He closed the door. Hanging opposite him on the strip of wall between the two windows were one of those long, narrow mirrors which some Victorian soul had decorated with bullrushes and yellow water flags. He saw himself reflected in it, and crossing the room, he looked at his reflection in the glass, but the light was growing too dim for him to see himself with the merciless clarity of a man who has said to his heart, “Thou fool”. He brought out a box of matches, and struck a match, and holding it like a miniature candle he scrutinized the reflection of his face in the glass, and suddenly he seemed to see it with the eyes of a stranger. He noticed the grizzled patches of hair about the temples, the faint lines about the eyes, the deepening of the two creases between the nose and the angles of the mouth. His skin had the indefinable texture of middle age. And then the flame of the match began to burn his fingers, and he blew it out and threw the end into the grate.
Gently he said to himself, “You fool.”
For something in him knew. He had been stripped suddenly of a beautiful illusion. It was as though he had been going about with the fancied face of a boy, and life had held up a glass and shown him the coarsened skin of the forties. He sat down at his desk in the window, and with crossed arms, watched the fading sky, and the awakening of the windows across the way. A light would appear and a blind be lowered, and the same thing happened within him. A light had appeared behind his blindness.
Though, after all, he had seen so little and yet so much, two young things passing by in a car, youth looking into the eyes of youth, and smiling. There was a rightness about youth, and as he realized its rightness, he felt gently and deeply humiliated. Something in him knew. And he sat and wondered at the illusion that had vexed him all these months, at his rather futile feverishness, his chasing of second youth. How strange! And his novel! Had the same illusion insinuated itself into the book lying in the drawer beside him? The illusion of youth and the mystery and the poignant beauty of April days? O, bitter, beautiful foolishness!
An impulse stirred in him. He opened the drawer and took out the typescript of “Blood and Iron”, and pushing his chair back, carried the book to the grate. He removed the Japanese fire-screen. His impulse was to make a holocaust of that other illusion, and then the impulse died away, or was replaced by some other motive.
He was moved by sudden curiosity. He felt other shame. He had looked at youth, and he had dared to examine his own face in the glass of reality, and was he afraid of this child of his own fancy? He was conscious of having lost his dignity, and his self-regard returned to him silently and reproachfully without plume or sword. Why not launch the book a second time, expose it naked to the most merciless of mirrors? There were other publishers. He thought of young Bagshaw, red, arrogant, prematurely bloated. A sudden courage hardened in him. He replaced “Blood and Iron”, and reclosed the drawer.
He sat down again at his desk. Something went from him and came to him that summer night. He saw Julia, he saw himself, and the bloom of youth and its fallacious softness, and his own hand going out to touch that beautiful surface. And yet what did youth crave for, the youth of this post-war generation? He had a new feeling about youth and about life as he sat while the dusk flowed in and filled the familiar room. He saw life and things as in a glass, but less darkly and as though some light turned the picture into a transparency and coloured it. He felt and he understood. He saw into the inwardness of things. He saw beyond the sombre, liverish stolidity of Taggart’s face, and almost he understood the grime in Taggart’s finger-nails. He looked through Miss Gall’s spectacles at the soul behind the tired eyes. He felt the insistent, merciless urge, the cracking whips with which life drives humanity. People did what life willed. They were blown like leaves. They hungered and they lusted and they loved, and hurried to express the insurgent “I”, because life wills them to express the massed urge of a million cells. The whole business of existing was—for the many—the swirl of appetite. Youth was urged to clasp youth. Man, in the force and fury of his years, strove because of the sex and the vitals that were in him.
The night came down, and things went from him, and things came.
And then he heard Miss Gall return. She was climbing the stairs. Her approach was the stealthy gliding of age, the faded figure of a symbolic resignation. He got up hurriedly and lit the gas. He did not want to be surprised by her in the darkness.
She opened the door three inches.
“O, you are back, sir. I thought—”
“Just lit the gas as you came in.”
“Your supper, sir?”
“I have had supper, thank you.”
She closed the door gently, and with a kind of little sighing sound, withdrew.
Next morning he wrote a letter to young Bagshaw, and put up “Blood and Iron” into a neat parcel. His mood was still water, and the ripple marks made by youth’s stone had died away. This book of his should stand and dare its own reflection in the mirror of young Bagshaw’s mind. He could have devised no more mordant ordeal for “Blood and Iron”, for Bagshaw’s mind was like an up-to-date butcher’s shop, full of red meat on marble slabs. He was one of the rising gods in the publishing world, and if the reading public did not know what it wanted, the thing was to inveigle it into your shop and show it something that glittered or something that smelt good.
Scarsdale, strangely and gently persistent, managed to push his way as far as the office of Bagshaw’s secretary, but that was his Ultima Thule. Bagshaw’s secretary knew her business.
“Mr. Bagshaw gives no interviews unless they are arranged. Perhaps you will leave your name.”
