Essential Stories (9 page)

THE SAILOR

He was lifting his knees high and putting his hand up, when I first saw him, as if, crossing the road through that stinging rain, he were breaking through the bead curtain of a Pernambuco bar. I knew he was going to stop me. This part of the Euston Road is a beat of the men who want a cup of tea or their fare to a job in Luton or some outlying town.

“Beg pardon, chum,” he said in an anxious hot-potato voice. “Is that Whitechapel?”

He pointed to the traffic clogged in the rain farther down where the electric signs were printing off the advertisements and daubing them on the wet road. Coatless, with a smudged trilby hat on the back of his head so that a curl of boot polish black hair glistered with raindrops over his forehead, he stood there squeezing the water in his boots and looking at me, from his bilious eyes, like a man drowning and screaming for help in two feet of water and wondering why the crowd is laughing.

“That’s St. Pancras,” I said.

“Oh, Gawd,” he said, putting his hand to his jaw like a man with toothache. “I’m all messed up.” And he moved on at once, gaping at the lights ahead.

“Here, wait,” I said. “Which part of Whitechapel do you want? Where have you come from?”

“Surrey Docks,” he said. “They said it was near Surrey Docks, see, but they put me wrong. I bin on the road since ten this morning.”

“Acton,” he read a bus sign aloud, recalling the bottom of the day’s misery. “I bin there,” and fascinated, watched the bus out of sight.

The man’s worried mouth dropped open. He was sodden. His clothes were black with damp. The smell of it came off him. The rain stained from the shoulders of his suit past the armpits over the ribs to the waist. It spread from dark blobs over his knees to his thighs. He was a greasy-looking man, once fat and the fat had gone down unevenly like a deflating bladder. He was calming as I spoke to him.

A sailor, of course, and lost. Hopelessly, blindly lost. I calculated that he must have wandered twenty miles that day exhausting a genius for misdirection.

“Here,” I said. “You’re soaked. Come and have a drink.”

There was a public-house nearby. He looked away at once.

“I never touch it,” he said. “It’s temptation.”

I think it was that word which convinced me the sailor was my kind of man. I am, on the whole, glad to say that I am a puritan and the word temptation went home, painfully, pleasurably, excitingly and intimately familiar. A most stimulating and austerely gregarious word, it indicates either the irresistible hypocrite or the fellow-struggler with sin. I couldn’t let him go after that.

Presently we were in a café drinking acrid Indian tea.

“Off a ship?” I said.

He looked at me as if I were a magician who could read his soul.

“Thank Gawd I stopped you,” he said. “I kep’ stopping people all day and they messed me up, but you been straight.”

He gave me his papers, his discharge paper, his pension form, official letters, as he said this, like a child handing himself over. Albert Edward Thompson, they said, cook, born ’96, invalided out of the service two years before. So he was not just off a ship.

“They’re clean,” he said suspiciously when I asked him about this. “I got ulcers, riddled with ulcers for fourteen years.”

He had no job and that worried him, because it was the winter. He had ganged on the road, worked in a circus, had been a waiter in an Italian restaurant. But what worried him much more was getting to Whitechapel. He made it sound to me as though for two years he had been threshing about the country, dished by one job and another, in a less and less successful attempt to get there.

“What job are you going to do?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s a bad time,” I said.

“I fall on my feet,” he said, “like I done with you.”

We sat opposite to each other at the table. He stared at the people in the café with his appalled eyeballs. He was scared of them and they looked scared too. He looked as though he was going to give a yell and spring at them; in fact, he was likelier to have gone down on his knees to them and to have started sobbing. They couldn’t know this. And then he and I looked at each other and the look discovered that we were the only two decent, trustworthy men in a seedy and grabbing world. Within the next two hours I had given him a job. I was chum no longer, but “Sir.” “Chum” was anarchy and the name of any twisty bleeder you knocked up against, but “sir” (for Thompson, out of the naval nursery) was hierarchy, order, pay-day and peace.

I was living alone in the country in those days. I had no one to look after me. I gave Albert Thompson some money, I took him to Whitechapel and wrote down the directions for his journey to my house.

