Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

  But, of course, it would be unwise to forget that Mr. Eccles held the only vital vote in such schemes for the general welfare. And had she not already decided that she had Put Mr. Eccles Off? Would she ever see him again? No. Probably, if she understood his psychology, he would avoid the pub, henceforth, and run like mad if he ever saw her. And since she had made such an ass of him against those railings, who could blame him? What a fool she had been. Heaven knew what she had gone and lost now. She wished she could see him once more, if only to let him know that she took the Railings all in the day’s work, as it were, and had had no deliberate intention of Putting him Off. Perhaps he would come in this evening. He might, after all.

  But ten o’clock that night – the time at which ‘The Midnight Bell,’ after a great deal of noise, barred its doors against its last customers – left Ella’s heart finally barren of any such hope.

  CHAPTER XV

  ‘I MENDED TWO WIRELESS sets the term before last,’ said Master Eric, practically out of the blue, his arrogant pleasure in his achievements depriving him of any power to lead into a subject gracefully, ‘which all the other chaps had given up.’

  ‘Did you now?’ said Ella, possibly with the minutest tinge of sarcasm in her voice. This was next morning – still grey and raining. She had now had three successive mornings of Master Eric’s ‘Helping’ in the bar, and possibly the cloak of love in which she indiscriminatingly, and because he was a ‘kid,’ wrapped Master E., was beginning to wear a little thin in certain patches under his complacent yet nagging friction. Not that she was conscious of this, or would have admitted it to herself if she had been.

  ‘And one of them belonged to the Science Master,’ pursued Master Eric. ‘That was funny, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. That was funny.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have thought that I could have done it when the Science Master couldn’t, would you?’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t,’ said Ella, secretly thinking either that there was some mistake or that the Science Master hadn’t really tried. But she showed nothing of that.

  ‘It was quite simple,’ said Master Eric, ‘too.’

  ‘Was it?’ said Ella, and at this moment Bob, who had been cleaning the brass outside, passed through the bar on his business. In passing through he gave a curious look at the infant, and another curious, and as it were comprehending look at Ella, which she scrupulously refrained from returning. Bob, in his masculinity, took the most extraordinary attitude towards this little boy. Only this morning, earlier, he had made a staggering reference, out of the blue, to ‘that awful little brat,’ and ‘What do you mean, Bob?’ Ella had said. But she could not credit that he really meant anything so shocking. Probably, she guessed, it was mere excess of humorous affection which forced him to express himself in so frightful a manner. Nevertheless, the glance which he now gave her in passing through did nothing to support that plausible and decent theory, and she looked away quickly.

  A minute or two later Bob put his head round the inner door, and made her heart stop.

  ‘Don’t you want that letter of yours, Ella?’ he said. ‘It’s been hanging about all morning.’

  ‘What letter?’ she said, going pale. Ella hardly ever received a letter, and they always frightened the life out of her. And this morning there were extra reasons for taking alarm. In the first place it had been lying there for three or four hours, a terrifying enough thought in itself for an inexperienced letter-receiver, and in the second place she was filled with a pulsating premonition as to the source from which it had come.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Bob, and did so.

  ‘Ta,’ said Ella, with as much indifference as she could rally, and looking at the cautious handwriting of the address, she had practically no doubt that her instinct had been correct. The postmark from Chiswick finally confirmed her, and she tore it open.

  ‘Strange,’ commented Master Eric, ‘that you don’t read your own letters when they’re waiting for you.’

  Unlike the good-mannered Bob, who had again vanished, Master Eric had no intention of leaving Ella in privacy with her correspondence, but was clearly going to hang about in as close proximity to her as possible and glean whatever of its contents he could. But Ella ignored him and began hastily to read.

  ‘178 Mervyn Avenue,

  Chiswick, W.4.

