“Mr. Scarsdale, pleased to meet you. My name’s Blaney—Osbert Blaney.”
He was an announcer and a loud-speaker. He had a hazel and round eye, and a face that was boyish yet water worn. He was full of movement, undulations, gestures. He was always drawing himself up and squaring his shoulders, and putting back a straggle of hair from his moist forehead.
“Mr. Scarsdale, Osbert Blaney salutes the creator of ‘Smith’.”
Now, Scarsdale knew with whom he had to do, for Mr. Blaney was the all-star soul of the Divine Dollar Film Co., and a producer of super-films. An agreement had been signed between Scarsdale and the Divine Dollar Film Co., and Mr. Osbert Blaney was producing “Smith”. He had come all the way from America to interview the creator of “Smith”.
Scarsdale shook Mr. Blaney’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you. Mr. Cassidy should have warned me.”
Mr. Blaney tapped Scarsdale on the chest.
“Leave Cassidy in the elevator, sir. When two artists get together—Beauty, the soul of humanity,—tears.”
His face crinkled up; he appeared to be on the edge of over-powering emotion; he turned, and leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece, soliloquized to Eleanor.
“Beauty, dear lady, the great urge, the great heart-beat. Weep? Yes,—I shed tears over ‘Smith’. I jumped right up, I took a car and went straight for Einstein. I said—‘Einstein, here is the story of the century. Tears in it,—tears I say. Sure—we must make a picture of that book, a marv’lous picture.”
He brought out a green silk handkerchief and dabbed his eyes and forehead. Both had the suggestion of moisture, and Scarsdale saw that his wife was watching Mr. Blaney like a puzzled and disapproving cat. He too was a little perplexed and on one leg. What did you do with such a magnate, so flamboyant and flowing a soul. Cigars? Yes, you offered him a cigar, and Scarsdale did possess a small box of cigars. They were in a drawer in the chiffonier. Hurriedly he collected the box and presented it to Mr. Blaney.
“You smoke?”
Mr. Blaney looked at Scarsdale as though he had flashed in from another world. He took a cigar. He dreamed.
“Sir, do you know what is going to happen to Smith? I—shall make Smith the soul of fifty million people. Smith shall sit down in every home in God’s own country. Your Smith was a book Smith. I shall make him a picture Smith. I will create Smith over again.”
He bit off the end of the cigar, sat down, got up again, accepted a lighted match from Scarsdale, and then forgot about it till it begun to burn his fingers.
“Now, let me say right here, Mr. Scarsdale, that you and I have got to sit right down and put the soul of that book into our scenario.”
Scarsdale offered him another match, and this time Mr. Blaney did light the cigar, but in two minutes the cigar had gone out again, not because Mr. Blaney did not like it, but because he talked so continuously. Never had Scarsdale heard a man talk as this man talked. There was no end to it and to him. Meanwhile Eleanor got up discreetly, and slipped out to prepare tea, but she had no intention of being absent very long. She wanted to keep an eye upon Mr. Osbert Blaney.
Mr. Blaney talked. He could not or would not remain put in the same place for more than a minute, and he was in a sort of perpetual motion, getting up and sitting down. Even when he sat upon Eleanor’s sofa he squirmed and undulated, and took all the smoothness and the order out of Eleanor’s new loose-cover. He dropped cigar-ash everywhere, but impartially so, for much of it fell upon his own waistcoat. He harangued Scarsdale. Scarsdale must visit America; he must spend three weeks at Hollywood, and there they would show him the great art and heart of the age, the one supreme crowd-compelling art. Novels! What were novels? Dim happenings upon paper. The screen made the whole world see and feel and hear. O, yes, there would be voices very soon. The gods would speak to the crowd.
But if Mr. Osbert Blaney perplexed the Scarsdales, he too suffered from a slight obliquity of vision when he regarded their externals. He could not quite rationalize their surroundings. He had expected another sort of Scarsdale overblown on the Blaney model, and parading his success like a Valentino or a Chaplin. What was the fellow at, anyway? Living in this stuffy, obscure rat-trap with a few sticks of cheap furniture! Almost Mr. Blaney doubted the authenticity of Scarsdale, the solidity of Scarsdale as an author.
