Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (50 page)

‘
I
’
ve
got something comfortable put by,’ said Mr. Eccles, italicizing his ‘I’ve’ in a purely scientific and self-effacing distinction between himself and the poor devils who hadn’t. . . .

‘Oh yes?’ said Bob politely, having gathered Mr. Eccles’ meaning without having gathered his exact object. And Ella did not reply.

There was, therefore, a rather uncomfortable silence in which the Comfortable (and yet slightly mysterious and foreboding) Something which Mr. Eccles had contrived to Put By, permeated the amicable and expectant air.

As for Ella, she had not replied because she (unlike Bob) had caught Mr. Eccles’ import as well as his meaning, and had again taken fright. There was something so eccentric, so uncalled-for, so ponderous and inelegant in Mr. Eccles’ allusion to what he had put by, that she had not the slightest doubt that he was doing what was known as Getting it In. Or Letting her Know. And that meant Advances again. And she had almost hoped, in the last few minutes, that she had expelled the demon of Advances. So he had something comfortable, had he? That might mean anything. It would be extremely interesting to know his criterion of comfort.

Still no one spoke, and Ella began to feel that it devolved upon her to start the conversation again, when that happened which, had it happened a little earlier, might have prevented, or at least postponed, the whole series of alternative misgivings and reassurances of which Ella had been the well-meaning vessel in the last quarter of an hour – another customer entered.

And directly after this other customer, another customer entered – and then shortly afterwards another. It was nearly always so – ‘The Midnight Bell,’ at a certain instant of the evening, becoming uncommonly like an accident which had just occurred, and upon whose scene people materialized from nowhere in complete dramatic awareness of the event. In ten minutes Ella was working hard.

It would have been doubtful whether Mr. Eccles would have had any further chance to hold any sustained conversation with Ella during the rest of the evening: certainly there was an end to any soft impasses and portentous silences. In any case, Mr. Eccles managed to leave well alone, and after drinking up the rest of his beer, he raised his new hat with a cheerful ‘Good night’ and went out. ‘Good-night, Mr. Eccles,’ cried Ella, cordially, but she was too busy to experience relief or aught else at his departure.

In this manner, then, an obviously cautious middle-aged gentleman (decidedly young for his age) had invited a rather plain barmaid to go to the theatre with him. The barmaid had given every appearance of willing acceptance. They were
going on Thursday. They remained, however, despite the private nature of their common commitment, wrapped in the deepest mystery to each other. So uncanny, grotesquely adjusted, and obscurely motivated are the parisitisms and coalitions formed by the small fish in the weird teeming aquarium of the metropolis.

E
LLA HAD A
small bedroom – practically an attic – at the top of ‘The Midnight Bell.’ It contained little more than a bed, a washing-stand, and a chest of drawers, and was lit lividly by incandescent gas. To this cold retreat she came directly after her work every night, generally humming softly to herself, being in good spirits both by virtue of her late exertions and her release therefrom.

Once inside, however, with the door shut, she ceased to hum. There is a great deal of the tomb in a bedroom; all passions, delights, schemings, ambitions, triumphs, must be taken back at night to these caves of cold arbitration. All journeyings and busy vanity must capitulate before their stationary severity. Ella undressed as quickly as she could.

A little later Bob would come up to his own cave, which adjoined hers. Although the wall was thin and they could easily have called to each other, they never said a word – not even a cheerful ‘Good-night.’ Caves were a serious business. But they could hear each other moving about and guess each other’s mental concentrations. To Ella, Bob was never so near, and never so far away as at these few minutes at the end of the day. She knew every dim bump and clink and splash and thud of his business-like undressing and washing; she could trace and visualize every movement. But where were his mind and soul disporting themselves? Somewhere, she knew, in that region which she could never penetrate in her intercourse with him, however intimate they became. In other
words, he was grinding out his own private problems, and those she would never share. She was nothing in his life. The nightly reminder made her own cave more bleak.

