Collected Stories (30 page)

“I thought it was the usual thing to ask a girl to go to the pictures with you first,” she said with a brassy air that wouldn't have taken in a child.

“I wouldn't know,” murmured Gussie in amusement. “Anyway, I suppose I thought you weren't the usual sort of girl.”

“But if you get it as easy as that, how do you know if it's the real thing or not?” she asked.

“How do you know anything is the real thing?” he retorted. “As you say yourself, you have to take things as you find them.”

“Taking them as you find them doesn't mean swallowing them whole,” she said. “It would be rather late in the day to change your mind about a thing like that.”

“But what difference does it make?” he asked wonderingly. “It happens every day of the week. You do it yourself with boys you go out walking with. You spoon with them till you find they bore you and then you drop them. There's no difference. You don't suddenly change your character. People don't say when they meet you in the street: ‘How different that girl is looking! You can see she has a man.' Of course, if you attach so much importance to the physical side of it—”

“I do,” she said quickly. By this time Gussie noticed to his surprise that she was almost laughing. She had got over her fright and hurt and felt that in argument she was more than a match for him. “Isn't it awful?” she added brightly. “But I'm very queer like that.”

“Oh, there's nothing queer about it,” Gussie said, determined on keeping control of the situation and not letting her away with anything. “It's just ordinary schoolgirl romanticism.”

“Is that all?” she asked lightly, and though she pretended not to care he saw she was stung. “You have an answer for everything, haven't you?”

“If you call that everything, my dear child,” he replied paternally patting her on the shoulder. “I call it growing pains. I don't know, with that romantic nature of yours, whether you've noticed that there's a nasty wind coming up the canal.”

“No,” she said archly, “I hadn't,” and then turned to face him, resting her elbow on the coping of the bridge. “Anyhow, I like it. Go on with what you were saying. Being romantic is thinking you ought to stick to someone you're fond of, isn't that it?”

Gussie was amused again. The girl was so transparent. It was clear now that she was in love with some young fellow who couldn't afford to marry her and that they were scarifying one another in the usual adolescent rough-and-tumble without knowing what ailed them.

“No, my dear, it isn't,” said Gussie. “Being romantic is thinking you're very fond of someone you really don't give a damn about, and imagining on that account that you're never going to care for anyone else. It goes with your age. Come on now, or you'll be catching something worse.”

“You don't mean you were ever like that?” she asked, taking his arm again as they went on down Pembroke Road. Even her tone revealed her mingled fascination and loathing. It didn't worry Gussie. He was used to it.

“Oh,” he said sentimentally, “we all go through it.”

There were a lot of contradictions in Gussie. Despising youth and its illusions, he could scarcely ever think of his own youth without self-pity. He had been lonely enough; sometimes he felt no one had ever been so lonely. He had woken up from a nice, well-ordered, intelligible world to find eternity stretching all round him and no one, priest or scientist, who could explain it to him. And with that awakening had gone the longing for companionship and love which he had not known how to satisfy, and often he had walked for hours, looking up at the stars and thinking that if only he could meet an understanding girl it would all explain itself naturally. The picture of Gussie's youth seemed to amuse Helen.

“Go on!” she said gaily, her face turned to his, screwed up with mischief. “I could have sworn you must have been born like that. How did you get sense so young?”

“Quite naturally,” Gussie said with a grave priestly air. “I saw I was only making trouble for myself, as you're doing now, and as there seemed to be quite enough trouble in the world without that, I gave it up.”

“And lived happy ever after?” she said mockingly. “And the women you knock round with? Aren't they romantic either?”

“Not since they were your age,” he said mockingly.

“You needn't rub it in about the age,” she said without taking umbrage. “It'll cure itself soon enough. Tell us more about your girls—the married ones, for instance.”

“That's easy,” he said. “There's only one at the moment.”

“And her husband? Does he know?”

“I never asked him,” Gussie said slyly. “But I dare say he finds it more convenient not to.”

