Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
Why had he not thought of it before? Dear God, he had been a landsman too long!
Now! He had his papers intact at ‘The Midnight Bell.’ Now! No time to waste. He had wasted enough time. He would go down to the docks now, and see what was doing. Now! Now! Now!
And here, curiously and abruptly, is the end of Bob’s story, or at any rate of his love story. Bob went to sea: but this story cannot be concerned with his adventures thereon, nor with what befell him afterwards. It is much more concerned with the mere fact that, after all he had suffered, and after all he had lost, Bob was yet able to glow in this manner and resolve to go to sea.
For because of this power of glowing and resolving, and straining still to rise, Bob, weak as he was, revealed, perhaps, something which was far greater than and embraced himself – something which he shared, perhaps, with the whole race of men of which he was so insignificant, needy, and distressed a member.
For there is this about men. You can embitter and torment them from birth. You can make them waiters and sailors (like Bob) when they want to be authors. You can make them (as Bob and most of them were made) servants of their passions – weak – timorous – querulous – vain – egotistic – puny and afraid. Then, having made them so, you can trick them and mock them with all the implements of fate – lead them on, as Bob was led on, only to betray them, obsess them with hopeless dreams, punish them with senseless accidents, and harass them with wretched fears. You can buffet them, bait them, enrage them – load upon them all evils and follies in this vale of obstruction and tears. But, even at that, there is yet one thing that you cannot do. You can never make them, under any provocation, say die. And therein lies their acquittal.
THE SIEGE OF PLEASURE
JENNY
PROLOGUE
JENNY MAPLE, A girl of the West End streets, was walking in the vicinity of Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly Circus, and Great Windmill Street at about eleven o’clock one night, when she became aware that she had attracted the glances of a seedy, furtive little man wearing a white silk muffler and a soft hat.
As a business proposition she did not altogether like his appearance; he looked sly, inelegant, and grasping. But she thought it best to give him what encouragement she could, as she was desperately hard up at the moment, and ‘in trouble’ (as she put it).
She was ‘in trouble’ for two reasons. First, she believed that she was at any moment liable to arrest. A ‘plain-clothes-man’ (whom she knew well by sight and who had always, she imagined, ‘had his knife into her’) had only last night arrested her girl friend, and was clearly out to get her too if she didn’t take the very greatest care: and apart from all the worry and humiliation of appearing before a magistrate, she simply had no idea where she could get the money for her fine.
The other trouble arose more from her own fault. A week ago a young man named Bob (he was a young waiter in a pub called ‘The Midnight Bell’ off the Euston Road) had given her, for various reasons, twenty-five pounds in order to make it worth her while to go away with him to Brighton for a week. It had been a fantastic thing to do, and she had known all the time that he had only done it because he had been crazily in love with her. He was a bit mad. All the same she had promised to go to Brighton and to meet him at Victoria with that end in view. Well, she had not. The twenty-five pounds in a lump sum had been too much for her. She had got drunk and spent all the money instead. She knew she was wrong there, and her conscience smote her somewhat. But even more than by her conscience she was smitten by the fear of what he might do. It was quite likely that he was wandering round looking for her now (he had often done that sort of thing before) and if they met she dreaded to think of the scene he might make.
So being thus doubly in trouble, she was much too anxious merely to get off the streets to pick and choose, and she decided that if this little man in the silk muffler would only make up his mind and speak to her, she would be glad enough.
That he was having a great struggle in this matter of making up his mind about her she could see plainly, and she was doing all she could to help him. That is to say that she was walking regularly and methodically round the London Pavilion: at one moment she was in Shaftesbury Avenue, at the next she was in Piccadilly Circus, at the next in Great Windmill Street, and then in Shaftesbury Avenue again, and so on round. This procedure, while avoiding frightening him by stopping still, gave him certain knowledge of her movements and every opportunity to look at her in passing and make his decision without committing himself. She really could not do fairer.
He, however, was in an appalling state of doubt and nerves. So far from showing the same method as herself, and waiting to meet her regularly as the circle came round, he was dodging all over the place. He was at one moment lurking behind her, at the next walking rapidly ahead of her and trying to get a look at her sideways, then hurrying round the whole circle to get behind her again, then lurking in a doorway pretending not to notice her, then boldly coming down the street to look at her fairly and squarely as though he had never seen her in his life before, then dashing over the road to get an opinion in safety from the other side – in fact, behaving idiotically and despicably.
At last it wore down even her own endurance. She decided to put the tormented connoisseur out of his pain. He had stopped in another doorway, and she was bearing down upon him. She went up to him.
‘Good evening, dearie,’ she said, smiling. ‘Do you want me?’
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and grinned, revealing the gaps in his yellow teeth.
‘What?’ he said, grinningly taken aback, and almost shaking with fright.
‘I think you want me – don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’ve been hanging about ever such a long while.’
There was a pause in which he looked down the street.
‘Depends how much you want,’ he said. He had now regained his repose a little.
‘Well, that depends on you, doesn’t it, dear?’ She spoke with sweet reasonableness. ‘I haven’t got a flat, so we’d have to go to a hotel. Would you like to spend the whole night?’
‘Well – depends on what it would come to.’
‘Well, if I spent the whole night I’d want a fiver – to make it worth my while. But if it was just for a little while it would come cheaper, like – wouldn’t it?’
He thought for a moment, and then adopted a business-like tone.
‘What about the whole night for four quid?’
Secretly she thought this a good bargain in her present state of distress, but of course she was not going to let him see that.
‘Haven’t you got a fiver?’ she asked.
‘No. I can only spare four pounds. Afraid it’s that or nothing. I ain’t got the money.’
She pretended to hesitate.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’m very hard up, so I suppose I’ll have to.’
‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink first, shall we?’
She saw how badly he needed a drink, and marvelled, as she always did, at these little men, to whom an evening of delight, apart from the money they paid for it, entailed such strenuous mental suffering. You would have thought he hated the sight of her – instead of loving the look of her – which his four pounds definitely demonstrated that he did in some sort of way. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘There’s just time before they close.’
She conducted him to a little public house off Rupert Street. They went into the Saloon Bar. This was filled with a crowd of people swallowing as much drink as they could before closing time, but they were lucky enough to find an unoccupied table in a corner. He asked her what she would have; she asked for a port, and sat down and waited while he shoved his way through to the bar to get it for her. A minute later he returned with it; together with a large whisky and soda for himself. He offered her a cigarette, which she took, and he lit a match wherewith he lighted her cigarette and his own.
At such moments as these Jenny always tried to establish a calm
and companionable feeling.
‘Well, dear,’ she said, having taken a sip at her port. ‘What sort of business are you in?’
‘Me?’ He puffed at his cigarette and looked quizzingly at her. ‘What do you think?’
‘I can’t say. You look as though you’re in business though.’
Experience had taught her that her clients were generally flattered by being told that they looked as though they were in business.
‘Well, I suppose I am. I’m in Motors as it happens.’
‘Oh yes? That must be very interestin’.’
‘Oh yes. Interestin’ enough. . . . Not quite as interestin’ as certain others though.’ And he brought his head humorously a little nearer to her, in order to reinforce the double meaning, and almost as if to remind her of the objects with which they had met.
Seeing him look at her like that, it occurred to her, for a moment, that she had seen this unpleasant little person somewhere before, but she could not for the life of her remember where.
‘I believe I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ she said.
‘Oh! Have you?’ he replied. ‘Well, I hope we’ll see a lot more of each other.’
Intending a double meaning again, he had the lighthearted air of a man who obviously did not give the notion the slightest credit, and she herself was not sufficiently interested to pursue the matter. A few minutes later half the lights went down in the pub; they finished their drinks rapidly and went out into the street. He stopped a passing taxi, and Jenny stepped into it.
‘Where to?’ he asked Jenny.
‘The **** Hotel, Paddington,’ she said. ‘I expect he knows it.’
‘The **** Hotel, Paddington,’ he repeated briskly to the driver, who gave a gloomy nod, and bent down his meter.
As she had foreseen, the taxi had scarcely started before he took her arm and cajolingly drew up near to her.
‘You’re a bad little girl, ain’t you?’ he said waggishly. ‘How did you get that way?’
‘Oo,’ she said, in the same burlesquing spirit. ‘I Took the Wrong Turning, my dear. I Took to Drink.’
‘You did – eh?’
‘That’s right, my dear,’ she went on in the same way. ‘All through a Glass of Port.’
She was speaking without the slightest seriousness at the moment, but a little later, thinking of odd things as she humoured him and his kisses and the taxi curved and sped through the mauve-lit London streets, she wondered whether she had not accidentally hit upon the truth. At the same time she remembered where it was that she had met this little man before.
‘All through a glass of port.’ Fantastic as the notion was, she believed it reflected, in an amusing way, one aspect of the whole truth. And her mind fled back (while she still humoured him and saw Paddington and their destination for the night approach) to the now barely imaginable days when, greenly innocent of drink and all else, she partook of that single glass.
What follows is the story of that glass of port, and those days.
I
THE TREASURE
IT SEEMS THAT the tragic predicament of the aged is that, having no further desire for their bodies, they have little left to do in life but concentrate upon the exacting and meaningless problem of living in them. Paradoxically, at no time of life is existence so intensely physical as in old age. Youth, in the careless working of its bodily perfection, may well attend to things of the spirit and mind: but senility, whose every corporal faculty is decaying and working arbitrarily, awaits on the body as all in all. Incessant organic events and misadventures, occupying the vigilant mind to the exclusion of all else, are observed, prophesied, and medicinally forestalled and mitigated. In the majority of cases it is not with beauty and seemly abstractions, but with pills and digestive expedients, that the superannuated await release in death.
In a middle-sized residence in the suburb of Chiswick, five or six years ago, there lived three people in this intensely physical state. There were two old ladies – Miss Chingford and Mrs. Rodgers, who were sisters and both over seventy – and their brother Dr. Chingford, who was eighty-three.
The three were figures in the neighbourhood, with which they had very few dealings. Sometimes the old man was taken for a walk, and the old ladies went shopping together pretty regularly every morning.
These two were not particularly welcome or liked abroad. Tradesmen, as they served them, winked or glanced meaningly at the next customer, and the latter could barely resist returning the same kind of glance as they shuffled out of the shop. They really were so old, and ugly, and silly to look at.
Tradesmen and others, of course, were unable to divine that they were not being old and ugly and silly on purpose. They were seen as hideous old women without past or future, and it was imagined that they were this because they had somehow decided to be so. For all that was thought about it, they might have been born hideous old women. At any rate they had now taken a resolute and unrepentant stand upon it, and people resented such a peculiar taste.
Nothing actually was further from their minds. But, being totally unaware that they were the victims of this injustice, they did nothing to remedy the matter. Indeed, as you saw them coming down the street – the tall, parrot-like, red-eyed, fussy, fatuously hatted Miss Chingford – the small, thinlipped, anaemic, bowed, wrinkled Mrs. Rodgers, with her enlarging pince-nez stuck with slight but maddening lopsidedness on her little nose – as they came down the street they had about them, in their old legs and person, a kind of formidable, bull-dog like waddle which well might make you think they were being positively arrogant about themselves. Also, being old, and having lost their nerve, and not being able to see or think quickly and properly, they were always getting into panics, and talking too loud, and peering at things too long, and holding people up, and waving umbrellas at bus-drivers, and fiddling in their bags, and obstinately refusing to be ‘done,’ in a manner which was really exasperating even to those who were wise enough to perceive that they were afflicted rather than contumacious.
They differed from each other in that the elder, Miss Chingford, was practically a full-blown eccentric and useless everywhere, whereas Mrs. Rodgers, by comparison and within the limits of age and illness, was tolerably complacent, and ran the house at Chiswick.
From Dr. Chingford, whose wife had died some thirty years ago, they both greatly differed. He, when he went abroad, caused no resentment in the neighbourhood. This was because he made no fuss, and was not ugly. On the contrary he was an extraordinarily tall and handsome man, wearing a white beard, and he was incapable of making any fuss, owing to his deafness, which removed him from common affairs. Only by shouting wildly at him, for some time, could you produce any imitation of responding language from him and then you had miserably to translate whatever sounds had emerged as well as you could. For this reason he was practically an unknown quantity in life, through which he appeared to float like little more than an apparition. All the same, with regard to him, people made the same error as they made with his sisters – that of assuming that he had adopted extreme old age and deafness as a career.
It happened that these three old people, who were far from well off as regards money, required a new servant. For the last six months they had been making do with a woman called Mrs. Brackett, whose business it was to come in daily. The arrival of Mrs. Brackett’s little boy, with a meagre and illiterate note explaining Mrs. Brackett’s inability to appear herself was, however, a constant occurrence, and the daily suspense endured by Miss Chingford and Mrs. Rodgers round about eight o’clock was fast growing unendurable. It might, though, have been endured a great deal longer had not Mrs. Rodgers one afternoon been visited by a servant once in her employ, who came for a reference.
This girl, whose name was Kate and who had left Mrs. Rodgers two years ago to get married, still sometimes came in to help, and was on very friendly terms with her old ‘mistress.’ Mrs. Rodgers gave her a cup of tea on this occasion, and afterwards they had a chat. In the course
of their conversation Kate asked Mrs. Rodgers whether she ‘happened’ to require a new servant. She knew, she said, of the very thing if she did.
A young girl, a vague connection of hers by marriage, was in need of employment. She had not actually been in service before, but was perfectly trained in domestic usage, an excellent plain cook, and extremely willing. She desired, if possible, to ‘sleep in,’ though she would not exact this.
Mrs. Rodgers was taken with the idea, and, unknown to Mrs. Brackett, the girl was given an interview. This took place in the drawing-room. Only Mrs. Rodgers saw her, and she came out in two minds.
She pronounced the girl neat, capable-looking, and respectful. She could, in fact, in view of Kate’s recommendation, actually furnish no excuse for rejecting her, save perhaps that of her age, which was only eighteen. The sum of years accumulated by the three upon whom she would minister amounting to over two hundred and twenty-five, the arrangement seemed ill-balanced. But Miss Chingford, an avid optimist and restless enthusiast for change, perceived no disadvantage in this, and after sleeping on the matter her sister came round to the same point of view.
There was, all the same, just one dim objection and foreboding at the back of Mrs. Rodgers’ mind, which she could not define clearly either to her sister or herself. It arose from the extraordinary prettiness of the girl.
From what she had seen at the time, and as far as she could remember now, the girl was not ordinarily, but extraordinarily pretty. During the brief interview this perfectly inconsequent and unacknowledgeable little matter had impinged itself upon the consciousness, it seemed of both, in a meek but peculiarly nettling way.
A second interview took place, and this time Mrs. Rodgers decided, but not with an entirely clean conscience, that perhaps she was not so pretty after all. She engaged her. She was to begin work on Thursday, coming in to work on that evening, and for the day on Friday, and then she was to bring her ‘box’ (a purely mythical and traditional container) on Saturday, when she would take up residence in her own room at the top of the house.