09 Not George Washington

by Unknown

  “You’re tired,” I said, forgetting my two last dances, forgetting everything but that I loved her.

  “Perhaps I am,” she said, taking my arm. We turned in silence to the portičre and found ourselves in the hall. The doors were opened. Some servants were there. At the bottom of the steps I chanced to see a yellow light.

  “Find out if that cab’s engaged,” I said to a footman.

  “The cool air–-” I said to Eva.

  “The cab is not engaged, sir,” said the footman, returning.

  “Yes,” said Eva, in answer to my glance.

  “Drive to the corner of Sloane Street, by way of the Park,” I told the driver.

  I have said that I had forgotten everything except that I loved her. Could it help remembrance now that we two sped alone through empty streets, her warm, palpitating body touching mine?

  Julian, his friendship for me, his love for Eva; Margaret and her love for me; my own honour—these things were blotted from my brain.

  “Eva!” I murmured; and I took her hand.

  “Eva.”

  Her wonderful eyes met mine. The mist in them seemed to turn to dew.

  “My darling,” she whispered, very low. And, the road being deserted, I drew her face to mine and kissed her.

  CHAPTER 16

  I TELL JULIAN (James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)

  Is any man really honourable? I wonder. Hundreds, thousands go triumphantly through life with that reputation. But how far is this due to absence of temptation? Life, which is like cricket in so many ways, resembles the game in this also. A batsman makes a century, and, having made it, is bowled by a ball which he is utterly unable to play. What if that ball had come at the beginning of his innings instead of at the end of it? Men go through life without a stain on their honour. I wonder if it simply means that they had the luck not to have the good ball bowled to them early in their innings. To take my own case. I had always considered myself a man of honour. I had a code that was rigid compared with that of a large number of men. In theory I should never have swerved from it. I was fully prepared to carry out my promise and marry Margaret, at the expense of my happiness—until I met Eva. I would have done anything to avoid injuring Julian, my friend, until I met Eva. Eva was my temptation, and I fell. Nothing in the world mattered, so that she was mine. I ought to have had a revulsion of feeling as I walked back to my rooms in Walpole Street. The dance was over. The music had ceased. The dawn was chill. And at a point midway between Kensington Lane and the Brompton Oratory I had proposed to Eversleigh’s cousin, his Eva, “true as steel,” and had been accepted.

  Yet I had no remorse. I did not even try to justify my behaviour to Julian or to Margaret, or—for she must suffer, too—to Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell, who, I knew well, was socially ambitious for her niece.

  To all these things I was indifferent. I repeated softly to myself, “We love each other.”

  From this state of coma, however, I was aroused by the appearance of my window-blind. I saw, in fact, that my room was illuminated. Remembering that I had been careful to put out my lamp before I left, I feared, as I opened the hall door, a troublesome encounter with a mad housebreaker. Mad, for no room such as mine could attract a burglar who has even the slightest pretensions to sanity.

  It was not a burglar. It was Julian Eversleigh, and he was lying asleep on my sofa.

  There was nothing peculiar in this. I roused him.

  “Julian,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he said, sitting up; “I’ve some news for you.”

  “So have I,” said I. For I had resolved to tell him what I had done.

  “Hear mine first. It’s urgent. Miss Margaret Goodwin has been here.”

  My heart seemed to leap.

  “Today?” I cried.

  “Yes. I had called to see you, and was waiting a little while on the chance of your coming in when I happened to look out of the window. A girl was coming down the street, looking at the numbers of the houses. She stopped here. Intuition told me she was Miss Goodwin. While she was ringing the bell I did all I could to increase the shabby squalor of your room. She was shown in here, and I introduced myself as your friend. We chatted. I drew an agonising picture of your struggle for existence. You were brave, talented, and unsuccessful. Though you went often hungry, you had a plucky smile upon your lips. It was a meritorious bit of work. Miss Goodwin cried a good deal. She is charming. I was so sorry for her that I laid it on all the thicker.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Nearing Guernsey. She’s gone.”

  “Gone!” I said. “Without seeing me! I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand how she loves you, James.”

