This evening at the end of May, Quick was out without an overcoat and in a cast-off hat given to him by Axelrode, his partner in the business in Mark Lane, in a new English suit, and a frayed tie of feminine taste. Quick, among the clerks and juniors homeward bound, walked along fast, raising his eyes to cornices, the names of streets, sudden corners, so that he would not forget them again. He looked intently at every newspaper he passed, every newsboy and occasional pedlar, and eagerly stole from scattered bits of evening newspaper what headlines and bits of news he could, commenting upon them with slightly moving lips. When he got to a restaurant or teashop, he would read an evening paper, but he had none now, he hated carrying anything, like all fast, long walkers. All this was his usual habit, he had done it in Antwerp, in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and New York.
After looking at the sky and at the lights coming on in the streets for a few minutes, and just as he reached Cornhill, in the very fast stage of his homeward trip, James Quick came to himself and thought: “Why do I feel so fresh, buoyant, why am I thinking of the days to come, when there is, money aside, Friday cheque aside, really nothing in the future, except my wife’s rare post-cards, and besides that, June, July, August, and so forth?” But he went on thinking pleasurably and soon he found the glare of his pleasure was concentrated on the office, on a room in the office, and on the young woman that he and Axelrode had engaged one morning last week. The appearance of the room as she sat in it, the slaty-green light, her pale, sad, moonlit face, the large new shade hat she wore which he thought did not suit her but made her thinner, the long hands going in and out of her purse with papers and her soft, serious voice, melting away into silent embarrassment, telling him about what she had done and what her employers had said, so far away across several oceans, and the way she held out a sheaf of papers to prove it, all written far away across the several oceans. All this came back to make him smile. How could he ever know what her employers had said at the ends of the earth? But she was so sincere that such a thought had never occurred to her. He had not read her papers. He thought of her face particularly; it haunted him both in its paleness, without colour or powder, and the shining of the blue or green eyes. He kept seeing them though he did not remember the colour of the brows or hair. She wore a brownish dress in a soft material. The folds from the waist, childishly gathered, had fallen over her hips as she sat facing him. She had no gloves and in her hands a long brown leather purse out of which she took the papers; on the bench, beside her, she placed a little book by G. D. H. Cole. At this, Quick’s mouth trembled and a smile appeared around it. “Another English eclectic Socialist,” he thought. “Another mussed-up liberal, but it only shows what a perfect lady she is.”
He went on thinking of the woman’s face, her manner, nervous, anxious, hungry, her timidity in her independence. He kept remembering how she was today in the office all day, and adding comments of his own, humorous, all with reference to the English national traits. She would not tell a lie. She had reproached him for putting a false date on a letter. She had refused to type the letter and offered to throw up her job although she was plainly hungry. He had taken the letter across the street to a public typist. All kinds of funny little incidents had already occurred in which she had been timidly irreproachable, and he thought, I am, after all, a tough American, I must remember I am among people with a different style, people who never let the right hand know what the left hand is doing. As Mark Twain said: “The English are mentioned in the Bible, the meek shall inherit the earth.” On the Royal Exchange they have engraved: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” They really believe that the Lord farmed out the fullness thereof to them. The face—He was afraid she had had nothing to eat for days when she came to them, hunger had emphasized the hollowed-out face. Under the green eyes were those two pits the English have. The straw hat, worn back, showed the forehead, smooth, straight, high and soft and a nose nearly Gascon, which hunger had set in high relief. A sweet look, he thought. In spite of Shaw, Wells, Keynes, Cole and all the what-is-its that have formed it. And he seemed to see her, hurrying home, bent, in the bus or underground, over her small green serious book. She was straight, lithe, but very spare, from time to time she went into a paroxysm of coughing. He thought over things she had said to him in the strange, pleasing idioms of the English he had read in English literature. He masticated them, ran over them with the tip of his tongue. He thought of her eagerness to assure him that she could work well, and of the first day when she refused the advance money he had offered her, supposing her to be penniless. Just the same, why should she suffer, poor, silly girl? The workers are so anxious not to cheat us, to stand on their dignity with us? thought he, shrugging his shoulders as if he had taken cold. I have a butler, a maid, a fourteen-guinea suit and bespoke shoes for eight pound ten and an eleven-guinea weekly flat for which I pay nothing, because it is a whore-house for my rich partner, and she is anxious not to cheat me. He laughed aloud in the street and went on just as rapidly, not noticing that he had attracted a few circumspect glances of the hurriers home.
