He put his arm closer round her.
“Are you glad you didn’t?” he asked.
“I am now,” she said.
“Who was it?” he demanded.
“It was someone at the shop,” she replied. “I don’t expect you’d even know him.”
“Did you want to marry him?”
She paused.
“Yes,” she said. “I did. A lot.”
“Then why didn’t you?” he asked.
The thought of how nearly he had lost her, excited him; it seemed that he had been only one move ahead of fate.
“Why didn’t you?” he repeated.
“He hadn’t got enough money,” she answered at last. “He couldn’t afford it.”
“How much did he earn?” he asked: he had known himself what it was to be cut off from life in this way.
“Thirty-five shillings a week,” she said and paused.
“He asked for a rise but you wouldn’t give it to him.”
“I’m glad I didn’t,” he replied.
He smiled; and she saw the smile on his face.
“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said.
“Did you love him much?” he persisted.
“Quite a bit.”
“And do you still love him?”
“It wasn’t so very long ago, remember,” she said quietly.
They were back in his flat now; it was the first time he had taken her there. She looked round the room admiringly, and thought for a moment of her own room. That was comprised of two high, deal partitions with a curtain on a rail to make one side of it. That was life cut down to its limits: this room was life lived the other way.
She had taken her hat and coat off and had thrown them down onto the couch beside her. She was still wearing the plain black dress that she wore every day in the shop and John Marco was standing over by the fireplace looking at her. He came slowly over to her and put out his arms.
“Kiss me,” he said. “You haven’t kissed me ever since I’ve known you.”
“You do love me, don’t you,” she said at last. Her voice was young and happy again by now. “Tell me how much you love me.”
“I love you so much,” he said, “that I want to give you everything.” And he began kissing her again, on the hair, on her eyes, and on her lips.
The clock on the mantelpiece whirred warningly and then struck: it was eleven. She gave a little laugh.
“I shall have to go,” she said. “I’m supposed to be in by eleven.”
But he continued to keep his arms around her.
“You can stay here with me,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Not to-night,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“You’ve got to give me time to think.”
“Time,” he repeated. “I’ve been waiting long enough, haven’t I?”
She began stroking his face: it was hard and rough to her hand and the feel of it pleased her.
“You’re very difficult to say ‘no’ to, aren’t you?” she said.
He did not answer for a moment. And then taking her face in his two hands he made her look into his eyes.
“Stay here with me,” he said. “Say that you’ll stop.”
“I’ll stop,” she answered.
But she dropped her eyes as she said it.
The dawn was breaking somewhere over beyond Dalston or Hackney, and the Bayswater chimney pots had come to life again and shone with the light of morning. A flock of pigeons, as white as angels, went wheeling over them, and down in the street below there was the clink of milk cans.
John Marco had lain awake watching the sky change from purple to grey and from grey to the colour of early daylight. Then when the room took shape around him again, he turned on his elbow and looked at the sleeper in the bed beside him. Her dark hair was spread out around her head like a fan and one hand was raised under her cheek, supporting it. He started to bend down and kiss her but he stopped himself. She looked too young somehow; and, in sleep, too helpless. It would have been like disturbing the night-time of a child.
“Let her sleep,” he thought. “For her, to-morrow will be a strange world.”
And for him? This new life that he had chosen would be strange too. The madness, the desire of last night was over now: it had slid into the dark history of things past. And in its place was left a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. He was now like any other man who has loved and forgotten and taken his pleasure where he could find it. He had finally destroyed the clear image that he had tried, tried so hard, so uselessly, to keep bright inside his mind; it was in pieces and he had no right to think of Mary now. Even if he were free and Mary able to come to him he could never take her back to him again.
And because of this, because it was the whole of his life that had been demolished, he began to hate that small figure that lay, still sleeping, beside him. It was she—more even than Hesther—because he had loved her, who had broken the image. He closed his eyes for a moment; and, as he did so, he saw Mary’s face again close before him. Then he roused himself; and Mary vanished. He was alone again with this girl, this stranger who had tried on a silly hat and had overthrown him. He bent over her once more, staring down at her. But the beauty seemed to have gone from the quiet features. The dark fan of hair repelled him: it was black and thick like Hesther’s. And the lips as he watched were moving as though repeating a name that was not his. Quietly, carefully so as not to rouse her, he left the bed and went over to the window.
Then because she was no longer by him, because her breath was not now on his shoulder, his mood changed again, and he grew sorry for her. She had not told him that she loved him; had not denied that previous, defeated lover.
Had not told him that she loved him: he repeated the words over in his mind. Perhaps, after all, she cared nothing, could care nothing so long as the world still contained that other man, the first man she had wanted. And if last night in giving herself she had been treacherous to everything in her own heart, where would their happiness lie, their future? They could never now be like other people, other lovers.
Even in their happy moments, the moments when they should be able to forget everything, they would still be remembering other looks, other voices. They would look into the same fire together and see different faces.
