of neglecting him. He took your ministrations for granted, and threw things at you, “Here, Nell, mend this—will you. I’ve got to be off.”
She liked her own bed, her own sheets, her own pillow. She had come to love her independence and her apartness, and then life had thrust at her this rather helpless creature, and she had found herself involved. She had been moved by his frightened eyes. The obscure little tragedy of him had imposed itself upon her. Also, he was not like the previous man, the red and brown male with brisk mustachios and an air of flat infallibility. He was not sexually complacent. He did not wallow in a woman’s sacred self as though it were a bed—his—and ever ready to accept him.
Never again could she suffer that sort of man, and his shallow assumptions, and penny-press mentality. She had seen all round such a man and through him. But Scarsdale was different. She had a feeling that he wanted to give her things, and not merely material things, but bits of himself, moments of understanding, silence for her silence. He did not trample and neigh.
Yes, life was a funny business. She had began to realize that it would not be complete without this sensitive creature, and that without him she would feel lonely.
Chapter Thirty-two
Scarsdale wrote and wrote. He got up early in the morning to work before the voices of the dear little children were heard in the land. He wrote after breakfast, and blessed compulsory education. He went out and walked for an hour and came back again to his pen and his manuscript. No longer did he use red ink, for there seemed to be sufficient red ink in “Smith” to make that obscure and struggling person vivid and alive. He was obsessed by Smith and by the sorrows and the sufferings and the pertinacities of Smith. The fellow smiled his thin, little hungry smile, and brushed the coat collar of a patient shabbiness, and cherished his shillings, and ate his bread and cheese.
Scarsdale discovered romance in Smith, the glamour of the seemingly sordid transmuted into an obscure heroism. Smith was so English in his emotional simplicity, in his decencies, in his superstitions, in his sort of boyish belief that cricket should be cricket. In some ways he was so Victorian, the sort of fellow who exasperated the neo-realists because he had a silly preference for clean shirts, and was stuffed full of middle-class illusions. Smith believed that a chap ought to stick it and not go wallowing. He was Thomas in civies, the fool fellow who got stuck in the Flanders mud
when the bright and superior young men adhered ingeniously to other softnesses. He groused and stuck it; he sang songs and stuck it, he was absurdly pleased when he got a dry pair of socks. He was a quite disgusting creature moved by an absurd goodwill, obstinately convinced that there were decencies in life that mattered, and that it was neither clever nor intriguing to go off with your friend’s wife and send him the bill for the motor-car. In fact, Smith did not think sufficiently about his own fleshliness, or about complex this or complex that. His complex was courage, and the Paul Verulams who had eased their haunches in chairs, found Smith an emetic creature. He wasn’t real, he wasn’t literature. He was sottishly decent instead of being sottishly and interestingly decadent. He wanted to love and to be loved. He wanted to do good things for the people he loved. He endured like the man at the plough. He was the sort of silly fool who had not contrived to be the possessor of a useful neurosis within ten miles of a belt of barbed wire.
But on one Sunday morning Scarsdale looked out of his sitting-room window, and instantly Smith disappeared. Someone was ill at Highbury Terrace, and Eleanor had put on a hat and gone up to inquire. She had returned, but not alone. A man stood with her outside the gate, a florid person with a rust-red moustache and a shiny face, a breezy yet substantial person very much in his Sunday clothes. Obviously, he was interested in Eleanor; his very shininess was a flattering effulgence. He wore gloves; he had a buttonhole; his fascinations had all the airs and graces of a premeditated strutting.
Scarsdale felt shocked. He supposed that he ought not to be looking out of the window, and he lowered his head, and fiddled with his pen. But who was the fellow, and what business had he smirking there, yes, just like an enormous shopwalker uttering words of welcome, “Step this way, madam, the whole world is yours.” Beastly occasion! And Scarsdale felt suddenly hot and savage with himself for feeling as he did. Besides, the man had looks, a certain presence, a pawkiness. A florid, excuse my glove fellow. Damn him! And Scarsdale took another look through the window, and saw Eleanor coming in, and the man with the buttonhole holding his hat six inches above his head. He was slightly bald. Scarsdale was glad of his baldness.
He made an effort to revert to Smith, but Smith had disappeared round the corner and could not be recovered. But how very absurd! Obviously, he was jealous, and of that! How very young and elemental of him. He sat listening. He heard Eleanor go up the stairs, and presently she came down again and entered the kitchen. Not very significant happenings, certainly, but he felt feverish, incomprehensibly restless. He wanted to go and look at Eleanor, to reassure himself about something, to discover whether she was just Eleanor, his particular Eleanor.
But he did not go. He sat and felt foolish and uncomfortable and self-conscious. He sat there for more than an hour, staring and fidgeting, and trying to convince himself that he was a ridiculous creature. He listened. The little house had a pregnant stillness. What was she doing? What would she be doing at half-past twelve on a Sunday morning?
And suddenly he heard her voice.
“Spen.”
He pushed his chair back with unnecessary haste. He went and opened the door.
“Yes.”
“Dinner’s ready.”
He saw her. She was unfastening her apron, and for some strange reason that apron reassured him, but not wholly so. There was no mysterious change in her. Her eyes met his.
“Working all the morning?”
“Yes.”
There was a savoury smell. He entered the kitchen and sat down at the table. He began to talk, and he felt that he was talking the most salubrious nonsense, but it appeared to have no effect on her. She carved the small loin of mutton with rich composure; she passed him his plate.
“Hungry?”
“Not so very.”