So soon as she was in darkness and the warmth of her sheets, she would listen to the occasional thunder from late traffic in the Euston Road near by, and her mind would wander away from Bob to the monotonous scenery of her own existence.

To-night she realized that the scenery had undergone a minute and unforeseen change. Last night all had been as before, to-night all was as before with the addition that she was going to the theatre on Thursday and had apparently acquired a new friend. She could not resist a certain feeling of pleasure at the change – for the thought of going to the theatre could not be anything but stimulating, and there should always be something exciting or diverting in a new friend.

She wondered why, in this instance, she felt no sense of diversion or excitement in her new friend. Was it just because he was middle-aged and undistinguished – or did the causes lie deeper? Was it not, possibly, because he was something more than a friend – a potential admirer – and as such a potential problem and task? Again, she wondered why she should not feel flattered and pleased by the thought of acquiring an admirer,
qua
admirer, even if she had the task of making him understand that he must be repelled. It was not as though she had often had an admirer of any kind. She ought to be delighted by the novelty. Why instead should she have a peculiar sense of being affronted? This she definitely did. It probably arose from the very fact that she had had so few admirers in her life – and that now one had appeared on the horizon, he should have such a dull, self-conscious, unattractive, and above all middle-aged exterior. If it was a feather in her cap, what a miserable feather – and was it a token of the only sort of feather she was ever fit to receive? It seemed so, since she was twenty-eight years of age, and had never yet been presented with a young, bright, attractive feather. Hence her feeling of affront from Mr. Eccles, whom
she half suspected of having divined this fact, and of having been emboldened by it, in offering his own shoddy feather. If he was in the mood to admire someone, why had he not gone to someone genuinely pretty and attractive? She knew she was plain all right: she knew it with such depth and frankness that she could positively find it in her heart to despise his taste! And if she despised his taste, she must despise the whole situation of which she formed a part. He had set in motion a degrading event.

Was she therefore, in matters of physical affection, doomed to degradation in her own eyes? No. If someone with a bright and beautiful feather to bestow (like Bob) were to admire her, she would not feel that his taste was at fault. The very brightness and beauty of the feather would be a charter of the immaculacy of its bestower’s judgment, and she would accept his homage merely as the delicious intimation that she had been mistaken about her own potentialities. For in spite of Ella’s realism concerning herself, she still had hopes that she was mistaken, that she had an authentic, if latent, attraction which might make her an active and full participant in the joys she had read about, and heard spoken of, and imagined for herself.

Bob, without making a move, incited these hopes: Mr. Eccles, by making a direct advance, in a manner distorted and discoloured them. How could she do otherwise than faintly resent Mr. Eccles?

On the other hand, these introspections were much more profound and morbid than the situation warranted, and it was not Mr. Eccles’ fault. It was ridiculous to expect him to see that he was not paying her an unambiguous compliment. He could not know what was going on in her mind. Moreover, since she knew in her heart that she was not really attractive, it was sheer arrogance on her part to put herself on a plane above Mr. Eccles. In fact, the common-sense thing to do, and she prided herself on her common-sense, was to accept her fate, and gain every ounce of comfort she could from what homage she could get. And was it not an acknowledged fact that there were enormous compensatory
comforts for those who forsook or had no access to the intemperate ecstasies of beauty and delight?

That word comfort. He had used it himself. He had made a fool of himself in his pains to make her understand that he was a comfortable man. What lay behind that ungainly attempt? The hint, surely, of dim possibilities that she might somehow participate in that comfort, that he might shower that comfort upon her. But in what way? As his wife? Or in some other capacity? She knew she was again rushing ahead of herself, and imagining absurd things, but the man must have had
some
motive,
some
logical object in all his shy but intent manoeuvrings.

What if he wanted to marry her? With nearly all the men with whom she came into contact, Ella, like most women, was in the habit of indulging in the droll and entirely disinterested conception of a state of affairs in which they wanted to marry her and Mr. Eccles had given her an unmistakable stimulus. Well, suppose he wanted to marry her? A comfortable man would be making a comfortable offer to a practically penniless barmaid who desired comfort and stability above all things else in life.

