Part 35

She sounded confident enough, but Mr. Smeeth did not know whether to believe her or not. As he left the hospital, a clammy air of dissolution and mortality clung to him. Barbican and Golden Lane, through which he passed on his way to Old Street and Brown & Gorstein’s, spoke to him only of decay. It was a curious afternoon, belonging to one of those days that are in the very dead heart of winter. The air was chilled and leaden. The sky above the City was a low ceiling of tarnished brass. All the usual noises were there, and the trams and carts that went along Old Street made as much din as ever, yet it seemed as if every sound was besieged by a tremendous thick silence. Cold as it was, it was not an afternoon that made a man want to move sharply, to hurry about his business; there was something about it, something slowed down and muffled in the heavy air, the brooding yellowish sky, the stone buildings that seemed to be retreating into their native rock again, that impelled a man to linger and stare and lose himself in shadowy thought.

Mr. Smeeth found himself doing this, after he had left Brown & Gorstein’s, and had turned down Bunhill Row on his way back to the office. He halted opposite that large building boldly labelled _The Star Works_, and wondered what was made there and whether it had anything starry about it. Then he turned round, idly, and stared through the iron railings at the old graves there. He had been this way before, many a time, in fact, but he never remembered noticing before that the earth of the burying-ground was high above the street. The railings were fastened into a wall between two or three feet high, and the ground of the cemetery was as high as the top of this little wall. There was something very mournful about the sooty soil, through which only a few miserable blades of grass found their way. It was very untidy. There were bits of paper there, broken twigs, rope ends, squashed cigarettes, dried orange peel, and a battered tin that apparently had once contained Palm Chocolate Nougat. This dingy litter at the foot of the grave-stones made him feel sad. It was as if the paper and cigarette ends and the empty tin, there in the old cemetery, only marked in their shabby fashion the passing of a later life, as if the twentieth century was burying itself in there too, and not even doing it decently. He moved a step or two, then stopped near the open space, where there is a public path across the burying-ground. He stared at the mouldering headstones. Many of them were curiously bright, as if their stone were faintly luminous in the gathering darkness, but it was hard to decipher their lettering. One of them, which attracted his attention because it was not upright in the ground but leaned over at a very decided angle, he found he could read: _In Memory of Mr. John Willm. Hill, who died May 26th, 1790, in the eighteenth year of his age._ That had been a poor look-out for somebody.

“’Aving a look at the good old graves, mister?” said a voice. It belonged to an elderly and shabby idler, one of those dreamy and dilapidated men who seem to haunt all such places in London, and who will offer to guide you, if you are obviously a stranger and well-to-do, but are quite prepared to pour out information for nothing to a fellow-citizen.

“Yes, just having a look,” said Mr. Smeeth.

“Ar, there’s some pretty work ’ere, if yer know where to look for it, mister. I know the Fields well, I do. Some big men’s buried ’ere. An’ I’ll tell yer one of ’em. Daniel Defow’s buried in ’ere, boy, and I could take yer straight to the plice. Yers, the grite Daniel Defow.”

“Is that so? Now, let me see, who was he exactly?”

“Oo was ’e? Daniel Defow! Yer know Rawbinson Crusoe, doncher? Rawbinson Crusoe on the island and Man Friday an’ all that? Thet’s ’im. Defow--’e wrote that. Cor!--think ’e did! Known all over the world, that piece, all over the wide world. Well, ’e’s in ’ere, Daniel Defow, and I could take yer straight to the plice. Yers, that’s right. Monument, too--ee-rected by the boys and girls of England to Daniel Defow ’cos ’e wrote Rawbinson Crusoe--in ’ere. I tell yer, boy, there’s some big men in there--what’s left of ’em.”