“Obliging sort of chap,” she said. “I could do with a man like that myself.”

Gussie stopped dead. As I say there were contradictions in Gussie, and for some reason her scorn of Francie's husband filled him with indignation. It was so uncalled-for, so unjust!

“Now you are talking like a schoolgirl,” he said reproachfully.

“Am I?” she asked doubtfully, noticing the change in him. “How?”

“What business have you talking in that tone about a man you never met?” Gussie went on, growing quite heated. “He isn't a thief or a blackguard. He's a decent, good-natured man. It's not his fault if after seventeen or eighteen years of living together his wife and himself can't bear the living sight of one another. That's a thing that happens everybody. He only does what he thinks is the best thing for his family. You think, I suppose, that he should take out a gun to defend his wife's honor?”

“I wasn't thinking of her honor,” she protested quietly.

“His own then?” Gussie cried mockingly. “At the expense of his wife and children? He's to drag her name in the mud all because some silly schoolgirl might think his position undignified. Ah, for goodness' sake, child, have sense! His wife would have something to say to that. Besides, don't you see that at his age it would be a very serious thing if she was to leave him?”

“More serious than letting her go to your flat—how often did you say?”

“Now you're talking like a little cat,” he snapped, and went on. He really was furious. “But as a matter of fact it would,” he went on in a more reasonable tone. “Where she goes in the evenings is nobody's business. Whether the meals are ready is another matter. They have two daughters at school— one nearly the one age with yourself.”

“I wonder if he lets them out at night,” she said dryly. “And what sort of woman is their mother?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” said Gussie, “but she's a great sort; a woman who'd give you her heart out.”

“I wonder what she'd say if she heard you asking another girl to spend the night,” she added in the same casual tone. Gussie was beginning to conceive a considerable respect for her tongue.

“Ah,” he said without conviction, “I don't suppose she has many illusions left,” but the girl had scored and she knew it. The trouble with Francie was that she had far too many illusions left, even about Gussie. And the greatest illusion of all was that if only she had married a man whose intelligence she respected as she respected his, she could have been faithful to him.

“She can't have,” said Helen, “but I still have a few.”

“Oh, you!” Gussie said with a jolly laugh which had got him out of many tight corners. “You're walking with them.”

“They must be in the family,” she said. “Daddy died five years ago and Mum still thinks he was the one really great man that walked the world.”

“I dare say,” Gussie said wearily. “And they were probably often sick to death of one another.”

“They were,” she agreed. “They used to fight like mad and not talk for a week, and then Dad would go on the booze and Mum would take it out of me. Cripes, I used to go up to him with my bottom so sore I could hardly sit down and there he'd be sprawled in his big chair with his arms hanging down, looking into the grate as if 'twas the end of the world, and he'd just beckon me to come on his knee. We'd stop like that for hours without opening our gobs, just thinking what a bitch of hell Mum was.… But the thing is, young man, they stuck it out, and when 'tis her turn to go, she won't regret it because she's certain the Boss will be waiting for her. She goes to Mass every morning but that's only not to give God any excuse for making distinctions. Do you think he will?”

“Who will?” said Gussie. In a curious way the story had gripped him. A woman could bawl her heart out on Gussie, and he'd only think her a nuisance, but he was exceedingly vulnerable to indirect sentiment.

“The Boss,” she explained. “Meet her, I mean?”

“Well,” Gussie said feebly, “there's nothing like optimism.” At the same time he knew he was not being altogether truthful, because orthodoxy was one of Gussie's strongest lines.

“I know,” the girl said quickly. “That's the lousy part of it. But I suppose she's lucky even to be able to kid herself about it. Death doesn't frighten her the way it frightens me.… But that's what I mean by love, Mr. L.,” she added lightheartedly.

“I hope you get it, Miss C.,” replied Gussie in the same tone.

“I don't suppose I'm likely to,” she said with resignation. “There doesn't seem to be much of it round. I suppose it's the shortage of optimists.”