He presently went into a small Lyons teashop for a sandwich and coffee and as soon as he was seated there, he took out a scrap of paper on which, in the smallest visible letters, he had marked his appointments for the next week. Under the heading letters, he had several names, Lawyer, Mother, Marian, Pete, these with all the other notations occupying only the space of a twopenny stamp. Taking a stump of pencil from his pocket and a folded blank letterhead, with the name of his new company and his own and Axelrode’s names, he began to write to his wife, very fast, in his large sloping hand. The writing was not at all like one’s first or last impressions of the man, gave somehow the idea of an old, tall man, whereas James Quick was middle-sized, white-skinned, black-eyed, with a silent, lively look and speaking lips and, in fact, a soft and truculent loquacity. He was a subtle black and white man, a prepotent, agile, clean, sweet-smelling sloven, a heady man, a sitting man, a man who loved to live by candlelight, pushed out of doors by an unspeakable greed of men, a little more—and a fisher of souls, but not this, he was, not dangerous, not ambitious, not proud, but with capacity, of old English stock, mature and steeped in the language, cured and treasured up. Distant cousins of his lingered then, as naval and army officers, in the now blasted ports of the Far East. He would have looked best, portly and ready, in a black coat with white ruffles slightly soiled, and from time to time, after being excessively aware, belligerent, angry, denunciatory, he suddenly assumed these invisibly, was courtly, lady-loving, but much as they were in the little courts of Europe before all kinds of unions of tax and race made for brusque joviality and the rough selfishness of early egalitarianism. He loved women as equals; that is, as men love friends, knowing and humbly loving all.
Yet his looks, to most people, like his writing, belied his nature. His writing took after that of a protector who had educated him as a child; his looks were those of a grand-uncle, a family lawyer, but his nature was a rebellion against the protector, a business man, and the grand-uncle.
In the tenth year of marriage he lived apart from his wife, a sweetheart of his youth. Marian lived in California with some friends in the hills, agreeably dispirited, without occupation and aimless. It gave her something to write about, her dullness, flatness, the extinction of the spirit in their childhood friends, and the failure of their marriage. Around this, which she conveyed by correspondence, Marian built a soft new life, which contented her a little and was easy to live. From time to time she wrote him a disconnected letter full of touching thoughts of their separate loneliness and the idea that two intelligent persons who understand each other too well, can efface each other in marriage. She thought this modern wisdom; “marriage is outmoded”. She and James were lost, sunk, strayed, such was life with really good understanding people and neither of them, she knew, had the courage to lift a finger to stir from their webby Nirvana. Often she did not write at all. James now wrote:
I am sen
ding you a packet by the next mail, with post-cards addressed to myself and with messages already written on them, messages to me from you—I am well, I am (not) enjoying myself, etc. All you have to do is sign your name—I know you will never write to me regularly otherwise, and I often have my tongue hanging out for some news. I am lonely.
He enclosed a cheque. James put this letter in his pocket, paid his bill, and went out to finish his walk home.
