This was before the war, and conditions were such that the tragedies and comedies of private lives seemed still to have importance.
I had not seen my friend Frank Weymouth for some years before coming across him and his wife that Christmas at the big hotel in Heliopolis. He was always a sunny fellow with a spilt-wine look about him, which not even a house-mastership at a Public School had been able to overcome; his wife, whom I had only met twice before, surprised me a little. I remembered a quiet, rather dark little person with a doubting eye; but this was a very kitten of a woman, brimful of mischief and chaff, and always on the go—reaction, no doubt, from the enforced decorum of a house where she was foster-mother of forty boys, in an atmosphere of being under glass and the scrutiny of intensive propriety. In our Egyptian hotel, with its soft, clever Berberine servants, its huge hall, palm-garden, and cosmopolitan guests, its golf-course with little dark, scurrying Arab caddies and thedesert at its doors, Jessie Weymouth frolicked and rolled her large dark eyes, scratched and caressed us with her little paws. Life had suddenly got into her, and left its tail outside for her to chase. She dragged us all along in her gay pursuit of it; Weymouth smilingly acquiesced in her outrageous ‘goings-on.’ He knew, I suppose, that she was devoted to him, and her bark no bite. His ‘term’ had been a hard one; he was in a mood of lying back, physically run down, mentally flattened out. To soak in idleness and the sun was all he seemed to care about.
I forget who first conceived the notion of our desert trip, but it was Jessie Weymouth who fostered it. The Weymouths were not rich, and a desert trip costs money. They, myself, and a certain Breconridge couple had agreed to combine, when the Breconridges were suddenly summoned home by their daughter’s illness. Jessie Weymouth danced with disappointment. “I shall die if we don’t go now,” she cried. “We simply must scare up somebody.”
We scared up the Radolins, an Austrian couple in our hotel whom we had been meeting casually after dinner. He was a Count, in a bank at Constantinople, and she, I think, the daughter of a Viennese painter. They used to interest me frombeing so very much the antithesis of the Weymouths. He was making the most of his holiday, dancing, playing golf, riding; while she seemed extraordinarily listless, pale, and, as it were, dragged along by her lively husband. I would notice her lounging alone in the gorgeous hall, gazing apparently at nothing. I could not make up my mind about her looks. Her figure was admirable, so were her eyes—ice-green with dark lashes. But that air of tired indifference seemed to spoil her face. I remember doubting whether it were not going to spoil our trip. But Jessie Weymouth could not be denied, and Radolin, we all admitted, was good company.
We started, then, from Mena House, like all desert excursionists, on New Year’s Day. We had only a fortnight before us, for the Weymouths were due back in England on the twentieth.
Our dragoman was a merry scoundrel by disposition and an Algerian Bedouin by race. Besides him we had twelve Arabs, a Greek cook, seven camels, four donkeys, and five tents. We took the usual route for the Fayoum. I remember our start so well. In front, Jessie Weymouth on a silver-grey donkey, and our scoundrel on his pet camel. Then Radolin, Weymouth, and I on the other three donkeys, and Hélène Radolin perchedup, remote and swaying, on the other riding-camel. The pack-camels had gone on ahead. All day we dawdled along, following the river towards Samara, where we camped at a due distance from that evil-smelling village. I had the middle tent, Weymouths to my right, Radolins to my left. Everything was well done by our merry dragoman, and dinner, thanks to him, Jessie Weymouth, and Radolin, a lively feast. Still, these first three days, skirting cultivation, were disappointing. But on the fourth we were well out on the lonely sands, and the desert air had begun to go to our heads. That night we camped among bare hills under a wonderful starry sky, cold and clear as crystal. Our scoundrel surpassed himself at dinner; Jessie Weymouth and Radolin were madcaps; Weymouth his old sunny self. Only Hélène Radolin preserved her languor; not offensively, but as though she had lost the habit of gaiety. That night I made up my mind, however, that she really was a beautiful woman. The long days in the sun had given her colour, taken the tired look out of her face, and at least twice during the evening I caught Weymouth’s eyes fixed on her as if he, too, had made that discovery.
The pranks of Jessie Weymouth and Radolin reached their limit at dinner, and they finished byrushing out into the night to the top of a neighbouring hillock.
Sitting in my tent doorway, counting the stars, I was joined by our dragoman. The fellow had been in England and knew about Western freedom and the manners of our women.
“She certainly is a good one, Mrs. Weymut,” he said to me. “Mr. Weymut a very quiet man. I think he will be tired of her flirts, but he never say nothing—too b——y gentle. The Count he is a good one too, but the Countess—ah! she made of ice! We get some fresh fruit to-morrow at the Fayoum.”
He went on to his men, two hundred yards away among the camels.
It was wonderfully silent. The light from stars and a half-moon powdered the sands; no wind at all, yet deliciously cold—the desert in good mood; no influence quite so thrilling to pulses, yet so cooling to fevers; no sound, no movement in all the night.
“Isn’t it heavenly? Good-night.”
Hélène Radolin was passing me in her fur. She went into her tent. I sat on, smoking. And presently, outside the dining-tent, I saw Weymouth, his head thrown back, drawing in deep breaths. By the light of the lantern over the tentdoor he had a look as if inspired by a curious happy wonder. Then he, too, went to his tent. Ten minutes later the madcaps returned, Mrs. Weymouth in front, very quiet; her face, indeed, wore a rather mortified expression, as if she had fallen a little in her own estimation. They went into their tents, and I heard voices a moment to left and right; then the stillness and the powdering light enveloped all.
Next day, bored with donkey riding, I walked with the Arabs and saw little of my companions. Weymouth and the Countess, I think, were on the two riding-camels, Radolin and Mrs. Weymouth on their donkeys. We came to the edge of the Fayoum about five o’clock. That camping-ground was narrow. In tents, when jammed together, one can’t avoid hearing at least the tone of neighbouring talk, and I was struck by a certain acrimony in the Weymouth tent. Jessie Weymouth seemed complaining that Frank hadn’t spoken to her all day.