  “But she’s gone. Gone without a word.”

  “She has gone because she loved you so. She had intended to stay with the Gunton-Cresswells. She knows them, it seems. They didn’t know she was coming. She didn’t know herself until this morning. She happened to be walking on the quay at St. Peter’s Port. The outward-bound boat was on the point of starting for England. A wave of affection swept over Miss Goodwin. She felt she must see you. Scribbling a note, which she despatched to her mother, she went aboard. She came straight here. Then, when I had finished with her, when I had lied consistently about you for an hour, she told me she must return. ‘I must not see James,’ she said. ‘You have torn my heart. I should break down.’ And she said, speaking, I think, half to herself, ‘Your courage is so noble, so different from mine. And I must not impose a needless strain upon it. You shall not see me weep for you.’ And then she went away.”

  Julian’s voice broke. He was genuinely affected by his own recital.

  For my part, I saw that I had bludgeon work to do. It is childish to grumble at the part Fate forces one to play. Sympathetic or otherwise, one can only enact one’s rôle to the utmost of one’s ability. Mine was now essentially unsympathetic, but I was determined that it should be adequately played.

  I went to the fireplace and poked the fire into a blaze. Then, throwing my hat on the table and lighting a cigarette, I regarded Julian cynically.

  “You’re a nice sort of person, aren’t you?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Julian, startled, as I had meant that he should be, by the question.

  I laughed.

  “Aren’t you just a little transparent, my dear Julian?”

  He stared blankly.

  I took up a position in front of the fire.

  “Disloyalty,” I said tolerantly, “where a woman is concerned, is in the eyes of some people almost a negative virtue.”

  “I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you?”

  I was sorry for him all the time. In a curiously impersonal way I could realise the depths to which I was sinking in putting this insult upon him. But my better feelings were gagged and bound that night. The one thought uppermost in my mind was that I must tell Julian of Eva, and that by his story of Margaret he had given me an opening for making my confession with the minimum of discomfort to myself.

  It was pitiful to see the first shaft of my insinuation slowly sink into him. I could see by the look in his eyes that he had grasped my meaning.

  “Jimmy,” he gasped, “you can’t think—are you joking?”

  “I am not surprised at your asking that question,” I replied pleasantly. “You know how tolerant I am. But I’m not joking. Not that I blame you, my dear fellow. Margaret is, or used to be, very good-looking.”

  “You seem to be in earnest,” he said, in a dazed way.

  “My dear fellow,” I said; “I have a certain amount of intuition. You spend an hour here alone with Margaret. She is young, and very pretty. You are placed immediately on terms of intimacy by the fact that you have, in myself, a subject of mutual interest. That breaks the ice. You are at cross-purposes, but your main sympathies are identical. Also, you have a strong objective sympathy for Margaret. I think we m
ay presuppose that this second sympathy is stronger than the first. It pivots on a woman, not on a man. And on a woman who is present, not on a man who is absent. You see my meaning? At any rate, the solid fact remains that she stayed an hour with you, whom she had met for the first time today, and did not feel equal to meeting me, whom she has loved for two years. If you want me to explain myself further, I have no objection to doing so. I mean that you made love to her.”

  I watched him narrowly to see how he would take it. The dazed expression deepened on his face.

  “You are apparently sane,” he said, very wearily. “You seem to be sober.”

  “I am both,” I said.

  There was a pause.

  “It’s no use for me,” he began, evidently collecting his thoughts with a strong effort, “to say your charge is preposterous. I don’t suppose mere denial would convince you. I can only say, instead, that the charge is too wild to be replied to except in one way, which is this. Employ for a moment your own standard of right and wrong. I know your love story, and you know mine. Miss Eversleigh, my cousin, is to me what Miss Goodwin is to you—true as steel. My loyalty and my friendship for you are the same as your loyalty and your friendship for me.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, if I have spent an hour with Miss Goodwin, you have spent more than an hour with my cousin. What right have you to suspect me more than I have to suspect you? Judge me by your own standard.”

  “I do,” I said, “and I find myself still suspecting you.”