The bungalow where I lived was small and stood just under the brow of a hill. The country was high and stony there. The roads broke up into lanes, the lanes sank into woods and cottages were few. The oak woods were naked and as green as canker. They stood like old men, and below them were sweet plantations of larch where the clockwork pheasants went off like toys in the rainy afternoons. At night you heard a farm dog bark like a pistol and the oceanic sound of the trees and sometimes, over an hour and half ’s walk away, the whistle of a train. But that was all. The few people looked as though they had grown out of the land, sticks and stones in cloth; they were old people chiefly. In the one or two bigger houses they were childless. It was derelict country; frost with its teeth fast in the ground, the wind running finer than sand through a changeless sky or the solitary dribble of water in the butts and the rain legging it over the grass—that was all one heard or saw there.

“Gawd!” said Thompson when he got there. “I thought I’d never strike the place.” Pale, coatless again in the wet, his hat tipped back from a face puddingy and martyred, he came up the hill with the dancing step of a man treading on nails. He had been lost again. He had travelled by the wrong train, even by the wrong line, he had assumed that, as in towns, it was safest to follow the crowd. But country crowds soon scatter. He had been following people—it sounded to me—to half the cottages for miles around.

“Then I come to the common,” he said. “I didn’t like the look of that. I kept round it.”

At last some girl had shown him the way.

I calmed him down. We got to my house and I took him to his room. He sat down on the bed and told me the story again. He took off his boots and socks and looked at his blistered feet, murmuring to them as if they were a pair of orphans. There was a woman in the train with a kid, he said, and to amuse the kid he had taken out his jack-knife. The woman called the Guard.

After we had eaten and I had settled in, I went for a walk that afternoon. The pleasure of life in the country for me is in its monotony. One understands how much of living is habit, a long war to which people, plants and animals have settled down. In the country one expects nothing of people; they are themselves, not bringers of gifts. In towns one asks too little or too much of them.

The drizzle had stopped when I went out, the afternoon was warmer and inert and the dull stench of cattle hung over the grass. On my way down the hill I passed the bungalow which was my nearest neighbour. I could see the roof as pink as a slice of salt ham, from the top of my garden. The bungalow was ten years old. A chicken man had built it. Now the woodwork was splitting and shrinking, the garden was rank, two or three larches, which the rabbits had been at, showed above the dead grass and there was a rose-bush. The bush had one frozen and worm-eaten flower which would stick there half the winter. The history of the bungalow was written in the tin bath by the side door. The bath was full of gin, beer and whisky bottles, discarded after the weekend parties of many tenants. People took the place for ever and then, after a month or two, it changed hands. A business man, sentimental about the country, an invalid social worker, a couple with a motor bicycle, an inseparable pair of school-teachers with big legs and jumping jumpers; and now there was a woman I hardly saw, a Colonel’s daughter, but the place was said to belong to a man in the Northampton boot trade.

A gramophone was playing when I walked by. Whenever I passed, the Colonel’s daughter was either playing the gramophone or digging in the garden. She was a small girl in her late twenties, with a big knowledgeable-looking head under tobacco-brown curls, and the garden fork was nearly as big as herself. Her gardening never lasted long. It consisted usually of digging up a piece of the matted lawn in order to bury tins; but she went at it intensely, drawing back the fork until her hair fell over her face and the sweat stood on her brow. She always had a cigarette in her mouth, and every now and then the carnation skin of her face, with its warm, dark blue eyes, would be distorted and turned crimson by violent bronchial coughing. When this stopped she would straighten up, the delicacy came back to her skin and she would say, “Oh, Christ. Oh, bloody hell” and you noticed at the end of every speech the fine right eyebrow would rise a little and the lid of the eye below it would quiver. This wink, the limpid wink of the Colonel’s daughter, you noticed at once. You wondered what it meant and planned to find out. It was as startling and enticing as a fish rising, and you discovered when you went after it that the Colonel’s daughter was the hardest drinking and most blasphemous piece of apparent childish innocence you had ever seen. Old men in pubs gripped their sticks, went scarlet and said someone ought to take her drawers down and give her a tanning. I got a sort of fame from being a neighbour of the Colonel’s daughter. “Who’s that piece we saw down the road?” people asked.