“I suppose,” she said, “you didn’t like my running out with Countie last night?”
Weymouth’s voice, quite good-humoured, answered:
“Oh, not a bit, why should I mind?”
By the ensuing silence I seemed to realise thatJessie Weymouth was disappointed. Perhaps I hadn’t really a feeling of suspense that evening, but, in reminiscence, it seems to me I had. Dinner was certainly a disharmonic feast: little Mrs. Weymouth audacious and rueful, Weymouth and the Countess subdued, Radolin artificial, our scoundrel and myself had to make the running. That fellow was needle-sharp, though not always correct in his conclusions.
“Mrs. Weymut got a fly in her little eye,” he said to me as I was turning in. “I make it all right to-morrow. I get a dancer at Sennourès. Oho, she is a good one! She make the married couples ’appy. We get some fresh eggs too.”
Severe silence in the tents to right and left that night.
A whole day’s travelling through the crops of the Fayoum brought us to the camping-ground outside Sennourès, among a grove of palm-trees—charming spot, but lacking the clear, cold spirituality of the desert night.
The dancer was certainly ‘a good one.’ What a baggage! All lithe, supple enticement, and jangle of shivering beads! The excitement of the Arabs, the shocked, goggling eyes of Jessie Weymouth—quite a little Puritan when it came to the point—the laughter of our scoundrel, HélèneRadolin’s aloofness, which kept even that daughter of Egypt in her place, were what impressed me during the performance.
Towards the end the Egyptian made a dead set at Weymouth, and, getting nothing out of him except his smile, became quite cross. Leaning down to our scoundrel and slinking her eyes round at the Countess, she murmured something malicious. Our laughing scoundrel patted her, and we broke up. In ten minutes our camp was empty—dancer, Arabs, all had gone off to the village. I went out and stood in darkness among the palm-trees, listening to the shivering of their leaves.
In the dining-tent Radolin was playing the guitar—a soothing sound after the vibrant Arab music. Presently I saw Weymouth come out. He stood under the lamp at the entrance, looking back; his face was fully lighted for me, but invisible, I think, to those within. I can still see the look on it. Adoration incarnate!
‘Hallo!’ I thought, ‘what’s this?’ And just then Hélène Radolin came out too. She passed him quietly; he did not attempt to speak or follow; but she saw. Oh, yes, she saw; then vanished into her tent. And Weymouth stood, rooted, as if struck by lightning, while, on and on, behindhim rose the thrum of that guitar and all around us the shivering of the palm-leaves in a gusty breeze.
Quite the custom, I believe, in these days to laugh at this sort of thing—at such sudden leaps of an irresponsible force; to suggest that they are old-fashioned, overrated—literary, in fact. The equality of the sexes—they say—the tendency of women towards brains and trousers, have diminished Venus; and yet, I fancy what happened to my friend Weymouth may still happen to young gentlemen who talk as if love had no fevers and no proprietary instincts; as if, when you burn for a woman, you are willing to leave her to another, or share her with him without fuss. Of course there are men who have no blood in their veins; but my friend Weymouth unfortunately had—not for nothing was the sunny, spilt-wine look about his hair and cheeks and dark-blue eyes.
For the rest of our desert trip the situation hopelessly promoted that adoration. Little Jessie Weymouth certainly did her best to help. She was the only one of us blind to what had happened. Her perceptions, you see, were blunted by the life of strenuous duty which she and Weymouth led in term time, and by the customary exhaustion ofher husband during the holidays. She could not imagine him otherwise than sober. But now—if ever a man were drunk! The thing became so patent that it was quite painful to see her continued blindness. Not till sunset of the second day, with the Fayoum behind us, in our high camp on the desert’s edge, did she appreciate tragedy.Those twowere sitting in camp-chairs close together, watching the sun go down. The Arabs, presented with a ram to soothe their grief at abandoning the joys of the Fayoum, were noisily preparing the animal to the idea of being eaten. Our scoundrel and Radolin were absent; I was sketching; Jessie Weymouth lying down in her tent. Those two were alone—their faces turned towards each other, their hands, perhaps, touching. A strange violet was in the light over the bare hills; how much they saw of it I know not, nor what they were saying to each other, when Jessie Weymouth came out of her tent, stretching and yawning, and, like the kitten she was, went stealing up behind, to startle them. Three yards away, unseen, unheard, I saw her stop. Her lips opened, her eyes went wide with amazement. Suddenly she covered them with her hands, turned round, and stole back into her tent.
Five minutes later out she came again, withbright, hard spots of colour in her cheeks. I saw her run up to them, her feverish attempts at gaiety; and I saw, too, that to them she simply did not exist. We none of us existed for them. They had found a world of their own, and we were shadows in the unreal world which they had left. You know the pink-flowered daphne, the scent of whose blossoms is very sweet, heavy, and slightly poisonous; sniff it too much and a kind of feverish fire will seize you. Those two had sniffed the daphne!
Walls have a singular value for civilised beings. In my thin tent between the thin tents of those two couples, prevented by lack of walls from any outlet to their feelings, I seemed to hear the smothered reproaches, the smothered longings. It was the silence of those two suddenly stricken lovers that was so impressive. I, literally, did not dare to speak to Weymouth while we were all mixed up like that. This English schoolmaster had lost, as if by magic, all power of seeing himself as others saw him. Not that those two ‘carried on’—nothing so normal; they just seemed to have stepped into quiet oblivion of everything but each other.
Even our scoundrel was puzzled. “In my house, when my wife behave bad, I beat her,” he said tome; “when I behave bad she scratch my face.” But there it was—we had no walls; Hélène Radolin could not be beaten, Weymouth could not have his face scratched—most awkward.
Things come to an end, and I never breathed more freely than when Mena House delivered us from that frightful close companionship.
As if by common consent, we dined at separate tables. After dinner I said to Weymouth:
“Come up and see the Sphinx by moonlight.”
