Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (70 page)

‘Your

‘E
RNEST
.’

Toodlums!
What a man! But she supposed he had made amends in his own impervious, ostrich-like way. And was he really going to buy her a fur coat? That would be nice, of course. But what great big kisses her suddenly and idiotically self-styled ‘toodlums’ would expect in sweet payment for this she dared not think! The trouble with the man simply was that he was an idiot – as far as amorous advances went, practically a cretin. But she supposed that that was not his fault, and that he was well-meaning, and loved her.

She had no idea how she was going to answer this. She would have, she imagined, to make it up, and then all the wearing problem would begin again – with Mr. Eccles continuing to make an ass of himself, and her unhappy mother continuing to make hints, and she herself unable to make any decision reinforced by her heart. She found now that she had subconsciously rather enjoyed her brief vacation from him.

Fur coats, indeed! It sounded most proud and sinful. It was awful to think of the things she would be forsaking if she took the opportunity (and it might never come again) of turning him down at this juncture. As she served that night in the crowded bar, and laughingly rebuked the insincere compliments of the men (they all said she looked ‘beautiful’ in her cracker cap) she wondered what they would all think if they knew that there was a gentleman with a rich private income
behind her, who really did think she was beautiful, and was prepared to support his opinion with fur coats and legality. It was not a chance which came the way of many barmaids, and there were few who would not rush at it.

Thus the strange and unforeseeable pattern of yet another Christmas Day was lived through. On the next day, Boxing Day – the last stretch in the hateful Christmas tunnel – Ella thought a great deal more about Mr. Eccles, but still had made no attempt to reply to his letter. She somehow excused and felt that he would understand her procrastination on the score of the prevailing irregularity of the Christmas posts, though actually she knew there was one which would reach him tomorrow. She even felt justified in delaying making any decision about Mr. Eccles, for in the Christmas tunnel you felt that all matters were as though suspended, and you could not properly resume your existence and pick up the threads until you came out into the clear mental daylight of Thursday. (After that there was another little tunnel of festivity ahead, in the New Year, but that was not a Severn tunnel, like Christmas.)

On Boxing Day Bob went off for his holiday – without saying good-bye – and she was rather hurt – though it was in the afternoon when she was over at Pimlico, where the fiend had made further miraculous and merciless leaps forward, but her mother was nearly dead with fatigue, overstrained nerves, and overdue rest. Ella gave her her usual ten shillings.

It was rotten – not having Bob to listen to in the next room that night – creepy somehow. The wind howled round the dark house, there was more rain, and she wondered what on earth he was doing with himself on such a stormy night. He was supposed to have gone to Brighton, but she dared not think about that. Anyway it would only be a week – a week went soon enough – sadly soon for the released toiler, and she would have him back fresh for the New Year.

The next day she could still not make up her mind as to the form of her reply to Mr. Eccles, and she took a walk by herself in Regent’s Park to think about it. She rather thought she would make it evasive for the time being, until she had taken
some advice. Why not confide in Bob when he came back? It seemed a funny choice, but Bob was young and alone understood her general outlook on life. She had no other young friends. Yes – she would confide in Bob. As she could make nothing else of him, she could at least make a friend of him, and not be silly about him any more. She was going to train herself in not being silly about him any more while he was away. And when he came back they were going to be great friends. That would be a happy evening.

It was with these resolutions that she came down to her evening duties.

It was about five minutes after opening, and she was standing alone wiping glasses in the bar (for the man taking Bob’s place was not coming until to-morrow), when Freda, the barmaid round in the public bar, who did not sleep in, and whom Ella did not know very well or like particularly, came round into Ella’s province to fetch a bottle.

‘Have you heard about Bob?’ she said, as she delved in a cupboard.

‘What?’ said Ella, her heart pounding.

‘He’s gone,’ said Freda.

‘Gone? I know he’s gone.’

‘No. Gone for good,’ said Freda, and having found what she wanted, went out of sight. A customer entered and ordered a bitter.

‘A trifle milder to-night,’ said the customer.

