VIIIRITA AND JOEAnd it seemed the very door-hinge pitiedAll that was left of a woman once,Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.ANNhad always known Old Lunt. As far back as she could remember the mews had been her playground, and the old man coming and going had been a part of the scene.She seemed to connect the silence that visited her mate after his death with him, for she filled it with reminiscence and stories about him. He used to sing queer old songs, and sometimes he could be persuaded to tell about the country where he came from and flowers and birds; yarns about his father’s farm and the happiness he had had on it until it came into his brother’s hands, and his brother had gone into the manufacturing. Then there was no home for him in the old stone house.For all her talk Ann could not break in upon René’s silence, and his eyes would implore her to cease, yet she could not cease. She went on and on talking, for she dreaded his silence as she dreaded his solemnity. They made life heavy and evil for her. If a man wasunhappy, there were plenty of distractions and consolations. Everybody was unhappy at times, but no one in his senses clung to his unhappiness the way Renny did. It was an exasperation to her to have him like this—“mooning and dithering to himself”—because he had been so much more complacent and docile than she had expected. She had looked for trouble, but he had slipped into her ways, and shared her pleasures with an astonishing ease and grace, so much so that she had had the mortification of hearing two women in the mews arguing about him:“Garn! ’E ain’t no scholard.”“’Struth. ’E’s a college gent.”“’Im! They might come to see a working girl, but they wouldn’t take up with ’er.”The trouble she had looked for should have been between herself and him, and she was prepared to tackle it so soon as it showed its head, but this trouble he kept to himself, outside her. And though she called it unhappiness, she knew well enough that he was not unhappy.Indeed, it was a joy to him to find himself more and more alive to the world, the little, grubby, amusing corner of it in Mitcham Mews, and the great roaring whirlpool outside in which lay his work. His pleasure in London was no longer purely emotional; no longer did he, as it were, implore London to let him be a part of it. He was working in it, contributing to its life, to its bustle and noise; but since his talks with Kilner and his reading of the poetical works of the old ragamuffin, he had been able little by little todetach himself from it and watch all that was going on. Truly there was never a more amusing city! Everything was on show. Everybody had the air of expecting to be looked at and admired; though everybody pretended also that he or she had no such expectation. When provincials arrived in London they seemed to feel all this and to wince before it, but soon they perked up their heads and behaved as though all eyes were upon them. And they went to the show-places, those of which there had been talk in their homes from their earliest recollection. But everything else also was a show to them. More and more the shops tended to become shows. Government offices were being pulled down and rebuilt to make more show. Exalted personages were bent on making a show of their common humanity. Even in the city, the offices in which Londoners worked—the counting-house behind the shop—were being razed to the ground to give place to colossal palaces of ferro-concrete and marble and plate-glass. Motor-cars were growing more and more garish and glossy; the advertisements on the hoardings were more and more crudely colored. For whom was the show? For whom was all the outpouring and display of wealth? Hardly, thought René, for Mitcham Mews, that sink of the submerged and those who could only just hold their heads above water. He thought he could find the answer in the miles and miles of little houses like the house in Hog Lane, six rooms, attics, and cellars, constantly stretching out to the west and to the east; the unceasing expansion of mediocrity, a flooring ofconcrete, warranted fireproof, to keep the fantastic creations of wealth uncontaminated by the sources from which wealth sprang.These were no general speculations. As he detached himself from the spectacle of London, and observed and brought humor and charity to bear on his observations, it became more and more clear to him that in this fantastic atmosphere he could not live. He was conscious of energy within himself. Upward from Mitcham Mews led to the mediocrity of the little houses, to those who lived in the dazzlement of the shows, forgetting life, forgetting death. Downward? There was no downward without sinking into the disgusting vices which repelled him. Beyond the mediocrity was only the show where everything was sterilized, thought castrated, art hermaphrodite. (Kilner knew too much of that.) At the same time, he felt that his present mode of life could not go on much longer. There would certainly be a move from Mitcham Mews, but he wanted it also to be a decision, not a mere change of houses.Ann returned to her idea of trying a new country, and for a time he played with the idea. It had its seductions. The long voyage: the indolent life on board ship; the possibility as they slipped away from existence in England of shedding those elements in themselves which prevented the full sympathy desired by their affection; the settling in a country where class differences were not so acute. But, he felt rather than saw, that would mean isolation with Ann, and his feeling was against it. When she tried to discuss itwith him, to get him to consider the respective merits of Canada or Australia, he was evasive in his replies and soon forced her to drop it. She would show a little disappointment, but would reassure herself by saying:“There’s no place like old England,” or: “Sally Wade’s in Canada, and she does miss dear old London.”He was so absorbed in his thoughts and his growing certainty that he did not notice how few of his evenings he spent with her. Because she was cheerful, he imagined