He came, still in his dream. We reached the Sphinx in silence, and sat down over against her on the sand. At last I said:
“What are you going to do now, old man?”
“I can’t leave her.” It was as if we had discussed the thing a dozen times already.
“But you have to be back on the twentieth?”
“I know.”
“My dear fellow, it’s ruination. And Jessie?”
“She must do what she likes.”
“This is madness, Frank!”
“Perhaps. I can’t go; that’s all.”
“What abouther?”
“I don’t know. I only know that where she goes I must.”
I just sat staring at the blunt shadow of the Sphinx’s broken profile on the moonlit sand. Thestrange, actionless, desert love-dream was at an end! Something definite—horrible, perhaps—must happen now! And I stammered out:
“For God’s sake, old boy, think of your wife, your work, yourself—be reasonable! It isn’t worth it, really!”
“Perhaps not. This has nothing to do with reason.”
From a master at an English Public School the remark appeared to me fantastic. And, suddenly, he got up, as if he had been bitten. He was realising suddenly the difference that walls make. His face had a tortured look. The woman he loved, walled up with the man she had married! Behind us the desert, hundreds of miles of clean, savage sand, and in it we humans—tame and spiritual! Before us walls, and we humans—savage, carnal again! Queer! I doubt if he saw the irony; but he left me sitting there and went hurrying back to the hotel.
I stayed on a little with the riddle of the Ages, feeling it simple compared with this riddle of the moment. Then I followed him down. Would it resolve itself in terms of l. s. d.? After all, these four people had to live—could they afford to play fast and loose with the realities? Hélène Radolin had no money; Weymouth his mastership and afew hundreds saved; Jessie Weymouth a retired Colonel for a father; Radolin his banking partnership.
A night of walls had its effect. Radolin took his wife back to Heliopolis next day. The Weymouths remained at Mena House; in three days they were due to sail.
I well remember thinking: ‘There, you see, it doesn’t do to exaggerate. This was a desert mirage and will pass like one. People are not struck by lightning!’ But in a mood of morbid curiosity I went out to Heliopolis.
In the tramcar on the way I felt a sort of disappointment—Hélène Radolin was a Roman Catholic, Frank Weymouth an English gentleman. The two facts put a stopper on what I wanted stopped. Yet we all have a sneaking love for the romantic, or—shall we say?—dramatic.
Well! The Radolins were gone. They had started that morning for Constantinople. In the Oriental hall where all this had begun I sat, browsing over my Turkish coffee, seeing again my friend Weymouth, languid and inert; his little wife’s flirtatious liveliness; Radolin so debonair; Hélène Radolin, silent, her ice-green eyes slightly reddened in the lids as if she had been crying. The white-garbed Berberines slipped by; Greekgentlemen entertained their dubious ladies; Germans raised a guttural racket; the orchestra twanged out the latest tango. Nothing was changed but those figures of my vision. And suddenly Weymouth materialised—standing as if lost, just where the lobby opened into the hall. From his face it was clear to me that he knew the Radolins were gone; before I could join him he went out hastily. I am sorry now that I did not follow.
That evening at Mena House I was just beginning to undress when Jessie Weymouth tapped on my door.
“Have you seen Frank?”
I told her where I had seen him in the afternoon.
“That woman!” she cried. “He’s not come back.”
I assured her that the Radolins were gone back home. She stared at me and began to cry. She cried and cried, and I did not try to stop her. She was not only desolate and miserable, but bitter and angry. ‘So long as she can be angry,’ I thought, ‘she’ll get over it. One is not angry under a death-blow.’
At last she had cried her misery out, but not her anger or dismay. What was she to do? I tried to persuade her that Frank would turn up in time for them to start to-morrow evening. He wasprobably trying to work the thing out of his system; she must look on it as a fever, a kind of illness. She laughed wildly, scornfully, and went out.
Weymouth did not turn up, but the morning brought me a letter, enclosing a cheque for three hundred pounds, a note to his wife, and a sealed envelope addressed to the headmaster of his Public School.
The letter to me ran as follows:
“Old Man,“I admit that I am behaving like a cad; but it’s either this or the sweet waters of oblivion; and there’s less scandal this way. I have made up some story for my chief; please post it. The cheque is for all my substance except some fifty pounds. Take care of it for my wife; she’ll get another five hundred, about, out of the turnover of our house. She will go to her father, no doubt, and forget me, I hope. Do, please, like a good fellow, see her safely on board. It’s not likely that I shall ever come back to England. The future is quite dark, but wheresheis, there I must be. Poste restante Constantinople will find me, so far as I know at present. Good-bye!“Your affectionate“F. W.”
“Old Man,
“I admit that I am behaving like a cad; but it’s either this or the sweet waters of oblivion; and there’s less scandal this way. I have made up some story for my chief; please post it. The cheque is for all my substance except some fifty pounds. Take care of it for my wife; she’ll get another five hundred, about, out of the turnover of our house. She will go to her father, no doubt, and forget me, I hope. Do, please, like a good fellow, see her safely on board. It’s not likely that I shall ever come back to England. The future is quite dark, but wheresheis, there I must be. Poste restante Constantinople will find me, so far as I know at present. Good-bye!
“Your affectionate“F. W.”
I did see Jessie Weymouth on board her ship, and a precious business it was.
A week later I, too, started for Constantinople, partly because I had promised Mrs. Weymouth,partly because I could not reconcile myself to the vision of my friend in the grip of his passion, without a job, almost without money.
The Radolins inhabited an old house on the far shore almost opposite the Rumeli Hissar. I called on them without warning, and found Hélène Radolin alone. In a room all Turkish stuffs and shadowy lights, she looked very different from her desert self. She had regained her pale languor, but her face had a definite spirit, lacking when I first saw her. She spoke quite freely.
“I love him; but it is madness. I have tried to send him away; he will not go. You see, I am a Catholic; my religion means much to me. I must not go away with him. Take him back to England with you; I cannot bear to see him ruin his life like this for me.”
