He sat on a bench, and pulled on a pair of pants.
A voice said—“Last bloomin’ baby show, chum.”
Another voice spoke—“Well,—I call it damned good business. Sending you home clean.”
Scarsdale glanced at the last speaker, and beheld a florid, wholesome, blond young man buttoning up a khaki shirt. He had the scar of an old wound on his left forearm, but his face had no wounded look.
“Yes, jolly good business. The war’s taught me a thing or two.”
The less sanguine person on the other side was pulling on socks.
“Lot of blasted red tape.”
“Bosh. Got a wife to go to?”
“O, plenty, you bet.”
“Well, I suppose a girl won’t quarrel with getting her man back clean. Sound sense.”
“I’m fed up with bein’ messed about.”
Both of them looked at Scarsdale who sat between them, and appeared to be in a position to give a casting vote. Scarsdale was staring at his own naked feet; they were clean feet.
He said—“Yes, it’s a sound idea, but in the future I’d rather do my own inspecting.”
“Quite so,” said the blond young man; “but some people like being dirty. That’s what the doctors are up against I guess.”
2
Scarsdale took a bus to Highbury Station. It was one of those golden days in March when the heart of northern man renews its youth, and Scarsdale was feeling young and free. Amazing emancipation! In an hour or less he would have kicked off that khaki for ever, and scorning the issue of a civvy suit, reclothed himself in peaceful tweeds. He had written to his landlady at No. 24A Canonbury Square; he had asked for a fire.
And here was Upper Street—Islington uncoiling itself in the March sunlight, and Scarsdale, on top of his red bus, looked at the familiar buildings like a man reviewing the days of his youth. The Angel, the Agricultural Hall, “Collins”, Roberts’s row of windows. To Scarsdale it was a street of splendour because it was friendly and familiar, and on that afternoon in March his eyes were not open to its shabbiness, nor to its air of faded and distressful gentility.
He got off at Highbury Station, and strolled across to take a look at Highbury Fields, and the row of grave old houses. Yes, this was England, solid, kindly England, decorus, a little grey, suddenly beautiful and suddenly hideous. He loved it, yes even the ugliness that man had made, for it seemed so much part of himself, and of his memories. He remembered summer evenings on a seat under those trees, with a book and a pipe, and a sense of life lyrical even in suburbia. He wanted to get back into his old self, back to that comfortable routine with its pleasant, platitudinous, go as you please philosophy.
He walked along the familiar streets to Canonbury Square. How respectable they were, a little shabby and dull perhaps, but so solid and reassuring. He came to the square and stood a moment, and thought how small it looked, with its railed garden in the centre, and its flat-faced houses with their rows of windows and doors. There were Lent lilies in flower, and lilacs were brilliant with green shoots.
No. 24A was in the right-hand far corner. Scarsdale felt excited as he approached its yellow brick and stucco, and its brown front door. He looked up at the balcony, and saw the two windows under their shallow arches, his windows. How comfortable and reassuring!
He rang the bell, and almost at once the door was opened. He saw Miss Lydia Gall standing there, the same Miss Gall, and yet she was different. He had remembered her as a tall, thin woman with prominent teeth, and eyes big and bulbous behind high-powered pince-nez, one of those women who are all edges. Her face had always been colourless, and running to nose and teeth and chin, while her hair seemed strained back from her forehead as though an invisible hand held Miss Gall well gripped. But Scarsdale’s impression of her was that of a woman yellow and thin, with teeth protruding hungrily, and hollow places even in her thinness. Miss Gall looked starved.
He saluted her. He was glad to see Miss Gall, for she was part of the comfortable past, a little too “refained” perhaps, but calculable. He was smiling, even though he was wondering why she looked so faded.
“Well,—here we are, at last, Miss Gall. It’s good to be back. You got my letter?”
Suddenly, and with just a momentary blinking of the eyes, Miss Gall burst into tears. They ran down her flat cheeks and blurred her glasses, and she felt in a blouse for a handkerchief that was not there.