“Her father’s in the Army.”

“Not,” two or three of them said, for this kind of wit spreads like measles, “the Salvation Army.” They said I was a dirty dog. But I hardly knew the Colonel’s daughter. Across a field she would wave, utter her obscenity, perform her wink and edge off on her slight legs. Her legs were not very good. But if we met face to face on the road she became embarrassed and nervous; this was one of her dodges. “Still alone?” she said.

“Yes. And you?”

“Yes. What do you do about sex?”

“I haven’t got any.”

“Oh, God, I wish I’d met you before.”

When I had friends she would come to the house. She daren’t come there when I was alone, she said. Every night, she said, she locked and bolted up at six. Then the wink—if it was a wink. The men laughed. She did not want to be raped, she said. Their wives froze and some curled up as if they had got the blight and put their hands hard on their husbands’ arms. But the few times she came to the house when I was alone, the Colonel’s daughter stood by the door, the full length of the room away, with a guilty look on her face.

When I came back from my walk the gramophone had stopped. The Colonel’s daughter was standing at the door of her bungalow with her sleeves rolled up, a pail of water beside her and a scrubbing brush in her hand.

“Hullo,” she said awkwardly.

“Hullo,” I said.

“I see you’ve got the Navy down here. I didn’t know you were that way.”

“I thought you would have guessed that straight away,” I said.

“I found him on the common crying this morning. You’ve broken his heart.” Suddenly she was taken by a fit of coughing.

“Well,” she said. “Every day brings forth something.”

When I got to the gate of my bungalow I saw that at any rate if Thompson could do nothing else he could bring forth smoke. It was travelling in thick brown funnel puffs from the short chimney of the kitchen. The smoke came out with such dense streaming energy that the house looked like a destroyer racing full steam ahead into the wave of hills. I went down the path to the kitchen and looked inside. There was Thompson, not only with his sleeves rolled up but his trousers also, and he was shovelling coal into the kitchener with the garden spade, the face of the fire was roaring yellow, the water was throbbing and sighing in the boiler, the pipes were singing through the house.

“Bunkering,” Thompson said.

I went into the sitting-room. I thought I had come into the wrong house. The paint had been scrubbed, the floors polished like decks, the reflections of the firelight danced in them, the windows gleamed and the room was glittering with polished metal. Door-knobs, keyholes, fire-irons, window-catches, were polished; metal which I had no idea existed flashed with life.

“What time is supper piped—er ordered,” said Thompson, appearing in his stockinged feet. His big round eyes started out of their dyspeptic shadows and became enthusiastic when I told him the hour.

A change came over my life after this. Before Thompson everything had been disorganised and wearying. He drove my papers and clothes back to their proper places. He brought the zest and routine of the Royal Navy into my life. He kept to his stockinged feet out of tenderness for those orphans, a kind of repentance for what he had done to them; he was collarless and he served food with a splash as if he allowed for the house to give a pitch or a roll which didn’t come off. His thumbs left their marks on the plates. But he was punctual. He lived for “Orders.” “All ready, sir,” he said, planking down the dish and looking up at the clock at the same moment. Burned, perhaps, spilling over the side, invisible beneath Bisto—but on time!

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. My own housekeeping had suffered from the imagination. Thompson put an end to this tiring chase of the ideal. “What’s orders for lunch, sir?

“Do you a nice fried chop and chips?” he said. That was settled. He went away but soon he came back.

“What pudding’s ordered, sir?” That stumped both of us, or it stumped me. Thompson watched me to time his own suggestion.

“Do you a nice spotted dick?” So it was. We had this on the second day and the third, we changed on the fourth, but on the fifth we came back to it. Then Thompson’s mind gave a leap.

“Do you grilled chop, chips, spotted dick and custard ?” he said. That became almost our fixed menu. There were bouts of blancmange, but spotted dick came back.

Thompson had been sinking towards semi-starvation, I to the insidious Oblomovism of the country. Now we were reformed and happy.