  He stared.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Perhaps you will when you have heard the piece of news which I mentioned earlier in our conversation that I had for you.”

  “Well?”

  “I proposed to your cousin at the Gunton-Cresswells’s dance tonight, and she accepted me.”

  The news had a surprising effect on Julian. First he blinked. Then he craned his head forward in the manner of a deaf man listening with difficulty.

  Then he left the room without a word.

  He had not been gone two minutes when there were three short, sharp taps at my window.

  Julian returned? Impossible. Yet who else could have called on me at that hour?

  I went to the front door, and opened it.

  On the steps stood the Rev. John Hatton. Beside him Sidney Price. And, lurking in the background, Tom Blake of the Ashlade and Lechton.

  (End of James Orlebar Cloister’s narrative.)

  Sidney Price’s Narrative

  CHAPTER 17

  A GHOSTLY GATHERING

  Norah Perkins is a peach, and I don’t care who knows it; but, all the same, there’s no need to tell her every little detail of a man’s past life. Not that I’ve been a Don What’s-his-name. Far from it. Costs a bit too much, that game. You simply can’t do it on sixty quid a year, paid monthly, and that’s all there is about it. Not but what I don’t often think of going it a bit when things are slack at the office and my pal in the New Business Department is out for lunch. It’s the loneliness makes you think of going a regular plunger. More than once, when Tommy Milner hasn’t been there to talk to, I tell you I’ve half a mind to take out some girl or other to tea at the “Cabin.” I have, straight.

  Yet somehow when the assist. cash. comes round with the wicker tray on the 1st, and gives you the envelope (“Mr. Price”) and you take out the five sovereigns—well, somehow, there’s such a lot of other things which you don’t want to buy but have just got to. Tommy Milner said the other day, and I quite agree with him, “When I took my clean handkerchief out last fortnight,” he said, “I couldn’t help totting up what a lot I spend on trifles.” That’s it. There you’ve got it in a nutshell. Washing, bootlaces, bus-tickets—trifles, in fact: that’s where the coin goes. Only the other morning I bust my braces. I was late already, and pinning them together all but lost me the 9:16, only it was a bit behind time. It struck me then as I ran to the station that the average person would never count braces an expense. Trifles—that’s what it is.

  No; I may have smoked a cig. too much and been so chippy next day that I had to go out and get a cup of tea at the A.B.C.; or I may now and again have gone up West of an evening for a bit of a look round; but beyond that I’ve never been really what you’d call vicious. Very likely it’s been my friendship for Mr. Hatton that’s curbed me breaking out as I’ve sometimes imagined myself doing when I’ve been alone in the New Business Room. Though I must say, in common honesty to myself, that there’s always been the fear of getting the sack from the “Moon.” The “Moon” isn’t like some other insurance companies I could mention which’ll take anyone. Your refs. must be A1, or you don’t stand an earthly. Simply not an earthly. Besides, the “Moon” isn’t an Insurance Company at all: it’s an Assurance Company. Of course, now I’ve chucked the “Moon” (“shot the moon,” as Tommy Milner, who’s the office comic, put it) and taken to Literature I could do pretty well what I liked, if it weren’t for Norah.

  Which brings me back to what I was saying just now—that I’m not sure whether I shall tell her the Past. I may and I may not. I’ll have to think it over. Anyway, I’m going to write it down first and see how it looks. If it’s all right it can go into my autobiography. If it isn’t, then I shall lie low about it. That’s the posish.

  It all started from my friendship with Mr. Hatton—the Rev. Mr. Hatton. If it hadn’t have been for that man I should still be working out rates of percentage for the “Moon” and listening to Tommy Milner’s so-called witticisms. Of course, I’ve cut him now. A literary man, a man who supplies the Strawberry Leaf with two columns of Social Interludes at a salary I’m not going to mention in case Norah gets to hear of it and wants to lash out, a man whose Society novels are competed for by every publisher in London and New York—well, can a man in that position be expected to keep up with an impudent little ledger-lugger like Tommy Milner? It can’t be done.

