Part 14

A faint sweet whiff of scent had come his way. His senses did not wait for any more evidence; they reported at once to his imagination, which immediately dowered the vague dark figure beside him with all sweetness and prettiness, not unlike that of Lulu Castellar, who was at the moment absent from the screen, the young inventor, having arrived in New York, being barked at by the three heavy men. Turgis took in all that the film had to offer him, but now he was no longer lost in it; he was living intensely in the tiny darkened space between him and the girl. Instinctively, he edged a little her way. Their elbows touched on the arm of the seat, and even that trifling contact sent a thrill through him. A little later, his left leg encountered something at once firm and soft, another leg, a beautifully rounded feminine leg, and the two remained in contact. This, like the other, may have been casual, but to Turgis the effect was electric. And then it chanced that his hand, hanging loose by his side, touched another hand, which was not withdrawn when it was touched again, this time deliberately. The two hands now met fairly; they grasped one another, squeezed; their fingers were intertwined; they sent and received messages in the dark. Turgis could now regard the graceful antics of Lulu Castellar with a benevolent detachment. The dream life of the screen was nothing compared with the pulsating real life of those contacts in the warm gloom, those little pressures and squeezes that were signals from that other enchanted world. He did not try to talk to her again. That would come later. He said nothing, hardly looked her way, afraid lest he should break the spell.

When the film ended and a kind of soft russet dawn broke as the screen disappeared behind the curtains, they moved away from one another, and he did not even catch a glimpse of her face. A great many people went out, and a great many others came in, but they were not disturbed. Then the curtains moved again; a soft russet twilight came, only to fade into darkness; and the programme artfully continued. But would this other and far more exciting programme continue? His heart bounded in the new darkness. He leaned towards her again; she did not evade him; and hand clasped hand again, stickily perhaps now but still exquisitely, thrillingly. Turgis had not been so happy for months.

It was not until the young inventor’s train to New York was again roaring across the screen, after the programme had gone round its full circle, that the girl loosened her hand and began to put on her gloves. Turgis had been waiting for this moment for some time. When she rose, he rose too; and she followed him past the indignant knees and up the stairs. It was when they reached the exit steps, descending into the real world, that he turned and spoke to her. And he knew instinctively that they were not now the two people who had been holding hands for so long in the darkness inside; those two intimates were ghosts now; these two on the steps, in the light, were strangers and would have to begin over again. When he spoke he acted upon this instinctive or intuitive knowledge.

“How did you like the picture then?” he asked, casually.

“I didn’t think it was so very good,” she replied, just as casually. “I don’t like that Lulu Castellar. Pulls herself about a bit too much, she does, if you ask me. Might as well have Saint Vitus’ dance and have done with it. Do you like her?”

“Oh--I dunno--she’s all right,” he muttered. He was recovering from a horrible shock. This girl was not pretty at all, not even reasonably good-looking. She was years older than he was, and she was hideous. He had just caught sight of her face properly for the first time. Her nose was all twisted and she had a bit of a squint. She was thirty if she was a day. Oh, hell--what a wash-out! She was still talking, but he could not bother listening to what she was saying. Sheer vexation made his eyes smart. He kept pace with her down the steps, mumbling an occasional “Yes” and “No,” but somewhere inside him was a hot little angry man who screamed and cursed at everything.

“Well,” she said, when they reached the bottom door, “I’ve got my sister to meet, so I’ll say good-night to you.”

“Good-night,” said Turgis miserably.

