Tipping the Velvet (52 page)

there was my little truckle-bed, propped in the corner, and

'I get tired,' she said, yawning again, 'as you can see! But my shoes beside the fire, and my coat upon the hook behind never of it.'

the door.

'But Flo, if it's such an endless task, why labour at all?'

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'Why, because I must! Because how could I rest, when the to see with her across the years to the queer new world that world is so cruel and hard, and yet might be so sweet. . .

would have Cyril in it, as a man . . .

The kind of work I do is its own kind of fulfilment, whether As I looked, she shifted in her seat, reached a hand out to it's successful or not.' She drank her tea. 'It's like love.'

the bookcase at her side, and drew a volume from the Love! I sniffed. 'You think love is its own reward, then?'

bulging shelves. It was Leaves of Grass: she turned its

'Don't you?'

pages, and found a passage that she seemed to know.

I gazed into my cup. 'I did once, I think,' I said. 'But..." I

'Listen to this' she said. She began to read aloud. Her tone had never told her about those days. Cyril wriggled, and she was low, and rather self-conscious; but it quivered with kissed his head and murmured in his ear, and for a moment passion -I had never heard such passion in her voice, all was very still - perhaps she thought me wondering about before.

the gent I said I had lived with in St John's Wood. But then

'O mater! Ofils!' she read. 'O brood continental! O flowers she spoke again, more briskly.

of the prairies! O space boundless! O hum of mighty

'Besides, I don't believe it is an endless task. Things are products! O you teeming cities! O so invincible, turbulent, changing. There are unions everywhere — and women's proud! O race of the future! O women! O fathers! Oyou unions, as well as men's. Women do things today their men of passion and storm! O beauty! O yourself! O you mothers would have laughed to think of seeing their bearded roughs! O bards! O all those slumberers! O arouse!

daughters doing, twenty years ago; soon they will even the dawn-bird's throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the have the vote! If people like me don't work, it's because cock crowing?'

they look at the world, at all the injustice and the muck, and She sat still for a moment, gazing down at the page; then all they see is a nation falling in upon itself, and taking she raised her eyes to mine, and I saw with surprise that them with it. But the muck has new things growing out of it they were gleaming with unspilled tears. She said, 'Don't

- wonderful things! - new habits of working, new kinds of you think that marvellous, Nancy? Don't you think that a people, new ways of being alive and in love ..." Love again.

marvellous, marvellous poem?'

I put a finger to the scar upon my cheek, where Dickie's

'Frankly, no,' I said: the tears had unnerved me. 'Frankly, doctor's book had caught it. Florence bent her head to gaze I've seen better verses on some lavatory walls' -I really had.

at the baby, as he lay sighing upon her chest.

'If it's a poem, why doesn't it rhyme? What it needs is a few

'In another twenty years,' she went on quietly, 'imagine how good rhymes and a nice, jaunty melody.' I reached to take the world will be! It will be a new century. Cyril will be a the book from her, and studied the passage she had read - it young man - nearly, but not quite, as old as I am now.

had been underlined, at some earlier date, in pencil - then Imagine the things he'll see, the things he'll do . ..' I looked sang it out, to the approximate tune and rhythm of some at her, and then at him; and for a moment I felt almost able 445

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music-hall song of the moment. Florence laughed, and, with

'I never said, did I,' she went on, 'what I did that night?' I one hand upon Cyril, tried to snatch the book from me.

shook my head. I remembered very well what I had done

'You're a beast!' she cried. 'You're a shocking philistine.'

that night - I had supped with Diana, and then fucked her in

'I'm a purist,' I said primly. 'I know a nice bit of verse when her handsome bedroom, and then been sent from it, chilled I see it, and this ain't it.' I flipped through the book, and chastened, to my own. But I had never stopped to think abandoning my attempt to try to force the staggering lines what Florence might have done; and she, indeed, had never into some sort of melody, but reading all the ludicrous told me.

passages that I could find - there were many of them - and

'What did you do?' I asked now. 'Did you go to that - that all in the silly American drawl of a stage Yankee. At last I lecture, on your own?'

found another underlined section, and started on that. 'O my

'I did,' she said. She took a breath. 'I - met a girl there.'

comrade!' I began. 'Oyou and me at last -and us two only; O

'A girl?'

power, liberty, eternity at last! O to be relieved of

'Yes. Her name was Lilian. I saw her at once, and couldn't distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues! O to level take my eyes from her. She was so very - interesting occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common looking. You know how it is, with a girl, sometimes? - well, ground! O adhesiveness! O the pensive aching to be no, perhaps you don't..." But I did, I did! And now I gazed together - you know not why, and I know not why at her, and felt myself grow warm; and then rather chill.