I confess to looking at her with the wonder whether it was religion or the lack of l. s. d.
“Ah!” she said. “You don’t understand; you think I am afraid of poverty with him. No! I am afraid of losing my soul, and his.”
The way she said that was extraordinarily impressive. I asked her if she saw him.
“Yes; he comes. I have to let him. I cannot bear the look on his face when I say ‘No.’” She gave me his address.
He had a garret in a little Greek hotel, justabove Galata—a ramshackle place, chosen for its cheapness. He did not seem surprised to see me. But I was startled. His face, shrunken and lined, had a bitter, burnt-up look, which deepened the set and colour of his eyes till they looked almost black. A long bout of disease will produce just that effect.
“If she didn’t love me,” he said, “I could bear it. But she does. Well! So long as I can see her I shall stand it; and she’ll come—she’ll come to me at last.”
I repeated her words to me; I spoke of his wife, of England—no memory, no allusion, no appeal touched him.
I stayed a month and saw him nearly every day; I did not move him by one jot. At the end of that month I should never have known him for the Frank Weymouth who had started out with us from Mena House on New Year’s Day. Changed! He was! I had managed to get him a teaching job through a man I knew at the Embassy—a poor enough job—a bare subsistence. And, watching my friend day by day, I began to have a feeling of hatred for that woman. Yet I knew that her refusal to indulge their passion was truly religious. She really did see her lost soul and his, whirling entwined through purgatory, like the soulsof Paola and Francesca in Watts’ picture. Call it superstition, or what you will, her scruples were entirely genuine, and, from a certain point of view, quite laudable.
As for Radolin, he took it all precisely as if there were nothing to take; smooth and debonair as ever—a little harder about the mouth and eyes, and that was all.
The morning before I went home I made my way once more up the evil-smelling stairs to my friend’s garret. He was standing at the window, looking down over the bridge—that tragic bridge of Galata where the blind and halt used to trade, perhaps still trade, the sight of their misfortunes. We stood there side by side.
“Frank,” I said, “this can’t go on! Do you ever look at yourself in the glass?”
No smile can be so bitter as a smile that used to be sunny.
“So long as I can see her I shall last out.”
“You surely don’t want a woman to feel she’s lost her soul, and is making you lose yours? She’s perfectly sincere in that.”
“I know. I’ve given up asking. So long as I can see her, that’s all.”
It was mania!
That afternoon I took a boat over to theRadolins. It was April—the first real day of spring, balmy and warm. The Judas-trees of the Rumeli Hissar were budding, the sun colouring the water with tints of opal; and all the strange city of mosques and minarets, Western commerce and Oriental beggary, was wonderfully living under that first spring sun. I brought my boat up to the Radolins’ landing-stage, and got out. I mounted the steps, greened over by the wash of the water, and entered their little garden courtyard. I had never come this way before, and stood for a moment looking through the mimosas and bougainvillæas for a door that would satisfy formality. There was a grille to the left, but to reach it I would have to pass in front of the wide ground-floor window, whence I had sometimes looked out over the water to the Rumeli Hissar. My shoes made no noise on the marble path, but what I saw in the room stopped me from trying to pass.
Hélène Radolin was sitting perfectly still in a low chair sideways to the window, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the tiled floor, where a streak of sunlight fell. In the curve of her grand piano, resting his elbows on it, Weymouth was leaning back, equally still, gazing down at her. That was all. But the impression I received of life arrested, of frozen lava, was in a way terrible.I stole back down the steps into my boat, and out on to the opal-tinted waters.
I have nothing more to tell you of this business. The war came down on us all soon after. Rumours I have heard, but I know nothing, as they say, of my own knowledge. Yet it has seemed to me worth while to set down this record of a ‘stroke of lightning’ in days when people laugh at such absurdities.
1921.
Harold Mellesh, minor clerk in an accident assurance society, having occasion to be present at a certain police court to give evidence in the matter of a smashed car, stood riveted by manifestations of the law entirely new to him. His eyes, blue and rather like those of a baby, were opened very widely, his ingenuous forehead wrinkled, his curly hair was moving on his scalp, his fists involuntarily clenching his straw hat. He had seen four ladies of the town dealt with—three ‘jugged,’ and one fined—before his sensations reached their climax. Perhaps she was prettier than the others, certainly younger, and she was crying.
“First time you’ve been here—two pounds, and ten shillings costs.”
“But I haven’t any money, sir.”
“Very well—fourteen days.”
Tears streaking the remains of powder; a queer little sound—the sensations within young Mellesh simmered like a kettle coming to the boil. He touched a dark blue sleeve in front of him.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll pay her fine.”
He felt the glance of the policeman running over him like a chilly insect.
“Friend of yours?”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t, then. She’ll be here again within the month.”
The girl was passing, he saw the swallowing movement of her throat and said with desperation:
“I don’t care. I’ll pay it.”
The blue man’s glance crept about him clammily.
“Come with me, then.”
Young Mellesh followed him out.
“Here,” said his policeman to the one in charge of the girl, “this gentleman’ll pay the fine.”
Conscious of a confusion of glances, of his own cheeks reddening furiously, young Mellesh brought out his money—just two pounds fifteen; and, handing over the two pounds ten, he thought, ‘My hat! What would Alice say?’
He heard the girl’s gasped out “Ow! Thank you!” his policeman’s muttered “Waste o’ money!” and passed out into the street. Now that his feelings had given off that two pound ten’s worth of steam he felt chilly and dazed, as if virtue had gone out of him. A voice behind him said:
“Thank you ever so much—itwaskind of you.”
Raising his straw hat he stood uncomfortably, to let her pass.
She pushed a card into his hand. “Any time you’re passing, I’ll be glad to see you; I’m very grateful.”
“Not at all!” With a smile, confused like her own, he turned off towards his office.