that she must be finding her own amusement and satisfaction. He saw a great deal of Kilner, and when the painter was otherwise engaged, liked to be out in the streets on duty. Without knowing why, he had begun to desire to save money. Every shilling put by added to his sense of independence and potential freedom. He had commenced with a money-box, but finding Ann one day shaking coins out of it, he opened an account with the Post Office Savings Bank. He said nothing to her at the moment and was angry with himself for letting it pass, but it was impossible to reopen the subject later. He told himself that Mitcham Mews was no harbor of strict morals, that its inhabitants did more or less what they wanted to do, and therefore made it enjoyable for him to live among them. (That was the reason Kilner had given him for living among the very poor. They had the same liberty as the very rich, with none of their pretensions or false responsibilities.) He haddismissed the matter from his mind when it was brought home to him one night on his returning late from work.Rita and her husband lived opposite Martin’s yard. As he came out of it, René was confronted by Ann leaving their house with a basin under her arm.“I’ve been seeing Rita,” she said. “Joe’s been out of work since the coal strike, and he’s going on the drink. Her time’s coming, and someone’s got to do for her. It was for her I took the money.”“I—I beg your pardon, Ann. Why didn’t you say so before?”“It was the way you looked, Renny, dear. You do frighten me so.”“I’m sorry. Can I do anything to help?”“It may be to-morrow. Anyway, soon. Would you mind keeping Joe away? He’s not your sort, I know, but he must be kept away.”“All right. He shall be kept away. Is she in for a bad time?”“I’m afraid she is. Work’s been so skeery of Joe these times that it’s been all she’s been able to do to feed the children.”“That’s bad. But she ought to have thought of herself.”“Sometimes,” said Ann, “there isn’t room for everybody to be thought of. If you can get through a day or two it’s as much as you can manage without thinking what’s going to happen in a month’s time.”“Don’t you ever look ahead, Ann?”“No. What’s the good? Whenever I do, it only frightens me.”“Are you frightened of anything now?”“A little.”They had reached their room and she had begun to wriggle out of her clothes.“I don’t like your being frightened, my dear. There’s nothing can hurt us, and being hurt is no great thing.”“All in the day’s work, eh? Oh, well. Some things. But, don’t you see, I think I’m going to be like Rita.”“Ann!”She looked at him queerly, almost maliciously.“What did y’expect? Making me so fond of you?”He said lamely:“I—I hadn’t thought of it.”She was stung into silence. Presently she crept into bed and lay with her face to the wall. In a tone of almost petulant disappointment she said at length:“I fancied that was why you were putting by all that money. I was pleased about that, I was.”René sat on gloomily in the outer room, listening, waiting for her to go to sleep. He was full of resentment against he knew not what. Her almost cynical practicality? Her acceptance without wonder of the new fact? As with the rest of his life, so now he was able to detach himself from her. She had been pleased with him because he had begun to make provision, as she thought, against the probable event. She had announced the event as one regretting the pleasantness of the past, almost as one diffidently presenting a bill—commercialization. Horribly their relationship was stripped of their individualities; they were just a man and a woman separated by that which they had together created. They had known kindness and fellowship, mutual forbearance and gratitude, and now they were despoiled of these good things. He was left impotent while she bowed to the disagreeable fact and was absorbed in it. And he began to see that they had long been borne toward this separation, and to escape from the pain of it he had turned to Kilner and the things of the mind, while she had comforted herself with the things of the flesh, the sufferings of the child-ridden Rita, who now seemed to him typical of the life of the mews, a creature crushed by circumstance, by responsibilities which she could not face, a house which she could not clean, children whom she could neither feed nor clothe, a husband whom she was unable to keep from deterioration. And to think that for one moment he had seen beauty in her, when she had appeared almost as a symbol of maternity, which must be—must it not?—always and invariably beautiful and to be worshiped. His idealism came crumbling down as he could not away with the knowledge that Ann had lost in beauty for him.It was no revulsion, no withering of his feeling for her; rather it was that the brutal fact had a burning quality to peel away the trimmings from what he felt.He found himself groping back in his life before Ann came into it. Nothing quite the same had happened to him before. The perishing of his youngdesire had left him in a whirling excitement which contained less torture than this obsession of cold realization. Bereft now of all that had made his life good and pleasant and amusing, he could only appreciate Ann and the experience that lay before her, appreciate, but not understand. That was too horrible. She had been so dear to him; such a good, kind, true, brave little soul. The resentment that he could not altogether escape he visited on Rita, as Ann had from the first visited hers on Kilner.Why should Kilner on the one hand, and Rita on the other, draw them apart? Why had they created nothing that could be shared outside themselves? Why should that which they had created destroy that which they had valued in their life together? Why—and he came firmly back to his real obsession—why should they have so isolated themselves that the natural consequence of their love, if love it were, should be an intrusion, a shock greater than they could bear?He listened again. Ann’s breathing seemed to tell that she was asleep. He crept in to her. She was awake. After what seemed an age, she said in a dry, weary voice:“I keep trying to think what kind of a house you lived in.”He described Hog Lane West.