These open spaces could not satisfy Scarsdale’s curiosity. They had no seal to lay upon his mood of restlessness. They were so artificial, asphalt and iron railings, a bituminous and metallic rus in urbe. His urge and his curiosity tended toward the streets, even though they were the “Bitter streets”, and flowing with unfamiliar faces. This new England, even in Islington, what was it like?
He walked down into Upper Street, and strolled along it. He was not wilfully in search of impressions; he wanted to look and to listen. Dusk was at hand, and lights were beginning to shine in the street lamps and in the shop windows. But surely he had never seen this suburban highway so full of girls and of women? And he began to feel that this feminine flux perplexed and troubled him. But what was it exactly? It was not an individual crowd; it seemed to parade in little, frothy freshets, noisily, assertively. It talked loudly in front of the windows; it advertised a sort of flashy insolence.
He found himself looking at faces, and he was surprised at the number of young faces in the street. Also, what was it about these faces that challenged his sentimental attitude toward woman? Hardness? Yes, that was it, even the young faces looked hard, bright and bold and hard. Not being a sensualist he did not divine that other quality, the insurgent sex, the raw flesh that is uncovered when war and pestilence and upheaval tear away the clothes of conventional repression.
From faces his glance began to rest on legs. Legs! Yes, how very unobservant of him! This was a new world of legs. The curtain of convention had gone up considerably. It surprised him. Also it surprised him to find that legs were alluring, and quite unexpectedly shapely. They looked softer, more softly curved—than the faces.
Also, he realized that none of these girls looked at him. They passed him by as though he had lost the lure of youth, the subtle something that challenges and invites. Possibly he was a little piqued. He paused and observed a reflection of himself in a chance mirror, and saw a long, lean, dark figure with high shoulders, and a narrow face under that black bulge of a hat. He got the impression of middle age, of a vague shabbiness.
His restlessness was not relieved. He turned back at last from the lights and the flux of humanity, and diverged into a side street. It was dark here, secret, solitary. He passed the opening of a passage. Someone giggled.
Chapter Six
Scarsdale had bought a new hat and a new overcoat. He had his card ready, and he presented it to the boy.
“I want to see Mr. Taggart.”
The boy did not trouble to look at the card.
“Got an appointment?”
“No; Mr. Taggart knows me.”
“Mr. Taggart doesn’t see people without an appointment. No use trying that game on me.”
He was a rude child whom the war had filled with a false sense of personal values.
Said Scarsdale—“You take that card up to Mr. Taggart. He expects me.”
The boy stared at him.
“All right. You stay here. Them’s my orders.”
He left Scarsdale in the passage to reflect upon the fact that methods and manners had changed. He could only suppose that the war had spoilt many people’s tempers, and that ration cards, and queues, and a shortage of sweet and fat foods, and fighting for seats upon buses, had produced chronic irritation. There had been scrambles and scuffles on the home front; too much money in some pockets, too little in others. People’s voices were louder. Even this sniffling little urchin had the face of a bully.
The boy reappeared. He condescended.
“You can go up. Second door on the right.”
“I think I know it better than you do, my child.”
Scarsdale had inflicted upon post-war youth the grossest of insults.
As he opened the glazed door of Mr. Taggart’s sanctum, Scarsdale saw the familiar, stumpy figure in black seated at its table. Yet Taggart was different. Mr. Taggart’s head had always been untidy, and in the centre of its grizzled frowsiness Scarsdale saw a pale patch of baldness. Mr. Taggart’s hair needed cutting; it fringed his collar. He sat hunched up in front of a table that was chaotic with letters, manuscript, newspaper cuttings, a paste pot, odds and ends of string. By the inkstand a half-empty medicine bottle showed a brown stain on its white label. Both Taggart’s figure and its surroundings advertised the slovenly, scribbling haste of a man who was worried and irritable, and overworked.
Taggart had been blue pencilling a proof. He turned in his chair. His sombre face with its bushy eyebrows and loose lower lip did not light up.
“Morning, Scarsdale. So you’re back.”
He had the air of possessing a grievance. Even Scarsdale’s reappearance grieved him.
“Sit down.”