  I first met the Reverend on the top of Box Hill one Saturday afternoon. Bike had punctured, and the Reverend gave me the loan of his cyclists’ repairing outfit. We had our tea together. Watercress, bread-and-butter, and two sorts of jam—one bob per head. He issued an invite to his diggings in the Temple. Cocoa and cigs. of an evening. Regular pally, him and me was. Then he got into the way of taking me down to a Boys’ Club that he had started. Terrors they were, so to put it. Fair out-and-out terrors. But they all thought a lot of the Reverend, and so did I. Consequently it was all right. The next link in the chain was a chap called Cloyster. James Orlebar Cloyster. The Reverend brought him down to teach boxing. For my own part, I don’t fancy anything in the way of brutality. The club, so I thought, had got on very nicely with more intellectual pursuits: draughts, chess, bagatelle, and what-not. But the Rev. wanted boxing, and boxing it had to be. Not that it would have done for him or me to have mixed ourselves up in it. He had his congregation to consider, and I am often on duty at the downstairs counter before the very heart of the public. A black eye or a missing tooth wouldn’t have done at all for either of us, being, as we were, in a sense, officials. But Cloyster never seemed to realise this. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Cloyster was not my idea of a gentleman. He had no tact.

  The next link was a confirmed dipsomaniac. A terrible phrase. Unavoidable, though. A very evil man is Tom Blake. Yet out of evil cometh good, and it was Tom Blake, who, indirectly, stopped the boxing lessons. The club boys never wore the gloves after drunken Blake’s visit.

  I shall never—no, positively never forget that night in June when matters came to a head in Shaftesbury Avenue. Oh, I say, it was a bit hot—very warm.

  Each successive phase is limned indelibly—that’s the sort of literary style I’ve got, if wanted—on the tablets of my memory.

  I’d been up West, and who should I run across in Oxford Street but my old friend, Charlie Cookson. Very good company is Charlie Cookson. See him at a shilling hop at the Holborn: he’s pretty much all there all the time. Well-known follower—of co
urse, purely as an amateur—of the late Dan Leno, king of comedians; good penetrating voice; writes his own in-between bits—you know what I mean: the funny observations on mothers-in-law, motors, and marriage, marked “Spoken” in the song-books. Fellows often tell him he’d make a mint of money in the halls, and there’s a rumour flying round among us who knew him in the “Moon” that he was seen coming out of a Bedford Street Variety Agency the other day.

  Well, I met Charlie at something after ten. Directly he spotted me he was at his antics, standing stock still on the pavement in a crouching attitude, and grasping his umbrella like a tomahawk. His humour’s always high-class, but he’s the sort of fellow who doesn’t care a blow what he does. Chronic in that respect, absolutely. The passers-by couldn’t think what he was up to. “Whoop-whoop-whoop!” that’s what he said. He did, straight. Only yelled it. I thought it was going a bit too far in a public place. So, to show him, I just said “Good evening, Cookson; how are you this evening?” With all his entertaining ways he’s sometimes slow at taking a hint. No tact, if you see what I mean.

  In this case, for instance, he answered at the top of his voice: “Bolly Golly, yah!” and pretended to scalp me with his umbrella. I immediately ducked, and somehow knocked my bowler against his elbow. He caught it as it was falling off my head. Then he said, “Indian brave give little pale face chief his hat.” This was really too much, and I felt relieved when a policeman told us to move on. Charlie said: “Come and have two penn’orth of something.”

  Well, we stayed chatting over our drinks (in fact, I was well into my second lemon and dash) at the Stockwood Hotel until nearly eleven. At five to, Charlie said good-bye, because he was living in, and I walked out into the Charing Cross Road, meaning to turn down Shaftesbury Avenue so as to get a breath of fresh air. Outside the Oxford there was a bit of a crowd. I asked a man standing outside a tobacconist’s what the trouble was. “Says he won’t go away without kissing the girl that sang ‘Empire Boys,’” was the reply. “Bin shiftin’ it, ‘e ‘as, not ‘arf!” Sure enough, from the midst of the crowd came: