Yesterday, he came by Queen Street and Watling Street, past St Paul’s and the marriage licence bureau; the day before by Upper Thames Street to the Temple and the Strand; this day was Friday.
He keeps walking with his round black head sturdily set on his square shoulders, his back straight, staring in front of him when he is absorbed, and then, when he comes to himself, his face becoming mobile, but still remarkably pale in the leaden light, he notes street names, buildings, direction and calculates the distances he is walking and will yet walk. He seems unable to stop but as if he must walk while the world turns mile after mile. This night he stopped at King’s Cross Station, took a muffin and a cup of coffee and then started out again rapidly, haunted, however, by some address that he was leaving behind him, a shadowy address, a house, a street he had not seen. This time, he struck into the distressed district of Caledonian Road and reached the heart of the Islington slums, all those rows of small houses, crushed together and squares entirely soot-blackened, with shrunken front and back bedrooms and downstairs parlours where pale lodgers take breakfast before work, philosophize in thin and hoarse tones, and out of which, for a dreadful reason, human beings issue in haste to take up their miserable day—why, and with what hope, why to return, thought Quick, we know but do not repeat for fear our hearts would break. They harden.
He went on faster, now started to come back in a rough square by Richmond Road, Liverpool Road, into the Pentonville Road again and so back to King’s Cross. He found a little shop where he could get some coffee, grey, lukewarm, and set out again desperately up the Euston Road, thinking he would go to Baker Street to Canuto’s and get something decent to eat. Nearly there, he turned round again, plunging towards Bloomsbury, which he had been skirting for so long. It was now after eight o’clock, the air was thickening but was still pleasant. Quick thought he might wander a while in the frosty squares before getting something to eat and going home. He must eat at home tomorrow, he thought, order something from Chapman and his wife; that was only fair, they expected tenants to give them a chance at a little profit. He came down Gower Street and turned into Torrington Square to go by the British Museum. When out of the square, he retraced his steps. Now he remembered the address that haunted him—it was his secretary’s. The girl had moved to the Euston Road. Since he had already looked at all the addresses in London that he knew, merely as a pastime, he would now add hers to the list. He came and stood before it. It was not yet dark. He looked down an alley between two small shops. Euston Road steamed and roared behind him. A house was set back above a chemist’s shop and it was entered by a new-painted street door, which opened under an archway. He stood looking upwards. Perhaps that one he now saw, the room carried on the arch, like a howdah on an elephant? As he looked, the curtains of this room stirred and a thin face peered, someone looked out. A man? Perhaps she had a lover. He went down the alley softly to the door, looked at it and then came back, looked up once more and turned westwards along the Euston Road.
A young woman hurried in front of him—like her, he thought. He hurried after her. She walked rapidly. He called: “Miss Hawkins, Miss Hawkins!” She missed a pace, went on. He began to run, “Miss Hawkins!” She wheeled and bumped into him. He pulled off his hat. “What are you doing here?” she asked. He said breathlessly: “I’ve been walking round here for a week, I’m the King of Southampton Row. I was just going for a coffee, will you come along too?” No, she was in a hurry to be off. He thought of the man at the window, and asked solicitously: “Are you going home?” “Oh, no, not home, but to see a friend.” “Then I won’t detain you!” But he did detain her, talking. When he released her, she was off like a shot, saying: “Excuse me, I’m so dreadfully late!” “Oh, my paws and whiskers, the Duchess!” cried Quick after her. She turned round at a distance, laughed, waved her hand and bounded on.
