He complained to Mr. Cassidy.
“These letters, an absolute pest. And I don’t want to lecture and dine out. My business is to write novels.”
Mr. Cassidy’s large face registered amusement. He did not believe that Scarsdale was quite sincere.
“Well, get a secretary.”
“A secretary!”
Scarsdale seemed to regard the proposal with horror.
“A secretary! Somebody messing about. Have to find her things to do. Worry me to death. Besides—”
He did not go on to explain to Mr. Cassidy that a secretary would not tone with Astey’s Row, but Mr. Cassidy knew all about Astey’s Row, and wondered how long Scarsdale would stay there. A fellow who already was making twelve thousand a year! Odd fish—this. Wasn’t he going to celebrate, to dispense cocktails and give dinners, and buy a super-car with a super-body, and have his photograph taken sitting in it? What about a colourful publicity, and editors and critics and the press? The fellow was like a rabbit in a hole who came out occasionally to nibble grass.
Mr. Cassidy made a suggestion.
“It’s the age of publicity, my dear chap. You ought to go out and show yourself. Every picture in the papers counts. Of course, self-advertisement can be done gracefully.”
Almost Scarsdale looked shy. He twinkled.
“I shouldn’t advertise well. Not my job. Besides, my wife doesn’t care about sensationalism.”
Mr. Cassidy’s bright little eyes were enigmatic.
“Is that so. Suppose you have bought a mink coat?”
Scarsdale took the quip seriously.
“No. But there is no reason why I shouldn’t. Rather do that than give people dinners.”
Mr. Cassidy smiled a kind of stomachic smile. Yes, probably, as rumour had it, Scarsdale had married his housekeeper, and she might need a good deal of camouflaging. But what sort of woman was Mrs. Scarsdale? Unless she was a rather extraordinary person she might have much to say about Scarsdale’s quietism. She would have him into a house in Kensington or St. John’s Wood, and into an Isotta or a Stutz, and down to Cannes, and even to Ascot. She would bring domestic pressure to bear upon this producer of best sellers, for Mr. Cassidy had read the first twenty chapters of “Molly”, and he was shrewdly convinced that “Molly” would hold fast to the coat-tails of “Smith”.
Scarsdale might be no sensationalist or speed-merchant, but he did foresee that life had many possibilities that were to be explored, and his conviction was that he and Eleanor would explore them together, and in their own way. Yes, and in spite of Mr. Cassidy and the pictorial press and all the various mechanisms. And yet Scarsdale was moved to wonder whether Eleanor was expecting him to make some dramatic gesture.
He arrived in Astey’s Row on that summer afternoon and found it sun-flecked and noisy and in the possession of very vigorous children. He was beginning to notice the noise, and to be a little irritated by it when he was at work. Astey’s Row! He came to Eleanor’s gate and found that someone had thrown a dirty newspaper full of bread crusts into the garden. He was annoyed. Even in his most derelict days he had not disposed of his rubbish by heaving it into other people’s gardens.
Though he missed the full significance of the act, for Astey’s Row was growing class conscious with regard to the Scarsdales, and in sensing a certain aloofness in Eleanor and her husband it had joined reality to rumour. Astey’s Row was becoming sarcastic and not a little hostile in its attitude toward this author-bloke and his woman. Hence, rubbish thrown over garden railings.
Scarsdale joined his wife in the sitting-room. He was tired; he found Mr. Cassidy rather exhausting. They sat at the open window, and the voice of Astey’s Row was with them.
“Letters for you, Spen.”
He saw a little pile of letters on the table.
“There seem to be about six posts in the day. Nellie.”
“Not quite.”
He opened the first letter, and discovered that it was an invitation from the “Atalanta Club,” a woman’s club. The secretary wrote to say that the club committee wished Mr. Scarsdale to be the guest of the evening at their next literary dinner.
Scarsdale passed the letter to his wife, and she read it, and left it lying in her lap.
“Going, Spen?”
“No.”