And she was still so young. Her life was not begun yet. “She will grow used to the money I shall give her,” he began saying to himself: “and all that she will remember is that man whom she might have had. And if I tire of her, if I no longer want this child beside me because she reminds me too much of what I have lost already, what is there for her then except heartbreak and desolation? She will grow to hate me; hate me as I grew to hate Hesther who took me away from everything that was mine.”
The sleeper in bed started and drew one bare white arm across her face. She gave a little sigh, half sigh half whimper, as she felt to-morrow coming to her; and then as though she were not eager for it, as though she were seeking to keep time waiting for her, she drew the clothes closer around her, hiding herself from the bright daylight.
But John Marco went over to her. He looked down at the small face and the shining pattern of her hair.
“Wake up,” he said roughly. “I’ve got to speak to you.”
She was still crying, and as she lay there she was trying desperately to fit the pieces of her life in shape again. She was trying to understand this disaster that had overwhelmed her.
“So you didn’t love me,” she said. “You didn’t.”
He shook his head.
“That’s not true,” he said. “You don’t understand.”
“You only wanted me,” she told him. “Just as though I’d been any other woman.”
“There’s someone else who loves you,” he said at last. “Go back to him.”
At the words, she began crying again; crying bitterly as she had cried when he had first spoken to her.
“How could
I, after this?” she asked.
“But you still love him?”
“I did.”
“And he still wants you.”
“Yes, he still wants me.”
“Then go back: you belong to him.”
“Not any longer.”
He had gone over to the window and his back was towards her. When he answered it was quietly, almost as though he were speaking to himself.
“On the day you marry him,” he said, “I’ll give him all the money he wants. There’ll be enough for both of you. You’re young: I was too old for you. Your future is together.” He paused and still more softly so that she scarcely heard it, he added something.
“A man can’t live without love,” was what he said.
He was standing in front of the fireplace in his living-room. She had gone now, had slipped away without his seeing her again. And in her going his loneliness came back to him. Probably he always would be lonely, he told himself: it was the special punishment that had been prepared for him. He could hope for nothing better. But in a way he was proud, too: it seemed that somehow he had contrived to be faithful again.
The clock on the mantelshelf chimed and he started. The morning was slipping past him. In half-an-hour he should be at the shop. It would be waiting: it couldn’t start without him. He didn’t belong to himself any longer: he was just the name-piece of John Marco Limited, something that the shareholders had bought and paid for.
Taking down his tall hat from the hat-stand he brushed it carefully: it was most important that when he turned up in the mornings he should set a good example.
Chapter XXXII
The Daily tours of inspection went on piling up behind him—he had made over five hundred of them by now.
The whole ritual was exact and invariable. The procession started down in the basement among the ironmongery, and worked up past the general drapery and the dress lengths, through the millinery and lingerie, to the children’s section and the restaurant. It was the fact that for nearly a year the whole ceremony had not varied by so much as a single deviation, that made it so astonishing when he suddenly cut out the lingerie altogether and went straight from the perfumery to small woman’s as though there had been nothing in between. For an entire week he ignored lingerie as though vests and bodices had not existed.
“Not the lingerie?” Mr. Hackbridge had asked in astonishment on the first morning of the omission. And John Marco had not answered.
After that, Mr. Hackbridge had said nothing. But he had kept his eyes open. It had not of course remained secret for very long that John Marco had been amusing himself with one of the assistants. Someone in the household goods had seen the two of them going into a restaurant together, and the next morning it was all round the building. Mr. Hackbridge put two and two together and pigeon-holed in his mind the fact that it was from the lingerie that the young lady had been chosen.
“So they’ve had some sort of tiff now, have they?” he mused. “And she’s thrown him over. He’ll get her back all right.”
And at the memory of what his piece of romance, Mrs. Hackbridge, now looked like in the mornings when he slid out of bed in a nightgown that drooped round her like a potato sack, Mr. Hackbridge found himself envying John Marco.
“He’s only got to whistle and they come to him,” he told himself. “He can have his pick and they daren’t say ‘no.’ He’s one of the lucky ones.”
But on the following day, still without warning, John Marco had suddenly resumed his accustomed visit: he had walked through the lingerie as though he had never missed it in his life. And the young lady about whom Mr. Hackbridge had his suspicions had given nothing away. She had gone on with her work of sorting out the price tickets without even once looking up. It was not indeed until Mr. Hackbridge had noticed that when John Marco was there she never did look up that his suspicions were confirmed. Only this time he put a different construction on the whole affair.
“He’s probably betrayed her,” he told himself. “And now he doesn’t want to have nothing else to do with her.” And he shook his head over the depravity of his employer. “He’s a Turk for women,” he reflected. “Those dark, thick-set men usually are.”
It was nearly a month later that Mr. Hackbridge caught John Marco off his guard: caught him off his guard for the first time since he had known the man. They had just passed through the gloves and were entering the lingerie when John Marco paused and looked back. It was easy enough to see which of the young ladies he was looking at; and this time the young lady did not turn away. She raised her eyes and looked back at him.