Saturday night was roaring away outside, but for him the heart had gone out of it. He walked on mechanically, so sorry for himself, so angry with everything, that he could have cried. His head ached from being in that rotten balcony so long. There were queer aches in his body too. Where could he go now? Nowhere worth going to. If you had plenty of money, evening dress and all that, you could go to restaurants and night clubs and dance with beautiful girls with fine bare arms. But he wasn’t in that seam. He’d no evening dress; no money; and anyhow he couldn’t dance. He couldn’t do anything. No, perhaps he couldn’t, but he was as good as most of those fat rotten blighters who had the money, who just went chucking it away while he had to count every penny. Look at that lot in the big car, with their fur coats and diamonds and white shirt fronts, probably going somewhere to dance and get boozed up and God knows what before they’d finished! Swine! He was as good as them any day. And better--he did do some work. What did they do? It was enough to make any chap turn Bolshie. He didn’t like the other chap who lodged at Mrs. Pelumpton’s very much; Park was a dreary, unfriendly sort of devil, and a Sheeny at that; but he didn’t blame Park for turning Bolshie. For two pins, he’d turn Bolshie, too. Yes, but what was the good of that?

All this time he had been walking on and on, through a Saturday night with the bottom dropped out of it, and now had left the spangled West End behind him. He stopped at a coffee stall, where several fools were arguing about nothing as usual, and had two buns and a cup of coffee--poor stuff it was too, too sweet and nearly cold. As he turned his back to the counter, he saw a girl, a really nice kid with a red hat and big dark eyes, smiling in his direction, and he smiled back at her hopefully, but then he saw her eyes move slightly and the smile instantly vanish. She had not been looking at him before, when she smiled; she had been looking at the chap standing next to him, who was ordering two coffees. And what a chap to be out with, to be smiling at! If that’s what she wanted, she could have him. One vast sneer, Turgis moved away, and boarded the first bus he found that would take him to Camden Town, back to Nathaniel Street with the ruins of his evening.

“’Ad a good time, boy?” said Mr. Pelumpton, now mellow with beer, as Turgis looked into the back room. “That’sh the way. Yersh. Enjoy yershelf while you’re young, I shay, and while you _can_ enjoy yershelf. I did when I wash your age an’ don’t ferget it, boy.” Here Mr. Pelumpton chuckled and then coughed. “I ’ad a good time and nobody could shtop me ’aving one.”

“What’s this about you and your good times?” said his wife, popping out from nowhere.

“I’m jusht telling our friend ’ere that I don’t blame him for enjoying himshelf while he’sh young, ’cosh I did the shame thing when I wash young.”

“Ar, you was a wicked devil you was,” said Mrs. Pelumpton, with reluctant admiration.

“Oh dear, oh dear!” Mr. Pelumpton chuckled. “Lishen to that. Ar well, boy, I don’t blame yer. Good old Shaturday night. I’ve ’ad ’em. I know.”

“I’ll bet you never had, you silly old fathead,” Turgis muttered under his breath.

“Only jusht remember thish, boy. Don’d overdo it, that’sh all. Don’d overdo it. You’re only young wunsh. Enjoy yershelf, if yer like, but don’d overdo it.”

Turgis looked at him in disgust. “Good-night all,” he said, mournfully, and climbed the chilling stairs to his room.

So much for Saturday.

IV

Sunday was fine, that is, there was no rain, sleet, or snow falling. There was also very little sunlight falling, and the streets of Camden Town and Kentish Town were like echoing slatey tunnels. Turgis saw them when he went out to buy a paper and a packet of cigarettes, and as usual he disliked the look of them. They were not very cheerful on a weekday, but they were a pantomime and a bean feast then compared with what they were on Sunday. It was on Sunday that Turgis felt his loneliness most keenly.

It must be admitted, though, that on this particular Sunday morning he had received and refused two invitations. The first was from Mr. Pelumpton, who had decided that he must pay a visit to Petticoat Lane--“jusht to shee ’ow the shtuff’s goin’,” he said, with an impressive professional air. He had suggested, with some condescension, that Turgis might like to go with him. Turgis had promptly declined. He had been to Petticoat Lane before, and he saw quite enough of old Pelumpton in Nathaniel Street and had no desire to go to Whitechapel with him, merely to provide him with a listener and some free beer.

The other invitation came from his fellow lodger, Park, the Bolshie. Park, a neat dark Jewy sort of chap, quiet and civil enough but with something machine-like and vaguely menacing about him, just as if he was not quite human, worked in the printing trade and apparently had to go at all hours, so that Turgis hardly ever saw him. Moreover, he was a tremendous communist worker, for ever attending meetings and conferences and addressing envelopes to distant comrades and circulating what seemed to Turgis, who had inspected it, some terribly dreary literature. The two young men did not like each other very much, but Park always saw in Turgis, who had the depressed look of a faintly class-conscious proletarian, a possible convert. Hence the invitation, which this time was for some communist affair, a meeting or two and coffee and cake for the comrades, somewhere out at Stratford or West Ham. Turgis turned it down, though not ungraciously, for though he did not care much for Park, he had a vague kind of respect for him. But he did not see himself with the comrades. Perhaps the real reason was that he could not imagine any girls, real nice girls, not glaring female comrades, in the picture. He did not tell Park so, did not even admit it to himself; and when Park, with the drab innocence of his kind, accused him of being a timid slave of the bourgeois classes, a would-be bourgeois himself, he had no defence but a grin and a jeering noise.

The paper kept him amused until dinner time. After dinner he went for a walk, which chiefly consisted of penny bus rides. They finally landed him, as they had landed a few thousand other people, at the Marble Arch corner of Hyde Park, where the Sunday orators congregate. Turgis often visited this forum and listened to the orators. He had no intellectual curiosity and never really attended to the arguments, such as they were, but he had a sort of genial contempt for the speakers that was a warming, comforting feeling. He felt that they were a great deal sillier than he was, and that was pleasant. Moreover, any leisurely crowd always had an attraction for him, because there was always a chance that there might be, somewhere in the middle of it, bored and lonely, a wonderful girl who would suddenly smile back at him.

He drifted from speaker to speaker with the crowd, which was largely composed of youths like himself, all feeling pleasantly superior, with a sprinkling of aggressive dialecticians and religious and political fanatics. There was a fantastic old man in a greenish frock coat who banged a large chart and talked in a high sing-song that left five words out of six quite unintelligible. His subject--of all things--was shorthand. Turgis stared at him for a minute or two, concluded that he was mad, and moved on. The next meeting, a large one, was political, and the only words Turgis caught--“What about Russia, where your socialism, my friends, has been put into practice?”--drove him away at once. Then there was a tiny group of people round a harmonium, played by a young man with bulging eyes and a straggling beard. They were drearily singing a hymn, and nobody was taking any notice of them. Next to them, one of those involved discussions, typical of the place, was in heated progress, and the audience, in its own ironical fashion, was enjoying it. All that Turgis, at the back, could hear was the speaker himself, a young man with spectacles and long yellow hair who had something to do with the Catholic Church, who kept crying: “One mewment, my friend, just one mewment! Kindly allow me to speak. Yes, yes, but one mewment! You have asked me if I would considah such a person insane. Now, one mewment!” Turgis lingered for some time at this meeting. There were one or two nice girls in the crowd, but not one of them was by herself. It was no good. He would have to find a pal.

The speaker on the right was being heckled by a woman who looked rather like Mrs. Pelumpton. He was an elderly man, dressed in an old-fashioned black suit, and he was shaking a Bible almost in her face. “Well, what do Ah do?” he cried, his eyes gleaming. “Ah turn once mo-ore to the graa-aate Boo-ook. Yes, Ah’ve a Bahble text for tha-at.” Turgis did not learn what the text was, for there came a tremendous bellow from this man’s neighbour, a dirty little fellow with a broad flat nose and an india rubber mouth, who looked like a nasty compromise between Hoxton and Manchuria. “What is thee yighest idee-al of thee yole universe, my friends?” he was screaming, in a lather of oratory. “I’ll tell you. Thee yighest idee-al of thee yole universe is Man--Man.” And he thumped himself on the chest. Turgis did not like the look of him at all. He also did not like the look of the Salvation Army lasses who were conducting the service on the other side. They were all so pimply. They looked as if they were always eating things that disagreed with them.

Next to the Army was a bony, shabby chap, a Bolshie, possibly one of Park’s pals. Turgis had heard him before, and only stayed long enough to make sure that he was on the same tack. He was. “Noo where did communism firrst appearr, ma frien’s?” he was asking. “Noat in Russia--oh no! Noat in England--oh no! Noat in Frrance--oh no! Bu’ in Grreece, ma frien’s, in ancient Grreece, where a mon called Playto wrote a buik called _The Repuiblic_. Yes, Ah know that this mon should rightly be called Plarto, but if Ah said Plarto, Ah know everybody would be staring at it an’ wondering who this Plarto was, so Ah call him Playto. An’ he was the firrst communist.” It was like listening to a Scots comedian who had gone sour. Turgis moved on, passing with the merest glance a very tiny group that everybody had ignored. There were three of them, two bearded and bare-headed men and a faded woman, and they were standing close together, apparently praying. Nobody was taking any notice of them, except a battered and boosy old actor (he recited a sort of story that introduced the names of all the successful plays running at the time, and Turgis knew him of old) who was waiting to claim the pitch. Why did these people come here? Who were they? What did they do at home? Once more, Turgis concluded they were all mad, but this time the thought did not give him any pleasant feeling of superiority. It depressed him. Suppose he was suddenly taken that way!

But there were roars of laughter coming from the crowd on the right, and above it Turgis recognised another familiar figure, an atheist chap, and quite a turn too. He was a fat young man, with a glittering squint and a nose so resolutely turned up that it could be described as a snout; and he had a very self-confident perky manner and a shrill voice. Turgis edged himself into the audience. “Now, where was Oi? Losing me plice, wasn’t Oi?” he cried humorously. “Ow, Oi know. Fish on Froiday, thet was it. Whoi dew the Catholics eat fish on Froiday? They down’t know. They down’t--strite! Yew arsk ’em an’ see. They down’t know. But Oi know.” Here the crowd roared its approval. “It’s in nonner of the old goddess, Froiyer, goddess of plenty. Froiyer--Froiday--see? Thet’s whoi they eat fish on Froiday. It is--strite.” The crowd roared again. “Then there’s the Trinity. What’s thet? Yew arsk ’em. They down’t know. They’re not allowed to talk about it. Whoi? Tew sycred. Thet’s what they’ll tell you--tew sycred. Secret and sycred--come from the sime root--mean the sime thing. They do--strite!” His audience did not care very much if secret and sacred did come from the same root, but it thoroughly approved of the piggy young man. And Turgis shared the general delight.

By the time he had returned down the line of speakers to the place where the old shorthand enthusiast had been (his pitch had been taken by a Christadelphian evangelist, a burly red-faced fellow who looked like a bookie), it was nearly dark and he found himself thinking about tea. He left the park, and walked along Oxford Street. Every teashop he came to was crammed. People were eating and drinking almost in one another’s laps. And already there were queues for the pictures. “If they’ve got homes to go to,” Turgis told himself, “why don’t they go to ’em.” He was sick of them. They were no good to him, these jumbles of faces. Finally, in somewhat low spirits, he found a place just off Oxford Street, one of those humble teashops with tall urns or geysers on the counter, a slatternly girl in attendance, a taxi-driver or two sitting at the first table and three Italians sitting at the back. He had a poor tea and it cost him fourpence-halfpenny more than he thought it would. When he went out again, it was drizzling, and miserably cold and damp. The queues for the pictures were enormous. All the cheaper seats were probably filled for the night.