But suddenly Mr. Blaney understood the stunt. He got up in a hurry, spilling half his tea, and while Scarsdale and his wife wondered, Mr. Blaney made an abrupt exit. He appeared in the front garden; he surveyed the house; he walked round the small path with his head cocked and his thumbs hooked into the armholes of his waistcoat. He returned, leaving the front door open. His round smile suggested that he was wagging a sly finger at the Scarsdales.
“Well, it’s very cute of you two people. Best bit of publicity I’ve swallowed for months.”
He indulged in one of his oily, rotatory movements.
“This—is—the house of Smith. It’s it! I’ve got your gag, sir. Being Smith in a Smith house. Why, that’s just the location to put the public in your pocket. We’ll have pictures of this little place all over America. Smith at home.”
He was delighted with his own acumen.
“You’ve staged it to the last cent. A touch of genius, Mr. Scarsdale. Publicity, what! Whose idea was it, yours or your lady’s? Never mind. I’ll plagiarize the publicity idea. We’ll take this very house for Smith’s house. Yes, absolutely.”
He stood over Eleanor.
“And now—my dear,—you’ll come and lunch with me at Claridge’s and meet my crowd. We’ve got to get your husband to come to New York. Sure. Smith’s going all over the world in my picture, and this little house with it. Yes, sir, I am telling you.”
When Mr. Osbert Blaney had left them Scarsdale and his wile looked at each other and gathered up the scattered fragments of themselves. They put the pieces together, and once more became Scarsdale.
Eleanor brushed the cigar-ash from the sofa, and tried to smooth out her poor, crumpled loose-cover, while Scarsdale lit a pipe.
“If he didn’t talk so fast he’d swallow everything. Are you going to America, Spen?”
“Certainly not. It’s not in my philosophy.”
“What did he mean about the house? I couldn’t quite make out what he was at?”
“He thought we didn’t live here.”
“How do you mean?”
“He thought we had another house, a real, big, swanky house somewhere else, and that this place is just a pose, a stunt. He thought we’d planned to squat here just to get talked about.”
His wife understood.
“I should be careful, Spen. He’ll want to photograph you in bed in your pyjamas. He’ll swallow ‘Smith’, and bring it up again all Blaney.”
2
And that—to a point—is just what happened, Astey’s Row was dragged into the picture, but Scarsdale was shy; he refused to go to America, and in a little while Mr. Blaney was going about saying that Scarsdale had no ambition.
He discarded Scarsdale and appropriated “Smith”. He became so full of Smith that in a very short time he gave to the world the impression that it was he—and not Scarsdale—who had created “Smith”. He improved Smith; he put Smith into new clothes and a super-film setting, and in due course “Smith” was shown to the world as Mr. Osbert Blaney’s “Smith”. “To all the Smiths in the world with Mr. Osbert Blaney’s love and compliments.” Scarsdale was squeezed into a few small letters. He had written a book, but how could “Smith” belong to such a pusillanimous and ambitionless creature? An Osbert Blaney Production—“The New and Improved and only Original Smith”.
Scarsdale smiled. He had his philosophy and some thousands of pounds, and he had Eleanor, and a new book. It was Eleanor who showed resentment.
“He might have written the book, Spen.”
“I rather fancy he thinks he has. Anyhow, he has improved it. And he has given me a huge puff.”
She was obdurate. She was much mor
e jealous of him than he was for himself.
“You don’t need it. And you don’t swagger, my dear.”
“Not built for it, Nellie. It’s not virtue. I’m simply not made that way.”
3
Eleanor, meanwhile, was thinking it over. Her growth was toward greenness and tranquillity, the idea of being somehow yourself in a little corner that was not Woolworth or Tottenham Court Road. She might shop at Woolworth on occasions, but she did not want to live Woolworth. She was a person, and Scarsdale was a person. Neither of them were loud-speakers.