This meeting cheered Quick up but left him with a hollow feeling too. To begin with, it was hunger. He went to a place at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. As he ate, he raised great eyes over his food, looking quickly round the room and wondering if there were many like himself, so much alone. He wanted to explain the streets, the politics of London to a woman. He was busy all day explaining them to his partner, to explain them to men was not agreeable at night. If he had a woman with him, he wouldn’t walk so much; then also, they could walk together, and he could point out the things of interest. Even Londoners, he had found out, did not know half so much about their city as he did. He thought, it was Old English, the face, antique, not peculiarly feminine—something that he had seen in old print shops. Perhaps it was the light in the office. He laughed. She argued with him about everything, she always thought he was wrong. He, who knew so much, and she, who knew so little—it made no difference—she seemed to think she and the rest of the English came post-graduate from God. He chuckled. “The philosophical Teresa.” He had had plenty of secretaries who teased, kidded, or flattered him. She never once agreed with him. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it, that’s what she is, a ship’s captain, or less than that, a rebel lieutenant, perhaps the reincarnation of Mr Christian of the Bounty.” He laughed aloud. This time he noticed someone looked covertly at him and he recollected where he was. He paid his bill, went out into the street and struck for home. It was not surprising: he dreamed about the girl and the dream was quite clear in his head the next morning. He had seen her, not as a ship’s captain, but hanging in a frame against the wall. He was inside the frame too, and there she sat with her knees showing through a long soft blue cloth, in fact she was garbed as a Madonna, her strange-coloured eyes looked past him. “Why ever a Madonna?” he said to himself as he shaved and looked into the mirror. “I am sure she would not like that dream of mine at all.” He smiled slightly. She was a funny girl.
In the office today he had explained to her, “My wife is a charming woman, fascinating. At our house, she was always surrounded by men, my friends. My only dream would be to make her happy, I have nothing else to live for.” He looked at her for a moment and repeated slowly: “I have nothing else to live for.”
“You!” She laughed.
He had been pleased. “Why? Do I seem aimful to you?”
“You? How could you not be, knowing what you know? I never met a man so brilliant. You light everything up when you explain it. The world has changed for me since I knew you. I felt miserable, hopeless, and now I’m anxious to come to work. I see there’s a life worth living. I think of things outside myself. You tell me about other nations, other kinds of men, you explain things. You have the knowledge we haven’t got and want, you could change the lives of people. How could you be without an aim?”
His jaw dropped, he turned pale and his large eyes stared at her. “I? I?” he repeated. “I seem like that to you?” He thought he heard his partner speaking outside in the hall and he said hurriedly: “Let’s get on with that letter. We’ll—we’ll talk later.” After a moment, he brightened. “If you feel like that, if I really help you, I’m only too glad to explain things to you.”
“Institute a Chair of Quickery and explain them to everyone. No one knows.”
“No one!” he laughed. “No one knows because she doesn’t know. The U.S.A. is the place for you,” he had said, “it’s the place for a bright girl. The people are all dead here, polite but dead. You can’t be happy here.”
“Happy! Who bothers about that?”
In the afternoon, he told her that his partner was a Jew, told her about European pogroms of which she had never heard; and ended with the joke: “If I had known, Mamma could have saved the horses and carriage.” He explain the status of Cuba, the Philippines, and Alaska, and told the joke of the Alaska fairy, commented upon the poll tax in the Southern States which prevents the Negroes from voting, and simmering in his own excitement and enthusiasm, capped this with several off-colour stories. Then he had kept repeating that in the days to come he would explain the United States—and the world—more and more, so that she w
ould see how things really were, and that when he got to know her better he would tell her some really vile jokes that he did not dare to bring out now. As she looked at him calmly and smiling, he was delighted at his own mental activity and at having found a friend. He exclaimed passionately—
“She was a Virgin of austere regard,
Not as the world esteems her, deaf and blind,
But as the eagle that bath oft compared
Her eyes with Heav’ns, so, and more brightly shined
Her lamping sight; for she the same could wind
Into the solid heart, and with her ears
The silence of the thought loud-speaking hears—”
Listening, she smiled secretively he thought, and he hastened to say: “Of course you know that quotation from Giles Fletcher?”
“I never heard of him.”
“What? The English poet? 1588–1623, thirty-five at the date of his death or disappearance,” said James Quick. “But alive today, if I believe the dream I had last night, of such a Madonna!”
“A Madonna,” she said contemptuously.
“But don’t you know Giles Fletcher?” he rushed on. “And you so English? I believe we Americans love English literature more than you do. What Englishman writes in the spirit of the Carolines as much as T. S. Eliot?”