Scarsdale tried to persuade her.
“I won’t keep Mr. Bagshaw two minutes. My name’s Scarsdale. He knows me.”
The secretary opened an inner door, but not more than two inches.
“A Mr. Scarsdale is asking to see you.”
Bagshaw’s rolling, rampant voice came out to them.
“Scarsdale? O, yes, quite impossible. Tell him to leave a message, or to write. Shut that door.”
The secretary closed the door, and turned her casual eyes on Scarsdale.
“Perhaps you will leave a message.”
He handed her the neat parcel.
“A book of mine. I want it read. There is a note inside to Mr. Bagshaw.”
“I see. It will be read in the usual way. I presume your address is inside. Good morning.”
3
On the Sunday Scarsdale went to Chelsea. He went because he was moved by curiosity and by a gentle and whimsical spite against himself. He allowed his fancy no flights to the moon, and where youth would have raged he walked softly, with desire like a faded flower in his buttonhole. He rang the bell of No. 53, and had the door opened to him by Harry, a strangely mute and almost sulky Harry.
His eyes brightened to Scarsdale, and then grew shy.
“O, Ju’s out for the day.”
Scarsdale had expected it, but he was a little puzzled by Harry’s face. The boy had an air of awkward concealment. He was sorry for Mr. Scarsdale and he was sorry for himself.
“All alone?”
“Yes.”
“How’s the garden?”
“O, all right.”
“Mind if I come and sit for half an hour?”
“O, rather not.”
He brightened momentarily, only to revert to his air of bothered blankness. He led Scarsdale into the garden, and wandered with him unhappily up and down the grass plot. Harry’s flower-beds were on the edge of autumn, and looking tashed and untidy, and he glanced at them as though they did not invite him to look at them too closely. His hands were stuffed into his trousers pockets. For so vital and frank a child he appeared strangely stubborn and troubled.
“Not much to see. Stay and have tea, sir.”
“May I?”
“Ju left it all ready. Don’t know when she’ll be back.”
Presumably his sister was out in the car for the day, and Harry, like Scarsdale, had suddenly real
ized the intervention of other forces. Almost the boy had the air of a child who had been frightened and shocked, but who was silent and stubborn over it. He would not blurt things out, or say just why or how he was hating a certain person. He had reticence. Quite brightly he might have chattered out the news, “O, Ju’s gone out for the day with Mr. Flood in his car. Yes, they asked me to go. Didn’t feel like it. Let’s have lots of raspberry jam.”
He had seen more than Scarsdale had seen, and like the man he had received a hurt. Somehow he had never thought of his sister in that way, or of her behaving in that way. Her air of strange excitement, the something in her eyes. And that Flood fellow tweaking her hair! A sudden, dolorous silence had fallen upon Harry. It had been like watching a strange man messing about with your mother.
They had tea together in the garden. It was an unhappy and inarticulate meal. To both of them the Madonna of the Pear Blossom had become red flesh. The man understood and was sad; the boy stuffed his fists into his pockets and was resentful.
Scarsdale did not stay very long. He embarrassed the boy, and was embarrassed by Harry’s secret distress. It was easily divined, though few men would have understood it, and probably Scarsdale would not have understood it three days ago.
“Suppose they left him behind. Poor little beggar. Jealous.”
He went away feeling vaguely surprised at his own lack of jealousy. It was as though he had suddenly grown too old and too clear-sighted to be harrowed by such emotion. Something had gone from him. He was water, still water, reflecting things, and not the fire that burns. He was earth accepting that which the seasons imposed upon it. Youth had a rightness, and some day Harry would understand that rightness.
He walked down to the river, and leaning on the embankment wall, watched the water in movement. He felt strangely old and sad and consenting. And suddenly he remembered that cheque. “Pay Julia Marwood—” Extraordinary that he should have forgotten it! Well, he had thrown his bread upon the river and it had gone down to sea. He did not expect it to come back to him.
4
Somewhere in Surrey a man and a girl lay in the heather in a hollow hidden by banks of gorse. They lay face to face, the girl with her eyes closed, while the man tickled her chin and lips and ears with a heather twig. They had brought their tea with them, and the basket and a couple of coats had been left on a stretch of turf higher up the hill.
The man was smiling. He had been talking about himself and his cars and his coming career as a racing motorist, and the girl had listened to him as she had listened to no one else. But in this secret place they were alone together, with the white clouds going over, and the wind making an occasional sighing in the furze. Against the blue of the sky a wood of Scotch firs warmed their red throats in the sunlight. The ling on which they lay was dry and fragrant.
They were alone together, absorbed in each other, two young creatures who desired only that which was desirable, each other. The girl’s face had a strange softness, a glow that seemed to come from beneath her skin. Her eyes were happy and wanton. She had forgotten everything save man, this sudden man who lay with her in the heather. While he, with his whimsical, hot gaze fixed on her, smiled and was content.