All day, among his accidents, he felt uncertain. Had he been a fool; had he been a hero? Sometimes he thought: ‘What brutes they are to those girls!’ and sometimes: ‘Don’t know; suppose they must do something about it.’ And he avoided considering how to explain the absence of two pounds ten shillings on which Alice had been reckoning. His soul was simple like the expressions on his face.
He reached home at the usual hour—six-thirty. His home was grey and small and had a little bit of green up Chalk Farm way, where the Tube made all things possible.
His wife, who had just put their baby daughter to bed, was sitting in the parlour darning his socks. She looked up—surely her forehead was rather like a knee!
“You wear your socks properly, Harold,” shesaid; “it’s all I can do to mend this pair.” Her eyes were china-blue, round like saucers; her voice had the monotony of one brought up to minimise emotion. A farmer’s daughter, young Mellesh had become engaged to her during a holiday in Somerset. Pale himself, from office and the heat, he thought how pale she looked.
“The heat’s dreadful, isn’t it?” she said. “Sometimes I wish we’d never had baby. It does tie you in the evenings. Iamlooking forward to Whitsuntide, that I am.”
Young Mellesh, tall and straggly, bent over and kissed her forehead. How on earth to let her know that he had ‘blewed’ their holiday? He was realising that he had done an awful thing. Perhaps—oh! surely—she would understand how he couldn’t sit and see that girl ‘jugged’ before his eyes for want of it! But not until the end of their small supper did he say abruptly:
“I got quite upset this morning, Alice. Had to go down to the police court about that car smash I told you of, and afterwards I saw them run in a lot of those Piccadilly girls. It fair sickened me to see the way they treat them.”
His wife looked up; her face was childlike.
“Why, what do they do to them?”
“Quod them for speakin’ to men in the street.”
“I s’pose they’re up to no good.”
Irritated by the matter-of-factness in her voice, he went on:
“They speak to ’em as if they were dirt.”
“Well, aren’t they?”
“They may be a loose lot, but so are the men.”
“Men wouldn’t be so loose if they weren’t there.”
“I suppose it’s what you call a vicious circle;” and, pleased with his play on words, he added: “One or two of them were pretty.”
His wife smiled; her smile had a natural teasing quality.
“They treatthembetter, I suppose?”
That was jolly cynical! and he blurted out:
“One, quite young, never there before, they gave her a fortnight just because she hadn’t any money—I couldn’t stick it; I paid her fine.”
There was sweat on his forehead. His wife’s face had gone quite pink.
“You paid? How much?”
He was on the point of saying: ‘Ten shillings.’ But something in his soul revolted. “Regular pill—two pound ten;” and he thought glumly: ‘Oh! what a fool I’ve been!’
He did wish Alice wouldn’t open her mouth like that, when nothing was coming out—made her look so silly! Her face puckered suddenly, then becamequite blank; he was moved as if he had hit or pinched her.
“Awfully sorry, Alice,” he muttered, “never meant to—she—she cried.”
“Course she cried! You fool, Harold!”
He got up, very much disturbed.
“Well, and what wouldyouhave done?”
“Me? Let her stew in her own juice, of course. It wasn’t your affair.”
She too had risen. He thrust his fingers through his hair. The girl’s face, tear-streaked, confusedly pretty, had come up before him, her soft common grateful voice tickled his ears again. His wife turned her back. So! he was in for a fit of sulks. Well! No doubt he had deserved it.
“I dare say Iwasa fool,” he muttered, “but I did think you’d understand how I felt when I saw her cry. Suppose it had been you!” From the toss of her head, he knew he had said something pretty fatal.
“Oh! So that’s what you think of me!”
He grasped her shoulder.
“Of course I don’t, Alice; don’t be so silly!”
She shook off his hand.
“Whose money was it? Now baby and me’ll get no holiday. And all because you see a slut crying.”
Before he could answer she was gone. He hadan awful sense of having outraged justice. Given away her holiday—given his wife’s holiday to a girl of the streets! Still, it was his own holiday, too; besides, he earned the money! He’d never wanted to give it to the girl; hadn’t got anything for it! Suppose he’d put it into the offertory bag, would Alice have been in such a temper even if it was their holiday? He didn’t see much difference. He sat down with knees apart, and elbows planted on them, staring at the peonies on the Brussels carpet paid for on the hire system. And all those feelings that rise in people living together, when they don’t agree, swirled in his curly head, and troubled his candid eyes. If only the girl hadn’t cried! She hadn’t meant to cry; he could tell that by the sound of it. And who was the magistrate—he didn’t look too like a saint; who was any man to treat her like that? Alice oughtn’t—No! But suddenly, he saw Alice again bending over his socks—pale and tired with the heat—doing things for him or baby—and he had given away her holiday! No denying that! Compunction flooded him. He must go up and find her and try and make his peace—he would pawn his bicycle—she should have her holiday—she should!
He opened the door and listened. The little house was ominously quiet—only the outsideevening sounds from buses passing in the main road, from children playing on the doorsteps of the side street, from a man with a barrow of bananas. She must be up in the bedroom with baby! He mounted the steep whitewashed stairway. It wanted a carpet, and fresh paint; ah! and a lot of other things Alice wanted—you couldn’t have everything at once on four pound ten a week—with the price of living what it was. But she ought to have remembered there were things he wanted too—yes, precious bad, and never thought of getting. The door of their bedroom was locked; he rattled the handle. She opened suddenly, and stood facing him on the little landing.
“I don’t want you up here.”
“Look here, Alice—this is rotten.”
She closed the door behind her.
“It is! You go down again, I don’t want you. Think I believe that about crying? I’d be ashamed, if I were you!”
Ashamed! He might have been too soft, but why ashamed?
“Think I don’t know what men are like? You can just go to your street girl, if she’s so pretty!” She stood hard and stiff against the door, with red spots in her cheeks. She almost made him feel a villain—such conviction in her body.
“Alice! Good Lord! You must be crazy! I’ve done nothing!”
“But you’d like to. Go along! I don’t want you!”
