She dared not look at him, but felt his whole person closing imperceptibly yet unrelentingly in upon her.
‘Yes. And I’m sure I’m ever so grateful.’ She wished to Heaven he would buck up, if he was going to do anything, as she would go mad and run away in a moment.
‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles, but apart from coming in a little nearer, made no further contribution to the situation.
‘It was ever so kind of you,’ she tried, and since she could shirk it no longer, she turned her head and met his eyes.
‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles, gazing at her in a hypnotized, semi-squinting way, and all at once she felt his arm round her waist.
His face was now so near to hers that she found herself squinting back. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, blindly, in complete prostration of the intellect.
But this was no answer for Mr. Eccles.
‘M’m?’ he said, and then, again, as his hold round her waist was made firm, ‘What?’ . . .
‘You shouldn’t be doing this, you know,’ said Ella. ‘Should you?’
‘M’m?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘What?’
Could the unfortunate murmuring man say nothing but ‘What?’ Hysteria would seize her in a moment and she would start giggling.
‘I said you shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said. ‘Should you?’
‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘What?’ . . .
It was no good. Mr. Eccles was in a trance, and would go on saying ‘What’ till midnight and beyond if left in peace. She definitely would have to leave him.
‘Well, I really must be going,’ she said putting her hand on his arm, as though to release herself.
‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles, ignoring this, and pressing her towards him with such vigour and suddenness that they both swayed, and righted themselves with the greatest difficulty. ‘What?’
‘Well – what?’ said Ella, now losing her patience a little.
‘M’m?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘You Little Devil, you. What?’
Oh Lord, thought Ella, what a terrible, versatile, unaccountable man! At the last moment he was piling sheer quizzing rakishness on top of all else. What was she expected to do now – stay and be Satanic? She couldn’t do it.
‘Well, I really must go,’ she said writhingly. ‘Will you come in and see me again soon?’
‘Aren’t you a Little Devil?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘What?’
There was nothing for it – she would have to be firm, and risk offending him. She took hold of his arm with both her hands, and freed herself.
‘You come in and talk about it some other time,’ she said and awkwardly seizing his hand to shake it she added ‘So long. Thanks ever so much. Good-night,’ and fled – half running from him in a way which she hoped he would construe as maidenly overcomeness.
‘What?’ she heard Mr. Eccles protesting as she fled, but she did not dare look back, and in a few moments she was out of sight.
‘The Midnight Bell’ was closed to the public, but she let herself in by the side door, and ran upstairs unobserved.
With the sound of Mr. Eccles’ ‘Whats’ still ringing in her ears, she undressed hastily, got into bed, and lay pondering in the dark.
‘What?’ But why should he ask her What? It was she, surely, who should question him. And after hour upon hour of fumbling and advancing and lurking he had thrown not a speck of light on the mystery of his pursuit. Instead of making himself clear when it came to the crises all he could say was ‘What?’ . . .
What indeed? What? What? What?
She gave the problem up, and slept the dead sleep of exhaustion.
CHAPTER XII
THE DECEPTIVE JUICE Sleep, while it no doubt actually reconstructed and refreshed Ella’s nervous resources, always gave the appearance, first thing in the morning, of having wrecked them. Ella was always at her worst when she woke, and her heart would misgive her fearfully. So soon as she was conscious her mind would go stalking anxiously through the debris of yesterday, certain of signs of calamity and wreckage, and seeking to discover what precise shape they had taken, and for what she was to be indicted by herself. Never did she fail to fix upon something to make the jagged worst of, moved by a hateful yet deliberate impulse. As the day wore on the streams of health and positiveness flowed once more in the dried-up channels, and she was her proper self.
