But the train moved. There was nothing to be done. He couldn’t turn me out. I stayed at the window. The draught of the rushing train was blowing in my face. One of those yellow sunsets of the autumn, with cloud like the brown smoke that runs off paraffin flares in the street markets, was painted over the manure-coloured brick of London and the approaching pink brick of the suburbs. The train snuffled on. I looked out of the window and then I saw D.O.M. at the next one, not her face but the elbow of her green coat and the fur of her collar. She was standing too. I stared until the wind made my eyes sting. Presently her head showed. But she did not turn, the metals crossed like scissors under the train at the points outside the coming station. Someone got out of our compartment at this station and I went to take his place. In doing so I kicked the violent man’s toe. He dropped his paper, stiffened his chin and muttered. I apologized and sat down.
At the next station another person got out and left the door open. “Close the door!” shouted the man. I was glad to curry favour. I stood up, closed the door and looked out. I saw her head again. I stared and stared and waited. She did not look my way. I went back to my place. But I couldn’t stay there. I had to get up again. She was there. She saw me. She affected not to see me. I was excited. I had entirely lost all sense of the people in the compartment. They were nothing but wagging and shaking sacks. I went back, got up again, a half-dozen times. I opened and closed the window, stepped across people’s legs, gazed out, sometimes rewarded and sometimes disappointed. As I went to my seat once more I hardly heard the man opposite to me say:
“What the devil do you think you’re doing, you young fool. Can’t you sit still?”
“This is not your compartment,” I said.
The wind in my eyes and the sight of D.O.M. at the window had given me defiance. All the brutality that lies under humiliation was ready.
“Perpetually getting up and treading on my feet,” said the man.
“There is no need to lose your temper,” I said. I was swept into another world, away from everything I had known. I felt the recklessness of a blasphemer in defying a man thirty years older than myself, a man with grey hair. I felt I had grown up ten years with a word.
“You dare talk to me like that,” said the man, removing his pince-nez and showing me his naked grey eyes.
The other passengers looked at us in a stupor of displeasure.
“If you were my son,” he said, “I’d thrash you within an inch of your life.”
“Try,” I said. “Go on.” I felt about thirty. I suddenly felt I had fought in the war. “Why aren’t you in the army, anyway,” I said. It was a phrase I had often heard.
The man threw down his paper, jumped up and was about to strike me when a passenger touched his arm.
“I shall call an inspector,” he said.
An expression of bliss came over the faces of the others in the compartment. There was a worship of inspectors on our line.
“Call a dozen inspectors,” shouted the man, still standing and threatening me. Before I knew what I was doing I gave him a push in the waistcoat, the train suddenly stopped with a jerk and he fell back into his seat. In our quarrel we had passed D.O.M.’s station where I always got out. We had arrived at the East station, the terminus.
This put me in a panic because I did not want to be seen quarrelling in the town where my home was. The passengers had risen and one, a woman, was between me and the man. He was trying to get at me. I pushed and got out on to the platform first, but my enemy was on me. He tumbled out and hit hard. The blow hit my shoulder. And he grabbed my arm, too. He was savage and unguarded. I saw his mouth like a flattened rose and landed my knuckles on it. This knocked him into the crowd and his spit was on my hand.
I knew I was for it now and had not a chance against this man and I was scared by what I had done. I got a burning blow on the ear that nearly knocked me senseless. I swung back at him and perhaps I hit him or one of the people who were trying to get between us and the barrier. It wasn’t a fight.
“You young swine. You young hound,” I heard his shouts. A passenger muddled the next swing of his arm and I caught him on the collar. The blow was not as wonderful to me as the first one; it made me feel dizzy. His spit on my hand had gone cold. I dodged away quickly, jumped on to a truck, climbed over the low fence and got down into the coal yard. A number of people were arguing with the man. His hat had fallen off and had been kicked and he was holding it crumpled in his hand and shouting at the person who had trodden on it. Someone said, “Striking a boy like that!” and this made me feel heroic now I was safe. I walked away with the feeling that I was treading through flames and one side of my face seemed to be like a football. Then I felt horror at myself; and at the whole human race. I had struck a man whose son had been killed. I suddenly knew what the war was. I went home and was sick.
After this, I did not use the East station any more. I got up earlier and used the Junction. For two years I dared not go near the East station and I did not see D.O.M. again. I found a new girl on the new line and went out arm-in-arm with her. That had an unhappy ending, too—unhappy for the girl. None of this would have happened if Isabel Hertz had not known what God is.
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT
It was the dead hour of a November afternoon. Under the ceiling of level mud-coloured cloud, the latest office buildings of the city stood out alarmingly like new tombstones, among the mass of older buildings. And along the streets, the few cars and the few people appeared and disappeared slowly as if they were not following the roadway or the pavement, but some inner, personal route. Along the road to the main station, at intervals of two hundred yards or so, unemployed men and one or two beggars were dribbling slowly past the desert of public buildings to the next patch of shop fronts.
Presently a taxi stopped outside one of the underground stations and a man of thirty-five paid his fare and made off down one of the small streets.