Mr. Smeeth nodded and continued to stare idly through the railings of Bunhill Fields, where the old Nonconformists are buried in mouldering eighteenth century elegance, to which they had at least conformed in death if not in life; and where, among the divines and elders, not only Defoe, but also Bunyan and Blake, the two God-haunted men, lie in the sooty earth, while their dreams and ecstasies still light the world. As Mr. Smeeth stared, something floated down, touched the crumbled corner of the nearest headstone, and perished there. A moment later, on the curved top of the little wall beside him was a fading white crystal. He looked up and saw against the brassy sky a number of moving dark spots. He looked down and saw the white flakes floating towards the black pavement. In all his life, he had never been so surprised by the appearance of snow, and for one absurd moment he found himself wondering who had made it and who was responsible for tumbling it into the City. He hurried away now, and as he went the snow came faster and shook down larger and larger flakes upon the town. Before he had reached Angel Pavement, not only had it whitened every cranny, but it had stolen away, behind its soft curtains, half the noises of the City, which only roared and hooted now through the white magic as if in an uneasy dream. It was so thick that Mr. Smeeth was no longer one of ten thousand hurrying little figures, but a man alone with the whirling flakes. The snow was storming the City and all London. In Twigg & Dersingham’s, they had turned on the lights, but they could still see a queer dim scurrying through the windows. Mrs. Smeeth, in her little dining-room up at Stoke Newlington, watched it with delight and remembered her childhood, when they had cried, “Snow, snow faster, White alabaster.” Mrs. Dersingham, who had been shopping in Kensington High Street, had to shelter from it in a doorway, and was wondering if it had caught the children. The Pearsons, secure in their warm maisonette in Barkfield Gardens, stood at the window for quarter of an hour, calling one another’s attention to the size of the flakes, for there had never been anything like this in Singapore. Miss Verever, who had missed her usual visit to the Italian Riviera, wrote another angry little note to her solicitor, because it was he who had insisted upon her staying in London. Lena Golspie, in Maida Vale, watched it for a minute or two, then switched on one of the big shaded lights and curled among the cushions, with a magazine, voluptuously, like a sleek blonde cat. Mr. Pelumpton was just prevented in time from making a bid of twelve and six for a marble clock (out of order), and stayed at home, in Mrs. Pelumpton’s way. Benenden, having dozed off, never knew it was there. For an hour it was unceasing, and all the open spaces on the hills, from Hampstead Heath on one side to Wimbledon Common on the other, were thickly carpeted, and everything in the city, except the busier roadways and the gutters, was magically muffled and whitened and plumed with winter, just as if it had been some old town in a fairy-tale.

_Chapter Ten_: THE LAST ARABIAN NIGHT

I

The outward changes in Turgis, already noticed by Miss Matfield and Mr. Smeeth, were only tiny scattered hints and clues, and by no means in proportion to the changes within, for during these last seven weeks, ever since that night when Lena Golspie had failed to keep her appointment with him, his life had been like a bad dream. There are some dreams, trembling on the edge of nightmare, in which the dreamer goes rushing frantically through dismal reeling phantasmagoria of familiar scenes and places trying to find a lost somebody or something. This had been Turgis’s real life. He had got up as usual, bolted his breakfast and exchanged a word or two with the Pelumptons, hurried down to the Tube, climbed into the City, sent and received advice notes, telephoned to this firm and that, fed variously in teashops and dining-rooms, looked at newspapers, even gone to the pictures, all as usual; but these customary activities had merely been a dream within a dream, a shadowy routine of existence. His real life had been this pursuit of Lena, and so far it had had all the urgency and dark bewilderment of a bad dream.

