Still She Wished for Company

by Margaret Irwin

  She was in Hill Street when it began suddenly to rain. It was as violent as it was sudden, and she dashed for an arched doorway. No cloak, no umbrella, a thin frock whose colours, she had discovered, “ran” even in cold water, and her new suède shoes which were such a pretty shape but cheap, and certain to spoil. She had put them on for Donald who was not a connoisseur in shoes nor even in feet. Damn that conductor! She might have got a seat inside the Bayswater bus by now.

  Repeated taxi whistles pierced the air, some close to her; there was the scurrying, skidding sound of rubber tyres on the wet road as a huge car sped past; a huddled, shrunken form ran splashing through the rivulets. The rain made a din in the street like the furious beating of kettledrums.

  Jan had pressed as far as possible into her doorway. She watched a small torrent rush down the gutter and the huge drops leap up from the pavements in a thousand tiny fountains. “Fairy thimbles” her mother had called them when they were children. Was this fairy rain? It seemed to have fallen all at once out of a clear sky as though it were an unnatural storm raised by witches.

  As a child she had been afraid of rain as many people are of thunder. And that, no doubt, was on account of a funny little verse and still funnier picture, in a large book of her father’s, which she had thought was addressed to herself as she was then called Rose—

  “O, Rose, thou art sick!

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.”

  Whenever she had had a cold or a headache her father had an irritating habit of remarking “O, Rose, thou art sick!” which was quite enough to make her shiver in bed when she heard the rain on the roof at night, and wonder if the invisible worm were even now flying through the storm to seek her out. She laughed now as she thought of it, huddled in her doorway.

  The straight, severe old houses that she liked so well looked blankly at her and offered her no welcome. They had been standing here a hundred years, far more than a hundred years ago. There would have been coaches rumbling down this street then, and sedan chairs hurrying through the rain and link boys running and calling. Perhaps one of them would be calling for her coach—did they do that? She had the haziest idea of the duties of link boys. The old inn of the “Coach and Horses” at the opposite corner, now dark and silent, would be full of life and bustle as some traveller’s coach arrived for the night. A gentleman from the country—no, a gentleman newly arrived from France. That sounded nice.

  The face of the “Gentleman Unknown” in her room had again flashed into her mind, and she now imagined it looking at her from the window of a coach. She could fancy the horses champing and steaming in the blurred light of torches in the rain, the footman jumping down from the box and swinging open the door, and the exquisite beruffled hand that would first appear, as the “Gentleman Unknown”; stepped down into the street and—perhaps—turned that half-quizzical, half-flattering gaze on her.

  She had begun to hum a song from the Beggar’s Opera— and stopped as she noticed for the first time the tall figure of a man in the shadow of a neighbouring doorway. He was watching her; she wondered how long he had been doing so, how long he had been there. He walked out into the rain with a long, careless stride, and came towards her. He wore an opera hat and a monocle, and a white silk scarf beneath his coat. There is a faint resemblance in the dress to the dandyism of an earlier date; Jan noticed it now as she had often done before.

  “Youth’s the season made for joys,

  Love is then our duty,”

  “Getting wet?” he asked, and took up his stand beside her.

  “Not very,” said Jan, without much conviction, for the wind at that moment was beginning to blow the rain into their corner.

  “You’ll get drenched,” he observed.

  She was silent. What was the use of his making remarks like that unless he offered her his coat like Sir Walter Raleigh or Saint Martin? And even that wouldn’t protect her precious new shoes. But he was silent too. He seemed to be considering something.

  “Better get a taxi,” he said at last, “I’ve whistled half-a-dozen times for one. What direction are you?”

  So that was it. It was not the most polite way of making the suggestion, but she liked his low, monotonous voice. There was a note in it of command, not intentional but instinctive. She liked, too, his well-cut, inexpressive face and the hard, rather dull eyes—at least, she found them interesting. They were not like any eyes that she knew.

  But why hadn’t he asked her straight out? Probably he was shy. It was certainly rather bold, and he had evidently been considering, hesitating. His manner was constrained, though pleasingly unlike the constraint of the men at the office, who were often a little shy of her. It was an adventure, and Jan could generally manage adventures in her own way. She felt chiefly an amused interest as she looked full into the heavy eyes and replied :

  “I live in Bayswater—Norham Road. Are you suggesting we should share a taxi?” She did not draw her pay till tomorrow and hoped she had enough in her purse.

  “No, certainly not ‘ share ’ it,” he replied, “it is for my pleasure.”

  “And for my convenience,” said Jan.

  “Your convenience,” he answered, “is my pleasure.”

  He laughed as though he had been rather absurd, but Jan laughed delightedly. Any flickering doubts of the proceedings were dispelled by such a phrase. It was quite like “Love is then our duty.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “it’s very nice of you, but I shall think it still nicer if you let me share, without any fuss. You see, don’t you?”