  ‘My dear “Ella,”

  ‘I write this to say that if the weather is in any way clement to-morrow – unlike this afternoon, when the heavens are surely somewhat reminiscent of the days of the flood! – I shall probably be up in your part of the world, and wondered whether you would care to ‘slip out’ and meet ‘yours truly!’

  ‘On no account put yourself out. It is not worth turning out in this dreadful weather, and I shall stay indoors myself unless there is an improvement. But if it is at all decent I shall be in the Main Hall (Entrance Coventry Street) of Lyons’ Corner House at 3.45 p.m. sharp. I shall not expect you to be there, and will wait five minutes. So decide yourself. I just thought I would make the suggestion as if you were in that part of the world, shopping perhaps, it might be pleasant to have a little tea and a chat. But make no effort as I myself shall not turn out if it continues like this. Au revoir, then, (or do we say Cheerio!)

  ‘Yours v. sincerely,

  ‘ERNEST ECCLES.’

  ‘Is it from a Lover?’ asked Master Eric, who was growing impatient while Ella deciphered this eagerly from beginning to end.

  ‘Don’t be so cheeky, Eric,’ said Ella putting it back in the envelope with a thousand lines of speculations starting in her head.

  ‘But the point is,’ said Master Eric, with the same suave impudence, ‘is it?’

  ‘You run along and mind your own business,’ said Ella. But the truth was, of course, that the child had unwittingly put his finger precisely on the mark. Was it from a Lover? Here was the old query up before her again, and what light, if any, was thrown upon it by this missive? None, that she could see. To begin with, it was a peculiarly non-committal and indeed semi-contradictory letter – in that he had not made it quite clear to her, or apparently to himself, as to whether he had asked her out to tea with him or not. The wording, in fact, took away with one hand what it gave with another. He wanted to see her, so far as she could gather, and he did not. She was amused by the way in which he cleverly sent her out shopping towards the end, also by the odd and rather arbitrary way he had chosen the district for her to do her shopping in. In fact he had shown great skill altogether in getting them both into that part of the world purely by accident, so that he did not have to invite her direct, but was merely accommodating her. And what a baffling letter in other respects! That ‘Ella,’ in inverted commas – what was behind that? Paternal archness? Or boldness tempered by reserve, as much as to say they had not actually plunged over the giddy cliff into affectionate Christian names as yet, but could stand on the edge and play with the prospect. And then what an extraordinary blend of old-fashionedness and clumsy pseudo-modernity in his allusion to ‘the Flood,’ ‘Yours truly,’ and ‘Cheerio!’ At one moment he was an elderly disinterested gentleman afraid of the rain, at the next betraying a kind of forced sprightliness which might be the omen of incalculable developments.

  However, the great thing was that she had not Put him Off, and she saw now how morbid she had been in imagining any such thing. On the contrary he must be pretty Keen, when you came to think about it, writing like that the day after he had left her, and she had a slight feeling of triumph. But what was her immediate line of action? She must put off all other plans and go this afternoon, of course. But what if it was raining? It was raining now, she believed. Yes, she could hear it beating in gusts against the window of the Saloon Lounge. He would never come out in this, and was she to undergo the humiliation of trapesing down there for nothing? Yes. On no account could she risk snubbing his advances or Putting him Off again. She had, as it were, got him back (however little she wanted him), and was not going to have any cause to rep
roach herself again.

  She listened to the rain against the window, in each gust casting gloomy dubiousness over the afternoon, and was surprised to find herself curiously excited about the outcome a few hours hence. Rain often affected her nerves like that, but she might have been in love with him, the way she thought and debated with herself about him. Well, anyway it gave her some sort of interest in life, a secret of her own, something which lifted her on to the hitherto remote plane of those who, as their natural right, always had some such secrets going on behind. Like Bob, for instance. Just as she was thinking this, Bob himself came again into the bar.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘was it a legacy?’

  ‘What?’ said Ella.

  ‘The letter,’ said Bob.

  ‘Oh – that . . .’ said Ella. ‘No. Nothing like that.’