‘Yes. It is,’ said Ella, but she had no idea what she was saying.

H
E HAD BROKEN
her heart – that was all she knew about it. She had got all the details there were from the Governor and the Mrs., but they were both really as mystified as herself. However, a change of waiters meant nothing to them.

He had come in during the afternoon and said that he was going back to sea – he had always wanted to do this, and a chance had come which he felt he could not pass by. It was ‘lucky’ (said the Governor and the Mrs.) coming at this time, as they had a new man to hand and would be put to no inconvenience in the transition. And packed up and gone to sea he had, all in the space of an hour or so. ‘He left a special message for
you
,’ the Mrs. said. ‘He sent his love and said he was sorry he couldn’t see you.’ And ‘He was a nice boy,’ said the Governor, ‘we’ll all miss him, I’m sure.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Mrs. ‘and good-looking, too. . . .’

A special message! What was the good of that, after cruelly breaking her heart? How could the Bob she knew have been so thoughtless, so heartless, as to play this trick on her behind her back? To run off while she was not looking, without a word, without warning, without an attempt to confide in his companion in slavery. After all their fun, conspiracy, and intimacy in the bar, after the Christmas present she had given him, after their going to the pictures together, after all those nights she had listened to him in his room, after everything. It was too hard. She would never trust in anybody again. Was no one to be trusted? And he had sent her his ‘love.’ What did that mean? She cherished it, although it meant nothing.

Most poignant disaster of all, they had put her into his room. A considerate thought of the Mrs. as it was actually the better room of the two. And how could she explain to the Mrs. that she adored the vanished waiter, and could not bear being put in his room? The New man would have her old room. His name was John, and she had met him – a measly, weedy, would-be vulgar little man with a thin nose and a tiny grey moustache – but she had to be nice to him as he found his way about.

She had to move in next day. She did it in the afternoon. She had to light the gas (the gas he had so many times lighted!) as it was so dark. It was about a quarter of an hour before she went downstairs for her evening’s work, and she stood there, looking at the vacant, wall-papered cell of the departed spirit.

He had obviously gone in a hurry, for he had left, again with unbearable poignance, many little things behind. . . . A half-used bottle of ink; some old razor blades; and some books and papers. A second-hand copy of Macaulay’s History of England, a little green Volume One of Gibbon’s Roman Empire, and some old numbers of John O’London’s Weekly. Ella had always known that Bob was a great reader, and she had often wondered why he had wanted to stuff his head with such dry things, while secretly admiring him profoundly, and being in a manner proud of him, for his excursions into learned realms beyond her comprehension. He had once told her with naïve pride that there were seven volumes of these Gibbons in all, and he was getting them one by one. But she had never seen another, and now he had left it behind. Why had he forsaken these tokens of some secret ambition to study and improve himself? She picked up the Macaulay, and glanced through its mysterious pages. She saw from the condition of the pages that he had not read it all through, and in a manner which struck her as curiously touching, he had in parts underlined the small print in pencil. Here, for instance: ‘
Yet it was plain that no confidence could be placed in the King. Nothing but the want of an army had prevented him from entirely subverting the old constitution of the realm
.’ Why had her dear, dear, Bob, who had vanished forever, been so anxious secretly to call attention with his delighted pencil to the truth that no confidence could be placed in the King at this period? And later: ‘
The discipline of the navy was of a piece throughout. . . . It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar with the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the Arctic Circle would pay prompt and respectful obedience to a chief who knew no more of winds and waves than could be learned in a gilded barge between Whitehall stairs and Hampton Court
.’ That must have appealed to his strange, charming, reticent soul as a sailor. Where was he now – on the high seas, battling with the winds and waves in the dark? Seeing and touching these relics of the inner life of an aspiring, striving and departed presence, she forgave him all his guilt in forsaking her, and was aware only
of a gentle pity for the frustration of all souls, including her own, under the dark firmament.