  A man who could turn a sentence like that must see. She was filled with a sudden hope. Was this at last her ideal, the man she had always dreamed of? A hitherto wholly unreal man, composed chiefly from her casual glimpses in the library, that last year at school, of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, Congreve’s Valentine, Lovelace without his insatiable vanity; a man of easy ironic wit, assured composure impossible to ruffle, and yet of fancies as fantastic as her own.

  This man had more of the air and bearing of her ideal than anyone she had ever met. He would look magnificent, though a trifle heavy, in the graceful dress of the latter half of the eighteenth century. This was a test that Jan was apt to apply with failure. Donald, unwittingly, had been considered to disadvantage in powder and ruffles, though he would look very well in a kilt.

  The man did not seem to have noticed her late request. He was looking intently at her and said presently. “I’ll go up to the corner. It’s impossible to get one here.”

  The words were spoken so low as to be almost muttered. He added, equally low, but forcibly, “You will wait.”

  He suddenly lowered his head as though to look at her the more closely. Jan met his eyes squarely, with a certain surprise. She had felt so sure that she liked him a minute ago, and liked him to the point of feeling quite hopeful and excited. Now she was not so sure. That hard, mask-like expression seemed to have opened for a flash, and she did not know what it was she saw beneath it. But in the same instant he had turned and was striding away up the street, his head bent low against the driving rain.

  No sooner had he gone than she hoped he would not get a taxi, would not come back. Was she being a reckless fool? Donald had said she had no idea how to take care of herself. But why should she? It was so dull to take care of oneself, so tiresome to imagine it was always necessary.

  A taxi came down the next street, turned the corner, was coming fast behind her, went past a little way. The door was ajar, and a man’s hand, thrust through the window from inside, was holding it so. The taxi slowed down, began to turn round. As it backed into the pavement Jan darted out from her doorway and raced up the street. In a few seconds she had left Hill Street behind her and was making for Oxford Street.


  Three-quarters of an hour later, she plunged, bedraggled and dripping, into a small room where a worn-faced woman sat at a sewing machine among a quantity of heterogeneous articles. A tall, largely-built girl who sat on the floor, half covered with stockings, got up clumsily, scattering them in all directions, and flung herself on the intruder with the eagerness of a prisoner who has seen a chance of escape. The escape was from a quarrel with her mother which had been in full progress a minute before.

  “Oh, Jan, your frock! Your shoes!”

  “They’re done for,” said Jan. “I couldn’t get a bus the whole way.”

  She took off her shoes and held them up, letting the water run on to a plate on the crowded table; they looked like two small drowned rats.

  “What wicked extravagance,” wailed the woman at the sewing machine, “if only you’d got a sensible pair as I told you.”

  “Oh, mother, I know. But I do so love pretty shoes.”

  “We can’t afford pretty things if they’re not sensible, and it’s bad taste to dress as though we can. I wonder you don’t feel that,” said her sister, peeling off the stocking she was darning from her arm and hand.

  “I do, Barney, I do. But you’re so much younger and wiser than I am. I recognize that my taste in conduct is deplorable, but my taste in shoes—come, you will grant that, though a little damped by present circumstances, they have an elegant shape?”

  “She’s talking nonsense again,” murmured their mother wearily. “Jan, do you really hope to go straight down to Berkshire to-morrow after the office? I don’t see how you can do it. It’s terribly late now, and there won’t be a moment to pack in the morning before you start. Do go upstairs quietly. Father has had a bad day and is very tired. That frock you began to make—I did mean to help you finish it, but there’s not been a moment. Tim and Johnny simply had to have these shirts.”

  “It’s all right, mother. I’ll just shove in one or two things to-night. I don’t mind a bit about the frock or anything. I’ll live in my old coat-frock all the time, and my sensible heavy-soled shoes. Alas! these shoes lie heavy on my soul to-night.”

  Brandishing the drowned rats in her hand with a tragic gesture, she left the room and seemed to leave a dull emptiness behind her. Her mother sighed. “It will be nice for Helen to have her,” she said.

  Barney swept armfuls of stockings into the large mending basket, very hastily lest her mother should resume the quarrel, kissed her good-night as hastily and with exaggerated cheerfulness, and ran upstairs to the room she shared with her sister. It was poorly lit by a gas jet that gave out a pale blue flickering Clare. Jan was lying on her bed, as motionless as if she were asleep.

  “Jan, you perfect ass, in your wet things! Get out of them at once! Do you want to be up packing all night? If you don’t hurry up, I’m damned well not going to help you. Where on earth can I put the suit-case if you don’t get off your bed?”

  Jan rolled slowly off it, looking a trifle dazed.

  She had been thinking of Helen’s cottage which she had not yet seen. Half asleep, she had forgotten that it was a real cottage with tiny rooms and windows, likely to be rather a squash with the baby and the nurse-maid and the addition of her brother-in-law each week-end, and had seen herself looking out of door windows on to a wide lawn, wandering through spacious rooms and gardens, never in a hurry, never having to make decisions, living through long days of placidly busy leisure in which she could do all the things she had always wanted and never found time to do at home.

