Short Stories 1927-1956 (23 page)

‘I think,’ he replied at last, faintly but firmly, ‘I have had enough of this ridiculous imitation street. And I hate the mock. We’ll turn back.’

There was little of the war-horse apparent in him as he wheeled. His mind had nonetheless suddenly cleared. It was finally made up. And he stepped out before his companion as if they had once and for all arranged the future between them. At the gate – the bland, white face of Grummumma’s house, flinging its reflected sunshine in their faces under the low, delicate, pale blue arch of the sky – Eirene paused. ‘You mean,’ she said with a choking voice, ‘that you would prefer me to be –
not
to be a friend. Well, so be it, Cecil. I can’t help myself. I must just bear it. But you shall find that I
am
in spite of you.’

This pathetic challenge, however, only served to consolidate Cecil’s
resolution
. At three o’clock in the afternoon Grummumma was accustomed to shut herself up in her bedroom for half an hour – to relax. She relaxed inch by inch, and then the complete area. It was Eirene’s turn to be sentinel again. She now sat playing very plaintive Mendelssohn in the drawing-room with the door wide open, and most of her attention, if not her actual eye, fixed on the staircase that descended into view beyond it. Cecil had left her there after lunch, and, as she had expected, now sat in his own room,
drinking
in the winning strains.

At half-past four he sent word by the parlour-maid that he would not be down to tea; and Grummumma having returned from relaxing, the two confederates nibbled their thin bread and butter in secret, and exchanged policies. Nonetheless, as if a bird in the air had carried the note, Cecil with door ajar realized the trend of their hushed talk, though he was honestly beyond the possibility of catching any single word of it. ‘What was to
happen
now?’ he was thinking, the eyes in his aching head fixed upon his
teacup
. At half-past five Grummumma went out. Eirene was evidently doing double duty.

At a quarter to seven Mr Mallow, Canon Bagshot’s latest curate, looked in, with a new novel from Mudie’s under his arm. This, he assured Eirene so eagerly that he might himself have been its author, was well worth
reading
. ‘There’s so much clap-trap, so much positive slush published
nowadays
,’ he asserted, ‘that any piece of fiction with a trace of conviction in it
– and I don’t mean necessarily moral conviction – just conviction, is
some thing
to be thankful for. One must face the facts.’

It was at this moment that Cecil came groping silently down the staircase, as if he were a thief in his own house, breaking not in, but out. Mr Mallow was possessed of a resonant voice, a gift that is singularly fortifying when a slim, fair, and possibly slightly feline young woman is sharing its charms. The young man on the other side of the drawing-room wall now had his ungloved fingers on the latch.

‘Face the facts?’ Eirene was trembling. ‘How very interesting, Mr
Mallow
. I should love to read it. There are some novels, you know, that really are rather awful. Still, I
believe
’
–
she opened her blue eyes wide just to show how much she meant it
–
‘I believe I almost prefer some of my facts done up in pretty paper. Is that
very
weak of me?
Men
like things so
dreadfully
bare!’

Cecil was so much engrossed in his private affairs that he did not pause to wonder why Eirene never talked with this particular timbre in her voice in her intercourse with himself. Mr Mallow’s robuster tones broke out once more. ‘You see, dear young lady, nowadays novelists may be said to be divided into three camps. On the one hand we have these deplorable
realists
who think that by calling a spade a spade they are bound to use, and are justified in using, the most deplorable language. On the other we have what I should call the serio-sentimentalists, who try to show life devoid of shadows and who therefore cannot see it whole. And last we have the Shocking School merely out to pull any leg that shows. As for the Feminists – but I am not suggesting, of course …’

But Cecil had by now released the catch of the lock and the heavy door had been softly shut behind him. He was free. And his one desperate desire now was to make that freedom secure. It being Professor Flaxman Smith’s parlour-maid’s afternoon out, she was given no opportunity to open her bright blue eyes wide with astonishment at the sight of ‘that young Mr
Jennings
’ positively running, even though at best it was but a shambling run. But he was covering the ground.

