Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (31 page)

The streets were glittering and empty. Glittering with rain that had fallen, and empty with an emptiness which a few
taxis, a policeman or so, and an occasional passer-by served to emphasize rather than lessen. . . .

He counted Prunella’s money. He had exactly four and twopence. He would have to spend it carefully. He could not return to ‘The Midnight Bell’ until he had washed and made himself presentable – until he had had one or two drinks – got himself right. The pubs didn’t open till eleven. It was now seven. Four hours to wait. He would have to save some money for some drinks. He might return to ‘The Midnight Bell’ about lunch time. But he would have to have some drinks. He was light-headed and scarcely knew what he was doing.

He didn’t believe he had sinned enough to deserve this. He must get some cigarettes. But he hadn’t sixpence to put into a machine. Could one ask a policeman for change? Why not take a taxi and return to ‘The Midnight Bell’? No, he couldn’t face them until he was more presentable. He must have some cigarettes.

He entered the Coventry Street Corner House. On the ground floor breakfasts were being served to a few people – either remnants of the night, like himself, or the lucky ones beginning the day. He smelt bacon, and the fearful false hunger of alcohol filled him.

He ordered an egg and bacon, and coffee. He could not eat the egg and the bacon. It cost him one and five. The warming coffee made him want to sleep. He could hardly keep his eyes open. He watched the waitress clearing his things away. He seized a chance to go suddenly without leaving a tip.

He walked down the Haymarket, and across Trafalgar Square, making quite naturally (bit again in unconscious obedience to dramatic precedent) for the river. He began to feel better, and his mind cleared. He supposed, if he had any sense, he would go to the police about that money. But he would never do it. That all belonged to a terrible nightmare past from which he only desired to flee. Any more travail and suspense would finish him. He desired nothing to mar the perfection and peace of his despair.

He reached the embankment and walked along to
Westminster Bridge. It was a fine, fresh morning: he had never seen a finer or fresher. It made the soul feel fine and fresh and forgiving.

It could never have been otherwise. He had merely essayed the impossible and failed. He believed it was not her fault. Existence had abused her and made her what she was: poverty had crushed him and made him unable to help her. He knew that he had never made any impression on her, and never would have done so. He knew that it all had come from him, and only the obsession and hysteria of his pursuit had given a weak semblance of reciprocation. He knew that his gesticulations had never disturbed, for one instant, the calm equability of her degradation. She had not, really, fooled him: she had been too passive and indolent for that. He had only fooled himself.

It was a healing thought. He reached Westminster Bridge.

Big Ben pointed to a quarter to eight. The glorious sun smote the astonished day. Not a cloud was in the sky. The river, full to the brim, sped quickly by, wallowing in its liquid and twinkling plenitude – flowing out to the sea – flowing out to the sea. . . .

The sea! The sea! What of the sea?

The sea!

The solution – salvation! The sea! Why not? He would go back, like the great river, to the sea! To the sea of his early youth – the mighty and motherly sea – that rolled over and around the earth!

Why had he not thought of it before? Dear God, he had been a landsman too long!

Now! He had his papers intact at ‘The Midnight Bell.’ Now! No time to waste. He had wasted enough time. He would go down to the docks now, and see what was doing. Now! Now! Now!

And here, curiously and abruptly, is the end of Bob’s story, or at any rate of his love story. Bob went to sea: but this story cannot be concerned with his adventures thereon, nor with what befell him afterwards. It is much more concerned with
the mere fact that, after all he had suffered, and after all he had lost, Bob was yet able to glow in this manner and resolve to go to sea.

For because of this power of glowing and resolving, and straining still to rise, Bob, weak as he was, revealed, perhaps, something which was far greater than and embraced himself – something which he shared, perhaps, with the whole race of men of which he was so insignificant, needy, and distressed a member.

