by Alec Waugh
I had met him at Faulkner’s School of Cricket in Walham Green. He was a sturdy, thick-set, nondescript-looking man in the late thirties. His movements were deliberate; he wore a wrist watch; he retained the short, bristling moustache of military service. I always had the feeling that he would have felt and looked easier in uniform; that he would be happier with his appearance decided for him. But I did not feel particularly curious about him. You can play cricket season after season with a man without knowing whether he is married, what his income is, what is his profession. You only know his name because you have seen it on the score sheet. I imagined that Jefferies was comfortably off. He had two winter overcoats, one of heavy blue serge, double-breasted and cut closely to his figure; the other shapeless, vast and patterned, with an outside belt. He wore an Old Cheltonian tie and drove a Morris Oxford.
He was a member of Richmond, though he played occasionally for sides like the Wanderers or the Thespids. It was indeed at Wimbledon that I had met him first. We had sat next each other at lunch, but I had never got to know him till the winter when we went every Saturday afternoon to Faulkner’s School. He was a slow left-handed bowler: the kind of bowler who can get my wicket every time, providing he had the sense to make me a present of one four past cover first. It was largely in the hope, that has since proved vain, of curing myself of that weakness that I arranged to have my practice at the same time, and at the same net as Jeffries. We used to chat together in the changing room, and during the intervals while Faulkner was coaching the other man. Within a couple of months we had become quite good friends and I had learnt a reasonable amount about him.
Our net practice was from three to four. One afternoon as we left the school he asked me if I wouldn’t come back and have tea with him.
“My place is just round the corner,” he said.
He lived near the Embankment in Beaufort Mansion. It is a dingy street. There was a bleak feeling about the stone staircase that led to the third floor flat; about the glass door set at an angle; about the long, narrow passage into which it opened; about the flat itself. It was impersonal. The furniture was of the kind that you would expect to find in a furnished flat taken by the month. There were two deep armchairs, and the kind of sofa that is too narrow to loll in and too deep for you to sit upright. There were no pictures. The photographs of Jeffries in uniform and of a tall, formidable woman in Edwardian evening dress struck a personal note as out of place as a bright patch on a dark curtain. Neither Jeffries nor his wife seemed to belong there. Particularly his wife. She looked an uncomfortable person. Her welcome of me was meant to be gracious, but actually was embarrassing.
“I’m so glad you’ve come. But I wish Archie had warned me you were coming. If he had, I would have got crumpets in. As it is, there’ll only be toast. You mustn’t think me a bad hostess. Archie never lets me be prepared.”
She was in the late twenties: dark-eyed, dark-haired; she might have been graceful had there not been something irritatingly genteel about her movements, certainly she would have been pretty had it not been for the peaked look upon her features. In the right setting she could have been, I felt, a very attractive woman. But she irritated one by the precise way she poured out tea, by her apologies for the toast, the anchovy sandwiches and the absence of cake.
Quite clearly Jeffries was worried too. He kept playing with his wrist watch and fingering the buttons of his waistcoat. I had the feeling of sitting on a volcano. Within half an hour the eruption came.
§
I have been the spectator of enough quarrels between married couples to realise that little can be learnt from the details of matrimonial dispute. The material is without boundaries over which the quarrels of married people range. Tears have been shed upon a politician’s speech; the treasure of a mantelpiece swept into the grate over an undelivered message; front doors have been slammed because Chablis has been preferred to claret; and the detached onlooker may well shake a marvelling head, wondering what strange properties are enclosed within the state of marriage that it can produce such high friction between wives and husbands out of causes that would leave unruffled the most casual of friendships.
The minutest analysis of such quarrels will teach him, however, very little. People who have lived for a number of years in close proximity acquire the habit of talking in shorthand to one another, and are able to employ the feeblest of pretexts as satisfactory media for their most deep-seated grievances.
This particular quarrel did appear, however, to be symptomatic.
It began with the arrival of the post and Mabel Jeffries tossing a letter across the table with an ungracious sniff.
“Mrs. Featherby has invited us to dinner on Friday week.”
Jeffries smiled.
“That’ll be jolly. We’re free then, aren’t we?”
“There’s nothing as far as I know to stop your going.”
“To stop our going.”
Again Mrs. Jeffries sniffed.
“You needn’t imagine that I’m going. I know where my place is. I know when I’m wanted. I know what your friends think about me. I’m stupid, ordinary, provincial. That’s what they say. If you want to dine at Mrs. Featherby’s, you can; but you can go alone. I’m not going to put myself under an obligation to her.”
She spoke sneeringly, with a slight thickening of her voice.
“My dear Mabel, how ridiculous! Mrs. Featherby’s very fond of you.”
“Is she? Then why does she look down her nose at me and leave me out of the conversation?”
“She doesn’t leave you out. It’s just that you won’t join in.”
“Because she chooses subjects I’m not interested in. She ought to choose subjects that I know about.”
“What would you have her talk about?”