All the peculiar paraphernalia of his life – cracks in the pavement, little windy orgies of dust and straw and dried dung, that same dust stilled and sodden after the night’s rain, hair-pins of every shape, metal, size, and degree of elegance, dead leaves, running ants, scraps of paper, sparrows, drowsing cats, questioning dogs, area railings, basement bars, cooks, kitchen tables, meat on them, fires in summer – all these phenomena now floated past his downcast eyes unheeded. It was Thursday. It was early closing day. With nothing but a name in his mind, and no address, with only the most meagre of hopes in the old trysting-place, he hastened on,
determined
that unless somehow or other Grummumma managed to circumvent
him, he was going to assure himself of one single thing before he returned home. What exactly that thing was, he did not attempt to put into words. He wanted to say something, but first he must find the human being whom he wanted to say it
to.

If the rather starchy-looking, blue-spectacled, elderly Cecil Jennings of thirty years later had ventured out on a similar quest, he would have had an extra hour of daylight, of Summer Time, to help him. This particular evening Cecil’s allowance of light was by that much the more brief. But the skies were fair, the air was fresh and gentle. And after a narrow escape from being run over by a brewer’s dray, he safely circumnavigated the rectory garden wall, and when he had pushed on along the river path to within a few hundred yards or so of the row of bright green lime trees, immediate risk of recognition was safely over.

The quality of the town were not accustomed to enjoy the river path at so late an hour. Maybe too because the day was Thursday and its usual
frequenters
were farther afield, or maybe because fortune was for that one evening in league with him, very few wayfarers indeed were about. The flowers of the dying grass from the first hayswathes in the meadow beyond the stream burdened the air with their strange sweetness. Swallows with tiny clash of beak and
skirr
of wing were hawking up and down the placid water; gnats in their dervish dancing drifted softly in every caprice of the breeze.

With little breath left either in body or spirit, Cecil came to a standstill. His mind was like a deflated balloon. The whole brave venture had
suddenly
become the stupidest goose chase. What preposterous self-confidence had brought him here? What justification, for that matter, had he for being a mere makeweight in the world at all? The burning heart had suddenly become like lead within him. An ailing half-wit dazzled by a shop-girl – the miserable folly of it all! The very beauty of the scene was a mockery and a sneer.

And now that the little sacred wooden bench would soon come within hail, every vestige of confidence forsook him. He felt as helpless and forlorn as a butterfly perishing in the vain attempt to extricate itself from its chrysalis skin. In the innocent hope of disguise, he had crammed on to his head an old soft hat discarded at least five years before. Nor were his clothes of his latest punctilious cut. It was no use. The whole attempt was fatuous. Nothing he could ever do would carry him farther than halfway. He might as well return to the High Street and apply at the Town Hall for a list of drapers and landladies and knock them up one by one. After the deliberate insult of that tea-party, even if he were successful, would she so much as consent to speak to him again? He buttoned his coat, shifted his eye-shade a little from the fretting line it had in his haste bitten into his forehead, and plodded on.

The lime tree was already disclosing the buds of its green-gold dangling racemes that would in a day or two be filling the air with a liquid sweetness as delicious as that of the withering grass. Here and there circlets of ripples showed where rising fish had rent the silken surface of the water. The river flowed on under the evening skies without haste between its banks.
Summer
comes, and goes. How was it possible that, only a few days before, this lovely, gentle, melancholy retreat had shown him a glimpse of Paradise, a paradise ablaze with lightning and shaken with thunder. The very bench, its timber still dark with a shower that had fallen, was eloquent with
deprecation
.

It was anguish to linger here, useless to venture farther, futile to go back. He must just give the problem up, that was all. And all this concern, this fatuity, interjected a sardonic voice (and one not entirely unlike
Grummumma’s),
from somewhere within his mind – all this for the sake of a green-sick shop-assistant! A young woman ineligible even for the parochial guild. A horrid Jesuitical Cartholic! A Cartholic, too, who for curiously conscientious reasons had only just escaped becoming the wife of one of the young puritans of the ‘Parade’. He listened with absolute calm to this harangue, as he stood leaning against the trunk of the tree. ‘But it doesn’t matter, my dear,’ he muttered as if in hope his whisper might penetrate to the ear of the secret Dryad slumbering beneath its smooth, dark rind. ‘Nothing in the world would matter if only you would come!’

