Scarsdale, moving along the opposite pavement, passed No. 53 and observed it. The door was green, but a rather faded green, and so were the railings. There were yellow plush curtains at the lower window, and lace curtains up above. An aspidistra in a brass pot occupied the space between the folds of yellow plush. He walked as far as Spellthorn Square, and crossing the road, returned slowly along the other pavement. It was a very quiet street, almost as quiet as on that night when he had brought to Julia Marwood her dead father’s letters and photographs.
5
Scarsdale had lost his sense of the passing time; he had been walking and idling for two hours, and one o’clock had struck, and he should have been hungry. He walked slowly past the iron gates of Spellthorn Terrace with the feeling of a man exploring the beginnings of adventure; he glanced with a self-conscious shyness at the doors and windows. He confronted an imaginary situation. Supposing he were to meet Marwood’s daughter in the street, would she remember him, and should he stop her and revive the memories of that October evening?
He was within three yards of the gate of No. 53 when the thing happened, but not as he had expected it to happen. The door of No. 53 opened abruptly, and in the opening appeared the back of a youth or young man. It was a resisting and contumacious back, and it seemed to belong to a figure that was being forcibly extruded from the passage of No. 53. Scarsdale had paused to stare; he was not conscious of having paused. He just stood and stared, for the struggle in the passage revealed its duality, and the person of the other disputant. It was Marwood’s daughter. He recognized her pale, broad face, even more starkly determined than he remembered it. The lips were pressed together, the nostrils pinched, the eyes wide and angry and set. Extraordinary tableau! He saw that she had the hatless youth by the ears, and that his head was butting against her bosom. His shortish, thick legs resisted.
The struggle between them was silent. Their two young bodies were locked together, and above the insurgent, oily blackness of the youth’s head the face of Marwood’s daughter had a cold, white, furious purpose. She had forced the other figure to the top step, and was thrusting it down when Scarsdale saw the youth’s hands go up. One struck at the girl’s face, the other clawed at her forehead and fastened on her hair.
Scarsdale ceased to stand and stare. Something was unleased in him. He swung in through the gate and up the path, and got hold of the youth’s coat collar and the flesh of one arm. He pulled. The figures came apart, and Scarsdale and the youth blundered down the steps together. But youth turned suddenly upon middle age. There was a scuffle, the upward jab of a fist. It caught Scarsdale under the ribs and well and fairly in the pit of the stomach. He doubled up.
Chapter Seven
That was the first blow dealt by youth to Scarsdale in the days after the war.
It astonished him; it left him doubled in undignified helplessness over the iron railing of the flight of steps. His new bowler hat had fallen off into the privet hedge, but for the moment he was beyond preserving either his hat or his dignity. Young Marwood had retreated to the gate. His heavy, stocky figure swaggered; he had the greasy, sallow skin of his father.
“You can chuck my hat out.”
His sister cast it out, a soft green felt hat with a floppy brim. She turned her attention to Scarsdale.
“You shouldn’t have hit him like that.”
“The old fool should have kept his hands off me.”
Scarsdale’s head and shoulders raised themselves, and young Marwood picked up his hat and moved off along the railings. Discretion and insolence retreated advisedly with an upward grin at the sister.
“Ta-ta, Sis.”
She ignored him; she was standing on the upper step and looking at the rather grey face of the unfortunate knight-errant who had been put out of action most ungloriously by a boy’s fist. Scarsdale had heard youth’s judgment passed upon him—“the old fool”. He was feeling abominably and absurdly sick.
A voice said—“I’m sorry. I’m afraid you’re hurt. He shouldn’t have hit you like that.”
He realized that his hat was lying on the top of the hedge, and he recovered it. The voice had administered another blow, for he had divined in it a concern that conveyed to him a suggestion of kindness tinged with contempt,—or was it patronage? He had the feeling that it was the way in which she would have spoken to an elderly man who had slipped on a piece of orange peel. The casual, bright, cold kindness of youth.