For there is this about men. You can embitter and torment them from birth. You can make them waiters and sailors (like Bob) when they want to be authors. You can make them (as Bob and most of them were made) servants of their passions – weak – timorous – querulous – vain – egotistic – puny and afraid. Then, having made them so, you can trick them and mock them with all the implements of fate – lead them on, as Bob was led on, only to betray them, obsess them with hopeless dreams, punish them with senseless accidents, and harass them with wretched fears. You can buffet them, bait them, enrage them – load upon them all evils and follies in this vale of obstruction and tears. But, even at that, there is yet one thing that you cannot do. You can never make them, under any provocation, say die. And therein lies their acquittal.

J
ENNY

J
ENNY MAPLE
, A girl of the West End streets, was walking in the vicinity of Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly Circus, and Great Windmill Street at about eleven o’clock one night, when she became aware that she had attracted the glances of a seedy, furtive little man wearing a white silk muffler and a soft hat.

As a business proposition she did not altogether like his appearance; he looked sly, inelegant, and grasping. But she thought it best to give him what encouragement she could, as she was desperately hard up at the moment, and ‘in trouble’ (as she put it).

She was ‘in trouble’ for two reasons. First, she believed that she was at any moment liable to arrest. A ‘plain-clothes-man’ (whom she knew well by sight and who had always, she imagined, ‘had his knife into her’) had only last night arrested her girl friend, and was clearly out to get her too if she didn’t take the very greatest care: and apart from all the worry and humiliation of appearing before a magistrate, she simply had no idea where she could get the money for her fine.

The other trouble arose more from her own fault. A week ago a young man named Bob (he was a young waiter in a pub called ‘The Midnight Bell’ off the Euston Road) had given her, for various reasons, twenty-five pounds in order to make it worth her while to go away with him to Brighton for a week. It had been a fantastic thing to do, and she had known all the time that he had only done it because he had been crazily in love with her. He was a bit mad. All the same she had
promised to go to Brighton and to meet him at Victoria with that end in view. Well, she had not. The twenty-five pounds in a lump sum had been too much for her. She had got drunk and spent all the money instead. She knew she was wrong there, and her conscience smote her somewhat. But even more than by her conscience she was smitten by the fear of what he might do. It was quite likely that he was wandering round looking for her now (he had often done that sort of thing before) and if they met she dreaded to think of the scene he might make.

So being thus doubly in trouble, she was much too anxious merely to get off the streets to pick and choose, and she decided that if this little man in the silk muffler would only make up his mind and speak to her, she would be glad enough.

That he was having a great struggle in this matter of making up his mind about her she could see plainly, and she was doing all she could to help him. That is to say that she was walking regularly and methodically round the London Pavilion: at one moment she was in Shaftesbury Avenue, at the next she was in Piccadilly Circus, at the next in Great Windmill Street, and then in Shaftesbury Avenue again, and so on round. This procedure, while avoiding frightening him by stopping still, gave him certain knowledge of her movements and every opportunity to look at her in passing and make his decision without committing himself. She really could not do fairer.

He, however, was in an appalling state of doubt and nerves. So far from showing the same method as herself, and waiting to meet her regularly as the circle came round, he was dodging all over the place. He was at one moment lurking behind her, at the next walking rapidly ahead of her and trying to get a look at her sideways, then hurrying round the whole circle to get behind her again, then lurking in a doorway pretending not to notice her, then boldly coming down the street to look at her fairly and squarely as though he had never seen her in his life before, then dashing over the road to get an opinion in safety from the other side – in fact, behaving idiotically and despicably.

At last it wore down even her own endurance. She decided to put the tormented connoisseur out of his pain. He had stopped in another doorway, and she was bearing down upon him. She went up to him.

‘Good evening, dearie,’ she said, smiling. ‘Do you want me?’

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and grinned, revealing the gaps in his yellow teeth.

‘What?’ he said, grinningly taken aback, and almost shaking with fright.

‘I think you want me – don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’ve been hanging about ever such a long while.’

There was a pause in which he looked down the street.