“O, dear,—Mr. Scarsdale,—I really must apologize, but I’m not quite—”
Her lips trembled; her face was all puckered up; her emotion had an absurd, pathetic futility, and she seemed conscious of its futility.
“Really,—I’m ashamed; so unlike me.”
She stood back and let him into the familiar passage with its brown linoleum and its drain-pipe for umbrellas, its fumed oak hat-stand, and its photographs in gilt frames. A draught blew from somewhere, and in that narrow passage Scarsdale felt a little chilly breath of tragedy. Something shivered. Miss Gall after closing the door, seemed to rustle by him like a pale and desiccated leaf.
He was troubled. The sun was not shining here, and there was a something in the woman’s poor, scared face that moved him to pity. She looked frightened, and her fear infected him.
He said—“Have you been ill?”
No, she had not been ill. She forced an icy animation, as though terrified by the very suggestion that she could be ill.
“It’s such a comfort to have you back, sir. I hope—I’m sure—you will be just as comfortable. I have had your trunks unpacked and your clothes aired.”
She loitered at the foot of the stairs, her hands clasped as though she might wring them, were the provocation supplied. Scarsdale’s face was in the shadow. He spoke gently.
“I’ll go up. The old rooms. I have often dreamed of them.”
He went up, and she followed him, and hesitated, and then climbed a few more steps, and stood with one hand on the rail. Scarsdale had opened the door of the sitting-room, and he saw the sun shining in on the same faded Axminster carpet, and the blue plush curtains at the windows, and his desk, and the upholstered armchair facing the fireplace. But the room was different; he missed things, a corner cupboard and its china, a mahogany bookcase, two chairs that had been christened Hepplewhite. And there was no fire.
He stood, wondering. He became aware of that figure in black hesitant in the doorway. He had a feeling that if he did not say something kind that poor starved face would crack. She was watching him so anxiously.
“Sunny and clean as ever.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I do hope—I—I had to sell one or two things. You see—”
And suddenly he did see, pieces of china going gradually, the war on the home front, a woman short of food.
He was looking at the empty grate, and his face had grown sad, and she was watching it. She thought that he was annoyed.
“I couldn’t manage a fire. You see—things are so difficult, so dear. And the rationing. One has to keep the coal for cooking, Mr. Scarsdale. I’m so very sorry.”
Her frightened voice pleaded, and he turned and smiled at her.
“O, that’s quite all right. Things must have been rather hard over here.”
Her eyes blinked and grew moist.
“You always were a gentleman, Mr. Scarsdale, so considerate.”
He wanted to say to her—“Look here, you’ve been starving yourself. You have had no butter, no sugar, no meat,” but he knew that at the moment such things could not be said. Some women are such devoted fools, they deny themselves to spoil that greedy creature—man.
3
In his bedroom Scarsdale found that everything possible had been done for him. His coats hung in the wardrobe; his trousers were in their press; shirts, pyjamas, underclothing, collars, ties, handkerchiefs were all in order. A pair of well polished black shoes waited at the bottom of the bed. A jug of hot water covered with a clean towel stood in the basin.
But
he had observed that the chest-of-drawers was not the same, and that a painted piece had taken the place of the mahogany chest. Also, as he removed the towel from the jug he noticed a neat darn in it, the work of Miss Gall’s hands.
He poured out water and washed.
Someone knocked at the door.
“Yes?”
“Will you have tea as usual at half-past four Mr. Scarsdale?”
“Please.”
He felt troubled about Miss Gall. He had known her for some fifteen years as the daughter of a Civil Service clerk who had left her a minute annuity and no relatives of any importance. Always she had appeared to him as one of those changeless women, never young and never old, supremely sexless, plain, reliable, a sort of clock or automaton. Never before had he been moved to consider Miss Gall as a person, live flesh and spirit, but the Miss Gall of 1919 had ceased to be a mere provider of life’s necessities.