He put on his hat.
“O,—that’s all right. He knocked the wind out of me. I suppose I—”
He was aware of her regarding him intently.
“Haven’t we—?”
“Yes, my name’s Scarsdale. Perhaps you remember.”
She did remember. Her eyes grew friendly, for she had every reason for feeling friendly toward him, seeing that he had been the messenger who had brought her the letter which had disclosed the whereabouts of her father’s will.
“You had better come in and sit down a moment.”
Scarsdale managed to smile at her, and the smile was part of his effort to recover the situation, and to remove the creases from a tumbled virility. There was something in her youth that provoked him.
“Thanks. May I? Really rather funny, isn’t it? Should never have thought a youngster’s fist could have hit me so hard. Caught me unawares—you know.”
She drew back into the passage.
“O, the young beast is always fighting. One of my brothers.”
“Your brother!”
But she was not an explanatory person. She showed him the sitting-room, and the obvious chair.
“I had just come back from the office to get my lunch. Would you like anything to drink?”
“A glass of water, may I?”
She went for the glass of water, and in handing it to him their fingers touched. Scarsdale looked up at her. His colour had come back.
“I’m afraid he must have hurt you. I was shocked.”
She gave a toss of the head.
“O, nothing to speak of. It’s not the first time I have had to throw him out. I think it will be the last. Do you mind if I go and get my lunch. I have to be back at the office at two.”
Scarsdale stood up.
“O, please go. I don’t want to interfere.”
She went, and he sat down again and sipped his water, and tried to rid himself of a feeling of resentment against young Marwood. He was surprised to find how much of the swaggering, sensational boy remained in him. Obviously, he should have taken the young lout easily by the collar and removed him to the pavement, and without even the unseemliness of a scuffle. But the upward, jabbing fist of youth had found his solar plexus, and he had lost his hat and his dignity.
He sipped his water, and when the tumbler was half empty, he placed it on the lower shelf of the stand that sustained the aspidistra. Rather an extraordinary house this, and rather an extraordinary young woman! And what was the present position of the Marwood family, and how much of the family was there? He sat stiffly and self-consciously in the chair in a house that remained wilfully silent. He began to feel a little uncomfortable. He was becoming more and more aware of the unexpectedness of that handsome, dark, young creature. How surprisingly strong she was! He felt a little afraid of her.
He sat and waited, and presently he heard a movement in the passage, and she reappeared. She was smoking a cigarette. She had a gunmetal cigarette case in her hand, and she offered it to Scarsdale. The case had belonged to her father, and had been returned with his effects from France.
“Feeling better?”
“Oh,—I’m all right.”
He took a cigarette, and handed the case back to her, and she stood leaning against a mantelpiece which had been cleared of all useless ornaments. She was very much at her ease, and observing him. She offered no explanations while conveying to him the impression that it was his affair to explain how he came to be in the neighborhood.
He fumbled at the situation just as he had
groped tentatively at Marwood’s door.
“Sure you are not hurt?”
Her very black eyebrows seemed to emphasize her stare.
“Please don’t worry. I was just calling the child’s bluff.”
“Does he live here?”
“He did.”
She flicked ash from her cigarette, and observed his clothes, and the grizzled hair above his ears. She waited.
“I happened to be in Chelsea.”
“Oh. Then you don’t live here?”
“No. Canonbury. I have only been back a few days, and I have been reviewing London. That’s one of my jobs.”
She did not understand him.
“Not musical comedy?”
He forced a little, self-conscious laugh.
“No,—books.”
“O,—books.”
He seemed to detect a tinge of contempt in her voice, and he became possessed by a desire to swagger. He wanted to impress her. She appeared so confoundedly cool and sure.
“Yes, you see I’m in the literary world. I write for the Scrutator and the Sunday Standard, and I help to edit a magazine.”
He did not tell her the name of the magazine, for he did not think that she would be impressed by the reputation of the Sabbath. Obviously the new world had not much use for the Sabbath.