  Amazing, the interest which her correspondence seemed to be causing all round! Here was Bob subtly aware that her letter had some kind of significance out of the ordinary rut.

  ‘Just from a friend,’ added Ella, in a voice which a sensitive listener could interpret as suggesting something a great deal more than a friend, and intended as such, for she enjoyed being the centre of mystery for a change.

  CHAPTER XVI

  MR. ECCLES HAD suggested that she should ‘slip out,’ but it was not a question of ‘slipping out’ exactly. It was a question of hanging about in her room, from three o’clock, when she finished work, until it was time to go, nervously watching the rain pouring down, repeatedly and senselessly titivating herself in the grey light, and getting into a state. She had little doubt that she was wasting a useful afternoon, but was determined to stick it out.

  In her endeavour not to be too early, she finally misjudged things so that she thought she was going to be too late, and suffered agonies in the bus, remembering his stern warning that he would only wait five minutes. But the clock in the Haymarket, when she reached Coventry Street, informed her that she was five minutes too early, and she entered the Corner House hot but with her mind at rest.

  No sooner had she entered the great main hall than she saw him standing there, looking at an imposing display of sausage rolls at the end farthest away from her: and no sooner had she seen him than she saw that he was carrying an enormous bunch of yellow flowers; and no sooner had she seen that, than she realized, with a small proportion of feminine triumph mixed with a large proportion of social terror, that this affair had not even begun as yet, that the first round on Thursday had been a mere sparring bout, and that in this round, the second, he was going to give her a livelier example of his inexhaustible strength.

  Flowers! Flowers at this stage! And at tea-time in the pelting rain, which, according to his letter, was to have precluded the smallest likelihood of either of them turning up! Only the infinitesimal possibility that the flowers were not intended for her enabled her successfully to feign not to notice them as she greeted him, and so preserve a cool and unembarrassed demeanour.

  ‘Ah – here you are!’ he said, his body coming to attention and his face lighting as he saw her. ‘You’re nice and early.’

  ‘Yes. I thought I was going to be late for a moment, though.’ And she smiled and shook his hand, which he just managed to release in time from a rather catastrophic muddle between umbrella, hat and flowers.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he said. ‘Downstairs, as before?’

  ‘Yes. That’d be very nice.’ And they walked towards the marble stairs leading downwards.

  They had nothing to say on the way down. Quite apart from everything else, both were suffering from that state of bafflement, dumbness and confusion which at first confronts all persons who meet another with no business in hand or avowed object other than the shyly confessed one of enjoying his or her company. But there was a great deal else to bring awkward silence on these two. In the first place their difficulty in starting polite conversation was rendered no easier by the memory of their last conversation, which had been (incredible as it might seem) up against the railings and in a warm quivering proximity out of the realms of politeness altogether – and in the second place, as Ella realized, there could be no settling down or peace of mind until the trembling crisis of the Flowers had been got over – and that was up to him. She was on the point of saying ‘What lovely flowers you’ve got there!’ or something like that, but thought she had better leave it to him, and wished that he would attack the problem manfully and as soon as possible.

  It was not very crowded below to-day, and they found a table for four in a corner. They sat opposite each other, and Mr. Eccles was thus able to create a private cloakroom for his innumerable accessories out of the chair next door to him, taking some time, as was his custom, to get everything off and comfortably established. When it came to the flowers, however, he paused, as though seeking where to put them, and Ella braced herself for the fatal moment.

  ‘Why – are these for me?’ would be her line, and she felt sure her cue was coming.

  But instead ‘Would you like these over there?’ said Mr. Eccles, non-committally, indicating the chair next door to her.

  ‘Yes. That’s right,’ said Ella, taking them from him in frantic bewilderment as to whether this was her cue or not. On the one hand the words ‘Would you like’ . . . might be taken as implying ownership or quasi-ownership on her part; on the other hand he might be merely politely asking her to accommodate him. She did not herself credit the latter interpretation, but how could she take the risk? She could, however, help him along.