He changed into civilian clothes. He felt strangely awkward in them; the stiff white collar was very much a collar, and he had trouble with his tie. Even the pockets were different. He looked at himself in the glass as though to greet his old, original self, but somehow the familiar self was not there. He too was subtly different, perhaps because he saw things differently, without wishing to see them differently. He was conscious of a sense of protest, of vague dissatisfaction, of newness even in these trappings of the past. The coat did not fit him sleekly; it looked hunched up at the shoulders.
The thought came to him suddenly—“I’m nearly four years older. I must go to my tailor, and get something new.”
Crossing the landing to the sitting-room he stood by the right-hand window, and looked down into the square. It had not changed. The row of houses opposite were the houses of 1914, or outwardly so. The grey railings enclosed the same garden with its grass and its asphalt paths, and the same chestnut trees, thorns, lilacs. The very lilac shoots and the daffodils might have been those of yesterday, the sparrows the birds of a pre-war spring, and yet in some disturbing way this north London square had changed.
Miss Gall entered with the tea-tray. This—too—was an innovation, for in the old days Miss Gall had been very much the refined person in the background. And what was he to infer, that this was a personal oblation, a welcoming gesture, or that she had no maid?
He watched her place the tray on the table. Her hands looked cold and congested. There were four pieces of thin bread and butter on a dish, and two obscure little yellow rice cakes on another dish. No buttered toast, and no fire!
She looked at him anxiously. She withdrew towards the door, and hesitated.
“One has to do one’s best, Mr. Scarsdale.”
Scarsdale sat down. He was becoming aware of Miss Gall as a woman whose bleached and anxious face was a mask behind which many distressful realities concealed themselves. He had a feeling that she had something to say to him, that she was a human knot that yearned to unravel itself before him, and that at the same time she was afraid of offending him. Yes, horribly and pathetically afraid. She looked hungry. She made him feel uneasy. She prepared to go and yet tarried.
He noticed that there were just four lumps of sugar in the basin, and suddenly he found his voice and his inspiration.
“Food shortage still rather acute?”
Her pale lips moved.
“Everything has been very acute.”
“Everything? Your rooms,—have you let—?”
“No one since 1916.”
“No one?”
“No, sir. Of course—one doesn’t complain. One has felt that one has to try and bear—”
Scarsdale glanced at her quickly. To him Miss Gall had suddenly become woman, a pale streak of tired, scared, starved humanity, gentility enduring. He felt that it was grossly discourteous and unkind of him to keep her standing there.
He said—“Won’t you shut the door and sit down.”
She looked at him half questioningly for a moment; she was so hesitant, so apprehensive, and then she closed the door gently, and sat down self-consciously on a chair by the far wall. Her long, red hands lay in her lap. An oval mirror in a black and gold frame hung behind her head.
“Thank you, Mr. Scarsdale.”
He removed the tea-cosy. He, too, was self-conscious, and at the same time very conscious of her.
“Things are rather strange even here.”
She echoed the word. Strange! Her voice seemed to falter.
“Some people don’t understand. I’ve felt frightened.”
“No need to feel frightened with me. By the way, have you a maid in the house?”
She hesitated.
“No.”
“You have done everything yourself?”
“Yes.”
Scarsdale looked at her with his big, brown eyes.
“Well,—thank you. There are things—Yes, one doesn’t realize at first; change and all that. It’s just occurring to me. You might like some money on account.”
Her hands twisted in her lap.
“I should.—It sounds so—ungracious and greedy. You have always been—”
“O, that’s all right. What about a girl?”
“A girl? O, they—well—girls—different. Munitions and office work. Girls, Mr. Scarsdale—”
“But you must get someone.”
And then another thought came to him.
“Money has changed, hasn’t it? I mean—the value—?”
She nodded.
“Prices. Everything going up.”
“I see. One has to adapt to a new scale. Obviously, you will have to charge me more.”
He saw her flush, and then grow pale.