Humanity for the most part is so confident in the skill of its senses that it seldom realizes how severe are their limitations. Not to be able to divine where the long-sought-for lost thing lies concealed in one’s own small earthly house; not to be able to see through even a sheet of paper; not to be aware that one’s nearest and dearest at but a hundred paces’ distance is in deadly danger; not to hear the faintest echo of the burning or icy thoughts in a close companion’s mind – such is man’s queer fate in his inexhaustibly rich environment. And yet poor Cecil never regretted the agony of the next few minutes of irresolution and despair, even though, as he was to discover when they were over, it was only a universal insensitiveness that was
keeping
him unaware.

Unaware, that is, that not twenty yards distant, and seated on the damp grass on the shelving bank of the river, her hands clasping her knees, was the young woman he longed for, her head turned towards him at an acute angle, her dark, quick eyes drinking him in. It seemed that she had made up her mind to give him time, and to give him his own time. Without
otherwise
stirring, she turned her head away again, and once more steadily
surveyed
the flowing water.

The narrow cheek-bones under the low brow and the straight black
eyebrows
were as pale as ivory in the reflected light of an almost colourless sunset. It was in part the usual pallor of shop life and in part the result of poor food and indifferent sleep. But then ivory itself does not take to itself this particular bloom until the animal that grew it has gone into the dark. Peace itself to be sitting here now after the awful conflict, inward and
outward
, of the last few days. Other battles had left ugly indelible scars, and yet she had come through – what was left of her. The long agonized inward conflict of the last few days was over. All was lost. And yet the world had never looked so lovely, so hard to abandon, nor had she herself ever been so utterly at rest. She had never much cared what became of her, not at least until that absurd morning when her missing glove had been all but restored. And now, after a black, exhausting night, when dreams in the shallow sleep that had at last closed in upon her mind at the first cheeping of the sparrows had only increased her torments by a conviction of hopeless inefficiency, she knew exactly
what
was to become of her. But she had never for an instant foreseen that in the meantime she would meet again the one human being who had been the final cause of her decision.

Already in the waning light her face appeared a little duskier, its grave scrutiny fixed on that profoundly lustrous and fluid looking-glass. She speculated how deep it actually was; smiled inwardly at the thought of how shallow it need be. She gazed across the sliding water and watched a moment with a curious spiritual greed in her eyes the haze-swathed fields with their fringe of solemn and gigantic elms. Her nostrils quivered as if with a suppressed sigh or shudder as she breathed in the honey of the first few linden flowers. It was a mysterious thing to be alive, or rather, not so much to be alive as to be one’s only means of sharing all this. When she was gone it would be all gone too – except, of course, what might come after. And she hadn’t much time to think very closely about that.

Still, she was quite accustomed to finding pinned on with a midget pin in the corner of every scrap even of machine-made lace or the flimsiest of handkerchiefs that she proffered across the counter, its precise price to the uttermost farthing. So she was unlikely to fail to realize that not only
whatever
happens in this world, but whatever one is responsible for in it, and buys or sells of oneself, has had affixed to it its own price also. And that, too, to the uttermost farthing. And yet it was a luxury to feel her hands clasped round her bony shins and to be huddling like this with her limbs and body close together in this quiet, rain-soaked grass that would certainly teach her all in good time not to be so imprudent. An overwhelming
remorse
for the fate of her own body suddenly swept over her. It would be a pity to waste it.

And then, very cautiously, stealthily almost, as if even the soundless grinding of one sinew of the neck against another might be audible in
this intense hush of evening, she turned her head once more and surveyed the stiff, awkward-looking shape now humped up so inanimately on its wooden bench under the tree. It would be silly, as well as unkind, perhaps, to keep him there any longer. She gave a little sort of nod at the water, much the same sort of little nod that she was accustomed to give when she had jotted down the total of a customer’s bill on the piece of cardboard at the end of her shop-book. Then she rose, stole up the bank, and went over to where Cecil was sitting.