She crossed the room and deposited the end of her cigarette in the brass pot belonging to the aspidistra. He had impressed her, but not in the way that he would have wished. She supposed that he had literary or artistic friends in Chelsea, and that his presence in Chelsea was natural.
“So, you’re a sort of celebrity.”
“O, not quite that.”
But he was pleased. He glanced at his wrist watch, and she, observing his glance, made her own movement.
“Sorry—but I shall have to be going. I have got my father’s job in an estate office here.”
“Why,—that’s splendid.”
She looked at him half-questioningly, but the inwardness of her glance was veiled. He seemed quite a nice old thing, for he looked older than his age, and to Marwood’s daughter anything over forty was final. But she was thinking of her younger brother, Harry of the bright buttons and the bright eyes. She wanted a career for Harry.
She said—“Sorry to have to turn you out. But perhaps you would like to sit here for a while.”
He rose instantly.
“O, no. I’m quite a tough person—really.”
He crossed to the fireplace, carefully extinguished the stump of his cigarette, and dropped it in the grate.
“Thanks for being so kind.”
Suddenly she smiled at him.
“O, not very much so. Thanks for your help. If you are ever round this way—”
He held out a hand.
“May I? Thanks—awfully.”
She grasped his hand firmly.
“You met my younger brother. He’s not like that other one. We’re great pals.”
“I’m sure you are.”
She shepherded him to the door, and smiled him out, and Scarsdale walked on towards Spellthorn Square with her smile pervading his consciousness.
2
He lunched at a little tea-shop in Kensington; he did not know the name of the street, and it did not matter. The tea-shop’s scheme of decoration was black, mauve and orange, and the waitresses were dressed to the same bright coloured toilet. He was allowed a plate of tongue, a roll and a tiny pat of pale butter, and a cup of very bad coffee. That—too—did not matter, for the spring had come, and in his blood were the stirrings of a second youth, a post-war rejuvenation.
Afterwards he found his way into Kensington Gardens, and sat down on a chair by the Round Pond, and watched the children, and dreamed. A westerly wind was blowing, and ruffling the water, and the incipient greenness of the trees seemed reflected in the April grass. The sky was in movement, and to Scarsdale came a sudden sense of the spaciousness of life, its blue and white fluidity, its chant of voices, its eternal youth.
“Man, what makest thou of life?”
His mood was both futurist and retrospective. He reviewed those years of gentle celibacy in Canonbury Square; bookish years, slippered years, when he had asked for nothing but the production of a nice, erudite, gentlemanly Pater cum Stevenson essay. He had been a purist, something of a spinster working coloured wools into pretty patterns, a diner out at clubs with a mild, literary flavour.
And suddenly he marvelled. He watched the children and the flickering water, and wondered how he had been content to grow—or rather not to grow—in that particular way. He had been a topiary person, a yew tree clipped in May, its young greenness restrained, growing older but remaining the same neat formal thing, the slave of the shears.
For what was life if you did not live it, and did not thrust both hands deep into the blue water? A man might be full of information and yet be no more than a dictionary, a gradus, and as unlike life as London is like a library. He sat in judgment upon himself, seeing the pre-war Scarsdale as one of those very futile people who, with a nice complacency, criticize other men’s creations, while themselves producing no live thing. Almost he had belonged to the little crowd that speaks superiorly of “fiction,” while assuming it a quite cultured business to write the lives of the great fictionists. He had been one of those little sniffling, armchair pedants whom Dickens had loathed.
He had not done anything. He had not loved and swaggered and got gloriously drunk, or gone dirty and hungry, or fought nature with naked hands, or taken gulps of sea water. He had not raged with jealousy or lust. He had not thirsted to kill. He had seen no brothel or no marriage-bed. He had not kissed and been kissed as though the whole of life hung on a pair of lips. He had done nothing but scribble, or help to handle the bodies of other men who had been in the battle line. He had written with a little prim air of authority upon things he had never experienced.