Across the whole width of the department they stood staring at each other. But it was not this in itself that was surprising: it was the expression on John Marco’s face. It was the saddest thing that Mr. Hackbridge had ever seen; it was the face of a man who has seen his whole life go tumbling into ruins.
He remembered it for days, long after that expression had gone from John Marco’s face and the man who remained was simply a machine which occupied the Governor’s chair in the inner office, and gave orders and cancelled them, and found fault with everything, and worked for fourteen hours a day and did not seem to have even the smallest kernel of human feeling anywhere inside him.
ii
The annual general meeting—the first of John Marco Limited—was in sight now; and the balance sheet was being prepared.
Except for the daily inspection, the office never saw John Marco. He was there at eight o’clock in the morning and at ten o’clock at night he was still shut away in his room with Mr. Lyman. Little Mr. Lyman wilted under it; his complexion, always rather pale and yellowish, became a kind of blotchy primrose, and deep amber circles appeared under his eyes. When at last he got into bed at night his head was still full of shifting columns of figures that made patterns in front of his eyes; and always in the middle of the pattern he saw the figure of John Marco a cigar between his teeth, like a heathen idol in some mathematical temple built of noughts and digits.
“Nothing to be put to reserve, sir?” he asked wearily on the night of the final session. “Use up every penny we’ve got?”
“Every penny,” John Marco repeated.
“And pay five per cent?”
“Pay five per cent.”
“The shareholders won’t expect it, you know, sir,” Mr. Lyman said diffidently. “Not in the first year, sir.”
“But I expect it,” John Marco answered. “It’s my business.”
“Quite so, sir,” Mr. Lyman replied hurriedly. “I only meant that it seemed too good to be true.”
John Marco crushed out the stump of his cigar in the ash-tray; the butt of the cigar was all ragged and bitten.
“It is too good to be true,” he said. “We may have to raise more capital.”
iii
It was late one evening as John Marco was passing out through the shop when he saw Mr. Hackbridge coming towards him. Hackbridge was walking very fast, and seemed agitated; he was walking so fast, in fact, that as he dragged his large, heavy feet across the thick pile carpet he left a trail behind him like a tractor’s.
“There’s a gentleman to see you, sir,” he said breathlessly.
John Marco took out his watch and raised his eyebrows.
“At this time?”
“Yes, sir. He said it was urgent.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mr. Tuke, sir. It’s a private matter he wants to see you on.”
Mr. Tuke! What did Mr. Tuke want? What right had he to come round to the shop like this after closing time trying to link the old life, the struggling, unpleasant one, onto the new? He would refuse to see him, would snub him bluntly through a second person.
“Tell Mr. Tuke,” he replied, “that I am too busy to see him.” He paused. “Tell him also,” he added, “that I am not aware of any business between us that requires an interview.”
Mr. Hackbridge shifted from one leg to the other.
“He told me you would pr
obably give that sort of an answer,” he explained, “and he said he wanted you to re-consider it. What he wants to see you about is very private and personal.”
For a moment John Marco’s heart closed and did not re-open: a little shudder of coldness ran through him. The words sounded sinister and disturbing. But they couldn’t mean anything, couldn’t mean the one thing that he was alarmed that they might mean: Mr. Tuke didn’t know anything about that. The words, “very private and personal” remained, however: he stood quite still, frowning, thinking over them.
“Have Mr. Tuke shown up,” he said at last. “Have him shown up to my private office.”
He broke off and began casting desperately about in his mind for some kind of solution to the mystery of the visit. But seeing that Mr. Hackbridge’s eye was on him he controlled himself.
“And have him shown up the main staircase,” he added. “I want him to see the sort of place he is in.”
Mr. Tuke was standing gazing out of the window when John Marco entered. His hands were clasped behind his back and there was a slip of paper held between them. At the sound that the door made in closing Mr. Tuke swung round and, defiantly lifting the point of his chin above his round collar, he faced John Marco.
It was nearly three years since they had met and John Marco’s first impression was that in the interval Mr. Tuke had shrunk somehow; shrunk and grown shoddier. The spell of seeing him in the pulpit every Sunday, had been snapped; and all that remained of that awe-inspiring presence was a large, red-faced man in a shiny clerical suit. His hair was a little longer than it had been, and the silver in it now began to show; it fell in lank, unfrivolous waves about his ears.
But the one thing that had not altered was his voice: that still came resounding out of some deep cavern inside him.
“John Marco,” he said gravely, “have you repented? Is your soul ready to be washed?”
“So that’s it, is it?” John Marco reflected. “It’s my soul he’s after.”
He did not reply at once. He allowed his eyes to run up and down Mr. Tuke contemptuously. Then he set his feet wide-apart on the rich carpet that was under him and addressed him in the tone of voice which he used sometimes to travellers who were too insistent and could not otherwise be got rid of.
I Shall Not Want Page 35
