Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (55 page)

Not that Ella was ever at home more than four hours every week on the average, or that she was what is called ‘happy’ at home. In fact she never failed to make herself dumbly miserable by going there. At the very outset there was a jarring note, her mother having some years ago acquired the preposterous surname of Prosser, whereas her true surname was the same as Ella’s – Dawson. This infantile homage paid
to Registry Office formulas invariably puzzled and annoyed Ella, although she could not dispute the fact that her mother was legally, indeed irremediably, married to Mr. Prosser.

To hear her mother being called Mrs. Prosser – that was to say after a fiend in human shape – was often more than Ella could bear, and she would be on the verge of crying out upon her mother for her responsibility in the error. Her mother, however, bore such an apologetic and uncomprehending air about the matter, and had obviously so completely forgotten the variety of motives which seven or eight years ago had prompted her to commit the act, that Ella always reproached herself for her resentment, and remained silent. Indeed, in an embarrassed way, they both tried to keep off the subject altogether in so far as it was possible, Ella giving her tacit consent to the only comment that her mother was capable of feebly re-affirming in an effort to justify or mitigate the penalty of her husband – namely, the negative one that he was not as Bad as he was Painted.

Whether, actually, Mr. Prosser was, or was not, as Bad as he was Painted (by Ella at any rate), was another matter. In point of fact, he was not the sort of man that anybody would think of Painting at all, in the ordinary way – he being one of the obscurer Paintings by the Almighty in a modern style, whose significance and place in the general exhibition were not to be instantly apprehended and whose soul did not show on the surface. A more silent and reticent man there never was. He had a thin body, an ashen face, glowering eyes, and a large grey moustache. A saddler by trade, he had been, before and just after the war ‘in his own way.’ The laws governing the benign progress of capital, however, had by slow and painful methods pinched and thrust him from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie into the ranks of the proletariat, with the result that, instead of being ‘in his own way’ he was now in almost everybody’s way, and a misery to himself. Always a sour-tempered man, a staunch conservative in politics, and something of a snob, instead of having sheltered himself with any form of philosophical encrustation, his fall from private ownership obviously yet rankled
and gnawed at him day by day, and hour by hour. There was nothing doing in his line, and he made a few unhappy shillings every week by cleaning the brass, and sweeping the floors, and snatching up the empty glasses of the more fortunate in a large public-house round the corner. A false and humiliating occupation indeed. There was thus much to excuse him, but not enough to account for his invincible and chronic silence and savagery, which he wreaked upon his wife, and which arose, perhaps, less from sheer distress than from a vindictive sense of vanished superiority. Ella, uncomprehending of social causation, saw no excuse.

Mr. and Mrs. Prosser inhabited three rooms on the third floor of the house Ella now entered, and regarded their quarters as comparatively spacious. There was a bedroom, a sitting-room, and a general muddling room containing a washing line and a gas range. The windows at the back looked out on to the sooty structure and black asphalt yard of a school – and the weighted droning of the class-room, or the murderous yelling and squealing of recreation in the yard, accompanied the occupiers through the tasks of the day.

Though, thanks to her mother, everything was fairly (
fairly
) clean inside, the long and steadfast grip of poverty showed itself everywhere and Ella never came up here without a slight sense of shame at being in such a ‘good place’ and wearing such fine clothes – a sensation from which she got hardly any relief in the fact that out of her weekly salary, which was twenty-two shillings, she kept only twelve, and gave the other ten to her mother.

Ella’s mother was a grey-haired, quiet, ill, puzzled woman of about fifty, with some resemblance to Ella, particularly about the eyes, and between them there existed the profoundest understanding and affection.

As soon as Ella had climbed the dark, airless and uncared-for stairway, and opened the door, and called for her mother, she saw at once that calamity, which carried on its campaign incessantly all along the line, had stricken the household at a fresh and unforeseen point, and by means of a fresh weapon of warfare, – uric acid. In other words, she had only to glance
at her mother to see that she was suffering from a frightful stiff Neck. This was swathed round and safety-pinned with a piece of flannel which made Mrs. Prosser look extraordinarily miserable, and also, if the truth was told, not a little silly. ‘It’s all right,’ she said at once, seeing Ella look at her. ‘I’ve got a stiff Neck.’ But why she should say it was all right was not clear, since she was obviously in excruciating agony every time she moved her head, and was thus compelled to move across the room with all the delays and caution of a novice on the tight-rope, and, in turning to look at anything, to move her entire stiffened body round as though she were incarcerated in a block of solid ice. Or, again, it was as though a ghostly surgeon had conveniently arranged to operate upon her while she went about her household tasks, and the operation was still in progress.