She again wondered what his standards of relative comfort were, how that occult comfortable Something put by, would present itself to the material eye in the form of
£.s.d
. per annum. He had given no clue to this, but with a man of his caution (and caution was glaringly his characteristic) she did not believe that he would have committed himself even so far as he had unless he was sure of his ground. Such a man would not have entered his name, as it were, in the Comfort Tournament unless he was pretty certain of distinguishing himself. Indeed she was prepared to believe that he was wealthy – by her standards at any rate. And suppose a wealthy man wanted to marry, and give her all the comforts of life? It was a well-known fact that these men were continually picking on the plain girls. Naturally Ella’s dream of earthly happiness was a home of her own, with the comforts and the permanent orientation thereof; and she had often thought that she would be prepared to make almost any
sacrifice to gain it. Would she, then, be doing her duty by herself if she was always going to be so squeamish and to flee from such opportunities.

Furthermore, would she be doing her duty by her unhappy poverty-stricken mother, whom she was so passionately anxious to Help – whom she already Helped in a wretched way from her own minute salary? What would all her profession of longing to Help amount to if she lost the chance of wealth itself when it came her way?

An old, or elderly man. But might not his elderliness (to imagine oneself, since this was all sheer imagination, to be perfectly wicked and unscrupulous) be an ultimate advantage? For apart from her visualization of a home of her own, Ella had another dream of happiness. This was of the proverbial Cottage in a proverbial but unspecified portion of the Country, with her mother and herself in rose-surrounded residence.

What of an elderly and mortal Mr. Eccles unscrupulously viewed as a route to a Cottage?

But then she was not unscrupulous, and anyway this was all nonsense. She wondered whether anyone in the world let their imagination run riot as she did. She composed herself to sleep.

B
EFORE THE THURSDAY
(by degrees characterized in Ella’s mind with gay disparagement as ‘famous’) Mr. Eccles came into ‘The Midnight Bell’ only once, and that briefly in a busy hour, to fix the definite time and place of meeting. As she was not sure of the exact position of the theatre in St. Martin’s Lane they hit upon St. Martin’s Church at 2.15. Mr. Eccles went out without even having a drink.

In the few days that had intervened Ella had given little thought to Mr. Eccles, except to note that he had not been near her, but when the famous Thursday dawned she
experienced a renewal of speculation and vague excitement in her heart.

So soon as she was awake she noticed that it was a rather famous day itself – sunny, blue and cold, with a brisk thudding wind driving enormous white bulging growths of clouds. The universe was saluting an occasion, and she went about her morning tasks, in the church-like, rapidly-changing shadows of the closed public-house, with a lighter spirit than usual not only on account of the coming relaxation, but also of the conceivable dangers, of the afternoon ahead.

She was more than usually cheerful with the morning customers, some of whom she rather proudly told she was going to the theatre, and at a quarter to two set forth.

By this time the sky was overcast with uniform grey, and in the bus going down her mood changed to one of insecurity and puzzlement at this extraordinary arrangement with a perfect stranger. This feeling was not decreased by the fact that although, by walking around, she timed her arrival exactly at 2.15 outside St. Martin’s Church, there was no sign of Mr. Eccles.

She had certainly expected to find him waiting there and she had no idea what to make of it. She was not sure that she was not a little aggrieved. This did not look much like the new trembling admirer, the elderly self-conscious gentleman who made strange allusions to his wealth. He just wasn’t there. And a minute or two passed in which he still wasn’t there.

She realized the perversity of human nature in that now that that conception of the trembling admirer was fading, now that all her fears and trepidations were therefore being put to rest, at that very moment she was a little hurt, a little disappointed, a little sad even, at a little triumph having gone out of her life. In other words there was one base side of her nature which relished Mr. Eccles’ homage purely as homage – with an utterly unscrupulous disregard of his possible sufferings. So she did not even attract Mr. Eccles! On second thoughts, however, the better side of her nature was what counted, and she was honestly glad to feel that this load was being taken off her chest.