“Sitting in a chair all the morning. And Sunday too.”
He glanced at her obliquely. Now what did she mean? Did she mean anything? He tried to digest her words and to assimilate them.
That same evening the gentleman with the buttonhole recurred. It happened after supper, and Scarsdale had lit a pipe and was helping Eleanor to wash up, when the front door bell rang. Scarsdale did not drop the plate that he was drying, but the glass-cloth felt very damp in his hands. He did not look at Eleanor, but went on polishing that particular plate. He did not make any remark. He did not say—“Now, I wonder who the devil that is.” He knew, or he thought that he knew. Neither he nor Eleanor had mentioned the man with the buttonhole. She dried her hands on the roller towel. She said, “I’ll finish these things if you like, Spen, when I come back.”
He polished that plate.
“No, quite all right. I’ll go on with it.”
She left him. He heard the sound of voices, and somehow the man’s voice suggested to Scarsdale the yellow yolk of an egg. It had rotundity, fatness, self-assurance; it seemed to speak across a counter with breezy optimism; it was the sort of voice that would accompany the slapping of butter into neat pats, or the dumping on the counter of packets of tea. Also, it was a gelatinous voice; it adhered, it clung. It followed Eleanor Richmond into the sitting-room; it continued there for a while; it adhered to the silence of the house like a kind of eggy smear.
Scarsdale was still polishing that same plate. He both listened and tried not to listen. He hated that voice and its owner as he had never hated anything in his life before. Smeary, yes, smeary and arrogant. It was a sacrilegious presence; it had dared.
The two voices grew louder. They were moving from the sitting-room to the front door. Scarsdale heard the man laugh, and the laugh was less round and easy than it should have been.
“All right, my dear, think it over. Any evening—you know.”
Scarsdale put the plate down and picked it up again. Damn that fellow. Damn his—. The front door closed, and Mrs. Richmond returned to him; she resuming her washing up; she noticed that Scarsdale could not have been very industrious during her absence. The big blue and white basin contained just as much crockery.
She said, “That was Mr. Fogwill.”
Scarsdale’s voice was a flat echo.
“O,—Mr. Fogwill.”
“He has a shop in the Essex Road.”
“A shop. A grocer’s shop.”
“Yes.”
Her hands were busy. She was douce and serene.
“He wanted me to go to the theatre with him.”
Scarsdale wiped the interior of a teacup. Damn the fellow! Asking this supreme woman to go to the theatre! And with that egg and bacon voice of his.
“Which theatre, Eleanor?”
“But I’m not going.”
“Not?”
“No.”
“You mean—you don’t want to?”
“No,—I don’t want to?”
Scarsdale put down the cup, and he put it down very gently, yet had it contained the yolk of an egg he might have felt urged to smash it exultantly against the wall. His pipe had gone out, and he went to the fireplace and lit a spill. The vase full of paper spills was his own idea. Economy. He relit his pipe and a sudden inspiration came to him.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes.”
“Would you let me take you to the theatre?”
Now, what a question to ask! But his asking of it was an event in the life of that small house. She smiled at him over a firm and deliberate shoulder.
“Of course. I’d love it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
2
Scarsdale bought upper circles at the Haymarket. He had asked Mrs. Richmond to choose a play, but she passed back the choice to him, saying that she did not know much about plays and theatres. In fact the play was of no consequence at all; it might have been “Cock Robin”, and the great occasion would have been just as significant and singular. But Scarsdale was in the clouds, and transcending the eggy radiance of Mr. Fogwill. He and Eleanor were going out together, and she wanted to go with him, and he had money in his pocket.
/> He said, “I think we ought to have a little dinner. Say, somewhere in Soho. My evening, you know, Eleanor.”
She consented, and Scarsdale took a bus and travelled all the way to Great Compton Street to reserve a table at “Le Petit Prince”. Coming home on another bus he was a little bothered about the clothes that should be worn. Evening-dress was not necessary; besides, the moth had got into his dinner-jacket, and his two white shirts had not been worn since they had been laundered three or four years ago. They were rather yellow. Besides—Eleanor. But somehow he was not worried about Eleanor, or her dress, or her atmosphere. Eleanor had an inevitableness; what she did she did, and it would be right. He decided to wear his black suit, and his usual hat and overcoat. He had no other overcoat; it might be the colour of coffee, but in Soho—in Soho you might be anything.
Eleanor surprised him. She had a new black dress, or—at least—he could not remember having seen that dress before; she had a black velvet cloak lined with what appeared to be cherry-coloured silk. She had a little cherry-coloured hat and a black vanity-bag with an ivory catch. She looked—well—he couldn’t get the adjective. There was no adjective fit to be applied to Eleanor. And she was so calm, so quietly right, so—Yes—mature was the word, but by mature Scarsdale’s wonder chose to place itself in front of a statue, a thing that had the quality of astonishing rightness. A voice murmured in him, “She could go anywhere. But—of course—she could go anywhere.”
He cleared his throat.
“Eleanor,—you look—”
Again the adjective would not arrive, but adjectives can be superfluous on certain occasions. She understood. If man is inarticulate and just gazes, the lily needs no tinting.
Scarsdale had ordered a taxi. It was to be at the end of Astey’s Row at half-past six, and at half-past six they closed the door of the house, and Eleanor dropped the key into her black silk bag. They entered the taxi, and were driven down into the Essex Road, and along it into Upper Street. Scarsdale looked proud; he was proud of Eleanor and of the taxi, and of the style in which this spring evening dressed itself. Even the Pentonville Road had a glamour.
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