Yes, he had been one of those bright little spinster men whom you meet in cities, little dogs that yap and do not understand why the mastiffs and the boar-hounds pay no heed to them.
Suddenly he laughed; he put his head back and laughed.
“Even that youngster’s fist got me.”
But some other youthfulness had smitten him. How that girl’s face lit up when she smiled!
3
Miss Gall happened to be looking out of one of the first-floor windows when she caught sight of the familiar figure of Mr. Spenser Scarsdale crossing the square. She had seen him go out in the sombreness of overcoat and bowler hat, and very much the Mr. Scarsdale of the Sabbath and the Scrutator, a middle-class figure in quest of a middle-class living. Miss Gall respected Mr. Scarsdale, and her respect was tinged with affection and pride. He was literary and so clever, and always the gentleman. But on this April afternoon Mr. Scarsdale returned with a patch of colour over his heart. He was carrying a pot of red tulips, bought from a barrow at Highbury Corner, and the pot was swathed in blue paper.
Miss Gall hastened downstairs, for Mr. Scarsdale would be ready for his tea. She heard the latchkey in the lock. Mr. Scarsdale came in with his pot of tulips, and it seemed to Miss Gall that his face had a sort of sheen.
He smiled at her.
“Bought these from a hawker. Pretty, aren’t they?”
Miss Gall agreed with him. Certainly it was pleasant to have flowers in the house, and if Mr. Scarsdale could afford to buy flowers, well—the world was looking up. She had known Mr. Scarsdale for years as a man of serious good temper, a plant of steady growth, but she had never known him gaillard or gay.
“They do look pretty, sir. Shall I take the pot from you?”
“Oh, I can manage.”
He went upstairs almost with the air of a man humming a song, and when Miss Gall ascended with the tea-tray she found Mr. Scarsdale posing the pot of tulips on his desk in the window. He had removed the blue paper, and had inserted the vessel of common red clay into a white and gold pot. His face had a dreaminess.
During the wee
k that followed, Miss Gall gathered other indications of the coming of spring. The lilacs came into leaf, and the buds of the young chestnut trees burst their sticky brown capsules, and sparrows flew about with pieces of straw. Also, there arrived for Mr. Scarsdale several large cardboard boxes, and he appeared on the Sunday morning in a suit of blue cloth with faint white lines running through it, and wearing a new type of collar and a blue bow tie with white spots on it. Also, he was wearing new brown shoes instead of boots, and dark blue socks with silver clocks to them.
Miss Gall was a little troubled. Mr. Scarsdale had not been a dressy person, and before the war she had seen him in grey or in black, and distinctly loose at the backs of the shoulders and baggy as to the knees. Even when he had departed for his holiday on one of his walking tours in the Lakes, or to Derbyshire or Sussex he had taken with him a prosaic knickerbocker suit of a stuffy brownness, stockings of the same colour, and massive boots. She understood that he had photographed all the churches in Sussex, and that he knew the downs from Beachy Head to Old Winchester Hill. He had written a poem on Chanctonbury. Miss Gall had read it and had thought it very nice.
Also, she detected in Mr. Scarsdale a potential if not an active restlessness. In the old days she had known his habits as exactly as she had known the ways of the kitchen cat. He had sat about a great deal, and had liked to get into his slippers, and his room had been littered with books, most of them with little slips of white paper protruding from between the leaves. He had been untidy and busy and enveloped in tobacco smoke, an absentminded yet calculable creature. Now he was always going out and going out with an air of briskness and a sense of stir and excitement. He carried a neat little cane. Miss Gall had watched him from a window and had seen him go round by the railings and tap them with his stick. He did not mooch in meditation round the square; he walked with his head up and his hat at a slight cock as though he was set most definitely upon adventure. Miss Gall was troubled, for any variation in the functioning of her precious patron was of financial importance to her, and as a bachelor he had been flawless.
Old Wine and New Page 8
