“Ever sincerely yours
“Spenser.”
Miss Gall met him on the stairs on his way out to post the letter. She was carrying his supper-tray, and he stood back against the wall to let her pass, and to Miss Gall he appeared taller than usual. There was something mysterious and adventurous about him, a largeness and a brightness of the eyes. He stood and moved as to music; he might have worn a plumed hat and a little pointed beard and a coat of black velvet.
“Your supper, sir.”
“I shan’t be a minute.”
He displayed the letter.
“Just going to post this.”
He held his head high, and smiled, and suddenly it became plain to Miss Gall that Mr. Scarsdale’s letter was going to a woman, and that he was in love with that woman. She did not know how she knew, and she continued up the stairs with the tray. She put the tray down on the table. She felt suddenly resentful, and tired. Life was always getting out of order, in spite of all your tidyings and slavings. She noticed that some of the milk had slopped over the lip of the jug on to the tray.
Miss Gall said, “Drat it”, perhaps because her inner consciousness was protesting against the social revolution in all its phases and disguises. Mr. Scarsdale getting married and leaving her! There would never be another Mr. Scarsdale. He belonged to the placid, patient past.
Meanwhile, Scarsdale had found his red pillar-box. He stood in front of it with the letter balanced on the fingers and palm of one hand. He smiled. He slid the letter into the mouth of the box.
2
Harry Marwood, being an observant child, noticed that when Julia opened the letter that he had brought to her from the front-door mat, she opened it on her lap. They were at breakfast together, and the edge of the table and the sag of the white cloth concealed both letter and cheque. Julia’s glances were veiled. She had glanced at the cheque before refolding it and slipping it back into the envelope.
Harry stretched out a hand for the marmalade pot, but his eyes were upon his sister. She looked “funny”. Almost she had an air of guilt. She had gone red after opening that letter, and then had begun to eat her two rashers of bacon as though she had a train to catch. Her face concealed something, and Harry, who was sensitive as well as observant, helped himself to marmalade, and held his peace.
But he was aware of her strangeness, and of her silence, and of her cutting herself a second slice of bread while half the first slice remained upon her plate. She had the air of looking at things without seeing them. Her silence and her self-absorption covered an undercurrent of excitement. She did not finish her tea, but got up with that envelope in her hand, clutched but not crumpled. She glanced almost impatiently at his deliberate knife and the little splodge of marmalade.
“All right, Ju, just finished.”
He was a tractable child, and devoted to her, and understanding, because of his devotion, that Julia was a creature apart. Julia had responsibilities and worries. She had Mr. Jimson and the office as well as No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace. Expeditiously he piled butter and marmalade upon two last cubes of bread, licked the tip of his left first finger and jumped up to help her.
In five minutes he was gone. He had put up that very bright and innocent face and had kissed her. There had been an unspoken sympathy in that kiss, a young trustfulness that refrained from asking questions, and she stood at the kitchen window, and took the letter from her apron pocket. “I am very grateful to you for allowing me to do this thing.” She glanced at the cheque.
“Pay Miss Julia Marwood—” It was incredible, and yet it had happened.
Softly she uttered the one word, “Beast”.
Yes, that first reaction of hers had been rather beastly. Instantly she had asked herself the question, “Is he good for so much?” Yes, she had questioned the honouring of the cheque, and even as she stood there in a patch of sunlight and felt the heartburn of her worldly scepticism, she knew that she would go to the bank directly its doors were open and pay in that cheque. Then—? There would follow one day, two days, perhaps three days of tense curiosity. How long would they take to clear that piece of paper.
“Beast!”
She was a complex of emotions, but her conception of life contained and controlled them. She was herself and she was Harry; she was ambition and shrewdness and laughter and strange shame. And, in a sense too, she was Scarsdale and that cheque and its opportunities, and Mr. Jimson’s ruling spirit, and the young autocrat in a car. A part of her might twinge like a foot in a tight shoe; but shoes could be compelled to mould themselves to your measure.
