Fowlers End (39 page)

“Go!” June Whistler cried.

I said, “I never hit a woman in my life, but I am strongly tempted.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding in perfect agreement, “knock me down and lay me out, ravish me like a mad dog, roll me over and do it again, and let us part friends.... Would you like a meringue?”

“No,” I said, “no meringues. I still don’
t get this lay.”

June Whistler became severe. She said, “I have yet to see the situation that is improved by beastly vulgarity. But you always were a dirty stinking crap-hound, weren’t you? Corrupt filth! Who picked you literally out of the gutter, you and your tin of herrings? Bah!”

“Look, if you want the economy of it, you’ve got back a couple of thousand pounds and your tin of herrings,” I said. “And now good-by forever.”

June Whistler said, “Wait a minute—” and went into the kitchen. She returned with that ill-fated tin of herrings which she handed to me with a grand air. I nearly told her what to do with them in the language of Fowlers End, but remembered myself and said that she should keep them in memory of me; whereupon she wept.

“I have treated you like a dog!” she said.

“Think no more of it,” I said.

Then, with genuine tenderness, she offered me the packet of bank notes and said, “I’m sorry we must part like this—” crying her eyes out—“but take this. Please take it. I don’t need it, and I won’t need it. I’m going to get married. Please take it, do!”

Now I do not know how the mind works, but an irrational irritation took possession of me at that moment.
What
right had she to get married to anybody?
At the same time, I was somehow relieved; but, ashamed of itself, this same relief exacerbated the irritation. Knocking the envelope out of her hand, I said, “Good-by!”

Before I got to the door, she was after me, holding out a meringue and saying, “At least take this ...”

So I took it and put it in my pocket while I kissed her good-by out of sheer pity. She made circular movements and said, “Just one last time to remember me by?”

But my back was up. I said, “No. The surgeon’s knife, I say. If you sever, sever forever. Good-by.”

By the time I had got to the middle of the street I had a sudden yearning for her: I was prepared to propose marriage. I went back to the house and, quite diffidently, knocked at the door. June Whistler opened it about six inches and said, “Go away.”

“I have decided that I love you,” I said.

“You know that I have always loved you,” said she. “But just let’s be tender memories. Scram.”

Shoving my hands in my pockets and clenching my fists I went downstairs again and walked a hundred yards before I discovered that my left hand was full of crushed meringue of the most sticky nature. I thought,
She had made it for me.
Licking it off my palm, I mixed it with my tears and felt that loneliness was creeping in upon me.

But why shouldn’t a girl better herself?
I asked myself.

Finding no answer to this, I abandoned the question, squared my shoulders, and went on to my mother’s house. The dear old lady was delighted to see me. She said, “I knew you would come; something seemed to tell me. Daniel, dear, how haggard you look. Have you been fretting?”

I ought to say that “fretting” was, in my time, an enemy of education: every week all the Sunday newspapers
were full of cases of “fretting”—boys of twelve who were found stark and cold, hanging by the neck on their braces, with notes pinned to their bosoms saying that it was because they did not know enough trigonometry to get through an examination. The whole country was full of swinging boys with their tongues hanging out and un-thumbed books of logarithms at their feet. They had “fretted.”

I even considered it myself, once, on the eve of an examination when I did not see my way clear to get through algebra. Only there must have been in me a love of life—I could not bring myself to repeat the act after my braces broke and I fell to the floor of my bedroom with a terrible bang, which I had to explain away. I said I had fallen out of bed. My father sized up the situation, with his usual perspicacity, when he saw me with half my braces inexpertly knotted about my neck and noticed the other half, freshly torn, dangling from the ceiling. He was a man of law, bless his hea
rt, and so got a swift juridical view of the situation. He said, “Daniel! If you go on this way, I give you my solemn warning you will live to be hanged.”

But my mother insisted that I had been “fretting,” and put the book of logarithms into the kitchen stove— where, no doubt, they helped to cook me a better dinner than if I had attempted otherwise to digest them. My argument was:
Who wants to know the height of a tree by measuring its shadow? A shadow,
I reasoned, is
neither here nor there; and for that matter neither is a tree here or there.
I was in the metaphysical stage.
Man born of woman,
I decided,
was neither here nor there. Nothing was anywhere....