  She would sit in a large, silent room and read musty old books (Jan loved the smell of old books), she would make pretty bags and absurd, charming little sewing aprons for herself and her sisters, she would try to write down some beginnings of stories (she could never make up more than beginnings), she would lie in the sun and do nothing at all.

  She shook herself, rubbed her eyes, said aloud, “What a fool I am!” and began to pull clothes out of the chest of drawers where all hers and Barney’s things were mixed up together. They had been meaning to tidy them for months, but there had not been a moment.

  She rummaged for all the letters she would now have time to answer. Bobby, in Cologne, nice, but dull, good only for dancing and revues; poor old Alice who was having such a deadly time teaching in that school; Kitty and Iris who were wealthy and had a lovely time, with nothing to worry them, but made up for it by going nearly demented over their successive love-affairs; dear, stiff old Mr. Arnold who lent her books that she never had time to read properly; that queer man whom she had only danced with once or twice but who kept on Writing letters from India—“Barney, Barney, have you seen any letters with an Indian stamp on them? No, not that one—where is the last?”

  Suddenly she sat down on a heap of clothes and declared that she would put the alarm at half an hour earlier and finish packing in the morning. It was no good going on looking for things in this beastly light with her head swimming.

  As they undressed, she told Barney about the man who had wanted to take her home in a taxi. But she could not tell why it was that she had run off at the last minute in that silly melodramatic way. Barney thought it neither silly nor melodramatic. At nineteen she had all the air of an elder sister to Jan at twenty-four, whom she yet admired as much as she deprecated. It was Jan who, through her grit in sticking to a job she loathed, combined with odd irrational flashes of cleverness, had got on the best of her rather feckless family, and Barney respected her accordingly. But she was a fool to behave like this. “You said that when he looked at you just before he went off, you thought his face looked beastly.”

  “Yes. I thought that afterwards as I was coming home. I didn’t at the time—I just wondered what it was that made him look like that. Now I know that it looked brutal—a sort of coarse, stupid brutality that wouldn’t have cared a bit what I felt about anything—wouldn’t have known, even. But it wasn’t till that moment—I liked him up till then.”

  “Why?”

  “He had never had to bother. He was easy, assured, accustomed to get what he wants.”

  “Exactly. There you are.”

  “Oh, shut up, Barney. Why should we assume that all men want is to kiss girls in taxis?”

  “Well, then, why did you run away?”

  “I tell you I don’t know or at least I can’t tell. It wasn’t because I was afraid of him—it hadn’t dawned on me then that that look was beastly. I was afraid of something else, and in quite another way—it was awful. A creepy sort of fear, as one used to have of the dark—of that street and the rain and that if I stayed there another minute I might see it all quite different. I wanted to, too, but I had a sort of panic—I can’t explain. It frightens me now to think I could have been such an idiot.”

  “You’re just tired,” said Barney. “I wish you’d marry Donald and let him look after you. You need a home.”

  “A home! Another! Haven’t we enough of a home as it is?”

  But Barney persisted in considering the advantages of an alternative home. Of course it would be a grind at first, but Donald would be sure to get on in time. “And you know, Jan, it’s something to be able to marry anyone now. Lots of girls can’t. And you work and live so hard”

  “That I’m not likely to last well. So that I ought to make haste and secure a husband while I’ve got the chance? Lord, what a rush it all is!”

  “I don’t believe you’re seriously in love with him a bit.”

  “I am a bit in love with him, but why seriously? Is love always serious?”

  “It is with Donald.”

  “Yes. And that’s where the gallant had such an advantage over the lover. His mind was free to cultivate all the graces and none of the inconveniences of an ardent passion. Barney, do you not also sometimes regret that love is no longer an art?”

  “I regret that you will talk such rot, and just like a book, too. I can’t think where you get it from as you hardly ever read.”

  Jan yawned suddenly and reached over to put out the g
as, but stopped, with her hand outstretched, to look beneath it at the picture she had stolen from the “Connoisseur” of the ’’ Gentleman Unknown.’’ How peculiarly bright those eyes were, even in that cheap reproduction. They had fascinated her as a child, had drawn her back again and again to look at them. As she looked at him now, the half-smiling, half-questioning lips seemed to be repeating her last question. It was not the first time she had caught him listening to their conversation.

  Barney, already in bed, pursued her thoughts.

  “After all,” she observed in her reflectively calculative way, as though she were engaged in a process of mental arithmetic, “we mayn’t have as good or as easy a time of it as most of the girls we know, but you do come in for a lot of funny experiences. That man might have been quite nice, a new friend— perhaps even useful. You’ve made some real friends almost as oddly—look at those delightful people you met in the train. It’s a pity, in a way, that now you will never know”

  “Barney, don’t!”

  “What’s up? Do you feel you regret it?”

  “Yes, of course. One always regrets everything one hasn’t done. But it’s not that. I can’t bear totting up what one gets or doesn’t get out of life as though it were a commercial proposition.”