Yes, she was going to accept that cheque and to use it, nor did she shirk the implications of its usefulness. She was not like the old-fashioned chorus-girl, who, having obtained all that was to be obtained from a man on the credit of her stage smile and her legs, became violently prudish and refined when man demanded the rewards of nature. Julia was through. No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace had taught her to face facts. Scarsdale’s gesture might be extravagantly that of a gentleman, but it indicated other and more primitive gestures.
Besides—she liked him. He might be a little grizzled and long in the leg, but he had an air. Obviously he possessed money, and he was clean. As yet she had not let herself go with any man, perhaps because she had had to fight sex in her mother and in her brother, and no man had made her feel the inevitableness and the fury of surrender. For the loan she would pass to Scarsdale a proper receipt and a promise to repay. She would make it appear to be a business transaction. She would offer him five per cent. on his money.
He might not be satisfied. She did not expect him to be satisfied, and that was as far as her realism could carry her. For Scarsdale’s figure had a haziness of outline; to Julia it was a shape seen in the dusk under trees, in the midst of a perplexing silence. She did not see him clearly, probably because he was of another generation. He stood off so from things, and moved sensitive and deprecating hands.
But Martagon Terrace waited for her. She locked up the house, and with the cheque in her vanity bag, set out upon the day’s adventure. She saw it so differently from the writer of the cheque. The flower-shop at the corner of Martagon Street had taken to itself a new owner and a new technique. Here was a modern fellow who could splash the new commercial colours in the very faces of Chelsea. The florist had had the façade above the shop painted in oblongs in yellow and lilac. A signwriter had just set out in large black letters the text of the new day:
“Say it with Flowers,
Say it with Cabbages.
Say it through Us.”
Julia glanced at the shop as she passed. She liked it; she liked the bright glare of the colours, and the cheeky bravura of the text upon the wall. She would have liked a bright blue or scarlet car. Yes, that was business, youth, the wearing of the red and the green. No antique Physic Garden, and bundles of dried herbs. Full of her youth she passed on to Mr. Jimson’s office.
At five minutes to ten she left her chair, and put on her hat. Mr. Jimson was in the inner office, and she spoke to him through the open door.
“I am going out for twenty minutes. Private business.”
A sound of shuffling consent came to her.
“Very well, Miss Marwood.”
She walked to her bank. She stood at the counter and filled in a paying-in slip, and handed slip and cheque to the clerk.
“To my account—please.”
The clerk examined the cheque a little too fussily, so Julia thought.
“Yes, I have endorsed it. All right, isn’t it?”
“Quite.”
“Thank you.”
3
Scarsdale allowed his romance three days of delay, not that they might prove to Julia that his cheque was good, but because he was that sort of lover, walking delicately in the moonlight. She had accepted his cheque, or at any rate she had not returned it, and she had not written. It would not have occurred to him that her business wit dominated the situation, and that she would withhold the rec
eipt until his signature was honoured.
But her silence perplexed him a little. Surely she did not suspect him of having offered her a mere bribe? She should be able to distinguish between love and lust. And the sensitive lover in him walked all the more gently, treading delicately beside the trailing skirts of her pride. He must not let her think gross, butcherly things, or imagine the hot breath of the prowling sensualist.
On the fourth morning he collected his pass-book from his bank and saw that significant entry. She had accepted his cheque and used it, and the devout lover in him felt crowned with a garland.
And suddenly he understood her silence. She was waiting for him to go to her. Yes, he understood her silence. It was exquisite and challenging. She would not put bold words upon paper. He pictured her waiting for him like a dark-eyed girl in the portico of a temple.