The stabbing stare of her blue eyes, the muffled energy of her voice, the bitterness about her mouth all made a fellow feel—well, that he knew nothing about anything—coming from one’s wife like that! He leaned back against the wall.
“Well, I’m damned!” was all he could get out.
“D’you mean to say she didn’t ask you?”
The insides of his hands grew wet. The girl’s card in his pocket!
“Well, if you like to be a cat I can’t help it. What d’you take me for?”
“Giving your own child’s money to a dirty slut! You owed it—that’s what it was—or will be. Go on with you; don’t stand there!”
He had a nasty longing to smite her on the mouth—it looked so bitter. “Well,” he said slowly, “now I understand.”
Yes, that was it—she was all of a piece with something, with that police court, with the tone of the men’s voices, with something unsparing, hard and righteous, which came down sharp on people.
“I thought—I think you might——” he stammered.
“Ugh!” The sound exasperated him so, that he turned to go downstairs.
“You whited sepulchre!”
The door clicked before he could answer the odd insult; he heard the key turned. Idiotic! The little landing seemed too small to hold his feelings. Would he ever have been such an ass as to say a word to Alice, if hehaddone it? Why! He had never even thought of doing anything!
Giddy from chagrin he ran downstairs, and, clawing his straw hat from the rack, went out. The streets were malodorous from London fug—fried fish, petrol, hot dirty people; he strode along troubled, his eyes very rueful. So this was what he was really married to—this—this! It was like being married to that police court! It wasn’t human—no, it wasn’t—to be so suspicious and virtuous as all that! What was the use of being decent and straight, if this was all you got for it? Someone touched him on the shoulder.
“Mister, you’ve been standing against something; you’re all white behind—let me give you a brush.”
He stood confused, while a stout fair man smote his back up and down with a large flat hand.Whited sepulchre! A bubble of rage rose to his lips. All right! She should see! He felt for the girl’s card, and was suddenly amazed to find that he had no need to look at it—he remembered the address! Not far off, on the other side of the Euston Road! That was funny—had he been looking at it without realising? They said you had a subconscious mind. Well, what about it? No, it was his conscious mind that was going to serve Alice out! He had reached the Euston Road. Crossing it, he began to feel a queer pleasurable weakness in the legs. By this he knew that he was going to do wrong. He was not going to visit the girl just to serve his wife out, but because the prospect was——! That was bad—bad; it would put Alice in the right! He stood still at the corner of a narrow square, with a strip of garden, and railings round it. He leaned against those railings, his eyes searching the trees. He had always been quite straight with his wife—it was she who had put the idea into his head. And yet his legs being pleasurably weak seemed in an odd way to excuse her. It was like his doubt whether they hadn’t to do something about it at the police court. Barring Alice—barring the police court—where would he—would any man be? Without virtue, entirely without virtue. A pigeon in the garden cooed.“Any time you’re passing, I’ll be glad to see you.” It had sounded genuine—really grateful. And the girl had looked—not worse than anybody else! If Alice had been sympathetic about it he would never have thought of her again; that is—well——! The doubt set his legs in motion. He was a married man, and that was all about it! But he looked across at the numbers on the houses. Twenty-seven! Yes, there it was! A bloom of lilac brushed his face. The scent jerked him suddenly back to the farm in Somerset, and he and Alice courting. Alice—not the Alice on the landing! He scrutinised the shabby house, and suddenly went hot all over. Suppose he went in there—what would that girl think? That he had paid her fine because——! But that wasn’t it at all—oh! no—he wasn’t a squirt like that! He turned his face away, and walked on fast and far.
The signs were lit above the theatres; traffic was scanty, the streets a long dawdle of what vehicles and humans were about. He came to Leicester Square and sat down on a bench. The lights all round him brightened slowly under the dusk—theatre lights, street lamps. And the pity of things smote him, sitting there. So much of everything; and one got so little of anything! Adding figures up all day, going home to Alice—that waslife! Well, it wasn’t so bad when Alice was nice to him. But—crikey!—what one missed! That book about the South Sea Islands—places, peoples, sights, sounds, scents, all over the world! Four pound ten a week, a wife, a baby! Well, you couldn’t have things both ways—but had he got them either way? Not with the Alice on the landing!
Ah! Well! Poor Alice; jolly hard on her to miss her holiday! But she might have given him the chance to tell her that he would pawn his bicycle. Or was it all a bad dream? Had he ever really been in the police court, seen them herding those girls to prison—girls who did what they did because—well, like himself, they had missed too much. They’d catch a fresh lot to-night. What a fool he’d been to pay that fine!
‘Glad I didn’t go into that girl’s house, anyway,’ he thought. ‘I would have felt a scum!’ The only decent thing about it all had been her look when she said: “Ow! thank you!” That gave him a little feeling of warmth even now; and then—it, too, chilled away. Nothing for it! When he had done sitting there, he must go home! If Alice had thought him a wrong-un before, what would she think when he returned? Well, there it was! The milk was spilt! But he did wish she hadn’t got such a virtue on her.
The sky deepened and darkened, the lights stared white; the square garden with its flower-beds seemed all cut out and stiff—like scenery on a stage. Must go back and ‘stick’ it! No good to worry!
He got up from the bench, and gave himself a shake. His eyes, turned towards the lights of the Alhambra, were round, candid, decent, like the eyes of a baby.
1922.
Taggart sat up. The scoop under the ranger’s fence, cannily selected for his sleeping place, was overhung by branches, and the birds of Hyde Park were at matins already. His watch had gone the way of his other belongings during the last three months, and he could only assume from the meagre light that it was but little after dawn. He was not grateful to the birds; he would be hungry long before a breakfast coming from he hardly knew where. But he listened to them with interest. This was the first night he had passed in the open, and, like all amateurs, he felt a kind of triumph at having achieved vagrancy in spite of the law, the ranger, and the dew. He was a Northumbrian, too, and his ‘tail still up,’ as he expressed it. Born in a town, Taggart had not much country lore—at sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, his knowledge stopped; but he enjoyed the bobbery the little beggars were kicking up, and, though a trifle stiff perhaps, he felt ‘fine.’