This morning she was not long at a loss for her problem. She turned on the pillow and Mr. Eccles towered up above and around her. Nor was she long in ascertaining which peak in the vast range of that problem she was to single out as the focussing point for self-recrimination. It was the final one – the parting – the querying and hideous clumsiness of the parting. She had as good as run away from him, and she had not the slightest doubt, now, that her rudeness had ‘put him off.’ Put him off for good, probably. Not that she was by any means certain that she did not desire to put him off – if she came to think about it later she might decide that that was exactly what she wanted. But that was not the question. She had put him off against her conscious will and by virtue of her own silliness or ineptness; she was landed resentfully with the fact that she had put him off, and the fiends of her customary early morning mood seized the opportunity to scourge her.
In the flurry of her escape she had not given him a chance to mention a further meeting, and she could not conceive him bothering to come near ‘The Midnight Bell’ again. Well, that was that – she had Put him Off, and she supposed she was relieved in a way. But was not this Putting Off symptomatic of the general miscarriage of her technique and manners? Was she not always Putting people Off with her childishness and self-consciousness? Why must she always be so critical, why couldn’t she have let Mr. Eccles go on saying ‘What’ and embracing her? Another girl would have encouraged and put him at his ease. It was always the same with her. Who did she think she was, that she could be so fastidious? And she proceeded on these heads to loathe and castigate herself.
As she dressed she heard Bob dressing in the next room, and the vigour of his personality seemed to emanate through the wall into her room. How full of confidence and triumph his evenings and mornings seemed. Could a man who bumped about and washed himself like that have any self-castigations or longings? Maybe he had, but in her general sense of yearning for him and everything she did not have, her imagination could not fly so high as to visualize any.
After breakfast, however, Ella’s introspections, as usual, imperceptibly vanished as she busied herself in the bar. By demonstrating her brisk command over one inanimate object after another, she set up a symbolic process which put her soul in countenance, and by ten o’clock she was the despotic marshal of a fiercely trained army of tumblers, and her vital self. Furthermore Mr. Eccles was on the shelf along with the tumblers.
This morning, also, there was a diversion in the bar. Yesterday the Governor’s young grandson, whose school had broken up owing to an epidemic, and whose parents were out of London, had come as a treat to stay at ‘The Midnight Bell.’ He had done this before during the holidays, and Ella knew him well, as it was his custom to ‘help’ her in the mornings in the bar before the house was opened.
For this healthy yet loathsome little boy, with his green school cap, sturdy body, bare chapped knees, and nauseatingly ruddy complexion, Ella had the greatest affection – or at any rate fondly believed she had. Her feeling, that is to say, was founded purely on the fact that he was a child, or ‘kid’ as she called it, and demanded no basis in behaviour. In Ella’s amiable yet curiously conventional mentality, the idea of not ‘loving’ a ‘kid,’ of not considering a ‘kid’ to be ‘great,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ ‘plucky,’ ‘grand,’ ‘fine’ – in fact singular and outstanding in all he uttered and accomplished – was unthinkable or practically blasphemous.
‘Here’s Master Eric come to help you, Ella,’ the Governor would say, and Ella having expressed delight, he would ‘help’ her all the morning. That is to say he would fetch a few things, carry a few things, hum to hims
elf, moon about, wander out on to the pavement where Bob was cleaning the brass, be called in, be stopped pulling at the beer engine, be found tormenting the dog, cause shrieking oscillations by fooling about with the wireless, or fire off a pea-shooter at the bottles – irregularly punctuating these enjoyments either by standing on his head against the wall and looking as though he was going to choke, or standing up against the bar, kicking at the woodwork in his ennui, and cross-examining Ella on points of technical or athletic knowledge.
Subtly and precociously realizing his position as the youngest heir to the establishment and the apple of the all-powerful Governor’s eye, he reserved a special air of arrogance and condescension towards the barmaid, calling her ‘Ella’ in an authoritative and feudal tone, and continually making clear the difference in their social states of grace.
His main delight, however, was to tie Ella up into intellectual knots. Bursting as he was with knowledge, electrical and otherwise, lately imbibed at school, they were both aware in their different ways that he was her intellectual and controversial master, and he might well have afforded to show some tact and forbearance on this head. Nevertheless, he was unable to refrain from seizing any and every opportunity to wipe the floor with her.