He had been able to call again at the flat before her father had returned, but she had only spent half an hour with him and had been vague and shifty in her excuses. He had flung away his resentment, had made the most abject apologies, and at last had made her promise to meet him again. She had kept him waiting twenty minutes on this occasion, and when she did come, she only turned the evening into a misery. She had been cold, had criticized his appearance, his manners, and had made him jealous. When he had tried to kiss her, she had laughed at him and evaded him. Then her father had returned, Christmas came, and the two of them had gone to Paris, leaving Turgis to imagine, with a vividness and force that brought a curious mingling of pain and pleasure, a host of scenes in which Lena went smiling in the arms of rich and handsome Frenchmen and Americans. But at least he could not see her, and so he was free for a few days to make what he could of life by himself. He made nothing of it. He could not forget her for a single minute. London was a jumble of silly meaningless faces. Before he had met her he had spent most of his leisure looking for adventures with girls and hardly ever finding them, but now, of course, they were offered at every turn, thrust on him, and they had no interest at all. He tried once--a girl outside one of the smaller picture houses had smiled at him and he had taken her in--but it was merely dull and savourless, like trying to eat sawdust. After that, he never bothered, living entirely in his thought of Lena and in the memory of those two first rapturous nights. He could not believe--how should he?--that those two nights did not mean as much, or nearly as much, to her as they meant to him, and so he was ready, was eager, to see in everything she had done since merely so many mysterious feminine moods, a queenly wilfulness and waywardness that would gradually be consumed in the mounting fires of passion. He knew that this was what happened with these wonderful creatures: he had seen it happen many a time on the pictures.

At first, he had realized, with wonder and humility, that it was all miraculous, that he was nobody in particular, with nothing very much to offer. But she herself had changed that. She had kissed him into being somebody, and now he had a great deal to offer--his love, his life. Very soon, being a born lover and romantic, it seemed to him that no girl could want more than that. Living over and over again as he did that hour or so of passionate embraces and kisses, he could look back on what appeared to him a long intimacy with her, far removed from any casual encounter (for he knew all about them, and this was quite different), so that he felt he had a claim, a right, and that when she avoided him or in any way challenged that claim, she was trying to escape from the very condition of life itself. Thus, if it was not wilfulness and waywardness, then it was something abominably wicked stirring in her to be regarded as a bigoted and militant priest would regard a heresy. None of this, of course, moved on the surface of his mind, but it coiled and uncoiled below that surface and obscurely determined what did eventually move there or what at last came bursting through, exploding beyond thought, into action.

When the Golspies came back, after Christmas, it took two imploring letters and a final telephone call (he rang up from the nearest call box to the office during a time when Mr. Golspie was safely away from the flat) to induce her to agree to another meeting, and even then, after all the crescendo of excitement, she never turned up. He was left in a hot and salted misery of shame and resentment, but he could no more turn his mind away from her than he could walk about with his eyes closed. And now all London and every familiar way of life were like the flickering background of a film, a film in which he pursued and she evaded him. He could think of nothing, nobody, but Lena.

The sleep that would not come to him at night hovered perilously near him during the morning at the office, when, heavy, drowsy, brooding, he would lean forward, chin in hand, one elbow on the desk, and leave his work untouched until his attention was called to it. He spoke little, and hardly let his dull gaze rest for a moment on one of the others there. They told one another that he seemed stupid, and stupid he was too, in everything that did not concern Lena. In what did concern her, he developed a wonderful acuteness and foresight. Thus, for example, any telephone call from the private office could be overheard at the receiver in the general office, if the little switchboard was rightly manipulated; and it often happened that the Golspies talked over the telephone to one another, usually with reference to what one or other of them proposed doing during the evening; and Turgis became expert at catching these talks while pretending to be at the receiver waiting for some number to be given him. He was able, too, to work on the least hint that might be dropped in Mr. Golspie’s casual talk. Then he would wait hours, even on cold, sleety nights, in the neighbourhood of 4a, Carrington Villas; sometimes in time to see her come out, perhaps with a young man, perhaps with her father and one of his friends, and then to stalk her down the road to the bus or the taxi rank; sometimes late enough to see her returning home, to hear her laughter suddenly break the silence. Twice, he had watched her, with an escort, go into a large expensive restaurant, where he could not possibly follow her. Once he had been able to get to the same theatre, and had sat in the corner of the gallery, looking down at her in the stalls. He had often jeered at young Stanley and his “shaddering,” but now, inspired by his jealous misery, he suddenly turned himself into a master shadower. Icy winds pierced and smote him; his feet ached in the slush; his hands grew numb and his eyes watered; he caught colds that ought to have sent him to bed, but he never heeded them and somehow they disappeared; and all this discomfort hardly troubled him at the time, for he carried a fire inside him, a burning excitement. It was only afterwards, when he trailed back to Nathaniel Street, sat in his little room pulling off his wet boots, turned and tossed and coughed in his bed hour after hour, dragged himself out in the leaden mornings, that he suffered in the body.