‘Depends how much you want,’ he said. He had now regained his repose a little.

‘Well, that depends on you, doesn’t it, dear?’ She spoke with sweet reasonableness. ‘I haven’t got a flat, so we’d have to go to a hotel. Would you like to spend the whole night?’

‘Well – depends on what it would come to.’

‘Well, if I spent the whole night I’d want a fiver – to make it worth my while. But if it was just for a little while it would come cheaper, like – wouldn’t it?’

He thought for a moment, and then adopted a business-like tone.

‘What about the whole night for four quid?’

Secretly she thought this a good bargain in her present state of distress, but of course she was not going to let him see that.

‘Haven’t you got a fiver?’ she asked.

‘No. I can only spare four pounds. Afraid it’s that or nothing. I ain’t
got
the money.’

She pretended to hesitate.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’m very hard up, so I suppose I’ll have to.’

‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink first, shall we?’

She saw how badly he needed a drink, and marvelled, as she always did, at these little men, to whom an evening of delight, apart from the money they paid for it, entailed such strenuous
mental suffering. You would have thought he hated the sight of her – instead of loving the look of her – which his four pounds definitely demonstrated that he did in some sort of way. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘There’s just time before they close.’

She conducted him to a little public house off Rupert Street. They went into the Saloon Bar. This was filled with a crowd of people swallowing as much drink as they could before closing time, but they were lucky enough to find an unoccupied table in a corner. He asked her what she would have; she asked for a port, and sat down and waited while he shoved his way through to the bar to get it for her. A minute later he returned with it; together with a large whisky and soda for himself. He offered her a cigarette, which she took, and he lit a match wherewith he lighted her cigarette and his own.

At such moments as these Jenny always tried to establish a calm and companionable feeling.

‘Well, dear,’ she said, having taken a sip at her port. ‘What sort of business are
you
in?’

‘Me?’ He puffed at his cigarette and looked quizzingly at her. ‘What do you think?’

‘I can’t say. You look as though you’re in business though.’

Experience had taught her that her clients were generally flattered by being told that they looked as though they were in business.

‘Well, I suppose I am. I’m in Motors as it happens.’

‘Oh yes? That must be very interestin’.’

‘Oh yes. Interestin’ enough. . . . Not quite as interestin’ as certain others though.’ And he brought his head humorously a little nearer to her, in order to reinforce the double meaning, and almost as if to remind her of the objects with which they had met.

Seeing him look at her like that, it occurred to her, for a moment, that she had seen this unpleasant little person somewhere before, but she could not for the life of her remember where.

‘I believe I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ she said.

‘Oh! Have you?’ he replied. ‘Well, I hope we’ll see a lot more of each other.’

Intending a double meaning again, he had the lighthearted air of a man who obviously did not give the notion the slightest credit, and she herself was not sufficiently interested to pursue the matter. A few minutes later half the lights went down in the pub; they finished their drinks rapidly and went out into the street. He stopped a passing taxi, and Jenny stepped into it.

‘Where to?’ he asked Jenny.

‘The **** Hotel, Paddington,’ she said. ‘I expect he knows it.’

‘The **** Hotel, Paddington,’ he repeated briskly to the driver, who gave a gloomy nod, and bent down his meter.

As she had foreseen, the taxi had scarcely started before he took her arm and cajolingly drew up near to her.

‘You’re a bad little girl, ain’t you?’ he said waggishly. ‘How did you get that way?’

‘Oo,’ she said, in the same burlesquing spirit. ‘I Took the Wrong Turning, my dear. I Took to Drink.’

‘You did – eh?’

‘That’s right, my dear,’ she went on in the same way. ‘All through a Glass of Port.’

She was speaking without the slightest seriousness at the moment, but a little later, thinking of odd things as she humoured him and his kisses and the taxi curved and sped through the mauve-lit London streets, she wondered whether she had not accidentally hit upon the truth. At the same time she remembered where it was that she had met this little man before.