She said, “Spen, I’ve been thinking it over.”
“About the new home, Nellie?”
“Yes, I think I should like to have a garden.”
That was final, symbolical and significant, and subtly imbued with the essence of living. For when a woman can ask such absurd questions as “Why is an oak an oak, and a poplar a poplar?”—or—“Why do birds sing”, she is close to the essential mystery of things, and to the mystery of the “I” and the “You”. But Eleanor did gaze at this seemingness of things, at the glimmer of the veil, at the strangeness of a leaf and a wing, and ask these questions, questions that even the Daily Wail could not answer. Perhaps she did not wish for an answer, or knew that there is no answer save the murmur that breathes in the little silent sanctuary of your self.
Inevitably Eleanor should have her garden, and Scarsdale called upon estate agents and was supplied with lists of properties that were for sale in Surrey and Sussex, Berks and Bucks. Everybody wished to sell, and Scarsdale was ready to buy, provided that the estate agents could provide Eleanor with her predestined garden.
“Just a small house and two acres, Spen.”
Scarsdale hired a Daimler car and they set out upon their pilgrimage, and at the end of the first day Eleanor quoted the old tag about all men being liars, but for men she substituted house-agents. “They simply don’t listen to what you say, Spen. They just serve up tinned villas.” The Daimler was chartered for a second day, and at Eleanor’s suggestion they called at the offices of a local firm in Surrey, and it was Eleanor who went in to seek for information.
She came out with a pink slip and an air of serenity.
“I found someone sensible in there. She waited to hear what I wanted and did not want.”
“Something possible?”
“The Mill House—Shillford. She says it is a rather funny old place. They want to sell. Three thousand pounds.”
“Let’s go and look.”
Scepticism had been instilled into them, but when the car turned up the lane past Shillford Church, and they saw the little old white house with its green shutters and rambling roof, and the stone wall and the iron gates, and the faded blue door, and the pollarded limes and the yews, and the cedar tree, their faith was renewed. There was something meant about the house. It sat down in that green valley like a bird on its nest, with a small stream running between willows, and a smother of fruit trees about it. It was a house for people who had no ambition save to be together and at peace.
Eleanor looked flushed.
“Spen, I do believe—”
Her husband unlocked the padlock and chain fastening the iron gates.
“Off the main road, Eleanor. Well away from Main Street. Let’s see, it says here, an acre and a half of garden, a small orchard and a paddock.”
She breathed the word paddock. Milk and buttercups, and the poas and fescues, and ox-eyed daisies.
“A paddock, Spen.”
They loitered. The garden had brick paths and box edging, two lawns that seemed to flow round about trees and banks of shrubs and into odd secret corners. The little fruit garden had a wall. There were old red-brick outhouses with undulating roofs and shabby blue doors. There were masses of ivy. A thrush was singing in the cedar. The whole place had a dim brightness, a feeling of having been lived with.
They did not hurry. They wandered as though they had arrived at the one place in the world that was essentially I and You. They looked into stables and potting-shed and a rather derelict greenhouse. They discovered a little old red-brick garden house at the end of a nut alley.
“Spen, you could work here in summer.”
“I could.”
Then they entered the house, and the very first room they explored seemed somehow to have been waiting for them. It was a long room beautifully proportioned; it had a French window at either end, and each window was filled with the tranquillity of the garden.
Scarsdale slipped a hand under his wife’s arm.
“Nellie, does it strike you how quietly this house breathes?”
She smiled.
“My dear, it’s never been hurried.”
“No ambition, what! Fancy Mr. Blaney here.”
“Don’t. There have never been any Mr. Blaneys here.”
They went over the whole house. They lingered in every room. The place was shabby, but with a kind of contented shabbiness. It was like Scarsdale himself, an old book, old-fashioned flowers, old wine.
He said, “We shall have to spend some money. What about the drains? Life generally has a snag somewhere.”
Eleanor had a notebook with her. She made a number of notes in the kitchen.