He crossed Oxford Street and, without thinking where he was going, cut into the streets to the north of it. In one of these, a number of people, mostly women, were hurrying up some lighted steps. A notice informed him that the Higher Thought Alliance, London Circle, was meeting in that hall, to hear a lecture by Mr. Frank Dadds of Los Angeles, and that admission was free and that all would be heartily welcome. He lingered on the steps, where he was sheltered from the thickening drizzle, and wondered whether to go in or not. Now and again, on Sundays, he looked in at various services and meetings (though he had never tried the Higher Thought Alliance before, and had never heard of it), partly for want of something better to do, and partly because he always hoped he might strike up an acquaintance with a girl there, perhaps share the same hymn-book or programme. As he was hesitating, a large middle-aged woman in a fur coat, who had been fussing about in the entrance, noticed him and said: “Do come inside. Everybody is welcome.” So he shook the raindrops from his overcoat, clutched at his hat, and, shyly, awkwardly, with his mouth wide open, he entered the hall. There, of course, before he had time to look round and see if there were any vacant seats near any nice-looking girls, an officious little man insisted on showing him to a seat. There were only about four men in the hall, but about two or three hundred women, mostly middle-aged and very dull. His own uncomfortable cane chair was between two of the dullest. On the platform, two women with short grey hair and a strained, gulping sort of expression, played the violin and the piano, and went on playing for the next ten minutes. Turgis began to feel sorry he had come, even though the place was warm and dry and the affair would not cost him anything.

Then the middle-aged woman in the fur coat, who had spoken to him outside, mounted the platform, and announced that they would begin with a hymn. It was not an ordinary sort of hymn--even Turgis could see that--and unfortunately nobody seemed to know the tune. Even the violinist had some difficulty in arriving at it. When the hymn finally trailed away into silence, they all remained standing, and then the woman in the fur coat said: “We affirm health, which is man’s divine inheritance. Man’s body is his holy temple,” and everybody else, except Turgis, looked down at slips of paper and repeated it after her: “We affirm health, which is man’s divine inheritance. Man’s body is his holy temple.” Several of the people near Turgis had some trouble in affirming this, because they were interrupted by fits of coughing, but they did their best. After that, they affirmed all sorts of things, divine love and power and truth and a general sort of oneness in the universe. Then they sat down, and nothing happened for a minute or two, during which time the universe had an opportunity of taking stock of their attitude towards it. Turgis was bewildered and not too happy, for the chair was very uncomfortable and his feet were cold.

He did not listen to what the woman in the fur coat said when she began talking again. She seemed to be reading a poem by a friend of hers, and then leaving a thought with them all. Turgis heard this remark because she repeated it several times and looked straight at him, the last time she said it. “And I’ll just leave that great thought with you,” she cried, and stared hard at Turgis, who felt embarrassed. The next moment, the two women with short grey hair were playing the violin and piano like mad, and the fussy little man and two others were rushing round with collection boxes. Two hundred and fifty women dived into handbags and then sat bolt upright, trying to look as if they did not know that their right hands were all clutching sixpences. Turgis left his pocket alone, and when the collection box came his way, he gave it a mysterious shake and then passed it on very quickly.

“A few minutes’ silent meditation,” the woman in the fur coat announced, composing her face meditatively. All the other women composed their faces meditatively too, and then looked down at their shoes. Turgis looked down at his, and noticed that one of them was splitting at the side. He wanted to waggle his toes to warm his feet, but if he began waggling, the shoe might split still more. They were rotten shoes. Everything he ever bought always turned out to be rotten. He was always being taken in. What he ought to buy was a pair of good thick Army boots; there were still some about in those ex-government stores shops; and they were cheap and they would last. But there again, what was a girl going to think of him if she found him clumping about in boots like a navvy’s? What girl, though? “Where d’you get your girls from?” he asked himself, with a sneer. There was a rustle and a shuffle: the silent meditation was over.

“And I’m sure Mr. Frank Dadds needs no introduction from me,” the woman in the fur coat was saying. “We are delighted to have him here with us again. We remember the inspiring talks he gave us last time, and we realise that we have a treat in store.” And there was an appreciative murmur.

Mr. Frank Dadds of Los Angeles suddenly shot up as the woman in the fur coat sat down. He was a tallish, fattish, fairish American in a light brown suit and a pink tie. He clasped his hands, then rubbed them together. He smiled at them all. He was obviously at home in the universe, and filled with divine love and power and truth and a general sort of oneness. Even Turgis was impressed by him, and all the women sat up and gazed at him with adoration. Then Mr. Frank Dadds burst into speech.