He lit his pipe, and almost at once his brainbegan to revolve the daily problem of how to get a job, and of why he had lost the one he had.
Walking, three months ago, burly, upright, secure and jolly, into the room of his chief at the offices of ‘Conglomerated Journals, Ltd.,’ he had been greeted with:
“Morning, Taggart. Georgie Grebe is to give us an article for theLighthouse. He won’t be able to write it, of course. Just do me a column he could sign—something Grebeish. I want a feature of that sort every week now in theLighthouse; got half a dozen really good names. We simply must get it on its legs with the big Public.”
Taggart smiled. Georgie Grebe! The name was a household word—tophole idea to get him!
“Did he ever write a line in his life, sir?”
“Don’t suppose so—but you know the sort of thing hewouldwrite; he gets nothing for it but the Ad. The week after I’ve got Sir Cutman Kane—you’ll want to be a bit careful there; but you can get his manner from that book of his on murder trials. He hasn’t got a minute—must have it devilled; but he’ll sign anything decently done. I’m going tomake’em buy theLighthouse, Taggart. Get on to the Grebe article at once, will you.”
Taggart nodded, and, drawing from his pocketsome typewritten sheets of paper, laid them on the bureau.
“Here’s your signed leader, sir; I’ve gingered it a bit too much, perhaps.”
“Haven’t time to look at it; got to catch a train.”
“Shall I tone it down a little?”
“Better perhaps; use your judgment. Sit here, and do it now. Good-bye; back on Friday.”
Reaching for his soft hat, assisted into his coat by Taggart, the chief was gone.
Taggart sat down to pencil the signed leader.
‘Good leader,’ he thought; ‘pity nobody knows I write ’em!’
This devilling was quite an art, and, not unlike art, poorly enough paid. Still, not bad fun feeling you were the pea and the chief only the shell—the chief, with his great name and controlling influence. He finished pencilling, O.K.’d the sheets, thought, ‘Georgie Grebe! what the deuce shall I write about?’ and went back to his room.
It was not much of a room, and there was not much in it except Jimmy Counter, smoking a pipe and writing furiously.
Taggart sat down too, lit his own pipe, took a sheet of paper and scrawled the words ‘Georgie Grebe Article’ across the top.
Georgie Grebe! Itwasa scoop! The chief had a wonderful flair for just the names that got the Public. There was something rather beautifully simple about writing an article for a man who had never written a line—something virginal in the conception. And when you came to think of it, something virginal in the Public’s buying of the article to read the thoughts of their idol, Georgie Grebe. Yes, and what were their idol’s thoughts? If he, Taggart, didn’t know, nobody would, not even the idol! Taggart smiled, then felt a little nervous. Georgie Grebe—celebrated clown—probably he hadn’t any thoughts! Really, there was something very trustful about the Public! He dipped his pen in ink and sat staring at the nib. Trustful! The word had disturbed the transparency of his mental process, as a crystal of peroxide will disturb and colour a basinful of water. Trustful! The Public would pay their pennies to read what they thought were the thoughts of Georgie Grebe. But——! Taggart bit into the pipe stem. Steady! He was getting on too fast. Of course Georgie Grebe had thoughts if he signed them—hadn’t he? His name would be reproduced in autograph, with the indispensable portrait. People would see by his features that he must have had them. Was the Public so verytrustful then? The evidence was there all right. Fraudulent? This was just devilling, there was nothing fraudulent about ‘devilling’—everybody did it. You might as well say those signed leaders written for the chief were fraudulent. Of course they weren’t—only devilled! The Public paid for the thoughts of the chief, and there they were since he signed them. Devilled thoughts! And yet! Would the public pay if those leaders were signed A. P. Taggart? The thoughts would be the same—and very good. They ought to pay—but—would they? He struck another match, and wrote:
“I am no writer, ladies and gentlemen. I am—believe me—a simple clown. In balancing this new pole upon my nose I am conscious of a certain sense of fraud——”
“I am no writer, ladies and gentlemen. I am—believe me—a simple clown. In balancing this new pole upon my nose I am conscious of a certain sense of fraud——”
He crossed out the paragraph. That word again—must keep it from buzzing senselessly round his brain like this! He was only devilling; hold on to ‘devilling’; it was his living to devil—more or less—just earning his living—getting nothing out of it! Neither was Georgie Grebe—only the Ad.! Then who was getting something out of it? ‘Conglomerated Journals’! Out of Georgie Grebe’s name; out of the chief’s name below the devilled leaders—a pretty penny! Well, what harm in making the most of a big name? Taggart frowned.Suppose a man went into a shop and bought a box of pills, marked ‘Holloway,’ made up from a recipe of ‘Tompkins’—did it matter that the man thought they were Holloway’s, if they were just as good pills, perhaps better? Taggart laid down his pen and took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Gosh!’ he thought, ‘never looked at it this way before! I believe it does matter. A man ought to get the exact article he pays for. If not, any fraud is possible. New Zealand mutton can be sold as English. Jaeger stuffs can have cotton in them. This Grebe article’s a fraud.’ He relit his pipe. With the first puff his English hatred of a moral attitude or ‘swank’ of any sort beset him. Who was he to take stand against a custom? Didn’t secretaries write the speeches of Parliamentary ‘big-bugs’? Weren’t the opinions of eminent lawyers often written by their juniors, read over and signed? Weren’t briefs and pleadings devilled? Yes; but all that was different. In such cases the Public weren’t paying for expression, they were paying for knowledge; the big lawyer put his imprimatur on the knowledge, not on the expression of it; the Cabinet Minister endorsed his views, whether he had written them out or not, and it was his views the Public paid for, not the expression of them. But in this Grebe article the Publicwould not be paying for any knowledge it contained, nor for any serious views; it would pay for a peep into the mind of their idol. ‘And his mind will be mine!’ thought Taggart; ‘but who’d pay a penny to peep into that?’ He got up, and sat down again.