  ‘What lovely flowers,’ she said.

  ‘Do you like daffodils?’ said Mr. Eccles.

  ‘Yes. They’re beautiful. Aren’t they?’ said Ella.

  ‘Yes, I’m fond of daffodils myself,’ said Mr. Eccles in the tones not of a gallant bestower, but a horticulturist, and leaving her more horribly suspended than ever.

  ‘Specially with these double buds,’ she said, deciding to throw pure horticulture back at him, until such time as he should master his puerile self-consciousness and stop playing with her. She was not going to help him any more.

  ‘Yes. I rather thought you would like them,’ he said, but the waitress appeared at this moment, and they had to stop to order tea. Thus, when this was done, she had got no nearer to an official confirmation of the gift, and worse (since he was now disingenuously pretending that she had naturally assumed he had given them to her), the whole responsibility was thrown upon her shoulders.

  ‘What were you saying?’ she tried, when the waitress had gone.

  ‘What about?’ said Mr. Eccles, absent-mindedly.

  ‘You were saying something about the flowers, weren’t you?’ said Ella, touching them again.

  ‘Oh yes. I was saying I was glad you liked them. I thought you would when I got them.’

  At last! Not that even this was properly explicit, but if she didn’t take the plunge now they would go on all night.

  ‘Why,’ she said. ‘They’re not – ?’ And hesitated with an appropriate vision of heaven dawning in her eyes.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Not for me, are they?’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘Why, I never dreamed. They’re lovely.’

  ‘I never dreamed that you thought anything else.’

  ‘But they’re lovely,’ said Ella. ‘I think that’s sweet of you.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Mr. Eccles, laughing shyly, and ‘I do,’ said Ella, and there was a very nice atmosphere.

  And indeed, now that the flowers were her own, and she could look upon them without embarrassment she saw how lovely (and terribly expensive) they really were, and realized that she adored flowers, and really did think him sweet. And on top of this the orchestra struck up, which softened her heart still more.

  ‘I’m glad you turned up to-day,’ he said. ‘As I don’t know what I’d have done with them if you hadn’t.’

  ‘Did you just get them on spec, then?’ she said, almost vaingloriously, and noting among other things how s
tupendously young he was looking to-day.

  ‘Yes. I thought I would.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have, you know. You told me not to come if it was raining.’

  ‘Ah. We have to take these risks.’

  Not only ten years younger, but his approach was so much more graceful. Had she been altogether misjudging this man? If she wasn’t careful she would be thinking of marrying him in a moment – that was to say, not as a remote and ridiculous hypothesis but as a serious and imminent proposition. In fact, why shouldn’t she marry him? He was wealthy, he was kind, he had every appearance of being her slave, he was even good-looking. Girls of her class in the ordinary way, and that included pretty girls, would Jump at him, as the saying went. Then why should she, who was not pretty, put herself on a plane above pretty girls? She knew by now that she had little enough to expect from life – so what if this man sitting opposite her, by some odd trick of fate was the one destined to make her happy? She must think about this hard when she was alone. In the meantime why not set her face steadfastly towards his good points instead of his bad – why not see to it that she Jumped at him herself while the Jumping was good. She passed a resolution to that effect.

  But what if he had no idea of marrying anybody? What if he made a practice of taking barmaids out and was a wicked rake?

  ‘Are you so used to it, then?’ she said, half to stimulate herself in the process of Jumping by flirting with him, and half to see if she could betray him into throwing any light on the latter query.

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ he said. ‘Sadly the other way, believe me.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ella, and looking at him, she found herself believing him.

  ‘I’m not at all the sort that hangs around stage doors, I can assure you,’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘Do I look it?’

  ‘No, I suppose you don’t,’ said Ella. . . .

  ‘In fact,’ continued Mr. Eccles, ‘I’ve never taken a chorus girl out in my life, so far as I can remember.’