If Jenny had not taken that first glass she would not have taken the second, and if she had not taken the second she would not have taken the third, and if she had not taken the third she would not then and there have resolved to abandon herself to the pleasures and perils of drink. And if she had not done that, she would not have become involved in the events which lost her her job, and set her going down the paths of destruction.
Probably there was never any doubt of Jenny’s social destiny, but can it not at least be said that that glass of port unlocked her destiny? Her ignorance, her shallowness, her scheming self-absorption, her vanity, her callousness, her unscrupulousness – all these qualities – in combination with her extreme prettiness and her utter lack of harmony with her environment – were merely waiting and accumulating in heavy suspense in the realms of respectability to be plunged down into the realms where they rightly belonged: and a single storm, lasting no longer than six hours, achieved this.
From the sheer nervous wear and tear of that calamitous and climactic night Jenny never survived. Being what she was, how could she? Her story, from her brief moment of revival in whisky that morning, is another story altogether, but it deviated, as has been seen, in no way from that which the sardonic world in general (hearing of a run-away servant girl spending the night and drinking whisky and having lunch with a strange gentleman friend) would have predicted.
At half-past eight that morning, at the **** Hotel, Paddington, there was a knock at their bedroom door, and a stout woman, incongruously dressed as a maid, brought in a large breakfast tray for two, and laid it on the bed without a word.
Jenny, lying over on her side, was very sleepy, and for a moment actually could not recall where she was or with whom she had spent the night. She succeeded in remembering, however, without opening her eyes to look. ‘You pour it out,’ she said.
After a while she sat up, and, taking her first sip at the tea, began to revive. She even had a little toast and marmalade.
He was in a wretched state of depression, and could eat nothing. She could see that he repented last night’s dissipation, and she had suffered too much in that way herself not to feel sorry for him. He gulped and gasped at the hot tea, and looked ahead of him.
‘You’re feeling sorry now,’ she said, smiling. ‘Aren’t you?’
She always rather enjoyed this moment of the morning, after she had spent the night with a man. Being able to lie on in bed, without regrets of any sort, while he, full of remorse and with passion spent, had to rush off back to his work, filled her with an indolently indulgent, one might almost say a maternal feeling towards him.
‘Oh – I’m all right,’ he said.
There was a pause as she buttered her roll.
‘Have you got to get back to business?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I got to be there at half-past nine.’
‘Married?’ she said.
‘Ah! . . .’
‘I’ll bet you’ll tell her a fine story when you get back, won’t you?’
He grinned, revealing the gaps in his yellowed teeth.
A moment later he gulped off the rest of his tea, and got out of bed. He was a simply dreadful sight in his shirt, and she tactfully lay back and looked at the ceiling.
‘You know I said last night I’d seen you somewhere before? . . .’ she said.
‘Yes?’ He was washing his face in cold water at the washing stand now.
‘I’ve remembered where it was.’
‘Oh?’ He went on washing his face.
‘I know your name.’
‘What?’ He turned round and looked at her with his face dripping. This had clearly alarmed him.
‘I said I know your name. Your Christian name at any rate.’
‘I bet,’ he said, hiding his nervousness by drying his face. ‘Go on. What is it?’
‘It’s Andy,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’
She saw how afraid he was, and she despised him for it.
‘Eh?’ she said.
‘How do you know that?’ he said, now drying his hands.
‘You were in a car accident with me, weren’t you?’ she said.
He stopped drying his hands, and looked at her, for an awestricken moment, in the face. Then he went on drying.
‘Well – what about it?’
‘We ran over a man on a bike – didn’t we?’
‘Well – what about it?’
‘And you drove on – didn’t you?’
‘Well – what about it?’
‘Oh – nothing. Bit funny meeting you again like this, though.’
‘Yes. I suppose it is.’
What a funk he was in! Why did these little men always imagine they were going to be blackmailed when they went with women? It would serve him right if he was. In fact, on second thoughts, that was rather a good idea. She had never tried blackmail.
‘Did the police ever get on to that accident?’ she said.
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘I expect they’d still give a lot to know, wouldn’t they?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh – nothing.’
There was a silence as he began to climb into his trousers.
‘You’re not trying to blackmail me by any chance, are you?’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘But I do think you might give me that extra quid – to make up the fiver. I know you’ve got it on you.’
‘Well, you can get it out of your mind – see? I’ll bring in a policeman here, if you’re not careful.’
‘So’s I can tell them about that accident?’
He did not answer. He was trembling all over.
‘You’re getting rather excited, aren’t you?’ she said.
He went on dressing in silence. As he put on his waistcoat he took out a pound note and flung it on the bed.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That do you?’
‘Very nicely. Ta.’
She thought him a pitiable fool to have lost his nerve to the extent of giving in to her demand, but she was pleased with the success of her little ruse, and felt nothing but kindly indulgence towards him again. Poor little wretch. How oddly had she got the better of him in the long run of years!
He had now got on his hat and coat, and was looking round the room to see whether he had left anything behind.
‘Ain’t you going to kiss me?’ she said.
‘I’m in a hurry, I’m afraid.’
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come and kiss me good-bye.’