“Better not arrive in a taxi,” he was thinking. “The old man will wonder where I got the money.”
He was going to see his father. It was his father’s last day at his factory, the last day of thirty years’ work and life among these streets, building a business out of nothing, and then, after a few years of prosperity, letting it go to pieces in a chafer of rumour, idleness, quarrels, accusations and, at last, bankruptcy.
Suddenly all the money quarrels of the family, which nagged in the young man’s mind, had been dissolved. His dread of being involved in them vanished. He was overcome by the sadness of his father’s situation. “Thirty years of your life come to an end. I must see him. I must help him.” All the same, knowing his father, he had paid off the taxi and walked the last quarter of a mile.
It was a shock to see the name of the firm, newly painted too, on the sign outside the factory and on the brass of the office entrance, newly polished. He pressed the bell at the office window inside and it was a long time before he heard footsteps cross the empty room and saw a shadow cloud the frosted glass of the window.
“It’s Harold, father,” the young man said. The door was opened.
“Hullo, old chap. This is very nice of you, Harold,” said the old man shyly, stepping back from the door to let his son in, and lowering his pleased, blue eyes for a second’s modesty.
“Naturally I had to come,” said the son, shyly also. And then the father filled out with assurance again and taking his son’s arm, walked him across the floor of the empty workroom.
“Hardly recognize it, do you? When were you here last?” said the father.
This had been the machine-room, before the machines had gone. Through another door was what had been the showroom where the son remembered seeing his father, then a darkhaired man, talking in a voice he had never heard before, a quick, bland voice, to his customers. Now there were only dustlines left by the shelves on the white brick walls, and the marks of the showroom cupboards on the floor. The place looked large and light. There was no throb of machines, no hum of voice
s, no sound at all, now, but the echo of their steps on the empty floors. Already, though only a month bankrupt, the firm was becoming a ghost.
The two men walked towards the glass door of the office. They were both short. The father was well-dressed in an excellent navy blue suit. He was a vigorous, broad man with a pleased impish smile. The sun-burn shone through the clipped white hair of his head and he had the simple, trim, open-air look of a snow man. The son beside him was round-shouldered and shabby, a keen but anxious fellow in need of a hair cut and going bald.
“Come in, Professor,” said the father. This was an old family joke. He despised his son, who was, in fact, not a professor but a poorly paid lecturer at a provincial university.
“Come in,” said the father, repeating himself, not with the impatience he used to have, but with the habit of age. “Come inside, into my office. If you can call it an office now,” he apologized. “This used to be my room, do you remember, it used to be my office? Take a chair. We’ve still got a chair. The desk’s gone, yes that’s gone, it was sold, fetched a good price—what was I saying?” he turned a bewildered look to his son. “The chair. I was saying they have to leave you a table and a chair. I was just going to have a cup of tea old boy, but—pardon me,” he apologized again, “I’ve only one cup. Things have been sold for the liquidators and they’ve cleaned out nearly everything. I found this cup and teapot upstairs in the foreman’s room. Of course he’s gone, all the hands have gone, and when I looked around just now to lock up before taking the keys to the agent when I hand over to-day, I saw this cup. Well, there it is. I’ve made it. Have a cup?”
“No, thanks,” said the son, listening patiently to his father. “I have had my tea.”
“You’ve had your tea? Go on. Why not have another?”
“No really, thanks,” said the son. “You drink it.”
“Well,” said the father, pouring out the tea and lifting the cup to his soft rosy face and blinking his eyes as he drank, “I feel badly about this. This is terrible. I feel really awful drinking this tea and you standing there watching me, but you say you’ve had yours—well, how are things with you? How are you? And how is Alice? Is she better? And the children? You know I’ve been thinking about you—you look worried. Haven’t lost sixpence and found a shilling have you, because I wouldn’t mind doing that?”
“I’m all right,” the son said, smiling to hide his irritation. “I’m not worried about anything, I’m just worried about you. This—” he nodded with embarrassment to the dismantled showroom, the office from which even the calendars and wastepaper basket had gone—“this—” what was the most tactful and sympathetic word to use?—“this is bad luck,” he said.
“Bad luck?” said the old man sternly.
“I mean,” stammered his son, “I heard about the creditors’ meeting. I knew it was your last day—I thought I’d come along, I … to see how you were.”
“Very sweet of you, old boy,” said the old man with zest. “Very sweet. We’ve cleared everything up. They got most of the machines out to-day. I’m just locking up and handing over. Locking up is quite a business. There are so many keys. It’s tiring, really. How many keys do you think there are to a place like this? You wouldn’t believe it, if I told you.”
“It must have been worrying,” the son said.
“Worrying? You keep on using that word. I’m not worrying. Things are fine,” said the old man smiling aggressively. “I feel they’re fine. I know they’re fine.”
“Well, you always were an optimist,” smiled his son.