“Oh,—I couldn’t do that, you just back, and—”
She looked at him inarticulately, confusedly.
“I—”
Scarsdale’s eyes were on the four lumps of sugar. He took just one lump.
“O, yes, but you must. Obviously. We have got to get things straightened out. They’ll come straight in time.”
4
The tea-tray had been removed, and Scarsdale lit a pipe and sat down at his desk which stood in the left-hand window facing the square. His elbows settled themselves familiarly on the blurred black leather. He noticed that the ink-pot had been filled, and that his wooden penholder lay in the tray. Some impulse made him open the top right-hand drawer, and he saw in it a pile of unused manuscript paper faintly tinged with yellow, a packet that he had opened in the early days of the war.
He sat with his elbows on the desk, meditating. He had been less than two hours in this quiet house, and its quietude was the same, and yet it was changed with mayhap and peradventure; its muteness did not spell repose, but suspense, suffering. He had come back to it as to a pleasant niche in the structure of civilization, and it was no longer a niche, but somehow a draughty passage between yesterday and to-morrow.
For Miss Lydia Gall had disturbed him. The simple and stark verities of No. 24A Canonbury Square had brought home to him with a certain grimness the problem of getting a living in the world of 1919. Four lumps of sugar in a bowl! And the woman’s starved face! Yes, she must have been short of food for months, living with her poor pride in this silent empty house. Money! Was it possible that he had lost his feeling for money, his sense of the inexorable values? He had been fed and housed and clothed, and he had returned full of a vague optimism to pick up his pen, and resume the profession of scribbler.
He glanced at the open drawer and its pile of paper. So much blank paper to be covered! And about what was he going to write? He would write as he had always written upon various aspects of life, on matrimony, and children, and going to the seaside, and on French and Italian art. His monthly articles in Harvest had been very well liked by people who found it nice to feel “highbrow” at the rate of twelvepence a month.
But why this sudden fretfulness? His job as sub-editor of the Sabbath had been kept open for him, for Taggart the editor had written to him in France less than a month ago, assuring hi
m that he was not forgotten. He supposed that he would continue to review books for the Scrutator and the Sunday Standard, and that he would resume the production of his monthly articles for Harvest. He ought to be able to earn a sure six hundred a year.
But this restless mood would not be stayed. He did not want to sit still, and he closed the drawer with its supply of blank paper, and went to his bedroom for his hat and overcoat. The hat was a bowler, and when he recrowned himself for the first time with that strange, peaceful headgear, it sat uneasily upon his head. He caught sight of himself in the glass, and was aware of a certain grotesqueness. The black excrescence seemed to make his narrow face look even more narrow.
On the stairs he met Miss Gall coming up, still anxious and propitiatory.
“O, Mr. Scarsdale, your coat! I forgot to tell you. The moth’s been in it.”
“This overcoat?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t notice anything. Will it matter?”
“There is a hole right in the middle of the back. And I had camphor in the drawers—too.”
“Well, never mind to-night. It’s rather chilly.”
“I’m so sorry. I’ll be able to get more coal now.”
Scarsdale went out wearing the coat. Let moth and rust go hang, for he felt a sudden urge toward action, and a curiosity, a desire to see and to feel, to touch and appraise the new world even in Highbury and Islington. He made his way to Highbury Grove, and walked up to where the bare trees of the Fields began beyond two red villas. Highbury Grove had a dismal sobriety, but Scarsdale had an affection for it because it was not new, and brought back memories of his boyhood, and expeditions to Maskelyne & Cook’s, and the Zoo, and the Lowther Arcade. He turned into the Fields. Yes, the trees were bigger, and on the higher ground one did gain the illusion of distance and of a grey landscape shut in by suburban cliffs. Some boys were kicking a football about, and their raw young voices reminded him too much of the war. Further on he heard a blackbird singing, and the song seemed to ascend as a plaintive and rich lament against a sky of harvest gold.
Old Wine and New Page 6