“No. The other one, I mean.”“Oh, that?” He told her it was like a little house in some Gardens not far away.Then in the same dry, weary voice she said:“I have been trying to think what she felt when you left her.”“For God’s sake,” cried he, “for God’s sake keep that out of it.”“I do try to, Renny, dear. But I can’t help thinking about her sometimes when you’re like that——”“Don’t talk about it, Ann, don’t talk about it. Go to sleep.”“Kiss me, then. I couldn’t go to sleep till you’d kissed me. Not to-night. Itisall right, isn’t it?”“Oh, yes. It’s all right, bless you.”“I don’t want to be a drag on you, Renny, dear. Itisa blessing we’re not married, isn’t it?”“That doesn’t matter.”“That’s what I say. If it’s right it can’t stop, can it? If it’s wrong, it must.”He kissed her to stop her talking. She sighed contentedly, slid her arm into his and pressed her face against his shoulder.“Good night. Wehavebeen happy.”And in two minutes she was asleep. He too was glad of the happiness they had. He was a little infected with her fatalism. If there were to be calamities, there had been stores of frank pleasure and true delight to draw upon in defense against them.By killing off an imaginary grandmother, Ann procured a half-day off from her work and spent the afternoon with Rita, who was weak and dispirited by the great heat which filled the mews with stale air and brought old fumes and stenches from the stables.There had been thunder and storms, and the two youngest children were down with colic. Joe had disappeared with Click and Billy, who, to Rita’s great distress, had begun to seek her husband’s company and to give him money—at least she supposed they did, for he had nowhere else to get it. All day long Rita talked about a bed her mother had bought for the best bedroom just before she married again, a beautiful bed with four big brass knobs and sixteen little brass knobs, and a bit of brass making a pattern at the head. And it had a real eiderdown, and the springs were not like ordinary springs, but spirals. When she had exhausted the wonder of the bed she began an endless story of the aspidistra and Mr. ’Awkins who undertook to water it and forgot for a whole week, when the leaves one by one went yellow and brown. Into this story was woven all the romance that had ever crept into Rita’s life, and as a good deal had crept in through the unlikeliest corners, it was a long story. She kept it going, as it were, by killing off the leaves of the aspidistra to mark the chapters. Mr. ’Awkins was a wonderful man, but he never quite said it, and Joe wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Joe really did seem to be fond of her, “and mother could be awful.” Besides Joe did promise to make a home for her, and they did go and look at furniture on Saturdays, but always after they had looked at furniture they used to go to music-halls, so they never had the money to buy it. And then they got married.For hours Ann sat listening to the woman’s voicedroning on. The elder children had been taken charge of by neighbors. The others needed constant attention. Joe came home in the evening, merrily drunk. Ann met him at the door and told him he could not come in. He swore at her and vowed he would. She struggled with him. He was fuddled and uncertain on his legs, and she very quickly had him slithering down the stairs. He sat at the bottom and roared:“Jezebubble! That’s what you are! Jezebubble! Throwing people down!”Ann had gone to the window, and seeing René in the yard opposite, she called to him and told him to take Joe away and make him sober. René came running up, dragged Joe to his feet, lugged him into the yard, and held his head under the tap. Joe spluttered and cursed, and when he was released, stood up with the water streaming from his hair, eyes, and mouth. He showed fight. René caught him by the neck and threatened to turn on the tap again unless he showed himself amenable to reason.Ann called:“Take him away.”René nodded, picked Joe up in his arms, and threw him on the floor of his car and drove him out far beyond Uxbridge into the country. There by a black pinewood they stopped. René got down and laughed, for Joe had picked himself up and was sitting perkily with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, with his hat on one side, pretending to be a lord.“Aw! Chauffah!” he said. “Dwive me to Piccadilly Circus. I want to buy a box of matches.”Changing his tone, he added: “You don’t ’appen to ’ave a fag on yer, guvnor?”René gave him a cigarette and a match, lit one himself, and sat by the side of the road.“Was that a joy ride?” asked Joe.“No charge,” replied René.“I’ve spat in the car. Is there any charge for that?”“I’ll smack your head if you do it again.”Joe looked warily and solemnly at him, then deliberately spat on the floor of the car.“That,” he said, “is to show I know you’re a gentleman, and what I thinks of yer.”René dragged him out of the car, smacked his head, and flung him into the bracken.“I’ll have the law on yer,” yelled Joe, trying to shout himself into a fury.“Then you’ll have to walk home. Maybe that would sober you.”“No ’arm, me lord, no ’arm. It’s looking for work, guvnor, that’s what it is. It makes you fuddled. ’Struth it does. Here am I with five children, doing my duty by my country, and I can’t get work. Five children. ‘Good!’ says you, being a gentleman and well provided for. ‘Who’s to support ’em?’ says I. ‘You,’ says you. ‘Let me work,’ says I. ‘There ain’t no work,’ says you. ‘There’s going to be work for as few as possible in this ’ere country,’ you says. ‘Chuck your flaming union,’ you says, ‘blackleg the bloody unionists,’ you says, ‘and there’ll be heaps of work at one farving per hour.’ ‘Five children,’ says I. ‘Good,’ says you. ‘They’ve got hungry little bellies,’ says I.‘Have they?’ says you. ‘Let ’em come and watch the blokes coming to my dinner-party to-night.’” He had worked himself up to an excitement which he could not contain, and he burst into tears.