Not a very pleasant opening for her visit, but Ella was hardened to such occurrences in this damned abode, and expressing the liveliest sympathy, and after having had a Look at it (as though that was going to do any good) and compelling her mother slowly to transport her stiff neck to the arm-chair in the sitting-room, she herself took over the tasks she had interrupted, and put on the kettle for tea.

Her mother did not remain still for long, but in about twenty minutes’ time tea was ready, and they settled down in the sitting-room for their weekly chat. By now the smoky dusk was thickening in the rain outside; the fire, extravagantly heaped for the occasion, was blazing red and spitting white jets of gas; and in the suitable gloaming impending, there took place, with the clink of tea-cups, a gentle summing-up and discussion of the week’s events. As the dusk grew deeper they saw little more than the shapes of each other, and grew more confiding.

S
TRENUOUSLY AS THEY
both tried to evade and shirk it, Ella and her mother were never very long able to keep away from the shamefaced topic which actually dominated their thoughts – to wit, Him. Into whatever realms of description they went, however cheerful or absorbed they became, He was lurking there in the conversational background (in fact they both knew He would be back for his tea before very long), and some chance remark would set them going. ‘And then, of course, He’s been very funny all the time,’ her mother would say. ‘Has he?’ said Ella, and after a reluctant pause, the various cats would come out of the bags.

There was, as usual, a long inventory of novel crimes to his name this week. He had been more silent than ever, he had taken to coming in at three o’clock in the morning and cooking himself eggs. He had publicly stormed at the floor above, he had stamped on the floor below, he had taken a resolute and fixed stand against washing himself, he had damned and blasted (and somethinged) the Stiff Neck, he had got speechlessly drunk (even for a speechless person) on Saturday night, and Lain On on Sunday till four in the afternoon. In fact, ‘You wouldn’t
think
he had had any Education,’ said Ella’s mother, and Ella could have said more.

At last, however, they drifted away from the subject and Ella began to wonder whether she would say anything to her mother about Mr. Eccles. She desperately desired to confide in someone about this strange happening and slight opening (if it was an opening) in her life; and quite apart from her need for advice, she had a sheer childish desire to tell gleefully, and perhaps a little boastfully, to some understanding person, of the extravagant pleasures to which she had been treated, and the staggering wealth which had been calmly expended upon her – for no apparent reason save her
beaux yeux
. On the other hand she was a little ashamed to speak of her participation in such reckless expenditure before her mother, whose nagging pains in penury would have been eased by a fraction of the bill for that afternoon and evening. And she
also doubted whether her mother would Understand. . . . If it came to that, she did not understand herself.

But she swallowed these scruples, and finding her mother listening sympathetically at last let out the whole story with the utmost relief – the entire story, that is to say, minus the ‘Whats’ and climax. They then talked round and round the subject.

‘But what does he
want
?’ said her mother at last, in her simple, striving, slightly scared, yet direct way.

‘Well,’ said Ella, ‘that’s just what I want to know, really.’ And in the deepening dusk she sensed exactly what her mother was thinking. Her mother was thinking of dalliance and sin: and her mother was thinking of Marriage. Furthermore her mother did not dare risk an observation on either of these themes, and was silent.

‘He’s a Gentleman,’ hazarded Ella, not quite knowing what she meant to convey by this, but half wishing to describe his general quality, and half to reassure her mother under the heading of dalliance.

‘Is he?’ was all her mother could say.

‘Oh yes,’ said Ella. ‘They’re Army People, I believe.’

Ella brought this out with intense self-consciousness, and was ashamed at her duplicity with herself – inasmuch as she had been only too acutely ready to despise Mr. Eccles for ‘dragging in’ this advantage at the time, and here was she, dragging it in just as clumsily, and taking it over and using it as a weapon herself.