He was reflecting upon the point that the club had not included his wife in the honour of that evening. It annoyed him. He was not going anywhere without Eleanor; he did not want to go anywhere without her.
He asked her a question.
“Eleanor, do you think you would care for this sort of show?”
“What do they do there, Spen?”
“Do? O, eat and talk—I suppose. Make funny speeches. Feel rather select and superior.”
“But I’m not asked.”
“And I’m not going. I’m not a public person.”
2
Developments were gradual, and their exploring of the new content of life as unpremeditated as the unexpectedness of life itself. There arose the question of a holiday, and Scarsdale wished Eleanor to make the choice.
“I’d like to go to Scotland, Spen.”
He was a little surprised, but why be surprised?
“Scotland? Why—of course.”
So to Scotland they went, and saw Melrose and Edinburgh and the Bass Rock, and traversed the Trossachs, and found Loch Lomond rather too full of Glasgow. Eleanor described it as being at the bottom of a basin, and not feeling like washing-up. They went on to Oban; they discovered the islands and the purples and amethysts and greys of this northern Greece.
The great idea occurred to Scarsdale. Other people drove about in cars; why should not he and Eleanor drive in a car. They could afford one. It had all the freshness of a unique discovery. He hired a car, one of the best cars in Oban; he sat in it beside his wife, feeling surprised and pleased, and just a little proud.
“Rather an idea—this, Eleanor.”
“You just sit and look, Spen.”
They visited Dalmally and Tyndrum and Rannoch Moor. They drove to Glencoe, and Glencoe proved climatic. Their car punctured twice, and the Scotch boy had to change a tyre, and while he growled and perspired they sat on the moor among the heather, and let life come to them. They explored the impersonal and the mysterious, and touched the unpremeditated, in each other.
“I can hear it, Spen.”
“What, dear?”
“The silence.”
She had a rapt look.
“It’s like going back to the days when I was so high. But—then—you’re not country, Spen.”
He observed her, and looked thoughtful.
“I don’t know about that. Astey’s Row, you know—”
She let a little silence go by.
“Perhaps we’re not Astey’s Row any longer, Spen. They feel that about us, Spen.”
“Who do?”
“The people in Astey’s Row.”
“Oh, is that why they sometimes throw rubbish into our garden? Perhaps it is.”
3
They returned to Astey’s Row and it seemed strange to them. Somehow it was not the Row as they remembered it, and even the great plane tree seemed less large and tranquil. There was the noise, and an overflowing neighbourliness that was not neighbourly, and the trams and the cars in the Canonbury Road, and the children, and intrusive humanity hutched and teeming. Yes, rows of hutches, not Martinsell Hill.
It was growing dusk. Eleanor stood at the window, and suddenly she pulled down the blind.
“It isn’t us any longer.”
She did not utter the words, but she had a feeling that Scarsdale heard them, and that his mood matched hers. She could have added, “We’ve grown out of this. It is we who change, not things. And—after all, isn’t everything us, what we see and feel? There’s nothing wrong in it either. It just happens so.”
Yet between them was a tacit consent. They were workers, careful people, with no inclinations toward sensational splurgin
g. They were apart from the crowd, while understanding the tragic inevitableness and the fated limitations of the crowd. The crowd makes itself. Meanwhile, Astey’s Row had sufficed; it had had its beauty and its significance, and in the mystic “I” of each of them Astey’s Row would continue. They were wise as to foundations. The crowd does not let you escape unless you have the wisdom and the patience of the husbandman, and the husbandman is apt to be out of fashion these days.
Eleanor was country.
“We’ll put it by, Spen, and see how the crops come in.”
Corn in the granary in contrast to Rome’s annona, free tickets for bread and games.