“’Struth is, sir,” he said presently, “I ain’t getting enough to eat, and you know how it is with my missus.”“Ann Pidduck is looking after her,” said René, “and I promised to look after you.”“Woffor did you take me out into the bloomin’ country?”“I hardly know. One doesn’t worry about distance in the car. She said: ‘Take him away.’ So I took you away. I’m afraid I have rather a literal mind.”“Well, it’s pretty here, ain’t it? I took my eldest into the country once. When he got back he said to his mother, he said: ‘There was parrots in all the trees, and as for cows there was more than one.’ ’E’d never seen any bird but sparrows and a parrot. I s’pose he thought anything bigger than a sparrow must be a parrot. What they’ll grow up like, Gawd knows, and He don’t care. It makes me sick to think of another one coming. I’d like to know what the ’Ell Gawd’s playing at making a man so that ’e ’as a great love o’ women and can’t get enough t’eat. Us workin’-men ought to be eunuchs, so we ought. If you got a spark o’ spirit in you it does you down every time. You can take me back now, guvnor. I’ll be good.”He climbed up into the car, resumed his lordly attitude, lit a cigarette, and said:“’Ome, and drive like ’Ell. I’ll stand the bally fines.”The pathos of the man’s grotesque humor springing up through his misery moved René so much that he forgot his own perplexity and desired only to please him. He drove back full tilt, guessing that it was late for the “controls” to be manned, and they reached the yard just as the lamps in the mews were being lit. As they came out of the yard they saw a policeman standing at the door opposite. Joe put René between himself and the constable, and they went up to Ann’s room. There the electrician peeped out.“I say,” he said, “I say. They’ve blabbed.”“Blabbed! What do you mean? Who’s blabbed?”“It’s Click and Billy I mean. They’d got stuff. I don’t know where they got it. They made me help get rid of it. I ’ad to get money somewheres. Click’s a Catholic, and he says stealing isn’t stealing if you’re starving. They must have been nabbed. I ain’t a thief, guvnor. I only helped get rid of the stuff. They said I could because I was known respectable. Respectability ain’t done me no good afore.”“Keep quiet,” said René. “He’ll hear you. Perhaps he isn’t waiting for you.”“’E ain’t moved. I know how they look when they’re on the cop. Devils! Sly devils! I seen ’em take Click afore now and old Bessie.”“Be quiet, you fool. Sit down and have something to eat.”He placed three cold sausages in front of Joe. They vanished. He produced a piece of ham. That wassoon gnawed to the bone. Half a loaf of bread and a small tin of bloater paste soon followed, and Joe began to caress his stomach affectionately.“Look here,” said René. “What will it mean if they get you?”“First offender. I’d get off, all right. But the crooks ’ll never let me alone, and the police ’ll have me marked down as a man to nab if ever they want a ’spected person.”“All right. You sit here. I’ll go and see how things are over there.”The policeman eyed René as he went in.“Want anything?”“No, sir. No.”“There’s nothing going on here, nothing unusual. Confinement.”Ann heard his voice and came down to him. They walked up the mews. Rita was in a delirium. She kept reproaching Joe over and over again for not buying a fire-screen he had promised her. And then she seemed to be living over again in some scene of jealousy. Joe must not come near her. It might not be safe. René told her his news. Ann said:“She guessed that. It’s that’s broken her up so. She thinks she isn’t a respectable woman any longer. I don’t know that it wouldn’t be best to let him be taken.”“But doesn’t that mean that he’s done for? You know better than I.”“You don’t get much of a chance.”“Then we’ll do what we can. Tell the policeman he isn’t sleeping here to-night.”“All right. All right. I don’t think I’ll be back till the morning, and then I’ll have to go to work. So good night, Renny, dear. It is good of you.”They parted. He heard her tell the policeman how things were in the house, and that Joe would not be sleeping there that night, but at his mother’s off the Fulham Road. The policeman asked for the address, and she gave it him pat, and after a moment or two he rolled away. René gave him three minutes, then returned to Joe and told him what had happened, gave him a shilling for a doss, and asked him to meet him in the morning at the cab-rank in Lancaster Gate.“If I pay your passage to Canada, will you go? You can get a start out there and have your family out after you. We’ll look after them.”“Will I go?” cried Joe. “I’ve had enough of this ’ere blasted country. Will I go? D’you know that’s been in my mind ever since that there joy ride. I says to myself, I says, moving’s that easy. You been stuck still, Joe, my buck, that’s what’s been the matter with you.”René keptcavewhile the poor devil slunk out of the mews, and then followed him, saw him mount a bus and be borne away eastward, standing up and waving his hand as long as he was in sight.His passing left René stranded. He had been caught up in the eddy of that little drama, and then flung back into his solitude, and, though he was cheered by his activity, he was also depressed by the horridgrubbiness of the life that had been revealed to him; nothing in the world for Joe but the procuring of food, the bare satisfaction of desire; an amused fondness for his children. That horrible capacity for happiness in degradation.He stood below the lighted window of Rita’s room. A moaning came out of it. A thin voice almost screaming:“Oh, don’t, Joe, don’t!”There were appalling silences. Then whisperings. A long silence that chilled him to the heart. At length the cry of the new-born child, a cry of pain. Then again silence, broken only by the sound of water and the clink of metal against crockery.In that moment René became almost unbearably alive to the suffering of the woman, and to all suffering, and to his own.
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitiedAll that was left of a woman once,Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.