“This is the one part that needs modernizing, Spen. That old grate, and the sink. Lead, and those silly taps. That’s one thing I do believe in, being wise in the kitchen.”
He watched her writing in her book. He knew now that the house was to be theirs.
4
One van was sufficient to empty the house in Astey’s Row of its furniture, and when the little place was empty they stood at the window of the sitting-room and felt both sad and happy. It was a spring day, and a powdering of green was appearing upon these London trees, and overhead there were craters of blue sky, but now that the house had been stripped it seemed to have lost its padding. All the noises of Astey’s Row and the Canonbury Road swarmed in and rattled their shoes.
“Just a little sad, Nellie?”
“Not really. I shall come here again sometimes.”
“Just to look?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose I shall too. Treading in the footsteps of Smith.”
A protesting meow came from a hamper standing behind the door. Thomas the cat was in that hamper, and ready to travel by taxi and train to a new world in Surrey. Eleanor bent over the hamper.
“Poor Tom, poor darling. I do hope he will like the new house, Spen.”
“Thomas will have to learn to be a country cat. He’s even more of a Cockney than I am, but I’m not worrying. I say, it’s four o’clock, that taxi was to be at the end of the Row at four.”
He went out to look for the taxi, and finding it there he entered the house for the last time and took charge of Thomas and his hamper. He was the first to leave. His wife loitered a moment, and as she closed the little, shabby front door, her hand glided down the edge thereof with a caressing, soothing movement. She had a feeling that the funny little place would never be as happy again. She withdrew the key, and without looking back, followed her husband.
Chapter Thirty-seven
That summer Scarsdale worked in the garden house, with his table under a lattice window, and the green hoops of the nut walk enclosing a distant vista of grass and flowers, and sometimes he would sit there and reflect upon life and its strangeness. He had attained tranquillity, or rather he had been given tranquillity by Eleanor.
Would he ever tire of tranquillity? Would she? He thought not. They had escaped from the bitter streets and the thunderous traffic, and whenever he walked down the nut alley and entered the house by one of the French windows of the long room, he was conscious of wonder, a little tremor of secret exultation.
He wondered at many things, that men should live in cities, that mystery should have ceased for them, that words should satisfy them, masses of meaningless and mechanical words that thundered to and fro, like traffic, explaining nothing. He wondered at the little cold bright face of the thing
called science. He wondered at his wife, at his garden, at himself turned gardener. He had such a long way to stoop. He had had to teach himself which were weeds and which were flowers.
He wondered at Eleanor. How was it that she had been able to furnish the house as she had done, with old furniture and soft fabrics and colours that were dim and gentle? How was it that she could accomplish that most amazing tour de force, discover two good maids and keep them? Yes, in Shillford! What machinations, what magic did she employ? How was it that she had been able to slip so doucely into the life of Shillford? She was learning to play tennis. She had taken charge of the local branch of the Women’s Institute.
Mrs. Spenser Scarsdale, the daughter of a small farmer in Dorsetshire, yet somehow supreme and adequate. Of course he was a little celebrity in his way, but when he considered his books and Eleanor they were mere stones in the grass for the passing of her feet.
He had settled six thousand pounds on his wife, presented her with the capital, and had asked no further questions, yet he always remembered the evening when he had spoken to her of this project.
“I want you to have a little money of your own, Nellie.”
It was sunset, and the light lay on the beech-wood down the valley. They could see this wood from one of the french windows. And Eleanor had gone to the window and had stood there with such a stillness that he had wondered. Suddenly she had turned from the sunset and come to him, and held his hand for a moment.
“Thank you, Spen.”
2
Scarsdale bought a car. It was a mild and inoffensive car, grey, a two-seater. He drove it himself, though he employed a gardener-chauffeur. There were characteristics that united Scarsdale and his car. He sat up rather straight at the wheel; he drove slowly and with deliberation well on the left-hand side of the road. He drove solemnly, and almost with an air of surprise that he should be doing such a thing.
Old Wine and New Page 39