Indeed, if the opportunity was not there, he had no hesitation in making it. Thus, this morning, kicking his shoes against the woodwork, and seeing Ella putting some bottles on the shelf, ‘I wonder what the H2O Content of those bottles is,’ he said with an unimpressive air of innocent detachment.
‘Yes. I wonder,’ said Ella, suspecting a trap, and hoping the matter would drop here.
‘What do you think?’ pursued Master Eric, who had no idea of letting it go like that.
‘I really don’t know,’ said Ella.
‘Yes – but you must be able to think.’
‘No,’ said Ella, with a judicial air. ‘I really couldn’t say.’ And then she had an inspiration. ‘What do you think?’
‘I was asking you.’
‘Well, you tell me.’
There was a pause in which Master Eric went on spasmodically banging at the woodwork with his feet, and, putting his head on one side, he traced a pattern with his finger on the bar.
‘I suppose you know,’ he said at last, in a steady voice, ‘what H2O is?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ said Ella, but there was no ‘of course’ about it. True, she had a hazy notion that H2O was an infinitely recondite (but rather unnecessary) way of alluding to plain drinking water, but she was by no means certain even of this.
‘What is it then?’ asked Master Eric.
‘Ah’. . . said Ella.
‘I don’t believe you know,’ said Master Eric. ‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Ella, seeing that she would have to burn her boats. ‘It just means water. Don’t it?’
‘Of course it means water,’ said Master Eric sharply. ‘But what does H2O mean – what do the letters mean?’
‘Oh,’ said Ella, ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘But you said you knew what H2O meant.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes – didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I suppose I did.’
‘Well – then – you didn’t know after all.’
Ella did not answer this.
‘Did you?’
‘No, I suppose I didn’t.’
‘You are Silly,’ said Master Eric, coolly pointing to facts. ‘Aren’t you?’
And because he was a ‘kid,’ and could do no wrong in her eyes, instead of doing what she should have done, that is, smacked his head, hit him in the solar-plexus and kicked him out of the bar, Ella merely remarked ‘Oh well,’ reflected that he had ‘caught her out,’ and hoped he would change the subject.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Master Eric, speaking as one who knew that the information was scarcely worth scattering on to such stony ground, ‘H happens to mean Hydrogen, and O happens to mean Oxygen.’
‘Oh,’ said Ella. ‘Really?’
‘And those two happen to make up water – that’s all.’
‘Oh.’
‘Funny – isn’t it,’ said Master Eric with searing sarcasm.
At this moment the Governor entered the bar.
‘Well, what are you talkin’ about, little ’un?’ asked the Governor, but the little one did not reply.
‘He’s been explaining,’ said Ella blithely, ‘all about Hydrogen and Oxygen, and I don’t know what.’
‘My word – you know more than me anyway,’ said the Governor, and ‘Yes – he’s a bright boy all right,’ said Ella. . . .
And the Governor winked at Ella, and Ella looked back at the Governor with a confidential pride and joy in the youngster that was boundless.
In this way the morning passed, and at eleven o’clock the house was opened, and Ella was kept hard at work till three, when it closed again. She then went upstairs and put on her hat and mackintosh in order to go out into the rain and visit her mother – a visit which was overdue, since to-day was Friday and she usually went on Thursday, her day off.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PARENTS OF this submissive girl dwelling in Pimlico, she walked along to the top of the Tottenham Court Road for a bus, which went at a good speed down the Tottenham Court Road itself; pulled up and rushed forward in dashes along Oxford Street; lined up in a sort of buses’ bread line in Bond Street, advancing inch by inch; sped down Piccadilly by the side of Green Park; whizzed furiously and giddily round the great open spaces of Hyde Park Corner, and landed her in the pouring rain in the vicinity of the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria, where the rich were leaving for happier climes. For this transportation she contributed threepence to the Company’s funds, and had about ten minutes’ walk ahead of her, threading her way through the least flourishing quarters of tobacco-cum-sweetshoppy Pimlico, and at length arriving at the corner of a decomposing street, where stood a decomposing house with four floors, a basement, and railings. Here, sandwiched between five or six other grim and doubtful ménages, lived Ella’s mother and stepfather.