4
“Molly” was published in the early autumn. Its reception was patchy so far as the applause was concerned, and one eminent critic who had praised “Smith”, described “Molly” as a gross literary lapse. Punch, who had treated “Smith” with benign playfulness, displayed a little petulance in its playfulness toward “Molly”. But Mr. Malcolm collected a sheaf of good reviews, and was able to quote them lavishly in his advertisements. Moreover, neither praise, dispraise, nor a studied silence appeared to make any difference to the popularity of the book. The advance sales in England had been round about thirteen thousand copies, and in America some thirty thousand, but within a month of publication Malcolm could advertise that over seventy-five thousand copies had been sold.
Scarsdale’s letters thickened.
Mr. Paul Verulam delivered another attack on him under the heading of “The Sentimentalist of the Slums.”
Eleanor had bought a new carpet for the sitting-room, and had renewed her stock of linen.
Mr. Cassidy was suggesting that Scarsdale ought to go to America and show himself.
The “Divine Dollar Film Company” was in treaty for the world’s film rights of “Smith”.
The content of life was changing, and Scarsdale was constrained to consider the realities, the compelling casuistry of cheques. His big money was beginning to flow in, and there was every prospect of the flow increasing and of continuing. “Molly” had assured the set of the tide. Mr. Cassidy was talking of seven thousand pounds for the film rights of “Smith”; editors were offering a hundred pounds for a short story, and two thousand pounds for a serial.
Scarsdale sat by the November fire, and scribbled figures in a notebook. Almost he looked worried.
“It’s perfectly preposterous.”
“What is, Spen?”
“Our estimated income for this year.”
“How much?”
“Close on seventeen thousand pounds.”
He brooded, and tapped the notebook with his pencil.
“Bit of a problem, Eleanor.”
She smiled at him.
“Is it! What are we going to do with it?”
“Invest—most. Don’t you agree?”
She nodded.
“Yes, foundations, Spen. Solid.”
“Quite. My damned income-tax and super-tax are going to be ghastly.”
“It does seem rather hard, Spen.”
But he gave a little laugh.
“O, well, the jackals have to get it somehow. We’ve been lucky. By the way, someone threw an old mattress in a sack into our garden, last night. A love offering—I suppose.”
“What did you do with it, Spen?”
“Do with it? Why—just tipped it over the other railings.”
5
Eleanor could not murmur the mystic word “entelechy”, and yet the meaning of some things revealed themselves to her just as a pear tree reveals the significance of blossom, or as Spring is kissed on the mouth by the wet west wind. She was country, a pot of flowers in a London window, and yet so much more than that. Things grew, and if you found yourself growing unexpectedly and in the grace of faith and understanding, then the soul of you could stand early and late at its window and hail both sunset and dawn. Life might have the sweet texture of silk, and the warmth of a fire, and the smell of the thorn blossom.
For Scarsdale was in love with two things,—his wife and his work. They intermingled; they were hand and flower, stock and scion, earth and water; they were part of the essence of things, and in life it is the essence that matters.
For when Scarsdale looked upon a pound note he did not see it as a pound note, but as a complex of perceptions and feelings, a symbol, a slit in the wall of seeming. He would never look upon the dollar until his eyes grew dull and the soul of him base metal. His work gave to him, and so filled him that he overflowed in giving.
He wanted to give to Eleanor.
Yet the first gesture suggested the materialist, though its inwardness waved aside the scorn of sensational man. Mr. Cassidy’s mink coat had remained in his mind, and Scarsdale understood that the crowd understands no success that is not dressed in mink. The woman must be befurred and ride in her chariot. Something in Scarsdale laughed, but with a tremor of tenderness. Nothing was too grand for Eleanor.
The memories of that visit to one of the most Parisian of the West End establishments were to remain with him with a quality of strangeness and grace.
“We want a fur coat.”
He had an appearance; Eleanor had seen to it; and they sat on a settee, and a gracious person attended on them, and slim young creatures paraded in furs. The very first coat took Scarsdale’s fancy. He asked the price.
“Two hundred and fifty guineas, sir.”
He swallowed ecstatically. He was not at all scared. He met Eleanor’s eyes, and they were questioning.