“Oh, well,” she hesitated thoughtfully; then, looking up and catching his eyes fixed on her, flushed angrily. “There you go,” she said, “laughing at me, because I haven’t been brought up in London, because I don’t know, and so can’t talk about the people you know and the things that interest them. You all look down on me. I’ve stood it as long as I can. I won’t stand it any longer. I won’t be forced to return your friends’ hospitality. You can go to Mrs. Featherby’s if you choose, but you go alone. I don’t have in my own house people who despise me. They can keep away.”
The flush in her cheeks deepened as she spoke; mottling her face with pink and scarlet, rendering it singularly unattractive. Jeffries made an effort to keep his voice level and his temper calm.
“You are being most unreasonable,” he said. “How can I go to parties alone without giving the world very false ideas as to what our relations are? How can I go to my friends’ houses without returning their hospitality?”
“You can give your parties in restaurants.”
“Thank you, but a man has got weary of restaurants and restaurant life by the time he’s reaching forty. He’s settling down, he wants a home where he can have his own things round him, where he can be himself, to which he can invite his friends.”
“If that’s your idea of a home, as a place you can have your friends to, and if your friends matter more to you than the wife and children for whom I thought men built up homes, then all I can suggest is that you get yourself another house where you can entertain those precious friends of yours.”
§
It is not always the married couples who quarrel in public that are the unhappiest. For their friends they create situations of the most acute embarrassment. But they themselves are not necessarily unhappy. The moment they are alone they begin to make it up. Their ill-humour is worked out. They say, “What on earth were we quarrelling over?” They agree that it was over nothing. “We only quarrel when other people are about,” they say. They agree that it is other people’s fault. There is a scene of exquisite reconciliation. They make each other very happy. Whereas the couple who have a social sense, who keep up appearances, who are affectionate to each other, who are easy guests and ea
sy hosts, whom everyone likes to have around, often start bickering before the taxi is ten yards from the front door. “Why did you say that?” “Why did you look that way?” Before they are half way home a fine row has started. Sooner or later their friends are astonished by the announcement of divorce proceedings. “We always thought you were so happy with one another.” Public dissension is no proof of private incompatibility. But I did not feel that this row between the Jeffries’ fitted into that category. It had a note of weary bickering which held no promise of reconciliation. It was hard to imagine Mrs. Jeffries except as an extremely disagreeable woman. Here was the end of another war-time marriage; made without forethought at a time when one lived in the minute, in the needs and reactions of the minute. I knew something of the circumstances of the case. I could guess the rest.
§
For three months Jeffries had been stationed in a small Midland town far from everything that comprised his life and interests. The only colour in the drab routine of training was the companionship of the girl at whose parents’ house he had been billeted. When he came back tired and dusty at the end of the day, she would be waiting, gay and welcoming, by the bright warmth and comfort of the drawing-room fire. They would sit and talk together, sometimes they would go to a dance or cinema.
It was inevitable that they should have come in that hot-house atmosphere of impermanence and separation to feel more than comradeship for each other; inevitable that he should have written to her from France; that his imagination should have come to picture her as the embodiment of all that was most remote from the boredom and squalor of his surroundings; inevitable that on his first leave he should have gone to see her; inevitable that in contrast to the wretchedness he had left she should have appeared as a composite vision of all that was most desirable in life; inevitable that after six months of the trenches a man should have imagined that all that one would ever ask when it was all over would be tranquillity and love and quiet evenings.
He could not picture in those days a time when he would want other things, when tranquillity would grow unsatisfying since the heart was young and he was no longer tired; when he would find himself wanting noise and excitement, theatres and late nights, and plenty of people round him. He could not tell that he was going to feel like that; he could not tell he was going to live to feel like that. He lived as one enlisted, “for the duration.”
Then, as suddenly as the war had begun, it ended. Jeffries had returned to London, to his work and friends and interests; to realise very speedily how little Mabel and he had in common.
Until then their married life had consisted of three leaves; brief and enraptured honeymoons in which they had neither seen nor wished to see anyone except themselves; weeks which had given them no opportunity of judging how they would be able to fit together into a London life.
That it would be a little difficult for her at first, Jeffries had had from the beginning the foresight to appreciate. She would be entering an unfamiliar world, among people who thought and spoke in a different idiom; who would be discussing people and situations she did not know, who saw from a different angle and a different platform the problems that make up the sum of conversation. It would be difficult for her at first. That Jeffries had from the beginning realised. But what he had not taken into account was the acute class consciousness that was to make Mabel imagine insults at every turn.
She was ill-at-ease in the world to which he introduced her. No amount of argument or persuasion could convince her that all his friends were not despising her and laughing at her.
She was alternately truculent and sullen. One evening gloweringly silent; another dominating the conversation with loud and aggressive talk. He could never tell how she was going to behave. Evening after evening she made a torture for him. I could imagine what his feelings were. A long list of acquaintances had dwindled into a few names and a few houses. And now those apparently were to be taken from him.
He had thirty years in front of him; what sort of life would he be leading during them if he was to be cut off from all his friends and all his interests?