ANNhad always known Old Lunt. As far back as she could remember the mews had been her playground, and the old man coming and going had been a part of the scene.
She seemed to connect the silence that visited her mate after his death with him, for she filled it with reminiscence and stories about him. He used to sing queer old songs, and sometimes he could be persuaded to tell about the country where he came from and flowers and birds; yarns about his father’s farm and the happiness he had had on it until it came into his brother’s hands, and his brother had gone into the manufacturing. Then there was no home for him in the old stone house.
For all her talk Ann could not break in upon René’s silence, and his eyes would implore her to cease, yet she could not cease. She went on and on talking, for she dreaded his silence as she dreaded his solemnity. They made life heavy and evil for her. If a man wasunhappy, there were plenty of distractions and consolations. Everybody was unhappy at times, but no one in his senses clung to his unhappiness the way Renny did. It was an exasperation to her to have him like this—“mooning and dithering to himself”—because he had been so much more complacent and docile than she had expected. She had looked for trouble, but he had slipped into her ways, and shared her pleasures with an astonishing ease and grace, so much so that she had had the mortification of hearing two women in the mews arguing about him:
“Garn! ’E ain’t no scholard.”
“’Struth. ’E’s a college gent.”
“’Im! They might come to see a working girl, but they wouldn’t take up with ’er.”
The trouble she had looked for should have been between herself and him, and she was prepared to tackle it so soon as it showed its head, but this trouble he kept to himself, outside her. And though she called it unhappiness, she knew well enough that he was not unhappy.
Indeed, it was a joy to him to find himself more and more alive to the world, the little, grubby, amusing corner of it in Mitcham Mews, and the great roaring whirlpool outside in which lay his work. His pleasure in London was no longer purely emotional; no longer did he, as it were, implore London to let him be a part of it. He was working in it, contributing to its life, to its bustle and noise; but since his talks with Kilner and his reading of the poetical works of the old ragamuffin, he had been able little by little todetach himself from it and watch all that was going on. Truly there was never a more amusing city! Everything was on show. Everybody had the air of expecting to be looked at and admired; though everybody pretended also that he or she had no such expectation. When provincials arrived in London they seemed to feel all this and to wince before it, but soon they perked up their heads and behaved as though all eyes were upon them. And they went to the show-places, those of which there had been talk in their homes from their earliest recollection. But everything else also was a show to them. More and more the shops tended to become shows. Government offices were being pulled down and rebuilt to make more show. Exalted personages were bent on making a show of their common humanity. Even in the city, the offices in which Londoners worked—the counting-house behind the shop—were being razed to the ground to give place to colossal palaces of ferro-concrete and marble and plate-glass. Motor-cars were growing more and more garish and glossy; the advertisements on the hoardings were more and more crudely colored. For whom was the show? For whom was all the outpouring and display of wealth? Hardly, thought René, for Mitcham Mews, that sink of the submerged and those who could only just hold their heads above water. He thought he could find the answer in the miles and miles of little houses like the house in Hog Lane, six rooms, attics, and cellars, constantly stretching out to the west and to the east; the unceasing expansion of mediocrity, a flooring ofconcrete, warranted fireproof, to keep the fantastic creations of wealth uncontaminated by the sources from which wealth sprang.
These were no general speculations. As he detached himself from the spectacle of London, and observed and brought humor and charity to bear on his observations, it became more and more clear to him that in this fantastic atmosphere he could not live. He was conscious of energy within himself. Upward from Mitcham Mews led to the mediocrity of the little houses, to those who lived in the dazzlement of the shows, forgetting life, forgetting death. Downward? There was no downward without sinking into the disgusting vices which repelled him. Beyond the mediocrity was only the show where everything was sterilized, thought castrated, art hermaphrodite. (Kilner knew too much of that.) At the same time, he felt that his present mode of life could not go on much longer. There would certainly be a move from Mitcham Mews, but he wanted it also to be a decision, not a mere change of houses.
Ann returned to her idea of trying a new country, and for a time he played with the idea. It had its seductions. The long voyage: the indolent life on board ship; the possibility as they slipped away from existence in England of shedding those elements in themselves which prevented the full sympathy desired by their affection; the settling in a country where class differences were not so acute. But, he felt rather than saw, that would mean isolation with Ann, and his feeling was against it. When she tried to discuss itwith him, to get him to consider the respective merits of Canada or Australia, he was evasive in his replies and soon forced her to drop it. She would show a little disappointment, but would reassure herself by saying:
“There’s no place like old England,” or: “Sally Wade’s in Canada, and she does miss dear old London.”
He was so absorbed in his thoughts and his growing certainty that he did not notice how few of his evenings he spent with her. Because she was cheerful, he imagined that she must be finding her own amusement and satisfaction. He saw a great deal of Kilner, and when the painter was otherwise engaged, liked to be out in the streets on duty. Without knowing why, he had begun to desire to save money. Every shilling put by added to his sense of independence and potential freedom. He had commenced with a money-box, but finding Ann one day shaking coins out of it, he opened an account with the Post Office Savings Bank. He said nothing to her at the moment and was angry with himself for letting it pass, but it was impossible to reopen the subject later. He told himself that Mitcham Mews was no harbor of strict morals, that its inhabitants did more or less what they wanted to do, and therefore made it enjoyable for him to live among them. (That was the reason Kilner had given him for living among the very poor. They had the same liberty as the very rich, with none of their pretensions or false responsibilities.) He haddismissed the matter from his mind when it was brought home to him one night on his returning late from work.
Rita and her husband lived opposite Martin’s yard. As he came out of it, René was confronted by Ann leaving their house with a basin under her arm.
“I’ve been seeing Rita,” she said. “Joe’s been out of work since the coal strike, and he’s going on the drink. Her time’s coming, and someone’s got to do for her. It was for her I took the money.”
“I—I beg your pardon, Ann. Why didn’t you say so before?”
“It was the way you looked, Renny, dear. You do frighten me so.”
“I’m sorry. Can I do anything to help?”
“It may be to-morrow. Anyway, soon. Would you mind keeping Joe away? He’s not your sort, I know, but he must be kept away.”
“All right. He shall be kept away. Is she in for a bad time?”
“I’m afraid she is. Work’s been so skeery of Joe these times that it’s been all she’s been able to do to feed the children.”
“That’s bad. But she ought to have thought of herself.”
“Sometimes,” said Ann, “there isn’t room for everybody to be thought of. If you can get through a day or two it’s as much as you can manage without thinking what’s going to happen in a month’s time.”
“Don’t you ever look ahead, Ann?”
“No. What’s the good? Whenever I do, it only frightens me.”
“Are you frightened of anything now?”
“A little.”
They had reached their room and she had begun to wriggle out of her clothes.
“I don’t like your being frightened, my dear. There’s nothing can hurt us, and being hurt is no great thing.”
“All in the day’s work, eh? Oh, well. Some things. But, don’t you see, I think I’m going to be like Rita.”
“Ann!”
She looked at him queerly, almost maliciously.
“What did y’expect? Making me so fond of you?”
He said lamely:
“I—I hadn’t thought of it.”
She was stung into silence. Presently she crept into bed and lay with her face to the wall. In a tone of almost petulant disappointment she said at length:
“I fancied that was why you were putting by all that money. I was pleased about that, I was.”
René sat on gloomily in the outer room, listening, waiting for her to go to sleep. He was full of resentment against he knew not what. Her almost cynical practicality? Her acceptance without wonder of the new fact? As with the rest of his life, so now he was able to detach himself from her. She had been pleased with him because he had begun to make provision, as she thought, against the probable event. She had announced the event as one regretting the pleasantness of the past, almost as one diffidently presenting a bill—commercialization. Horribly their relationship was stripped of their individualities; they were just a man and a woman separated by that which they had together created. They had known kindness and fellowship, mutual forbearance and gratitude, and now they were despoiled of these good things. He was left impotent while she bowed to the disagreeable fact and was absorbed in it. And he began to see that they had long been borne toward this separation, and to escape from the pain of it he had turned to Kilner and the things of the mind, while she had comforted herself with the things of the flesh, the sufferings of the child-ridden Rita, who now seemed to him typical of the life of the mews, a creature crushed by circumstance, by responsibilities which she could not face, a house which she could not clean, children whom she could neither feed nor clothe, a husband whom she was unable to keep from deterioration. And to think that for one moment he had seen beauty in her, when she had appeared almost as a symbol of maternity, which must be—must it not?—always and invariably beautiful and to be worshiped. His idealism came crumbling down as he could not away with the knowledge that Ann had lost in beauty for him.
It was no revulsion, no withering of his feeling for her; rather it was that the brutal fact had a burning quality to peel away the trimmings from what he felt.
He found himself groping back in his life before Ann came into it. Nothing quite the same had happened to him before. The perishing of his youngdesire had left him in a whirling excitement which contained less torture than this obsession of cold realization. Bereft now of all that had made his life good and pleasant and amusing, he could only appreciate Ann and the experience that lay before her, appreciate, but not understand. That was too horrible. She had been so dear to him; such a good, kind, true, brave little soul. The resentment that he could not altogether escape he visited on Rita, as Ann had from the first visited hers on Kilner.
Why should Kilner on the one hand, and Rita on the other, draw them apart? Why had they created nothing that could be shared outside themselves? Why should that which they had created destroy that which they had valued in their life together? Why—and he came firmly back to his real obsession—why should they have so isolated themselves that the natural consequence of their love, if love it were, should be an intrusion, a shock greater than they could bear?
He listened again. Ann’s breathing seemed to tell that she was asleep. He crept in to her. She was awake. After what seemed an age, she said in a dry, weary voice:
“I keep trying to think what kind of a house you lived in.”
He described Hog Lane West.
“No. The other one, I mean.”
“Oh, that?” He told her it was like a little house in some Gardens not far away.
Then in the same dry, weary voice she said:
“I have been trying to think what she felt when you left her.”
“For God’s sake,” cried he, “for God’s sake keep that out of it.”
“I do try to, Renny, dear. But I can’t help thinking about her sometimes when you’re like that——”
“Don’t talk about it, Ann, don’t talk about it. Go to sleep.”
“Kiss me, then. I couldn’t go to sleep till you’d kissed me. Not to-night. Itisall right, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s all right, bless you.”
“I don’t want to be a drag on you, Renny, dear. Itisa blessing we’re not married, isn’t it?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“That’s what I say. If it’s right it can’t stop, can it? If it’s wrong, it must.”
He kissed her to stop her talking. She sighed contentedly, slid her arm into his and pressed her face against his shoulder.
“Good night. Wehavebeen happy.”
And in two minutes she was asleep. He too was glad of the happiness they had. He was a little infected with her fatalism. If there were to be calamities, there had been stores of frank pleasure and true delight to draw upon in defense against them.
By killing off an imaginary grandmother, Ann procured a half-day off from her work and spent the afternoon with Rita, who was weak and dispirited by the great heat which filled the mews with stale air and brought old fumes and stenches from the stables.There had been thunder and storms, and the two youngest children were down with colic. Joe had disappeared with Click and Billy, who, to Rita’s great distress, had begun to seek her husband’s company and to give him money—at least she supposed they did, for he had nowhere else to get it. All day long Rita talked about a bed her mother had bought for the best bedroom just before she married again, a beautiful bed with four big brass knobs and sixteen little brass knobs, and a bit of brass making a pattern at the head. And it had a real eiderdown, and the springs were not like ordinary springs, but spirals. When she had exhausted the wonder of the bed she began an endless story of the aspidistra and Mr. ’Awkins who undertook to water it and forgot for a whole week, when the leaves one by one went yellow and brown. Into this story was woven all the romance that had ever crept into Rita’s life, and as a good deal had crept in through the unlikeliest corners, it was a long story. She kept it going, as it were, by killing off the leaves of the aspidistra to mark the chapters. Mr. ’Awkins was a wonderful man, but he never quite said it, and Joe wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Joe really did seem to be fond of her, “and mother could be awful.” Besides Joe did promise to make a home for her, and they did go and look at furniture on Saturdays, but always after they had looked at furniture they used to go to music-halls, so they never had the money to buy it. And then they got married.
For hours Ann sat listening to the woman’s voicedroning on. The elder children had been taken charge of by neighbors. The others needed constant attention. Joe came home in the evening, merrily drunk. Ann met him at the door and told him he could not come in. He swore at her and vowed he would. She struggled with him. He was fuddled and uncertain on his legs, and she very quickly had him slithering down the stairs. He sat at the bottom and roared:
“Jezebubble! That’s what you are! Jezebubble! Throwing people down!”
Ann had gone to the window, and seeing René in the yard opposite, she called to him and told him to take Joe away and make him sober. René came running up, dragged Joe to his feet, lugged him into the yard, and held his head under the tap. Joe spluttered and cursed, and when he was released, stood up with the water streaming from his hair, eyes, and mouth. He showed fight. René caught him by the neck and threatened to turn on the tap again unless he showed himself amenable to reason.
Ann called:
“Take him away.”
René nodded, picked Joe up in his arms, and threw him on the floor of his car and drove him out far beyond Uxbridge into the country. There by a black pinewood they stopped. René got down and laughed, for Joe had picked himself up and was sitting perkily with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, with his hat on one side, pretending to be a lord.
“Aw! Chauffah!” he said. “Dwive me to Piccadilly Circus. I want to buy a box of matches.”Changing his tone, he added: “You don’t ’appen to ’ave a fag on yer, guvnor?”
René gave him a cigarette and a match, lit one himself, and sat by the side of the road.
“Was that a joy ride?” asked Joe.
“No charge,” replied René.
“I’ve spat in the car. Is there any charge for that?”
“I’ll smack your head if you do it again.”
Joe looked warily and solemnly at him, then deliberately spat on the floor of the car.
“That,” he said, “is to show I know you’re a gentleman, and what I thinks of yer.”
René dragged him out of the car, smacked his head, and flung him into the bracken.
“I’ll have the law on yer,” yelled Joe, trying to shout himself into a fury.
“Then you’ll have to walk home. Maybe that would sober you.”
“No ’arm, me lord, no ’arm. It’s looking for work, guvnor, that’s what it is. It makes you fuddled. ’Struth it does. Here am I with five children, doing my duty by my country, and I can’t get work. Five children. ‘Good!’ says you, being a gentleman and well provided for. ‘Who’s to support ’em?’ says I. ‘You,’ says you. ‘Let me work,’ says I. ‘There ain’t no work,’ says you. ‘There’s going to be work for as few as possible in this ’ere country,’ you says. ‘Chuck your flaming union,’ you says, ‘blackleg the bloody unionists,’ you says, ‘and there’ll be heaps of work at one farving per hour.’ ‘Five children,’ says I. ‘Good,’ says you. ‘They’ve got hungry little bellies,’ says I.‘Have they?’ says you. ‘Let ’em come and watch the blokes coming to my dinner-party to-night.’” He had worked himself up to an excitement which he could not contain, and he burst into tears.
“’Struth is, sir,” he said presently, “I ain’t getting enough to eat, and you know how it is with my missus.”
“Ann Pidduck is looking after her,” said René, “and I promised to look after you.”
“Woffor did you take me out into the bloomin’ country?”