He said—“I like that coat. Why not try it on.”
Yet another quality was impressed upon him, the rightness of his wife’s dignity. She was equal to all these women, and to the mirrors and the white enamel, and the hush of the sanctuary. She had a stillness. All her movements were quiet and right.
She did not question the extravagance. She entered one of the fitting-rooms, and in a minute or two the gracious person reappeared and summoned Scarsdale.
“Madame would like you to see the coat, sir.”
Scarsdale joined his wife in the fitting-room. He looked at her. She and the coat were one.
“I like you in that, Eleanor.”
She liked herself in it, and the temper of her husband’s extravagance. The gracious person controlled the chorus.
“Madame looks superb in it.”
Scarsdale purloined the word. Superb. What an amazing occasion! He heard the gracious person declaring that the coat needed no altering; it had been created for the ideal figure, and madame had that figure, the height and the carriage.
Scarsdale made a movement as of easing his neck and his collar.
“We’ll take that coat. I’ll give you a cheque.”
A ledger was produced.
“What name, sir.”
“Scarsdale,—Mr. Spenser Scarsdale.”
The gracious person gave him a bright glance.
“The Mr. Scarsdale?”
“Perhaps.”
“I have just been reading ‘Molly’, sir.”
He had to give the address. Astey’s Row! He wondered whether the gracious person would boggle over it and raise her eyebrows. She did neither. But it was strange.
In the taxi, Eleanor laid a hand on her husband’s knee.
“Spen, you shouldn’t—”
“O, yes, I should. I like it. Besides—”
He held her hand, and a little smile came into his eyes.
“It’s so easy, isn’t it? But the address! It gave one to think.”
She looked at the fat back of the taxi-driver.
“Yes, not in Astey’s Row. Quite impossible, quite vulgar. Not that I mean, Spen—dear—”
“Of course not. We have grown out of Astey’s Row, Eleanor. Where next? Don’t want to splurge. Think it over. It’s so much the woman’s affair. I’d like to get away from the noise.”
She said, “I’ll think it over.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Was there any place in London without noi
se? Would there be any place in England without noise?
Scarsdale consulted Malcolm over the club luncheon-table, and Malcolm, who was a man of many cultures, happened to have purchased a property within half a mile of an aeroplane factory, and its testing ground. He had purchased the property previous to the erupting of this pimple of progress, and he had a grievance.
“The damned things boom overhead. I understand the mood of the fellow who got out a gun and had a pot at one of them. Infernal mechanical blow-flies.”
He cautioned Scarsdale.
“Quiet? You want quiet? My dear chap, you’ve been born a hundred years too late or too early. Well, get a place half a mile from any main road. Even then some damned new concrete canal may get you. London? O, no, I’d get out of London. It eats you up.”
Scarsdale explored. There was no harm in exploring while Eleanor was thinking it over, and he called on various agencies, and being in Chelsea he nearly stumbled into the office of Jimson & Marwood. Miss Marwood was very much there, and still Miss Marwood, very short in the skirt and wearing black, and a green-jade necklace. Her eyes had become a little hard and swollen and glassy; her very red mouth was a petulant streak in the perfect pallor of her face. She had the air of being perfumed and powdered. She owned a car coloured black and scarlet. She trailed about with her at her leisure a suggestion of Brooklands and burnt oil, and a collection of male entities, and all the symbols of a contraceptive freedom. She had driven a racing car at Brooklands, and her portrait had appeared in one of the picture papers.
Scarsdale did not come face to face with Julia. He crossed the road hurriedly and was glad.
Returning to Astey’s Row after one of these expeditions he found his wife and a strange gentleman entertaining each other in the sitting-room. The stranger wore a blue lounge suit very much buttoned in at the waist, a pink carnation, a bright blue collar and tie, spats. His hat and malacca cane and washleather gloves lay on the table. He had his back to the door, and when Eleanor said, “My husband”, the stranger rose with a kind of éclat, twirled, and held out a soft pink hand.
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