The day was close and hot, but Scarsdale did not suffer from the heat, nor did he perspire and bite black finger-nails like Mr. Taggart. He sat at the open window of his stuffy little room, and confronted the blankness of a wall whose bricks had once been yellow. To Scarsdale the gold was there beneath the grime. Somewhere machinery lumbered and clanked, and its underchant was like the clangour of a Wagnerian world, subterranean and mysterious. There was a machine in Scarsdale that functioned, while the lover in him looked through and beyond the wall of brick to the other world where his young Madonna of the Pear Blossom sat dreaming.
He had but one glimpse of Mr. Taggart during the day. They met in the corridor just before the luncheon-hour, and Taggart, walking as though he carried a bag of broken glass inside him, glowered up at Scarsdale’s beatific face.
“Thunder coming.”
“Yes, possibly.”
Taggart went on down the stairs, with a kind of sombre smirk under the unbrushed brim of his hat. Damn the fellow! He appeared to be so egregiously pleased with life, and unaware of other thunders.
At the end of the day Scarsdale spent ten minutes in the slipshod little lavatory. The basin was cracked, and the soap poached into a fatty mess, and the roller towel creased and smeared. He had to use the basin and the soap, but he eschewed the towel; it had been used too promiscuously and he preferred his handkerchief. He looked at himself carefully in the small mirror, and damped his hair and smoothed it with his hands. His tie was a little too Presbyterian, and he gave it a Catholic humanity. Then he returned to his room to collect his hat and gloves and umbrella, and the bunch of roses. He had bought roses during the luncheon-hour. His umbrella embarrassed him; possibly he had feelings about its wrongness, and the rightness and grace of a court-sword. But then, there was thunder in the air.
So, with roses and umbrella, and unrained upon, though a slaty sky was muttering, he arrived upon his Julia’s doorstep. He rang, and she beheld him shyly raising his hat with the hand that also held the handle of his umbrella. The roses demurred. They were as shy and as reverent as the lover.
“Not disturbing you?”
She looked at him with the vivid eyes of her youth. She had been prepared, paraded, and here he was upon her doorstep, a perplexing, shadowy figure. His umbrella and his hat seemed to embarrass him. He smiled as though they shared some wonderful secret, some pot of divine honey into which no greedy, casual finger should be dipped.
She let him in and closed the door. They stood in the half light of the passage. Had he clutched her suddenly, had it been ever so clumsily, or even thrust the roses into her hands, she would have understood him as man. But he stood off and gazed with a kind of exquisite and silly shyness, and looked at her as though she were an iced cake under a glass cover.
“I want to thank you, Julia. Yes, that’s all. Not a word. I’ve brought these.”
He held out the roses, and her face had a strange, sullen blankness. It looked heavy and obscure, and about the mouth there quivered a little quirk of incipient impatience. He was so nice and nebulous, and she liked her colours to be primary.
“Come in. Harry’s not back yet.”
She led the way into the sitting-room, and he followed her and appeared in doubt as to where to place his hat and umbrella, and finally he sat down with them upon the sofa, the umbrella lying across his knees. He had a very bright, wise face, but no words. He radiated devout light like a lamp in a sanctuary.
She put her mouth and nose to his roses.
“I say,—about that cheque, it’s simply marvellous of you.”
His hands caressed the umbrella.
“My dear girl,—that’s all right. Not a word.”
“O, no, that’s not business. I have written you out a receipt. It’s here.”
She produced an envelope from her skirt pocket, and thrust it at him almost with an air of menace.
“Take it. I insist on that. Now, when do you want me to repay?”
“O, no fixed date. Use it as long—”
“Say in three years. And the interest. I can manage five.”
He became suddenly stern.
“Quite impossible. Usury—between us! My dear girl,—I could never—”
Her eyes brightened for a moment.
“You really are too awfully good. I’ll just go and put these roses in water. Shan’t be a minute.”