“I hardly know. One doesn’t worry about distance in the car. She said: ‘Take him away.’ So I took you away. I’m afraid I have rather a literal mind.”
“Well, it’s pretty here, ain’t it? I took my eldest into the country once. When he got back he said to his mother, he said: ‘There was parrots in all the trees, and as for cows there was more than one.’ ’E’d never seen any bird but sparrows and a parrot. I s’pose he thought anything bigger than a sparrow must be a parrot. What they’ll grow up like, Gawd knows, and He don’t care. It makes me sick to think of another one coming. I’d like to know what the ’Ell Gawd’s playing at making a man so that ’e ’as a great love o’ women and can’t get enough t’eat. Us workin’-men ought to be eunuchs, so we ought. If you got a spark o’ spirit in you it does you down every time. You can take me back now, guvnor. I’ll be good.”
He climbed up into the car, resumed his lordly attitude, lit a cigarette, and said:
“’Ome, and drive like ’Ell. I’ll stand the bally fines.”
The pathos of the man’s grotesque humor springing up through his misery moved René so much that he forgot his own perplexity and desired only to please him. He drove back full tilt, guessing that it was late for the “controls” to be manned, and they reached the yard just as the lamps in the mews were being lit. As they came out of the yard they saw a policeman standing at the door opposite. Joe put René between himself and the constable, and they went up to Ann’s room. There the electrician peeped out.
“I say,” he said, “I say. They’ve blabbed.”
“Blabbed! What do you mean? Who’s blabbed?”
“It’s Click and Billy I mean. They’d got stuff. I don’t know where they got it. They made me help get rid of it. I ’ad to get money somewheres. Click’s a Catholic, and he says stealing isn’t stealing if you’re starving. They must have been nabbed. I ain’t a thief, guvnor. I only helped get rid of the stuff. They said I could because I was known respectable. Respectability ain’t done me no good afore.”
“Keep quiet,” said René. “He’ll hear you. Perhaps he isn’t waiting for you.”
“’E ain’t moved. I know how they look when they’re on the cop. Devils! Sly devils! I seen ’em take Click afore now and old Bessie.”
“Be quiet, you fool. Sit down and have something to eat.”
He placed three cold sausages in front of Joe. They vanished. He produced a piece of ham. That wassoon gnawed to the bone. Half a loaf of bread and a small tin of bloater paste soon followed, and Joe began to caress his stomach affectionately.
“Look here,” said René. “What will it mean if they get you?”
“First offender. I’d get off, all right. But the crooks ’ll never let me alone, and the police ’ll have me marked down as a man to nab if ever they want a ’spected person.”
“All right. You sit here. I’ll go and see how things are over there.”
The policeman eyed René as he went in.
“Want anything?”
“No, sir. No.”
“There’s nothing going on here, nothing unusual. Confinement.”
Ann heard his voice and came down to him. They walked up the mews. Rita was in a delirium. She kept reproaching Joe over and over again for not buying a fire-screen he had promised her. And then she seemed to be living over again in some scene of jealousy. Joe must not come near her. It might not be safe. René told her his news. Ann said:
“She guessed that. It’s that’s broken her up so. She thinks she isn’t a respectable woman any longer. I don’t know that it wouldn’t be best to let him be taken.”
“But doesn’t that mean that he’s done for? You know better than I.”
“You don’t get much of a chance.”
“Then we’ll do what we can. Tell the policeman he isn’t sleeping here to-night.”
“All right. All right. I don’t think I’ll be back till the morning, and then I’ll have to go to work. So good night, Renny, dear. It is good of you.”
They parted. He heard her tell the policeman how things were in the house, and that Joe would not be sleeping there that night, but at his mother’s off the Fulham Road. The policeman asked for the address, and she gave it him pat, and after a moment or two he rolled away. René gave him three minutes, then returned to Joe and told him what had happened, gave him a shilling for a doss, and asked him to meet him in the morning at the cab-rank in Lancaster Gate.
“If I pay your passage to Canada, will you go? You can get a start out there and have your family out after you. We’ll look after them.”
“Will I go?” cried Joe. “I’ve had enough of this ’ere blasted country. Will I go? D’you know that’s been in my mind ever since that there joy ride. I says to myself, I says, moving’s that easy. You been stuck still, Joe, my buck, that’s what’s been the matter with you.”
René keptcavewhile the poor devil slunk out of the mews, and then followed him, saw him mount a bus and be borne away eastward, standing up and waving his hand as long as he was in sight.
His passing left René stranded. He had been caught up in the eddy of that little drama, and then flung back into his solitude, and, though he was cheered by his activity, he was also depressed by the horridgrubbiness of the life that had been revealed to him; nothing in the world for Joe but the procuring of food, the bare satisfaction of desire; an amused fondness for his children. That horrible capacity for happiness in degradation.
He stood below the lighted window of Rita’s room. A moaning came out of it. A thin voice almost screaming:
“Oh, don’t, Joe, don’t!”
There were appalling silences. Then whisperings. A long silence that chilled him to the heart. At length the cry of the new-born child, a cry of pain. Then again silence, broken only by the sound of water and the clink of metal against crockery.
In that moment René became almost unbearably alive to the suffering of the woman, and to all suffering, and to his own.