“I never heard of T. S. Eliot,” she said coldly.
He laughed slyly and pressed her to read T. S. Eliot and acquaint herself with modern American writing. The genius of the language had passed to the other side of the Atlantic, what had modern English writers done? This she did not know. She said: “I’m afraid I’ve been in a stupor for three or four years. I read only books on economics and politics.”
“You’re interested in English economics?” he asked ironically.
“Not at all, but this young friend of mine, this young man at the university here is studying it.”
Quick had promised to meet the young man and guide him if he needed guidance. He had inquired his address and it was in the direction of Malet Street that he now walked.
Beside the door were four bells with four small handsome brass plates. Quick came up to the door to read these, and then went out again and looked up at the house, the corniced top of which was just visible. “Number fifteen,” murmured Quick and went by Great Russell Street to Tottenham Court Road and retraced his steps to Malet Street, looking about him and exploring the side streets and alley names with the care and curiosity of a cat. He was rather shortsighted and often had to walk close up to lamp-posts and the fronts of houses. Steeples of the quarter were ringing ten when Quick came by number fifteen again. The hall-light burned steadily through the fanlight, a lamp had come on in the front room of the ground floor and a light shone in the basement and the second floor, exactly as before. Quick walked past. There was no one in the street near. He came into Gordon Square around which he walked several times, idly memorizing the names of the societies with their offices there and the numbers, and he found his imagination beginning to weave a fabric on the woman’s figure that he had dimly seen leaving a house, perhaps it had been number fifteen, perhaps Miss Hawkins’s friend. As he thought, he moved his lips almost imperceptibly. “For months, I’ve known this woman Hawkins, sat opposite to her at my table every day. I know her political and social viewpoint I might say better than she does, and who she is, as a person, that is, her mannerisms, nods, becks and wreathed smiles, the outward part that’s visibly linked to the inward, in her especially—I know her in that way better than any person in London, better than Axelrode—well, not better than Axelrode, but better than—say Chapman, my butler. I know her certainly better than I now know my wife, ‘the office wife’ is not a false term at all, it is true. Yet, speaking very frankly, do I know this young woman so very well? There’s a mystery about her, a personal mystery. I can’t make it out.
“Take where she lives. Three pounds ten is good pay for London, yet she lives at 15A Euston Road, a slum, a rattletrap in a hell of noise. How much? Could I ask her? Would she resent it? Probably these English girls have a high idea of privacy and dignity. She’s not English but Australian of course, but it’s the English race, unadulterated by any revolution. Then her clothes, they’re very poor. Of course, the women dress miserably here. Other Americans laugh at English hats, but I see in it a sign of the complete neglect and impudent disregard of women by the English male. They must be desperate. What do women do when they are neglected? Supposing I—?
“On the other hand,” Quick went on to himself, beginning to twiddle his fingers in a peculiar style, holding his hand out somewhat frontwards and shaking his hand as if it were merely a bunch of fingers, “on the other hand, yes, I may be merely a provincial myself. One of your Brontës, now. The debunkers, the American wise guy tries to prove that all the Brontës wanted—they, the Brontës I mean—was a man. Is that the whole story of female genius? Speaking very frankly, America could do with a few such virgins, if that is all there is to it. However, to proceed, the mystery of this woman is that with the salary I pay her and that I purposely increased because she looked so thin and hungry, she looks like a pauper. Am I complicating it? She is the phthisic type and she coughs, it might be that. Then she has no chance. But that does not explain Euston Road and the clothes.
“But if she is going to see this man, it is a love-affair and woman’s first instinct is to dress for her boy. . . .
“Is it this man she goes to see, therefore? Or what is he to her? Perhaps there is some dreadful or sordid, some tragic family story behind it, someone in trouble whom she helps out, a brother, a sister unhappily married, a brother who gambles, a wastrel—who knows? I know her, I say, as well as anyone in the world, yet I know nothing. She looks devoted and loyal, no doubt deeply affectionate, permanently attached when she loves. Perhaps there is here one of those hard-hearted family parasites for whom an elder sister sacrifices herself. Need it be this boy friend? Perhaps she was going to give lessons or take one. One of those clandestine and nasty uneasy affairs that start with the exchange of lessons in English and French.