Only I liked my four square meals a day, having abolished God.... That was then.

Now, my mother said, “You mustn’t fret. Something seemed to tell me, so I made some meringues. And I’ll tell you something, Daniel—I held back a few pounds, which,
God knows, you’re welcome to. Only promise, no bookshops?”

I said, “You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick,” and tugged out of my pocket an immense roll of money, which I handed to her with a sardonic bow, saying, “Enough to choke a horse, if a horse were fool enough to eat it. Eh?”

At this she cried, “It was because he fell off the roof into the cucumber frame,” and fainted away in sheer horror. But she came to in a little while, and I told her that I had made a deal, and here were three thousand, five hundred pounds—all for her. Tour poor father always predicted it would come to this!” she said.

My temper was frayed. “What the hell do you mean?” I asked. “Come to what? Eight hundred per cent and your money back?”

“Oh, I don’t know where to turn. Oh, Daniel, Daniel, why did you do it to me? How am I going to explain this to your Uncle Hugh? Where shall I put it, because I’m sure you’ll need it again?”

I said, “Put it in the bank. Need it again? Why ‘again’? It’s your money. Put it in the bank, Mother, put it in the bank!”

“Your Uncle Hugh would find out,” she said.

“The bank’s business is secret, confidential,” I cried.

“Daniel, you know I hate to be secretive with your Uncle Hugh—”

“Oh, God damn and blast my Uncle Hugh!”

“My poor boy, you’re overwrought and blasphemous. Have a meringue and I’ll get you a glass of brandy. Only I beg you, don’t drink it.”

“Then why offer it?”

“That’s only nice.... Your Uncle Hugh, my dear, is a fine man.

Don’t speak so hardly of your Uncle Hugh. He meant you nothing but good, and he has a good heart.”

Something in her tone put my teeth on edge; there was an excessive sweetness in it. I said, “I have an appointment. I’ll see you later.”

“Dear Daniel, just to please your old mother, your silly old mother, do take a teeny little sip of brandy?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’m so glad!”

Then I went out for a drink, all on my own, to the Prince of Wales, by the Common. This vilest of all hostelries was put up shortly after Queen Victoria’s legitimate successor was decorated for dancing a Highland fling at a tender age. It still has a prefabricated look, a halfhearted look, a jerry-built look. It should not be there. It should not be anywhere. But it has pretensions to gentility in that it has a saloon bar patronized by spies from the Inland Revenue. They mingle with the vacuum-cleaner salesmen and such rabble, and are always to be distinguished by the fact th
at they give or take nothing for fear of counter-spies by whom they might later be accused. Buy a double in that place and some insect of a man will scurry up and ask if you are someone else. Naively you correct him, saying that you are not someone else but So-and-so. Begging your pardon, he scratches his way out. Two years later the bureaucrats, after an enfilading fire of cross-examination about your expenditure, take careful aim and shoot one last deadly question at you:
Weren’t you having doubles in the Prince of Wales— two years, three months, and nine days ago?
Then, out of the wall crawls Judas all in
black, and you are done for.

In those days it was a nondescript, dull, middle-class place on the Common, and you could find your way to it simply by watching men in black coats taking their dogs out after sunset—they always looked north, south, east, and west in an abstracted way while the dog pee’d—and then
they scuttled like beetles to the Prince of Wales, where they hastily gulped fourpennyworth of bitter. Beyond the Common lay some scrubby, useless land studded with silver birches, called Samshott Heath. Perhaps you have seen, in some side street, a mattress thrown out for the dustmen as unfit to use even by the poorest of the poor? So was Samshott Heath thrown out by God.

I went into the saloon bar, which was somber enough to strike terror into the boldest. Not into the timidest: into the boldest. It did not encourage boldness. Clearly on display was a frame such as they put obituaries in, enclosing a document in microscopic print pertaining to the licensing laws. I paused to read it while the proprietor, an ex-civil servant, looked at me like a proper little Godbolt. Disliking his manner, I went up to him and asked, “Got accommodation for an elephant?”