Why was he going home, to the flat in Hay’s Mews? Only because people always go home. As he walked he thought about Axelrode, a young man in the office, Marian, and the pale face of the new young woman floated before him occasionally. He wondered what she was doing this evening. She was a stranger like himself. She was probably, however, spending the evening with serious and plain-looking English girl friends, other high-minded young women, or in a study circle. He would like to go along. Or with boy friends? He could not imagine her with boy friends—but after all, why not? What did he know of the English? Being so solitary he would have liked at that moment to have been admitted to that suburban semi-detached house—as he imagined it—or to that small, smoky, depressing cold-water flat in Bloomsbury; to join in the soft, incomprehensible, high-voiced circle, where people took seriously the English eclectics, and English letters. How could you despise them, after all, the race of Shakespeare, Congreve, and Bertrand Russell? The race of Newton and Haldane? Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual—masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe? Yes, Americans, thought he, were still fooled by their own raw-head-and-bloody-bones Westerns. And so, thought he, what do I know, too, of the pale young woman? Where was she eating now? Did she eat spaghetti, and drink bad red wine in Soho-Bohemia, or was it tea and “shepherd’s pie” at Lyons’, or was she at this moment at home, spearing the gluey leather of crumpets—or was it muffins—before a leaky gas-fire? He muttered: “Except for Axelrode, yes, and his reverend-ridden wife, she is the only friend I have in London, an acquaintance of a few days. But then if she can stand it, I should be able to.”
He walked on in the falling twilight. A strange, gentle, solitary race, like cats. Some called the English hypocritical. Were cats hypocritical? They blinked, calculated, purred, stole, borrowed, and hunted while others slept, and kept on considering behind their blue-green eyes. At present he called the English lithe, wiry, intense, antique, passionate, and fascinating. To know a race, you must live with it. Yes, those chap-fallen, tallowy faces, those Pool-of-London eyes, those misty polls—h’m! He walked to Trafalgar Square, down to the Embankment, over into lichened, tumbling Lambeth, through its muddy, dark and dangerous streets, back across the river to the flare of town, and all the ways up and down that he trundled, he saw hundreds of eager people, mostly drooping and lank, he saw students alone and in couples, but he did not see anyone he could make a friend of, and presently, at about twelve, he came into his furnished flat in Hay’s Mews, found that the house butler, Chapman, had left out coffee with a spirit-lamp for him, took it and with it alone for a friend, went to bed. He rolled into Chapman’s bed, between sheets, a tired and depressed man. He had left New York first and Amsterdam last, hoping the Old World would enliven himself and either give his wife a new spurt of love or dissolve their bloodless relationship at last, but they had continued their life as before, he at work, she living “a vegetable life”, as she said, both with nothing to say and he a well of strength closed over and probably sealed for ever, as she herself said. He had no desire to leave poor Marian. What happiness could he get out of her unhappiness? Yet he was looking for a woman. For, would she ever be happier or unhappier? It was not in her nature ever to be happy. He blundered on, waiting for things to turn up. He did not like the business he was in with his partner, although it was honest and brisk.
Quick tossed, and thought over the failure of his life. What would be the end of his marriage in heaven? He was thirty-seven. They spent more and more time apart. “I must seriously look for another woman,” he thought in despair. “This married bachelorhood can’t go on. It ought to inspire me to work—but what?—and it doesn’t! She never loved me—poor woman! She was a timid girl and took the first man she knew well, that offered. They certainly have no sort of life, to get married at the first opportunity. And then to find out the vacancy....”
He tried to think of office matters. Axelrode made all his money on the produce and stock exchanges, the rest was just exercise to keep his wits in shape, a little daily dozen for idle cash.
“What a wasted life,” Quick murmured. “What must I do? What can I do? Introduced to business at the age of thirteen. I’m good at it, but I don’t like it. In the Middle Ages, I would have been introduced to the church and been a middle-class churchman. I have talents. No one wants my real talents. The only one who wants my real talents—This morning: ‘Do I bore you with all this clatter of mine? I know most of it’s foreign to you, shocks you probably, we Americans are pretty rough-and-ready, crude and obscene even’, and she said: ‘No, you’ve restored me to life’—that’s odd—‘I was dead to the world’—(h’m!) ‘I look forward to coming to work when I get up in the morning, I see that the rest of mankind lives too’—h’m!”