With an air of impatience he strode over to the bed, and kissed her.
‘Thank you,’ said Jenny, smiling at his childishness. ‘I only hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, dear.’
He went straight out of the room, and a moment later, as she picked up the pound note, she heard his brisk footsteps receding down the pavement outside. Then the sound was lost in the roar of a passing ’bus, and he was swallowed up for ever in the great world of London.
THE PLAINS OF CEMENT
ELLA
CHAPTER I
AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN the afternoon, when the turbulent and desperate traffic, coursing through the veins of the West End, announces the climax of London’s daily fever, a thing occurs in Oxford Street, which, though unknown to the great majority, and barely perceptible by the senses of anyone in that overwhelming noise, is all the same of great ulterior significance. The bolts on the inner sides of the doors of the public-houses are slid back, and any member of the public is at liberty to enter and drink.
In most cases advantage is not at once taken of this liberty. Indeed, it may be said that only the chronically dissolute are instantaneously alive to the opportunity; and the places generally remain gloomy and empty for at least a quarter of an hour. All the same, there they are open.
By a curious instruction of the law, Oxford Street does not receive impartial treatment at five o’clock. On one side of the street only – the north side – may the houses open their doors. On the other side the
y must remain dumb and lifeless until half-past five. And the same dispensation applies not only to the buildings on either side of the road but to the entire districts north and south of Oxford Street. Thus it is that Oxford Street, for this area of London at this time of day, constitutes a river of furious traffic dividing an arid from a flowing land – a fact of which an enormous number of its citizens are unconscious, but of the profoundest moment to the chronically dissolute aforementioned.
Among the hundreds upon hundreds of taverns sliding back their bolts in the favoured domain, was ‘The Midnight Bell’ – a small, but bright and cleanly establishment, lying in the vicinity of the Euston Road and Warren Street. Though it had no wide reputation, all manner of people frequented ‘The Midnight Bell.’ This was in its nature, of course, since it is notorious that all manner of people frequent all manner of public-houses – which in this respect resemble railway stations and mad-houses. Nevertheless, a student of the streets, conceiving ‘The Midnight Bell’ as the nucleus of a London zone less than half a mile in diameter, could not have failed to have been impressed by the stupendous variety of humanity huddled within the region thus isolated by the mind’s eye. The respectable, residential precincts of Regent’s Park, the barracks and lodging-houses of Albany Street, the grim senility of Munster Square, the commercial fury of the Euston and Tottenham Court Roads, the criminal patches and Belgian penury of Charlotte and Whitfield Streets, that vast palace of pain known as the Middlesex Hospital, the motor-salesman’s paradise in Great Portland Street, the august solemnity of Portland Place itself – all these would crowd in upon each other in the microcosm thus discriminated – a microcosm well-nigh as incongruous and grotesque as any that the searcher might be able to alight upon in the endless plains of cement at his disposal.
Here, then, stood ‘The Midnight Bell,’ and anyone entering its Saloon Bar of an evening would have found its chief figure, a young woman of the name of Ella, in charge. She would either be talking quietly to a customer at one end of the bar, or moving about busily dispensing those distillations to whose existence and efficacy the whole building owed its origin and peculiar design.
Ella had no idea that she was dispensing mental or spiritual states. She had no knowledge of the potency of drink, which she personally detested: she had no knowledge that she played a notable and curious part in the uproar and excitation of civilization: she had no knowledge of the oddity of her station behind that bar – a virtuous, homely, and simple-minded young woman, set up for five hours on end to withstand and feed the accumulating strength of the behaviour of scores upon scores of strange men manifestly out, or going out, of their minds. She did not even have any conscious knowledge of the nightmare variety of her geographical surroundings. ‘We get all sorts in here,’ she would say, in her slow, amiable way. Or, ‘Oh yes. They get ever so fresh, sometimes.’ Or, ‘It’s a funny business, that’s a fact.’ And having thus peacefully called upon her wonderful inner machinery for rendering the abnormal normal without a qualm, she would not give the matter another thought.
Such was the sovereign blindness which characterized Ella’s attitude towards her own employment and the part she played north of Oxford Street at five o’clock – a mental state which, in view of its practical uses, might with greater justice be described as heaven-sent sagacity. And certainly blindness or stupidity, in the ordinary sense of the terms, were the last features to be ascribed to Ella. Indeed, the funny thing about Ella was that although she perceived and apprehended practically nothing, she unaccountably perceived and apprehended practically everything. A liar, or a braggart (and drunkards, whom Ella coped with as part of her daily task, are most often both) had only to meet her grey and friendly gaze to be irritatingly aware of this contradiction. Without knowing it herself she summed up a person or sensed a situation in a second. Nor was she by any means inarticulate. The banality of the expressions she employed in voicing her thoughts was no criterion of those thoughts’ real shrewdness or aptness. Infinitely stale and hackneyed idioms she certainly used, but this was merely because, having access to the wisdom of the ages, she used the expressions sanctified by the ages. Ella always meant what she said. She breathed life into old forms. Hence, when Ella remarked, say, that ‘the longest way round is the shortest way home’ she was not echoing a proverb as a parrot would. On the contrary, after the continually recurring experience in her everyday life, of the fact that short, hasty, or violent methods on behalf of any end generally involve the frustration of the whole endeavour, she had long sought in her thoughtful mind for some law to cover the detached instances of this phenomenon, and had at last alighted, with joy, upon the ready-made aphorism. Similarly Ella, having observed in some of her friends or customers, the human but indefensible practice of accusing others of the very faults from which they themselves most glaringly suffered, would be heard suggesting, with delightful vividness, that ‘people in glass houses should not throw stones’ or that ‘the pot was calling the kettle black.’ A poet could have done no better. The sheer force of her sincerity made these stale maxims her own original pronouncements. And she took continuous pleasure in the exercise of this gift, though a superficial observer – learning from her lips that still waters run deep, or that you cannot burn the candle at both ends, or that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or that it is no use crying over spilt milk, or that enough is as good as a feast, or that pride goes before a fall, and innumerable other essences of wisdom – might easily mistake for dullness her genuine love of artistic self-expression.