She escaped. She drew a deep breath and ran out into the garden for a moment. The atmosphere in that room had seemed to her overscented with sentiment. Now, what was he at? She had been ready to meet him, and to be as real to him as his cheque was real, and he had sat on the sofa like an old-fashioned, eligible man, nursing the nice conventions with his hat and umbrella. She was perplexed, and she was irritated. She wanted to know exactly what he expected of her, and his idea of reality seemed to be to smile and to cover up the cakes.
“Fooling about!”
She put his flowers in water and went back carrying the vase. He stood up when she entered the room. He had rid himself of his umbrella, but not of his self-conscious pose. The situation was becoming more and more refined and rarefied.
“Just your colour, Julia.”
“Which?”
She gave him a challenging look. She attacked by standing close in, and looking sideways and up into his face.
“The dark one.”
He touched a particular flower with the tip of a long finger, and she waited tensely for him to show his hand, but suddenly he put his two hands behind his back.
“Dark and damask is Julia’s flower.”
Her face seemed to grow as firm and solid as the white surface of the vase. Deliberately she placed it on the table. She was like a young woman on the stage to whom her opposite had given the wrong cue. She sat down on one of the hard chairs, and Scarsdale resumed his seat upon the sofa.
They talked, letting any odd subject drop and picking it up again. They tossed polite words at each other, and then suddenly the June rain came down and the room was darkened. Never had she felt so smothered and so bored. Why couldn’t he be real? Was he real, or just a nice piece of sentiment in trousers?
While he was feeling the embarrassment and accepting it as inevitable, obviously she was embarrassed. Any nice girl would have felt it just as she did. Proud, silent Julia! He said to himself that a man should walk delicately, without touching the virginal hem of her soul.
And then, suddenly, he decided that it was time for him to go. These April occasions should be brief and sensitive. He got up. The shower was a wet sheet.
She made a protest, however perfunctory she may have found it.
“You can’t go—yet.”
But he was above the vicissitudes of the weather.
“Get a taxi around the corner. Yes, really. Besides, I have a gamp.”
They huddled each other to the door with mutual and restive politeness.
“Good-bye, Julia. Don’t worry.”
“Of course not.”
“That’s splendid.”
The length of him went out and down into the rain. He opened his umbrella with a jerk, and looking back at her bumped into the gate that ha
ppened to be closed. It spoilt the impressiveness of his walking off.
She closed the door. Something gave way in her. She rushed up to her room, and throwing herself on the bed, buried her face in the pillow. She laughed, she smothered the immoderate, helpless noise of it against the pillow. O, my God!
Someone was calling.
“Ju! Ju! where are you?”
She sat up, suddenly sobered. Harry had come back, and Harry was real. She went downstairs to get her brother’s supper.
Chapter Thirteen
Mr. Jimson was made to feel the suddenness and the shock of youth, for that which yesterday had seemed a girl had become an absurdly self-sure young woman. Perhaps she was not as self-sure as she seemed, but her chance was there and she seized it, and was ready to growl “My bone.”
For that which happened to Mr. Jimson happens to most of us, and Mr. Jimson had had no children in his house to give the effect of gradualness to the eternal revolution. The old, cracked crock of him was suddenly jostled by this bright and brazen young pot, and gave out shrill protests. “Preposterous! A young wench like this! She’s not more than two-and-twenty. A man of my age and experience! It isn’t dignified. These young things want to begin where we left off.” But the pressure of youth was upon him. At Mr. Jimson’s age a man’s forcefulness may have put on the pantaloons of an authoritative fussiness, while the soul of him has grown fat and cowardly. No longer can he take life by the throat. He asks for comfortable, prosy corners, and avoids draughts, and is careful about the airing of his vests and pants. Risks are anathema. The pirate in him is dead; he has become a rentier.
Mr. Jimson surrendered, and even while surrendering was astonished at himself. He twiddled his gold cross, and peeped from under irritable, bushy eyebrows. Was he dreaming, or was he in fact discussing the formalities of a partnership with Marwood’s daughter? Extraordinary! He had been in the habit of bullying Marwood, but then Marwood had had a family to keep.
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