§
Sometimes we had a net in the evening between five and six. He was depressed and gloomy when I met him at the School on the following Wednesday. He scarcely spoke while we were changing. His bowling was so ineffective that it removed half the value of Faulkner’s coaching. It was not till we were dressing afterwards that he referred to the scene of the previous Saturday.
“I’m so sorry you had to see a show like that,” he said.
“It was all right.”
“It wasn’t. It was awful. I don’t know how I can go on with it. Another thirty years. We’d best separate, I suppose. It’s bad luck on the kids. But I’m not sure that anything isn’t better than bringing them up in an atmosphere where parents quarrel.”
He was seated on a locker leaning forward, his elbow rested on his knee. He gave the impression of talking to himself.
“There’s no sense in going on,” he said. “It’s funny, though. I didn’t know marriage ended in this way. I thought there was a third party. I thought love became friendship. Then a new attraction shook one off one’s feet. I didn’t know that one just got so sick of the sight of a person that one couldn’t bear being in the room with her.” He gave a shudder and shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s go and have a drink,” he said.
We walked towards Walham Green Tube Station. It is a grubby, noisy, crowded street: so grubby, noisy and crowded that we did not notice till we had actually collided with it, the inquisitive group that had collected in front of the Tube station, about a dramatically contentious uproar.
“You may argue it as you please,” a loud, thickened, and slightly drunken voice was shouting. “But let me tell you that you’re a disgrace to your country and the army you say that you belonged to. Don’t you start speaking out of your turn now. Just you listen to what I’ve got to tell you.”
It is not in human nature to resist the appeal of such an outburst. Peering over the shoulders of the crowd, we saw a large, broad-shouldered navvy glowering at an equally large but dejected and shabby figure that stood twisting between his hands a battered hat, in the crown of which reposed beside two boxes of matches a dozen or so copper coins.
“A disgrace, that’s what you are!” the navvy was contesting hotly. “You’re no use to anyone. You won’t work, you just stand there pretending to sell matches, hoping that because you’ve got a ribbon or two along of your coat that some one’ll chuck a brown at you. You’re a disgrace, a dirty disgrace, to those medals, that’s what you are!”
He spoke fiercely, but the beggar had a breadth of shoulder. He was quite capable of looking after himself. I was astonished when Jeffries, violating the Englishman’s deep-rooted distrust of interference, pushed his way into the centre of the ring.
“You’ve no right to talk to a chap like that,” he said. “Were you in the war yourself?”
“Yes, sir, I was. Four blooming years of it. And I didn’t find life any too easy when I came out of it, with a wife and two kiddies and no one exactly chucking jobs about. I stuck to it, though; I didn’t hang round like this dud here with a hat in one hand, a box of matches in the other and a row of medals same as we’ve all got, along my coat. Chaps like this, sir, just don’t try to work. It’s their kind what gets ex-soldiers a bad name.”
He spoke truculently, but with conviction. Looking from the one to the other I could not help suspecting that it was a true indictment.
Jeffries hesitated.
“There’s a good deal, probably, in what you say. But we don’t know the facts and each case is different.” Turning to the beggar he took him by the arm. “Come on out of this,” he said. Before the crowd had realised what was happening, Jeffries had marched his man through the middle of them, into a quiet side street.
“We’ll go somewhere where we can have a drink and talk,” Jeffries said to me.
The man said nothing. He looked suspiciously and i
nquiringly at his odd rescuer. Such a thing could scarcely have happened to him before. He did not know with what manner of man he had to deal. Better wait to be given a lead, he must have thought.
But Jeffries had no intention of giving him any lead. He took him into the saloon bar of an obscure pub, ordered two sandwiches and a pint of beer, then leaning back against the cushions of the window-seat, contented himself with a quiet “Well?”
The ex-soldier hesitated; then picking up the tankard, emptied the half of it, set it down, and with a slightly watery eye and trembling lower lip: “You’re a good sort, guv’nor,” he began. “Been in the army, I expect, yourself. Couldn’t stand by and see an old comrade insulted. After all the fighting that I’ve seen, too, right from the very beginning, ’listed in ’14. Out there from Hooge to Beaumont Hamel. Then back again in Bullecourt and right through till the big Arras do, when they nearly got us. Practically the only one in my crowd who got through safe. They hit me twice. See here.”
But Jeffries would not let him roll up his sleeve. It was not to hear this sort of stuff that he had brought the man from the jeering crowd. The long rigamarole had sickened him as much, probably, as it had sickened me. It had been spoken whiningly, in the self-pitying manner of the professional beggar. It had been a tarnishing of something fine.
“But afterwards,” he asked; “what did you do when the war was over?”
“I looked around for work, guv’nor.”
“You couldn’t find it?”
“All the chaps who hadn’t gone to the war had got the jobs.”
“You put yourself in touch with all the organisations that were trying to get work for the ex-Service man?”
“Oh, yes, guv’nor.”
“And you got nothing. You’ve not had any employment of any sort since you were demobilised?”
“I wouldn’t quite say that.”
“You’ve had jobs, you mean, and lost them?”
“Well, it ain’t that way either, quite.”