In appearance Ella was a plain girl – which means that she was incapable of startling. She was neither startlingly attractive, nor startlingly ugly. She could attract no attention at first sight: she could therefore never hope to attract very much attention. This does not mean that she was without admirers. But they were few and far between – so few and far between that in her sadder moments she believed herself to be in some way disinherited from the main privileges and delights of other girls and women. But then something would happen which would surprise her, and instil in her mind a new estimation, possibly a too hopeful and deceptive estimation, of her powers. And then she would be disappointed, and proceed to underestimate herself again. Life thus was very difficult – as it must be for a plain, as distinguished from a downright ugly, or a downright attractive, woman. But difficulties did not disturb Ella very much.
Ella was about twenty-eight years of age, had a good figure, and was always neatly and plainly dressed. Her hair was dark, and, to be ‘in the fashion’ as she put it, she had had it shingled.
On the October evening with which this story commences, a gentleman, entering the Saloon Bar of ‘The Midnight Bell’ about five minutes after the place had opened, caused Ella’s heart to flutter, but not with love.
CHAPTER II
THE SALOON BAR was a narrow apartment about thirty feet long, with a substantial wooden bar going its whole length, and opening out at the inner end into the Saloon Lounge – a bright general room with tables and chairs for the drinker not pressed by time. Ella stood behind the bar, near the till. Thus, on her right, she had a view into the Lounge, wherein Bob, the waiter of ‘The Midnight Bell,’ was at this moment pouring coal upon the fire, and poking it up into a blaze.
No other customer had as yet entered, and an air of chilly desolation, like that of an empty theatre before the play, made itself felt amidst the harsh electric light, and labelled, bottly sparkle of Ella and Bob’s surroundings. This despondent air was added to by the coldness and darkness of the evening outside – the coldest and darkest yet in the declining year – and the fact that the mind had not yet fully adapted itself to the recent switch over from Summer time – that brutal onslaught upon the nervous rhythm and infinitesimal aesthetic adjustments of the modern Londoner.
The first thing that anybody would notice about the newcomer, who now came forward to the bar with a hearty and yet remotely sinister ‘Good evening’ to Ella, was that he was by no means an old ma
n. That fact was promulgated in his entire demeanour. His bright blue eyes, his decided walk, his quick smile, his erect stature, the nervous turns of his body and movements of his arms, all said the same thing. It might have been argued by some that this intense propaganda of youthfulness in itself made him appear older than he actually was, but that is beside the point. The next thing to be noticed about him was that he was by no means an ugly or utterly insignificant man. Though time (he was fifty-two years old) had whitened his hair and short moustache, though he was of but medium height, though he wore black boots and dressed himself in the conservative collars, ties and garments of a respectable middle-aged clerk, there was yet something about his face, something firm, keen, and comparatively young, which attracted attention. It may have been the sparkling blue of the eyes, it may have been the fine head of wiry white hair, it may have been that thick close-cropped moustache – whatever it was, it was something closely allied to a military look, and something which could not pass unnoticed, if only for the reason that he himself was so forcibly conscious of it.
The third and final thing to be noticed at a first glance concerning this newcomer was that he was wearing a new hat. Indeed this feature at the moment enveloped and predominated over all the others. There are new hats and new hats. No man in the history of the world had ever worn a hat quite as gloriously and fervidly new as this. Not that it was a hat which, amidst a crowd of new hats in a hatter’s shop, would have in any way been distinguished from its brothers (it was just an ordinary new dove-grey trilby with edges bound with grey silk). It was from its wearer, from its wearer’s would-be unconcerned and yet all-pervading self-consciousness of what lay on his head, that it gained its beautiful and vigorous novelty. You could see at a glance that for the time being the man lived in and through his hat. You could see that it cost him sharp torture even to put it on his head, where he could not see it, and it had to take its chance. You could see him searching incessantly for furtive little glimpses of his hat in mirrors, you could see him pathetically reading the fate of his hat in the eyes of strangers, you could see him adjusting his tie as a sort of salute to his hat, as an attempt to live up to his hat. You could see him striving to do none of these things.