His mind, however, lived as it had never lived before, knowing exquisite agonies, finding pleasure and pain inextricably confused in these hours of waiting and shadowing. Sometimes when he was returning to his lodgings, cold, tired out, hopeless, or rose to meet another heavy blank morning, he would tell himself that he had done with it all, and then he might creep through a day or two trying to live a life of his own, but everything would seem then so dull, so savourless, that he hurried back to Carrington Villas, to the waiting and dodging and hurrying round corners. He discovered, too, that when he knew where Lena was, what she was actually doing, his jealous feelings were less strong and sharply barbed than when he did not know where she was and whom she was with: it was bad to realise that for the next two or three hours she would be dancing with that tall fellow who sometimes brought a car, but it was much worse to be miles away from her and to know nothing. When he was pursuing her, though only in this strange, shadowy fashion, Lena and he alone were real, the only real human beings in a city that had been turned, with all its winter magnificence of lighted lamps and shop windows, golden buses, glittering night signs, and shining wet pavements, into an illuminated jungle. When he tried to put her out of his mind, however, there was nothing in the whole city that would let him forget. It had been tantalising, maddening enough before he had met Lena, when he had gone wandering about the streets in an amorous hunger, but now it was a hundred times worse. Everything he saw spoke to him of women and love. The shops he passed were brilliant with hats and clothes that Lena might wear; they showed him her stockings and underclothes; they were piled high with her entrancing little shoes; they invited him to look at her powder-bowls, her lipstick, her scent bottles; there was nothing she wore, nothing she touched, they did not thrust under their blazing electric lights. The theatres and picture houses shouted to him their knowledge of girls and love. The hoardings were covered with illustrations, nine feet high, of happy romances. The very newspapers, under cover of a pretended interest in Palm Beach or feminine athletics, gave him day by day photographs of nearly naked girls with figures like Lena’s. And in and out of the buses, tube trains, theatres, dance-halls, restaurants, teashops, public-houses, taxis, villas, flats, went boys and their sweethearts, girls and their lovers, men and their wives, smiling at one another, laughing together, holding arms, clasping hands, kissing. Slinking through this Venusberg, like a shabby young wolf, he could not forget. It never gave him a chance. He had never given himself a chance. He had nothing to put in the way, no ambition, no interests, no friends; so far he had asked for little, merely food, shelter, and trifling amusement, except love. In his heart of hearts, he did not want to forget.