But now she had to unpack, and make his cold cave her own. To use his jug and basin, to open and shut his window, to draw his curtains, to make all the little sounds she had heard him making, as though by a process of metamorphosis she was him, and was hearing herself from the next room! It was almost more than she could bring herself to do. Never would this cave cease in her mind to be Bob’s cave, and she a nymph compelled sorrowfully to inhabit it, reminded ever and again of what had gone.

And that letter still to be written! In her present mood the mere thought of that man made her ill. Why not have done with him? How, with the dear memory of Bob in her mind, could she submit to his vile, moustached embraces – his Squeezes, and Teasings, and sly little Pussings? And he was so certain of himself in his financial power over her. She was to write to her Toodlums with a great big kiss! Oh – how she would love to put him in his place! Toodlums! She would give him toodlums!

On a sudden impulse she fetched pen and paper.

‘Dear Mr. Eccles,

‘Thank you for your letter, but after all this time I have been thinking it all out and have decided that we would never be suited to each other. I am sorry if you have been put to any inconvenience, but we are not in the same class, and I do not love you enough, and you must not write any more as I should not answer. I thank you very much indeed for the kind interest you have shown in me, but this is final I am afraid. Thanking you again.

‘Yours regretfully,

‘E
LLA
.’

She wrote this straight off, without any attention to punctuation or style, and she stamped and addressed the envelope when she was down in the bar and had begun her evening duties. But she did not post it.

She had her mother to consider, and she doubted if she would have the cheek to post a letter like that.

I
T IS A SAD
pass when a solitary young woman in London is so low in spirits and miserable in her thoughts that she decides she must buy herself some sweets and go by herself to the pictures and sit in the gloom, to hide from the roaring world, and try to divert her mind from its aching preoccupations by looking at the shadows. You will sometimes see such lonely figures, eating their sweets and gazing gravely at the screen in the flickering darkness of picture theatres, and it may well be that they are merely other Ellas, with just such problems and sorrows in their grey lives as hers.

It is the sweets which give the tragedy to the spectacle. To have reached such an age, to have fought so strenuously all along the line of life, and yet to have come to a stage of hopelessness and isolation wherein the sole remaining consolation is to be found in sweets! Yet this was Ella’s predicament the next afternoon.

It was raining. She could not stay in her room or she would go mad; she could not bear the thought of going over to Pimlico to her people. She had to have something to buck her up, and all she could think of was the pictures and some sweets. She decided to be extravagant and go to the Capitol, to which she had never been, and she bought four ounces of Italian Cream (for which she had a passion dating from childhood) on the way.

It was a tremendous extravagance, as she knew you could not get into the Capitol under one-and-six, but she was beyond caring about extravagance, and she had to have some distraction.

In her bag she still had her unposted letter to Mr. Eccles. That was why she dreaded going to Pimlico so much; for there
she would be plied with further wretchedly hopeful questions about the Gentleman, and pressure might be put upon her which would cloud her judgment. She had to decide this matter by herself, but she still had no idea whether she was going to post the letter or not, or what she was going to do if she did not. Perhaps she would decide in the Cinema.

She had no sooner entered the imposing, lavishly mirrored portals of the Capitol than she had a feeling that her impulse to entertain herself had been a mistaken one. She bought her one-and-sixpenny seat, getting the impression that the uniformed staff and invisible dispenser of tickets at the office would have preferred her to have spent even more than that, and she was taken to a seat in the first six rows. Here she was with a few odd people and children, and she tried to concentrate upon the show and enjoy her Italian Cream.

But although this was very nice, she had to be careful not to make herself sick, and she soon found her mind wandering and her heart sinking. It sank in sudden unexpected lurches, which left a slow ache behind. When it sank like this, it did it either for no reason at all, or at some little memory or thought of Bob – of Bob now on the high seas, of Bob smacking Eric’s head, of Bob sending his ‘love,’ or Bob taking her to the pictures himself, and to tea afterwards, in those warm friendly days when she had no idea of the desolation that was to befall – of Bob this and Bob that – Bob all the time. It was no good. He had struck, as it were, a blow upon her soul which had been transmitted to her physical being – a feeling which she could definitely locate in the region of her diaphragm, and which nothing could alleviate.