He said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you don’t, don’t you? It says that you are bound to provide ‘Accommodation, et cetera,
for Man or Beast....’
I am a man, you will concede? I happen to have a beast, an elephant.”

This civil servant of a publican, instead of laughing in a jolly way, offering me a drink on the house and (taking me aside to whisper a confidence) beating me up outside the public bar as the good old publicans used to do, said sharply, “Get out of my house!”

“I won’t,” said I.

“I reserve the right—”

“On what grounds do you reserve what right?”

“You’re drunk.”

“Aha! Libel—slander—defamation—accusation of obnoxious habits—and loss of business,” I said, with a knowing smile, taking out an old envelope and a pencil. “I demand the names and addresses of everybody within earshot I insist that you call the police. Categorically, I want
a surgeon to smell my breath. Slander, eh? False arrest, is that the idea? Then Payne, Payne, Payne, Payne, Rackham, Rackham and Payne shall know the reason why! Give me a double whisky and soda. And if I wish to bring an elephant into this hostelry, I am by law so entitled. Also, cheese and pickled onions, and a crust of bread and butter. You are bound to provide me with refreshment, and my beast. I know the law. I own an African elephant, two camels and a mule. By God, sir, I’ll have your license! Well?”

The landlord said no more, but hastily poured me my drink of whisky. Various emotions were chasing themselves around the shallow dome of his shadowy skull now. He was hoist by his own petard, this unfrocked
tchinovnick:
he had broken the law in several places. He had refused “entertainment” to my beast, an elephant, and considering me drunk (although I had not touched a drop all day), had said so in a loud, reedy voice. But having pronounced me drunk, which was defamatory, he had gone and served me. This was almost a hanging matter.

There was nearly a riot in the public bar, from where several men had a clear view and listen of the altercation. One shouted, “Carm on, Steve!” Two or three others begged me in various terms to kick off his private parts, knock his bloody eyes out, show him who was who, and have his liver for the bloody cat. I had aroused the beast in the mob. An Irish navvy cried, “Up the rebels!” A man with a mustache gravely emptied his pint pot, dried himself on his sleeve, said, “God save the King!” and struck the Irish laborer on the head. Then I demanded, “Landlord, call the police!”

“No, no, for heaven’s sake, no! Here’s your change.” He pushed toward me eighteen shillings and eightpence.

“And what’s this for,” I asked, “considering I haven’t paid you yet?” And I flung down one-and-fourpence.

The man was out of countenance. He looked from the money to me, and back to the money, and asked, “What’s this?”

Seeing what he was, I said, “Coin of the realm. Would you like me to put down nine hundred and sixty farthings and ask for a pound note? I may, you know. Somebody call a policeman!... Or do you question that I have nine hundred and sixty farthings? Defamation, eh? Good! You’ll hear more of this.”

While I gave him a mysterious smile he begged me to pick up my change—what time a Hogarthian, gaptoothed, hairy-handed gathering in the public bar were geeing me up, as the carters used to say, urging me to take the landlord’s tripes home for supper, to tenderize his kidneys before stewing them, and please to let them have a marrow bone. They liked the look of me. Pointing to the change to which I was not entitled, I said to the landlord, “Drinks all round for my friends in the public bar.” There was a deafening cheer, and they ordered extravagantly, while a lady old enough to be my g
randmother, exhibiting underwear which I hesitate to describe as she executed a Cockney cancan, sang “Knees Up, Mother Brown.”

I sat down with my drink and my pickled onions. At least I had got back at somebody. I drew a deep breath, took a sip, and prepared to relax when I heard—as in a nightmare—an odious voice saying, “Look here, my friend. Look at this tie. If one is a little muddy, why, what the devil’s a bit of honest dirt? Eh? The noblest work of God, what?”

A solemn, heavy voice replied, “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp—the man’s the gold for a’ that.”

“My very words,” said this detestable voice, which I associated with lying rumors and stolen soda pop, with braggings and bullyings and bashings. “Now, I’m a good Socialist, and I’ll give you the general line. Why should
A.A.A.A. cut in on Samshott Heath? Where’s your statistical correlation? Answer me that. You can’t, can you?”