That first phase of unusual smartness, brushed hair, clean collars, creased trousers, had passed; he could not bother with that any more; if Lena wanted him to be smart again, well and good, she could tell him so, but meanwhile, he was his old shabby self, indeed shabbier than ever. Mr. Dersingham, Mr. Smeeth, Miss Matfield were beginning to give him some queer glances at the office. Well, they could look; so long as he kept the job at all (and that was certainly important), it did not matter to him; he was careless of all that. He was careless of most things these days. His finances, always difficult, had now drifted into a very bad state, and he owed Mrs. Pelumpton a pound or two, and even then he had to cut his ordinary expenses down to the lowest level, which meant that he had to feed cheaply and scantily. That did not matter either, for only now and then did he feel really hungry. Mr. Pelumpton, the old fool, had told him several times he ought to see a doctor, and even Mrs. Pelumpton was beginning to ask him if he hadn’t a pain anywhere, he looked “that bad,” she said. He told her that he hadn’t a pain, though this was not true, for very often now he had a sort of pain, not easy to describe, but roughly amounting to a tender hollowness, in his head. He tried one or two things at the chemist’s, just to make him sleep, for the nights following these vigils were the worst, when he turned and tossed and his eyes burned and the hollow place in his head enlarged itself; but these things did not do him much good, and what sleep he got, he paid for in the morning, when he felt heavy and shivery, so that the scantiest wash and shave was a hard drudgery. His work in the office was that too, though after Mr. Smeeth had taken him into the “White Horse,” he tried to appear a bit more energetic, for he knew very well that if he lost his job, he was in a hopeless situation. All these things, however, were only on the dream-like fringe of life. What was there in the centre, though this was like a dream too, a very different dream, dark, urgent, and with a terrible beauty, was his pursuit of Lena, the outward Lena who was behaving so strangely to him, whom she had welcomed and kissed and held so close. Even yet he believed that she was merely teasing him, holding him off for a little space, and that soon all would be well.

At last, after seeing her several times in one week, at a distance and never once alone, he made a desperate throw and spoke to her. It was a queer night, unlike any other he had seen during the time he had haunted Maida Vale, for during the afternoon, a Wednesday, there had been a sudden heavy fall of snow, so sudden, so heavy, that for once it had remained as snow and had not changed immediately into a black slush. The roofs and gardens and privet hedges in Carrington Villas were still white with it; even the gates and railings here and there were snow lined; and the night was at once curiously light and muffled. He did not pay any close attention to these details, did not consciously observe the brilliance of the stars, the unusually solid velvety black of the houses, the white-blanketed spaces, the sudden crystal glitter now and again, the crunch of the trodden snow as the night crispened; but nevertheless they stole into his consciousness and worked obscurely there. He thought of his boyhood, which he had not left behind him long, though usually it seemed a hundred years away, a faded muddle. Now it returned to him vividly, evoked by the unfamiliar sight of the snow. He had not had a very happy boyhood, but in this hour, when it came back purged of its shame and distresses, it seemed magical and the thought of it warmed and melted him, so that something suspicious, something grudging, something in his mind that matched a certain furtive look he had, shook itself free and then vanished. It left him feeling confident, eager, a young man in a world full of friends.

Then he saw her coming up the street, the tall fellow by her side. He was not sure at first, but then he heard her voice. He hurried forward to meet them before they could turn in the entrance to 4a, and he contrived it so easily that he was able to slow up and then come face to face with them before they had reached the gate. He stopped, raised his hat, and cried: “Good evening.” He did not know whether to add “Miss Golspie” or “Lena,” had no time to decide, but felt that something must be added, so ended with a mumble that might have been anything. His heart knocked painfully. She looked lovelier than ever in the mysterious snowy half-light.

The tall young man stopped at once, raising his hat, too, and smiling.

“Oh!” Lena’s soft little cry was charged with meaning; there was dismay, irritation, disgust in it. She hesitated a moment, threw him a quick frowning glance, then said, coldly: “Oh--good evening,” and at once moved away, leaving the tall young man staring after her for a second or two. Then he gave Turgis a nod and hurried away.

Turgis saw them turn in at the gate. He heard the young man’s short gruff laugh and then an exclamation of some sort followed by a little trill from Lena. The door closed behind them, and it might have been banged to in his face. For several minutes he never moved. Then he slowly walked past the house, and, looking up, saw the light in the window above, in that room where she had given him supper and danced with him and kissed him. For a moment he thought wildly of marching up there, striding in and demanding to know this and that; but he knew there was no sense in that, for not only was the tall young man there, but also Mr. Golspie himself might be there. He crossed the road, turned to look at the lighted window again, stared at it until at last it was nothing but a vague crimson blur, then walked away, his shoulders humped in misery.