“H’m,” continued Quick to himself, “that’s unusual, isn’t it? People don’t often long to come to work! Her private life can’t be very exhilarating—or am I just something she’s never met before—I have a kind of mental vigour of course—then the Yankee viewpoint shocks and shakes up—can she realize what is happening to her? If so—lonely, probably, rather.”
He turned, lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling just visible. His bedroom was lighted from outside by a high narrow window towards the roof. It was barred with iron on the outside, and looked down into a narrow alley where no sun fell. There was usually not even sunlight above in the narrow slit of sky. Quick cast his eyes at this and thought of his friends, Axelrode, all those at home now, in bed, their children and wives around them, quiet, warm, snoring houses. He did not feel so depressed as before, however, for some reason. “A slum, a prison,” he said aloud, but the warm and ruddy feeling did not depart. Through his shifting thoughts he chased the idea which had given him this glow, what was it? He couldn’t put his finger on it. He went on busily therefore: “I meant to explain to her today about university professors. Talking about that acquaintance of hers, she made it plain that she—and probably he—thinks business men crafty—quite a scum. Of course, she admires profs—the bookish sort, the earnest, long-cheeked, bookish girl, as an adolescent, probably had her first crush on some college prof or man.
It’s hard for girls to get over that—can’t believe beggars like us are—if she only knew—yes, h’m!—but what I was saying when she said—? I must explain to her about the lawyers, though she is willing to believe that lawyers are dishonest, that’s out of literature of course. I see what’s wrong—yes, I must explain—”
Thinking of these things he fell asleep. He had some extraordinarily clear vision in his dreams which remained with him a long time, but he could not remember it. As he went back to work it came back to him—Burne-Jones’s girl in a grape-coloured robe, and something more Pre-Raphaelite, Dante, death—he went to work absorbed by this. He had seen no one since leaving the office on the previous evening. He became excited through the day explaining things to his single disciple. Axelrode, who was going to Le Touquet to arrange some business deal, was getting ready to go and was out of the office most of the day. Presently Axelrode’s chauffeur brought round his long green car and he was off. Now James was alone, the typist was in her den. He disliked the severe atmosphere of the office. He went out for coffee several times and sat at the table of the pale, bow-legged waitress that the other men shunned. He was sorry for plain, poor women. When he came back to the office he felt lonely and sick. He sent the office-boy for sodium phosphate, took it, felt worse, wished he could go home. He had to wait for a telegram from Axelrode. Nothing to do—what a miserable life it was. He spe
nt an hour or two writing a letter to Marian, filled four pages of typing telling her things she did not care about and never had wanted to know. Then he wrote to two old friends in America to whom he had not written for six months. But the confessions did not ease him; the pale girl, opposite him, taking down notes, did not understand him and would not laugh at the jokes he told her. When she had gone away, he thought it over, and it struck him that perhaps she did not understand the jokes either—and they were rather libertine—for example the one about the Irishman and the spirit seance, “Has anyone here had intercourse with ghosts?” That Wall Street chestnut was either offensive or incomprehensible to the young lady. And the Chinese with the fluctuation of the franc—I must lead up to it. For after all she ought to go to the U.S.A. to see what women get there, no one there would work for what she works for—and if she does, she’ll have to—I must work these jokes in carefully. Suddenly he laughed. He called her back and told her a very mild joke. She gave him a letter to sign, gravely, laughed, and suddenly flushed. He said: “I can see you’re not used to that kind of talk.”
“Not very. In fact not at all.”
He was enchanted, he cried: “In fact you don’t know very much about anything!”
“Since I met you, I know I don’t.”
He was delighted.
31
Modern Is as Modern Does
It was Friday, their regular meeting. Jonathan was lounging in his room, the tea-kettle on and a bright fire in the grate. It was a cold evening although early June. By a quarter to nine, Teresa was late. He smoked, and kind thoughts poured into his mind. When he knocked out his pipe, he noticed the time was five past nine and restlessly took a few steps through his room. She had forgotten the appointment! It was incomprehensible that she should not come when he had made a rendezvous with her.
For Love Alone Page 43