With a Public so gullible—what did it matter? They lapped up anything and asked for more. Yes! But weren’t the gullible the very people who oughtn’t to be gulled? He rose again, and toured the dishevelled room. The man at the other table raised his head.
“You seem a bit on your toes.”
Taggart stared down at him.
“I’ve got to write some drivel in theLighthousefor Georgie Grebe to sign. It’s just struck me that it’s a fraud on the Public. What do you say, Jimmy?”
“In a way. What about it?”
“If it is, I don’t want to do it—that’s all.”
His colleague whistled.
“My dear chap, here am I writing a racing article ‘From the Man in the Paddock’—I haven’t been on a racecourse for years.”
“Oh! well—that’s venial.”
“All’s venial in our game. Shut your eyes, and swallow. You’re only devilling.”
“Ga!” said Taggart. “Give a thing a decent label, and it is decent.”
“I say, old man, what did you have for breakfast?”
“Look here, Jimmy, I’m inclined to think I’ve struck a snag. It never occurred to me before.”
“Well, don’t let it occur to you again. Think of old Dumas; I’ve heard he put his name to sixty volumes in one year. Has that done him any harm?”
Taggart rumpled his hair, reddish and rather stiff.
“Damn!” he said.
Counter laughed.
“You get a fixed screw for doing what you’re told. Why worry? Papers must be sold. Georgie Grebe—that’s some stunt.”
“Blast Georgie Grebe!”
He took his hat and went out; a prolonged whistle followed him. All next day he spent doing other jobs, trying to persuade himself that he was a crank, and gingerly feeling the mouths of journalists. All he got was: Fuss about nothing! What was the matter with devilling? With life at such pressure, what else could you have? But with the best intentions he could not persuade himself to go on with the thoughts of Georgie Grebe.And he remembered suddenly that his father had changed the dogmas of his religion at forty-five, and thereby lost a cure of souls. He was very unhappy; it was like discovering that he had inherited tuberculosis. On Friday he was sent for by the chief.
“Morning, Taggart; I’m just back. Look here, this leader for to-morrow—it’s nothing but a string of statements. Where’s my style?”
Taggart shifted his considerable weight from foot to foot.
“Well, sir,” he said, “I thought perhaps you’d like to put that in yourself, for a change. The facts are all right.”
The chief stared.
“My good fellow, do you suppose I’ve got time for that? Anybody could have written this; I can’t sign it as it stands. Tone it up.”
Taggart took the article from the chief’s hand.
“I don’t know that I can,” he said; “I’m——” and stopped.
The chief said kindly:
“Ill?”
Taggart disclaimed.
“Private trouble?”
“No.”
“Well, get on with it, then. How’s the Grebe article turned out?”
“It hasn’t.”
“How do you mean?”
Taggart felt his body stiffening.
“Fact is, I can’t write it.”
“Good gracious, man, any drivel will do, so long as it’s got a flavour of some sort to carry the name.”
Taggart swallowed.
“That’s it. Is it quite playing the game with the Public, sir?”
The chief seemed to loom larger suddenly.
“I don’t follow you, Taggart.”
Taggart blurted out: “I don’t want to write anyone else’s stuff in future, unless it’s just news or facts.”
The chief’s face grew very red.
“I pay you to do certain work. If you don’t care to carry out instructions, we can dispense with your services. What’s the matter with you, Taggart?”
Taggart replied with a wry smile:
“Suffering from a fit of conscience, sir. Isn’t it a matter of commercial honesty?”
The chief sat back in his swivel chair and gazed at him for quite twenty seconds.
“Well,” he said at last in an icy voice, “I have never been so insulted. Good-morning! You are at liberty.”
Taggart laid down the sheets of paper, walked stiffly to the door, and turned.
“Awfully sorry, sir, can’t help it.”
The chief bowed distantly, and Taggart went out.
For three months he had enjoyed liberty. Journalism was overstocked; his name not well known. Too shy and proud to ask for recommendation from ‘Conglomerated Journals,’ he could never bring himself to explain why he had ‘got the hoof.’ Claim a higher standard of morality than his fellows—not he! For two months he had carried on pretty well, but the last few weeks had brought him low indeed. Yet the more he brooded, the more he felt that he had been right, and the less inclined he was to speak of it. Loyalty to the chief he had insulted by taking such an attitude, dislike of being thought a fool, beyond all, dread of ‘swanking’ kept him silent. When asked why he had left ‘Conglomerated Journals’ he returned the answer always: “Disagreement on a point of principle,” and refused to enter into details. But a feeling had got about that he was a bit of a crank; for, though no one at ‘Conglomerated Journals’ knew exactly why he had vanished, Counter had spread the news that he had blasted Georgie Grebe, and refused to write his article. Someone else had done it. Taggart read the production with irritation. Itwas jolly bad. Inefficient devilling still hurt one who had devilled long and efficiently without a qualm. When the article which had not been written by Sir Cutman Kane appeared—he swore aloud. It was no more like the one Sir Cutman would have signed if Taggart had written it than the boots of Taggart were like the boots of the chief, who seemed to wear a fresh pair every day, with cloth tops. He read the chief’s new leaders with melancholy, spotting the many deficiencies of style supplied to the chief by the poor devil who now wrote them. His square, red, cheerful face had a bitter look while he was reading; and when he had finished, he would rumple his stiff hair. He was sturdy, and never got so far as calling himself a fool for his pains; but, week by week, he felt more certain that his protest had been in vain.
Sitting against the ranger’s palings, listening to the birds, he had a dreamy feeling about it all. Queer creatures, human beings! So damned uncritical! Had he not been like that himself for years and years? The power of a label—that was what struck him, sitting there. Label a thing decently, and itwasdecent! Ah! but, ‘Rue by any other name would smell as sour!’ Conscience!—it was the deuce!
1922.