“What does the bad clothing prove? I am perhaps merely thinking nationally. In the U.S.A. they shoot papa if he doesn’t give junior a Ford to himself; here they’re not so. The British vampire robs at home too—thus life is spiritual. As a result, here, youth still believes in—my mind to me a kingdom is—perhaps she and her boy friend simply don’t care about clothes. They are both poor but they love—yes, why not? No, she is struggling bitterly, but against what? Here I am back to the beginning. It’s certainly queer that I sit opposite a woman for several months, every day, and I see her devastated by some illness or tragedy. I could ask but one doesn’t do that. It isn’t done! One can’t ask point-blank: ‘What’s the matter with you? You look as if you’re dying on your feet.’ How simple it would be.”
Quick now turned towards Montague Street, just after the clocks had struck the quarter past eleven, and on his way passed Jonathan and Teresa, arm in arm, walking in the direction of her room. The man was muffled against the weather and wore a broad-brimmed hat. Quick could only see a man taller than himself, with a wiry walk. He was following them, on the opposite side of the street, with no set purpose, when he saw them walk backwards and forwards on the pavement for a while and then begin to retrace their steps. He had not far to go to reach the corner and from there he saw them first separate and the girl, after hesitations, enter the house with the man. Such a scene at that hour, on such a dark evening, startled Quick. He was upset and put it down to crowded memories of London stories of the two friends of the gloomy sort, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and all the English writers of city wretchedness as well as the murder mystery writers—this was, after all, he told himself, the city of Jack the Ripper and of many a horrid drama which did not reach the newspapers in such a wild form but which ended badly. It was the city of unhappy, tortured men and women, it was the city of evil loves. He walked along much troubled, always in the same neighbourho
od up and down the streets, returning every quarter of an hour to the proximity of Malet Street and Montague Street.
“Intelligence, energy, idealism,” he said to himself, “don’t help a woman at all to pick out the criminal or even betrayer of the other sex, in fact they peculiarly indispose her to suspect anything—not to mention that the sexes are made to be deceived by each other. Love is blind. Faults actually become virtues in the eyes of the other sex. Mothers know and condone, sweethearts, on the other hand, see a murderer possibly as a saint, purging the race, well not as bad as that—Nancy loves Bill Sykes. There you are! That type of sex criminal naturally picks out his victims anyhow among the unsuspecting. There is something very attractive to him, juicy, fantastically enjoyable in seeing the paroxysms of goodness, the imbecility of the victim. It’s after all possible, more likely it’s this brilliant, unhappy youth she mentioned. Yes, it’s a love affair. My intervention isn’t needed. Or this young Englishman she is walking with may be her brother, they’re discussing something, she has lent him money—much money for her—she is supporting his lazy, greedy, or sick wife and children; he is out of work and she is persuading him to do something, or explaining her circumstances to him—or he is separated from his wife, yes, obviously he is living alone—or wait, have they gone out to discuss something and are now returning? But the waiting at the gate, that was strangely suspicious, why did she hesitate in that way, then the way the door shut—the house looks decent enough and there are four lodgers there, those big roomy houses, converted private houses, are not soundproof. She’s a woman of mature age, she has travelled, she knows what she is doing. But do any of us know what we are doing in sex? And as for a brilliant, travelled, mature woman—what could—what am I, a knight-errant?” he asked himself, twiddling his fingers and his face lengthening. He sighed and heard the steeples begin their long roundelay which meant the hour was now twelve. “Twelve? Is she going to stay the night there?” and he walked a little more, saying to himself that her life was her own. Nothing to him if she lived with the young man, in fact, he was glad of it, if he did not maltreat her—was she secretly married? That might explain everything. But could that be when she had been here such a little time—unless she had come with or to a husband?
For Love Alone Page 46
