Old Wine and New

by Warwick Deeping

  Modernity passed him easily, and perhaps with a twinge of scorn.

  “Look at this old josser dawdling. Get on with it, for God’s sake get on with it.”

  Ironic, amused impatient glances were cast at him. He had no sense of speed, no urge to rush from nowhere to nowhere to fetch nothing.

  The Scarsdales did not take the car out at week-ends, and Newlands Corner and its Sunday squelch of humanity and orange peel and waste paper was unknown to them. They drove out on Mondays and Tuesdays and Thursdays. They pottered along lanes, and visited old churches. Often they took a tea-basket.

  They liked to boil a kettle over a stove.

  Scarsdale would say, “We have taken two hours to get here, Nellie.”

  Scandalous admission, and yet she was contented.

  3

  Scarsdale continued to carry on his business as a prowler and a sitter upon seats. The funny people might raise their eyebrows and say, “Old Scarsdale, stuck in the country, scooping strawberry jam out of a pot!” But it wasn’t so. Two days a week Scarsdale’s gardener-chauffeur drove him to Shillford station, and Scarsdale caught the nine-forty-three to town. It was a source of wonder to Garrod the chauffeur that his employer should go up to London looking so anonymous and shabby, and there were occasions when Garrod felt himself better dressed than his master.

  As a prowler and an observer of humanity, Spenser Scarsdale was an adept, stepping back into the world of the Essex Road and Astey’s Row. There were districts that had a particular flavour for him, Bloomsbury, and any side-street within three miles of Canonbury Tower, and the Charterhouse and Smithfield, Covent Garden and Soho. He prowled like an expert; he could stuff his hands into his overcoat pockets and slouch. Even the underworld did not resent his presence, for he was without any appearance of succulent and polished complacency. No one would have been surprised to see him pick a cigarette-end out of the gutter.

  He had a queer collection of friends, people whom he had met upon seats, and in cheap eating-houses and at coffee-stalls, and in the world of understanding he was one of them. They knew him as Mr. Spenser, a derelict journalist. They would have been shy of him, and perhaps too matey, had they known that he had an income of some fifteen thousand pounds a year.

  Occasionally he explored the East End, touching the limits of all hideousness in Plaistow and the Barking flats, but even his prowling, sympathetic soul would return from such places feeling smeary and saddened. Here were obscure, smelly chunks of buildings where soap was made. There were chemical works, and on one occasion he discovered a sort of slimy creek, but he never went there again.

  He appeared at strange functions, weddings, out-of-door meetings, a Jewish christening—he had a Jew tailor acquaintance in Soho, and once—because it was necessary for the sake of his craft, he attended as an out-patient at the Charing Cross Hospital. Probably there were few men living who knew his London and its human intricacies as he did.

  Eleanor’s London was different. She shopped in Oxford Street, and though she might walk down Bond Street she was shy of its shops. Never could she be persuaded to lunch luxuriously and à la mode, but her choice remained faithful to a certain tea-shop in Sefton Street where in summer they would give you a plate of tongue and salad that was not too tired. The shop was run by two women who had to live, and Eleanor always gave the waitress sixpence.

  Twice a year she took a bus to the “Angel”, and walked along Astey’s Row. She looked at the little houses and the great plane tree. She loitered, she gazed, she wondered a little at life and then went home.

  4

  The Scarsdales were going to Italy and Egypt.

  On that particular November day three weeks or so before they sailed, Scarsdale went up to town to make certain final arrangements, and to walk—as he loved to walk—somewhere in London. It was one of those dead days, raw and foggy, and Eleanor, looking through one of her windows at a blurred red sun vanishing below the edge of a winter world, felt that the room was cold. She put coal on the fire and glanced at the clock. Spenser was coming back to tea, and suddenly, for no reason at all, she felt anxious, and mistrustful of the dusk, and switching on the shaded lamp beside her husband’s chair, she lowered the blinds, and drew the curtains.

  She sat down to listen. She could not say why she felt uneasy and on edge, and when she heard the sound of the car, and footsteps coming up the path she knew them to be Scarsdale’s, and the little knot of tenseness in her relaxed. She rose and rang the bell for tea. She was aware of the room as a pleasant place, secure and warm and curtained, with the fire burning brightly.

  Scarsdale came in. He looked tired and in the shadow. He kissed her, but he kissed her as though his thoughts were elsewhere. Almost, his eyes looked frightened.

  “Cold, Spen?”

  “A little.”

  He sat down on the big tuffet in front of the fire, and she felt his silence and suffered it. Tea was brought in and placed on the table beside her chair. Her hands moved over the tray.

  “Have it there, Spen?”

  “Yes.”

  He reached for his cup and a plate. She saw him in profile, and his face had a haggard seriousness. It was as though something had shocked him and he could not forget it, and was glad of the warmth of the fire.

  Suddenly he spoke. “Extraordinary thing happened to-day. In the Gray’s Inn Road. Saw a man run over by a bus.”

  She waited.

  “Gave me a shock, Eleanor. I helped to pull him out. You see—”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes. You see—he did it on purpose.”

  A little silence passed. He was staring at the fire.

  “Extraordinary thing. It was an old chap who used to work with me, old chap named Frater. Suppose he was desperate. One ought to do something about this sort of thing, Eleanor. I’ve got to do something about it, you know, find out if he’s left anyone behind.”

  A clock struck with a rich, deep deliberate rhythm. She said softly, and her voice was like the clock’s, “Of course we must do something about it, Spen.”

  He spread his hands to the fire.

  “Buses, red buses. They used to frighten me at times. Just like life, modern life, thundering along, always in a hurry.”

  He looked through his long fingers at the fire. He was thinking of Eleanor, feeling her and the room and its tranquillity.

  “Yes, if it hadn’t been for you I might have been old Frater,—all smashed up and bloody.”

  THE END

  TRANSCRIBER NOTES

  Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

  Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

  [The end of Old Wine and New by Warwick Deeping]