Scarsdale sat down. Possibly he was ceasing to bridle at the unexpectedness of post-war England, and to wonder at the facile optimism of the returning soldier. Presumably Taggart should have jumped out of his chair, and caught him by the hand with a “Well, old man, glad to see you home.”
They looked at each other, but Taggart’s glance had lost its straightness. He seemed to peer up obliquely from under the bushes of his brows.
“Glad to be back, I suppose.”
Scarsdale smiled.
“Well, yes. And I suppose some of your people are not sorry to have us back. You must have been badly harried.”
He glanced at the slovenly table. And then he became aware of a silence, and of Taggart tapping the air noiselessly with his pencil.
“You want to come back here?”
“Well, yes.”
“Better warn you, bit precarious. Things are different.”
“Difficult?”
Then Taggart exploded. He got up out of his chair, and measured himself a dose of medicine in a dirty glass, and drank it as though he were taking poison. His face was bitter.
“Difficult! We have been going to the dogs for a year and a half. We’ve hung on. We have decided to hang on for another year.”
“Isn’t Sabbath selling?”
Taggart stared at Scarsdale as though he thought him a fool.
“Selling? Good lord! Can you conceive anything called the Sabbath selling in this—? Why, man—! Yes, if we produced a paper and called it ‘Sex’—there would be some business doing. Slump. Slump upon slump.”
He flung about the room, and then came and stood in front of Scarsdale’s chair, and waggled the blue pencil at him. He had become savagely and aggressively serious.
“Mark you,—it’s revolution. What I mean is—everything is upside-down. All the old values going, the old decencies. This is a damned, new, raw world, my lad, raw as a fresh rump-steak. Why haven’t you heard the gibe?”
“What gibe?”
“The war’s two great failures, religion and somebody’s mackintosh.”
He let out a sudden guffaw, a savage, uncouth, and ridiculous bray.
“Sabbath indeed! O, yes, come back if you want to. Morley and I are going to fight for another year. Come back and cook up nice little pious pifflings for the multitude. And what does the crowd want? Money and women and sensation.”
He waggled his blue pencil.
“Perhaps you can bring some real blood into the Sabbath, my lad. Brighter Sundays, what! A parade of pimps in Piccadilly Circus! Early services at the music halls.”
Scarsdale looked shocked.
He said—“Some of you people at home seem to have lost your heads a bit. Worry and overwork, and bad food. I’m not afraid to come back. I noticed the medicine bottle of yours, Taggart.”
Mr. Taggart gave him a strange, bushy, concentrated stare. Then, with a kind of ferocious deliberation he picked up the medicine bottle, smelt the cork, opened the window, and sent the bottle whirling into the narrow courtyard. They heard it smash.
“All right, if we smash we smash. Don’t blame me. I’ve warned you.”
“When shall I start?”
“O, next Monday.”
2
Scarsdale walked. After that outburst of Taggart’s, culmin
ating in the smashing of his medicine bottle, he felt that the new world and the new Taggart had to be reviewed. Not that Mr. Taggart had ever been completely Sabbatarian, or so wholly a private secretary to Jehovah that the casual man in him had been effaced. The Taggart of the pre-war days had had his cheerful material moments when he had visited the Cheshire Cheese, and other houses, and had eaten and drank mightily. Some quite ridiculous association of ideas had led Scarsdale to think of him as Og of Bashan. When Taggart had allowed his gastronomic god full liberty, the divine afflatus had expressed itself in ptarmigan and port.
But what were the realities? Morley of Messrs. Morley & Taggart, had inherited from the whiskers of his father that excellent religious journal Sabbath, and also a publishing business that had issued Law and Church literature. It was the elder Morley who had discovered to the world those novels by a lady who was known as W.O.A.D. Not that the lady had dyed herself blue, or painted the world red. The letters stood for the Wife of a Dean. W.O.A.D.’s novels had had a perfume of their own; they had smelt of vestries, and harvest festivals, and footstools, and the roses in ecclesiastical gardens, and virginal emotion. Woad’s young women had worn bustles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, and had been full of religious experiences and unborn babies. Occasionally, by way of warning, the Dean’s wife had permitted her public to smell sawdust and patchouli, but only just sufficiently so to allow them a protesting thrill.