“Listen to me a moment. I want you to get this idea,” said his father, his warm voice going dead and rancorous and his nostrils fidgeting. His eyes went hard, too. A different man was speaking, and even a different face; the son noticed for the first time that like all big-faced men his father had two faces. There was the outer face like a soft warm and careless daub of innocent sealing wax and inside it, as if thumbed there by a seal, was a much smaller one, babyish, shrewd, scared and hard. Now this little inner face had gone greenish and pale and dozens of little veins were broken on the nose and cheeks. The small, drained, purplish lips of this little face were speaking. The son leaned back instinctively to get just another inch away from this little face.
“Listen to this,” the father said and leaned forward on the table as his son leaned back, holding his right fist up as if he had a hammer in his hand and was auctioning his life. “I am 65. I don’t know how long I shall live, but let me make this clear: if I were not an optimist I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t stay another minute.” He paused, fixing his son’s half averted eyes to let the full meaning of his words bite home. “I’ve worked hard,” the father went on. “For thirty years I built up this business from nothing. You wouldn’t know it, you were a child, but many’s the time coming down from the North, I’ve slept in this office to be on the job early the next morning.” He looked decided and experienced like a man of forty, but now he softened to sixty again. The ring in the hard voice began to soften into a faint whine and his thick nose sniffed. “I don’t say I’ve always done right,” he said. “You can’t live your life from A to Z like that. And now I haven’t a penny in the world. Not a cent. It’s not easy at my time of life to begin again. What do you think I’ve got to live for? There’s nothing holding me back. My boy, if I wasn’t an optimist I’d go right out. I’d finish it.” Suddenly the father smiled and the little face was drowned in a warm flood of triumphant smiles from the bigger face. He rested his hands on his waistcoat and that seemed to be smiling too, his easy coat smiling, his legs smiling and even winks of light on his shining shoes. Then he frowned.
“Your hair’s going thin,” he said. “You oughtn’t to be losing your hair at your age. I don’t want you to think I’m criticizing you, you’re old enough to live your own life, but your hair you know—you ought to do something about it. If you used oil every day and rubbed it in with both hands, the thumbs and forefingers is what you want to use, it would be better. I’m often thinking about you and I don’t want you to think I’m lecturing you because I’m not, so don’t get the idea this is a lecture, but I was thinking, what you want, what we all want, I say this for myself as well as you, what we all want is ideas—big ideas. We go worrying along but you just want bigger and better ideas. You ought to think big. Take your case. You’re a lecturer. I wouldn’t be satisfied with lecturing to a small batch of people in a university town. I’d lecture the world. You know, you’re always doing yourself injustice. We all do. Think big.”
“Well,” said his son, still smiling, but sharply. He was very angry. “One’s enough in the family. You’ve thought big till you bust.”
He didn’t mean to say this because he hadn’t really the courage, but his pride was touched.
“I mean,” said the son, hurriedly covering it up in a panic, “I’m not like you … I …”
“What did you say?” said the old man. “Don’t say that.” It was the smaller of the two faces speaking in a panic. “Don’t say that. Don’t use that expression. That’s not a right idea. Don’t you get a wrong idea about me. We paid sixpence in the pound,” said the old man proudly.
The son began again, but his father stopped him.
“Do you know,” said the bigger of his two faces, getting bigger as it spoke, “some of the oldest houses in the city are in Queer Street, some of the biggest firms in the country? I came up this morning with Mr. Higgins, you remember Higgins? They’re in liquidation. They are. Oh yes. And Moore, he’s lost everything. He’s got his chauffeur but it’s his wife’s money. Did you see Beltman in the trade papers? Quarter of a million deficit. And how long are Prestons going to last?”
The big face smiled and overflowed on the smaller one. The whole train, the old man said, was practically packed with bankrupts every morning. Thousands had gone. Thousands? Tens of thousands. Some of the biggest men in the City were broke.
A small man himself, he was proud to be bankrupt with the bi
g ones; it made him feel rich.
“You’ve got to realize, old boy,” he said gravely, “the world’s changing. You’ve got to move with the times.”
The son was silent. The November sun put a few strains of light through the frosted window and the shadow of its bars and panes was weakly placed on the wall behind his father’s head. Some of the light caught the tanned scalp that showed between the white hair. So short the hair was that his father’s ears protruded and, framed against that reflection of the window bars, the father suddenly took (to his son’s fancy) the likeness of a convict in his cell and the son, startled, found himself asking “Were they telling the truth when they said the old man was a crook and that his balance sheets were cooked. What about that man they had to shut up at the meeting, the little man from Birmingham, in a mackintosh …”
“There’s a fly in this room,” said the old man suddenly, looking up in the air and getting to his feet. “I’m sorry to interrupt what you were saying, but I can hear a fly. I must get it out.”
“A fly?” said his son listening.
“Yes, can’t you hear it? It’s peculiar how you can hear everything now the machines have stopped. It took me quite a time to get used to the silence. Can you see it, old chap? I can’t stand flies, you never know where they’ve been. Excuse me one moment.”
The old man pulled a duster out of a drawer.
“Forgive this interruption. I can’t sit in a room with a fly in it,” he said apologetically. They both stood up and listened. Certainly in the office was the small dying fizz of a fly, deceived beyond its strength by the autumn sun.
“Open the door, will you, old boy,” said the old man with embarrassment. “I hate them.”
It May Never Happen Page 17