My voice trailed away; I had lost my Yankee drawl, and She coughed, and put a hand to her mouth. Then she said, spoken the last few words in a self-conscious murmur.

still gazing at the coals: 'When the lecture was finished Florence had ceased her laughter, and begun to gaze, Lilian asked a question -it was a very clever question, and apparently quite gravely, into the fire: I saw the orange the speaker was quite thrown by it. I looked at her then, and flames of the coals reflected in each of her hazel eyes. I knew I must know her. I went over to her, and we began to closed the book, and returned it to the shelf. There was a talk. We talked - we talked, Nance, for an hour, quite silence, a rather long one.

without stopping! She had the most unusual views. She'd At last she took a breath; and when she spoke she sounded read, it seemed to me, everything, and had opinions on it quite unlike herself, and rather strange.

all.'

'Nance,' she began, 'do you remember that day in Green The story went on. They had become friends; Lilian had Street, when we talked? Do you remember how we said that come calling ...

we would meet, and how you didn't come . . . ?'

'You loved her!' I said.

'Of course,' I said, a little sheepishly. She smiled - a Florence blushed, and then nodded. 'You couldn't have curiously vague and inward-seeming kind of smile.

known her, and not loved her a little.'

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'But Flo, you loved her! You loved her - like a torn!' She made that rug.' She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire blinked, and put a finger to her lip, and blushed harder than

- the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by ever. 'I thought,' she said, 'you might have guessed it...'

some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my

'Guessed it! I - I am not sure. I never thought you might feet from it. 'It didn't matter that we weren't lovers; we were have - well, I cannot say what I thought..."

so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together.

She turned her head away. 'She loved me, too,' she said, We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of after a moment. 'She loved me, like anything! But, not in Eleanor Marx' - she nodded to the little photograph - 'that the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn't mind. The was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she favoured her; I don't have a photograph of Lily. That she wouldn't do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, book, of Whitman's, that was hers too. The passage you she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!'

read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.' Her that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them.

looked again at the fire.

'If women may be comrades,' she said again, 'I was hers . . .'

'A few months after I first met her,' she went on, 'I began to She grew silent. I looked at her, and at Cyril - at his flushed see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up and sleeping face, with its delicate lashes and its jutting here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her pink lip. I said, with a kind of creeping dread: 'And then . . .

rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless,

?'

after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere ...

She blinked. 'And then - well, then she died. She was too Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn't mind, he loved her slight, the confinement was a hard one; and she died. We almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and couldn't even find a midwife who would see to her, because raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the she was unmarried - in the end we had to bring a woman in man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her from Islington, someone who didn't know us, and say that out..."

she was Ralph's wife. The woman called her "Mrs Banner"

She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of

- imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on strict. She wouldn't let us in the room with her; we had to her skirt. 'Those were, I think, the happiest months of all sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his my life. Having Lilian here, it was like - I cannot say what hands and weeping all the while. I thought, "Let the baby it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness.

die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe . . . !"

She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just

'But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her 449

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sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I

'It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I've found that she'd begun to bleed. By then, of course, the wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn't poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -'

when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, under six months then, and the idea of having another girl and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she about the place - especially you, who I had met the very acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile.

week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like

'I wish I'd known,' I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own after he'd got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so was a moment, when you picked up Cyril -I daresay you foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the don't even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at Lilian's death. There had been Florence's strange all... I didn't know whether I could stand to see you do it; or depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother's whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke -

gentle forbearance, her friends' concern. There had been her and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I've odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian's son, yet also, never been gladder of anything, in all my life!'

of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass dead, so that the mother might be saved . . .

for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.

her, stroking gently at her sleeve . . . and at last she roused But before she could reach it, I called her name.

herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away.

I said, 'Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was

'How I have talked,' she said. 'I don't know, I'm sure, what a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you'd let me stay. I'm made me speak of all this, tonight.'

-I'm a torn, like you.'

'I'm glad you did,' I said. 'You must - you must miss her,

'You ore!' She gaped at me. 'Annie said it all along; but I terribly.' She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if never thought much about it, after that first night.' She missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a began to frown. 'And so, if there never was a man, your term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and story wasn't like Lilian's, at all ..." I shook my head. 'And looked away.

you were never in trouble ..."

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'Not that kind of trouble.'

Eleanor Marx - except it was not Eleanor Marx I saw, of

'And all this time, you have been here, and I've been course; it was her, with Eleanor Marx's features. I turned it thinking you one thing, and . . .' She looked at me, then, in my hands, and read the back of it: F.B., my comrade, it with a strange expression - I didn't know if she felt angry, said, in large, looped letters, my comrade for ever. L.V.