Messrs. Morley & Taggart had made considerable profits out of Woad’s novels. Their publishing catalogue had been carefully edited. They had issued books that were good for children as well as books that were good for adults. “My Life among the Zulus” was a classic. “Darwin Defied” had had a considerable circulation. As for Sabbath it had become in the ’eighties and ’nineties a kind of habit in the homes of the nice minded, like roast beef at midday, and cold beef and baked potatoes for Sunday supper. Its familiar blue cover associated itself with the tea-tray and the muffineer. That it was incredibly dull and inhuman did not matter in that age of pleasant, placid dulness.
But the times had ceased to be dull and placid. Obviously so. A breath of reality had shaken the world, and also Mr. Taggart. He had been contentedly religious, between moments of cynicism, and splurges into ptarmigan and port, while the publications of Messrs. Morley & Taggart were productive. But when the new world reverted to a kind of bloody naturalness, and men and women wanted life and each other, and Sabbath ceased to circulate, Mr. Taggart broke his medicine bottle and swore.
Scarsdale walked up the Strand, but the Strand seemed to him more crowdedly so, and still full of remnants of the khaki world. The traffic was more aggressive, the pavements less suited to the stroller. But for the moment Scarsdale was not concerned with the Strand; it was just so much noise and material hustle. He had been a little shocked by the explosion of port and ptarmigan Taggart. Of course you had to allow a man a streak of humanity, even when he edited a paper that was as decorous as a bishop’s apron, but in the old days there had been an episcopal solidity about Taggart, a flatulent earnestness. Somehow you did not expect to hear a bishop squeal when donations to this or that failed to flow like Macaulay’s Tiber. And Taggart had squealed, because his pocket was less well-filled. Well, and why not? The pocket is the most sacred part of modern dress, its holy of holies. Also it is human to squeal. And was not he—Scarsdale—just as much concerned about the future contents of his pocket, and had not Taggart’s outburst shocked him because it had scared him just a little? Virtue, as the Greeks understood it, has a stomach, heart—and head. Also it may be the father of children.
Scarsdale came to Trafalgar Square. He walked round it as though to assure himself that the sacred place had not been violated, and that Nelson still watched over England. Yes, Nelson was up there, undisturbed by the voices of little Communist cads. The month of April, and on the wall separating the pavement from the platform, girls and Australian soldiers sat two by two, unashamedly interested in life and in each other. Some arms were around other waists. Slim legs dangled beside the stouter legs of the victors. And for some reason this mating in the open air of those brown men and the young wenches made Scarsdale feel shy and superfluous, and very much three-and-forty and the wearer of a bowler hat. He had been no warrior, but a mere scullion in the house of Æsculapius, and the Red Cross had been less expressive than the bomb and bayonet. He wandered round to the terrace below the National Gallery, and leaning on the parapet, allowed himself to stand and stare. Whitehall seemed to flow like a broad and stately river to wash the feet of the Mother of Parliaments. Yonder were Westminster and Father Thames. Nelson’s lions were calmly couchant.
Scarsdale meditated. Mr. Taggart became a mere monkeyish figure surprised in a chattering rage because of a shortage of nuts, and Scarsdale’s eyes saw other figures, Nelson among the clouds, the lions, Australia and its wench, the ever-moving crowd, the inevitable buses. Yes, the very buses were inevitable, and the voice of Big Ben the voice of a tradition.
There came into Scarsdale’s mind the word—revolution. Taggart had used it, but he had used it with a worried wildness. And what was revolution, a turning over or a turning round, mere upheaval or an ascending spiral? His consciousness seemed to enlarge itself under that April sky, and in the heart of this great city. These solid flagstones and buildings seemed to pivot about the slender column of the Admiral, and the clouds were like white sails set to the wind. The roar of the traffic was ceaseless.
Scarsdale had a feeling that he was in the midst of movement, and suddenly it seemed to him that this city was a great grey gyroscope steadily spinning. Almost and for him it revolved about the slender stem of Nelson’s column. The roar of the traffic was the music of its motion. The piece of symbolism fascinated him. He saw the lions turning round, and the radii of the streets, and the houses, and the buses and taxis and the human crowd. All of it would go on spinning.