This, in fact, was Ella’s home and background. Also, in a manner, it was her secret, for those who saw the neat, beer-pulling, chaffing Ella in the bar of ‘The Midnight Bell’ carried social introspection no further than the epithet ‘barmaid,’ and it no more occurred to them to suspect that she had some such human background and spiritual resource, that she carried on a complete life of her own in other words, than it would have occurred to them to suspect her of murder or arson. Not even the Governor or Bob suspected. Actually, however, Ella looked at the matter from exactly the contrary angle. To her this was her real life, and wherever her mother was was necessarily her home; and however frequently she might leave it, and lodge apart in order to slave her life out elsewhere, she could never regard such departures as anything but prolonged ventures or enforced excursions launched from this fixed centre in her heart. Such are the cool misapprehensions of a harsh and disinterested world.
Not that Ella was ever at home more than four hours every week on the average, or that she was what is called ‘happy’ at home. In fact she never failed to make herself dumbly miserable by going there. At the very outset there was a jarring note, her mother having some years ago acquired the preposterous surname of Prosser, whereas her true surname was the same as Ella’s – Dawson. This infantile homage paid to Registry Office formulas invariably puzzled and annoyed Ella, although she could not dispute the fact that her mother was legally, indeed irremediably, married to Mr. Prosser.
To hear her mother being called Mrs. Prosser – that was to say after a fiend in human shape – was often more than Ella could bear, and she would be on the verge of crying out upon her mother for her responsibility in the error. Her mother, however, bore such an apologetic and uncomprehending air about the matter, and had obviously so completely forgotten the variety of motives which seven or eight years ago had prompted her to commit the act, that Ella always reproached herself for her resentment,
and remained silent. Indeed, in an embarrassed way, they both tried to keep off the subject altogether in so far as it was possible, Ella giving her tacit consent to the only comment that her mother was capable of feebly re-affirming in an effort to justify or mitigate the penalty of her husband – namely, the negative one that he was not as Bad as he was Painted.
Whether, actually, Mr. Prosser was, or was not, as Bad as he was Painted (by Ella at any rate), was another matter. In point of fact, he was not the sort of man that anybody would think of Painting at all, in the ordinary way – he being one of the obscurer Paintings by the Almighty in a modern style, whose significance and place in the general exhibition were not to be instantly apprehended and whose soul did not show on the surface. A more silent and reticent man there never was. He had a thin body, an ashen face, glowering eyes, and a large grey moustache. A saddler by trade, he had been, before and just after the war ‘in his own way.’ The laws governing the benign progress of capital, however, had by slow and painful methods pinched and thrust him from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie into the ranks of the proletariat, with the result that, instead of being ‘in his own way’ he was now in almost everybody’s way, and a misery to himself. Always a sour-tempered man, a staunch conservative in politics, and something of a snob, instead of having sheltered himself with any form of philosophical encrustation, his fall from private ownership obviously yet rankled and gnawed at him day by day, and hour by hour. There was nothing doing in his line, and he made a few unhappy shillings every week by cleaning the brass, and sweeping the floors, and snatching up the empty glasses of the more fortunate in a large public-house round the corner. A false and humiliating occupation indeed. There was thus much to excuse him, but not enough to account for his invincible and chronic silence and savagery, which he wreaked upon his wife, and which arose, perhaps, less from sheer distress than from a vindictive sense of vanished superiority. Ella, uncomprehending of social causation, saw no excuse.
Mr. and Mrs. Prosser inhabited three rooms on the third floor of the house Ella now entered, and regarded their quarters as comparatively spacious. There was a bedroom, a sitting-room, and a general muddling room containing a washing line and a gas range. The windows at the back looked out on to the sooty structure and black asphalt yard of a school – and the weighted droning of the class-room, or the murderous yelling and squealing of recreation in the yard, accompanied the occupiers through the tasks of the day.