When they reached her flat, she leaned against the railings with her legs crossed and her hands behind her back—again a boyish attitude which attracted Gussie.

“Well, good night, Miss Romantic,” he said ceremoniously, taking her hand and kissing it.

“Good night, Don Juan,” she replied to Gussie's infinite delight. Nobody had ever called Gussie that before.

“When do I see you again?”

“Are you sure you want to see me?” she asked with light mockery. “An old-fashioned girl like me!”

“I still have hopes of converting you,” said Gussie.

“That's marvellous,” she said. “I love being converted. I was nearly converted by a parson once. Give us a ring-up some time.”

“I will to be sure,” said Gussie, and it was not until he reached the canal bridge that he realized he had really meant: “What a fool you think I am!” He felt sore all over. “The trouble with me is that I'm getting things too easy,” he thought. He felt exactly like a man with a thousand a year whom somebody wanted to push back into the thirty-shilling-a-week class. Thirty shillings a week was all right when you had never been accustomed to anything else, but to Gussie it meant only one thing—destitution. He knew exactly what he would be letting himself in for if he took the girl on her own terms; the same thing that same poor devil of a boy was enduring with her now; park benches and canal banks with a sixty-mile-an-hour gale blowing round the corner, and finally she would be detained at the office—by a good-looking chap in uniform. “What a fool I am!” he thought mockingly.

But even to find himself summing up the odds like this was a new experience for Gussie. He was attracted by the girl; he couldn't deny that. Instead of crossing the bridge he turned up the moonlit walk by the canal. This was another new thing and he commented ironically on it to himself. “Now this, Gussie,” he said, “is what you'll be letting yourself in for if you're not careful.” He suddenly realized what it was that attracted him. It was her resemblance to Joan, a girl who had crossed for a moment his lonely boyhood. He had haunted the roads at night, trying to catch even a glimpse of her as she passed. She was a tall, thin, reedy girl, and, though Gussie did not know it, already far gone with the disease which killed her. On the night before she left for the sanatorium he had met her coming from town, and as they came up the hill she had suddenly slipped her hand into his. So she too, it seemed, had been lonely. He had been too shy to look for more; he hadn't even wished to ask for more. Perfectly happy, he had held her hand the whole way home and neither had spoken a word. It had been something complete and perfect, for in six months' time she was dead. He still dreamt of her sometimes. Once he dreamt that she came into the room where he was sitting with Francie, and sat on the other side of him and spoke to Francie in French, but Francie was too indignant to reply.

And now, here he was fifteen years later feeling the same sort of thing about another girl who merely reminded him of her, and though he knew Helen was talking rubbish he understood perfectly what she wanted; what Joan had wanted that night before she went to the sanatorium; something bigger than life that would last beyond death. He felt himself a brute for trying to deprive her of her illusions. Perhaps people couldn't do without illusions. Walking by the canal in the moonlight, Gussie felt he would give anything to be able to feel like that about a woman again. Even a sixty-mile-an-hour gale would not have put him off.

Then, as he came back up the street from the opposite direction, he noticed how the moonlight fell on the doctors' houses at the other side. His was in darkness. He put his key in the lock and then started, feeling frightened and weak. There was a figure by the door, leaning back against the railings, her hands by her side, her face very white. She stood there as though hoping he would pass without noticing her. “It's Joan” was his first thought, and then: “She's coming back,” and finally, with a growing feeling of incredulity: “So it does last.” He looked again and saw who it really was.

“My goodness, Helen,” he said almost petulantly, “what are you doing here?”

“Well,” she said in a low voice, doing her best to smile, “you see I was converted after all.”

He led her silently up the stairs with a growing feeling of relief, but it wasn't until they were in his own flat that he really knew how overjoyed he was. It was all over now, but he felt he had been through a really terrible temptation, the temptation of a lifetime. Only that people might interpret it wrongly, and he was really a most decorous man, he would have said his guardian angel had been looking after him.