What was this London but a creation of man’s urge to express himself, a thing willed in brick and stone and steel; alive, gyrating. And did the centripetal and centrifugal forces balance, or was there some subtle nexus holding humanity together? Habit! Yes, habit. Habit and tradition. The necessity of man to man. And it seemed to Scarsdale that he was being granted a moment of illumination. He saw such a city as London as a mystical gyroscope, weaving colours as it spun, and the colours were the merged hues of man’s activities. The colours might change, as political favours change, but the swing of the wheel would continue.
3
But, in a little while, his outlook became personal. His vision of a whirling, predestined crowd narrowed to the contemplating of his intimate inward self and its hopes and fears, its moods and expectations.
What was he in the pattern? What did he desire? Was it security, the same old slippers before the same old fire, the same old thoughts and habits? For, if the colours of the gyroscope were changing, should he too not change? How live, how die? And in living was he to be his old, deliberate, docile self, a scribbler, Taggart’s understudy, a reviewer of other men’s books? What had he done with life? What had he done that could be compared with the sex swagger of those Australian soldiers? Had he not been a creature of ink instead of a man of blood?
Old Thames running down to The Nore! And ships! And speed! And the laughing eyes of a girl, and the wind in the June grasses! And he was going to squat in a stuffy little room next door to a man who was going bald and had dirty finger-nails, and who was savagely dyspeptic.
Was it possible? Or was he to feel the whip of the new world’s restlessness?
How those white clouds sailed!
4
Scarsdale went on walking, and his restlessness walked with him. He strolled down Whitehall, and past St. Stephen’s, and struck the Thames at high tide. He followed the river, and found himself wondering at its life, at the life on a barge or a tug. Were those other men restless, or did the world of the river suffice them, with the realities of its ebb and flow, and the coming and going of merchandise?
/> He rediscovered the Tate Gallery and remembered days very long ago when he had known a passion for Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s women. What a name, and what women! And those sorrowful, sweet, sensual mouths! He felt rather old and sad. He walked on, and rediscovered Chelsea, and the trees of Battersea Park, and Chelsea Hospital, and the Albert Bridge, and Cheyne Row. Battersea suggested nothing to him save recollections of some students’ rag about a dog, though Battersea was to be famous for other rags and rednesses. Cheyne Row propounded problems. He strolled along looking at the houses, finding himself vaguely distressed by a beauty and a dignity that were like the dead leaves of a happy and memorable year. He was perplexed. He wondered why those old houses should make him sad. Was it that they tantalized him, and tempted him to yearn for something that was not his, success and the beauty of it, spacious rooms, blue doors and balconies, and calm-eyed stately windows? This was not Taggart and the Sabbath, nor was it Australia and young wenches with dangling legs. Nor was it Spenser Scarsdale, nor the war, nor the peace.
At Church Street he left the river, and finding himself in King’s Road he ceased to be a mere piece of drifting, human restlessness. He remembered the name of Marwood. He realized that he had wandered into the Marwood world, and that on occasions he has made imaginary descents upon that world to review the face of Marwood’s daughter. A live curiosity stirred in him, and something more than mere curiosity, for he stopped in front of a postman and asked to be directed.
“Can you tell me the way to Spellthorn Terrace?”
“Cross the road. First on your right.”
“Thank you.”
In rediscovering Spellthorn Terrace the memories of that October night came back to him with sudden vividness, the darkness, the wet pavements, his fumbling at the door; his interview with Marwood’s daughter, his return to the darkness, the dead leaves, the lovers huddled against the railings. Was No. 53 still Marwood? Walking along the opposite pavement he observed the row of little houses. They were alike, yet each seemed to differ like a human face. He saw a succession of privet hedges and iron railings, minute front gardens, flights of steps going up to doors sunk under shallow arches. The doors were brown and blue and green, but brown predominated. Each house had four windows. A cornice linked up the whole row, and above the cornice a collection of strange chimney-pots posed themselves against the sky. Some were brown and some white; some were mere red tubes, and others capped and moulded. Some had cowls and elbow-shaped attachments of zinc. Their variousness gave to the row an individual aliveness.
Old Wine and New Page 7