‘Is he really?’ said her mother, in a tone of awe which she was no longer able to conceal.

‘Yes,’ said Ella. ‘So I understand.’

It was odd, she reflected, that whenever she was with Mr. Eccles her mind harped incessantly upon his blemishes and absurdities, whereas now she was discussing him with someone else, she was seeing all those blemishes as advantages and sticking up for him – rather swanking about him in fact.

‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘I certainly think you ought to keep in with him.’

‘Yes. I suppose one ought,’ said Ella, and suspected, in the
silence that followed, that her mother’s mind had again reverted to that dimly discerned yet irresistible concept of matrimony. Mrs. Prosser’s next remark proved Ella’s suspicion well-founded.

‘Is he Nice Looking,’ she asked, ‘at all?’

‘Oh yes. Quite all right,’ said Ella. ‘He’s Getting On, of course. . . .’

‘Well, that’s sometimes Better, isn’t it?’ said Mrs. Prosser, encouragingly.

What was her mother trying to do? Encouraging her to over-ride her most precious impulses, and calculatingly sell herself to so impressive a bidder? What else? Ella had an instinct to be shocked. She was aware, however, of the peculiar unscrupulousness of the elderly, however deep their love, with regard to the matter of marrying off their daughters, and felt she must allow for this.

‘I mean he really
is
Getting On,’ she said. . . .

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Prosser, ‘perhaps he’s learnt some sense.’

It was no good. Ella perceived that her white body had no place in her poor mother’s calculations. But again she could not be offended. She understood her mother’s feelings too well; she knew, from the anxious, tentative tone of her voice, how wretchedly, day and night, she yearned for some turn in their fortune, to see Ella ‘settled’ – a passion so selfless and intense that it had come to disregard the very self and emotions of its object. She could not resist throwing her a little scrap of hope.

‘Well,’ she said, almost significantly. ‘He’s certainly been very kind.’

‘He certainly has.’ And Mrs. Prosser, possibly for the first time in weeks, was a cheerful woman.

‘Well, we shall see,’ said Ella, and there was a pause.

‘He hasn’t tried,’ said Mrs. Prosser, in a funny voice, ‘to Carry On at all, I suppose, has he?’

‘Oh no,’ said Ella, ‘None of That. . . .’

She realized that it would not be proper, nor indeed in any way possible to furnish an impression of whatever proportion of Carrying On was implied in the indescribable ‘Whats’
against the railings. And this was a pity, since they constituted, really, the sole crisis of the situation, providing the most suggestive clue from which any vital interpretation of the situation might be made. But there is more often than not a sad curse attached to confidences of this nature between mother and daughter (and friend and friend, if it comes to that), whereby the one confiding is forced to withhold some essential particular, and yet foolishly seeks to obtain relief in the sympathy and opinion of a listener who has been, as it were, betrayed, and is enlarging upon an entirely false and incomplete hypothesis.

So, making the gulf even wider: ‘Oh no,’ Ella repeated, ‘I wouldn’t allow that. . . .’

‘No . . .’ said Mrs. Prosser, in an ambiguous voice, and Ella was not quite certain that she detected the note of relief that she had anticipated. In fact she was not sure that her mother was not a little disappointed. In the shattering lack of principle to which her selfless passion had brought this normally austere woman, it was quite possible that a little Carrying On might have a perfectly decent and suitable place in the picture, as part of the process of Encouragement and general submissiveness to a lord of creation. Ella saw that, near and dear as they were to each other, they were eternally apart, and thought it would be well to change the subject, lest her mother’s innocence of their separation should be destroyed.

She had no need to bother herself, for at this moment mounting footsteps on the wooden stairs outside caused Mrs. Prosser tensely to whisper ‘That’s Him!’ and the sound of the outer door being opened announced beyond question that He had Come Back.

No sooner were these sounds heard than the warmth of their contact and the glow of their confidings were transformed, in an instant, like an asbestos gas fire abruptly turned off at the main, into the ashen pallid coldness of fear and self-defence, and they stiffened their nerves for his entrance.