“All right here, isn’t it?”
“Lovely.”
She turned on her back and basked, her eyes half closed.
“How did you find this place?”
“O, known it for years. Not like this—though. Lucky for us the crowd isn’t on wheels yet. Or not much of it. Will be some day.”
“Does it matter?”
“Not now.”
She turned and looked at him.
“Tommy, I’d like something under my head.”
“Right-o.”
He rose and went for one of the coats, and folded it, and looked about him for a moment over the banks of furze. His blue eyes were alert and a little fierce. Not a soul! He bent down and placed the folded coat under her head.
“How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
“I say you—”
He lay down beside her suddenly. Her eyes glimmered at him. And obeying some mutual, urgent impulse, they clung together, face to face and body to body.
Chapter Seventeen
A young girl opened the door of Mr. Paul Verulam’s room on the third floor of the Bagshaw building.
“Mr. Bagshaw wants to see you, sir.”
Verulam raised his large red face and mooning spectacles.
“Very well.”
He did not hurry. He might be Bagshaw’s reader and literary adviser, but also he was that very eminent novelist Mr. Paul Verulam, and becoming more and more eminent yearly in the estimation of the elect. He was subtle and precious and had a taste for things pathological, and a nice way of presenting them preserved in alcohol. His largeness, and a kind of rubicund pomposity, and the sudden upward rush of his sandy hair from a round and shiny forehead, suggested that he should be impressive on a platform, though the quality of his blue eye was a little ambiguous and muddy. He rose, and with a leisurely impressiveness, descended the stairs, and this act of descent had an air of condescending rectitude. For the occasion he was descending to Bagshaw’s level. He did not propose to remain much longer with Mr. Bagshaw’s firm.
He passed through the secretary’s room. He smiled at her, and when he smiled the long yellow teeth shone like gold in the large red countenance.
“Good morning. Miss Pearson.”
He exuded sugar, sacerdotalism. He processed into Bagshaw’s room, looking, so Bagshaw thought, more episcopal and Trollopian than ever, but with the suggestion of something smeary concealed under the apron. The interview between them was brief. They did not mix. Verulam wore the halo of the highbrow, and Bagshaw was wishing that he would go and wear it elsewhere.
As Verulam, pivoting on his own axis, turned towards the door, Bagshaw remembered something.
“A book came in by a fellow named Scarsdale. Read it?”
“ ‘Blood and Iron’.”
“Haven’t the faintest idea what it was called. Any good?”
Verulam moved to the door.
“Perfectly preposterous book.”
“So I should have imagined. No use on the sentimental side?”
“Not even caramel.”
“Right. I know the chap slightly. Can quote you if necessary.”
He watched Verulam oil his way out of the door, and was amused by the poise and the pose of him. A good literary figure! But Bagshaw’s dislike of Verulam, and Verulam’s contempt for Bagshaw were mere incidentals. “Blood and Iron” made its way back to Scarsdale, and was delivered into Miss Gall’s hands, and was carried upstairs and placed upon Scarsdale’s desk. Finding it there he smiled a little, whimsical, self-effacing smile. He untied the string and unfolded the brown paper. The Bagshaw letter was more abrupt and less kind than the Shelby letter had been.
Scarsdale pushed the brown paper and string into the waste-paper basket, and hid “Blood and Iron” away in a drawer. He had a feeling that it would not see the light of day again for any useful purpose, and his feeling about it was right. He kept that novel as a curiosity, as a sort of human document, as a faded and foolish wreath that had crowned the forehead of an egregious second youth. The Bagshaw letter he tore up and threw into the grate.
Blood and Iron!
He carried his bag of buns into Highbury Fields and sat with his back to Highbury Terrace. In later years he came to wonder how it was that he had felt no interest in that row of pleasant, quiet houses. He had no prescience. Also, he was very much concerned with ways and means, he had no job, and Miss Gall, like a grey ghost, walked the empty galleries of his house of dreams. He felt absurdly responsible for Miss Gall, more so than for himself. He would have to work, not for Julia and glory, but to pay an elderly woman for his board and lodging.
As he emptied his bag and crumpled it up, he made reflections upon the obvious.
“Shall have to get a berth somewhere. Different. Yes
, things are different. I don’t seem to get started as quickly as I used to do. Or is it that youth makes the pace, the new pace? Those old horse-trams down Upper Street! Now, motor-buses. Things much the same really, only someone turns the handle faster.”
And yet, a wayward curiosity pricked him. A man does not become a complete Stoic in the course of seven days, and the house in Spellthorn Terrace still drew Spenser Scarsdale. It was as though twenty years had gone by since the illusion of youth had passed from him, and in visiting Chelsea he was an old man pottering about in a world of memories. Such was his reaction. The middle ’forties were to be neither “fabulous” nor “roaring”, but a season when snow seemed to lie gently upon a frozen earth. The war had happened a hundred years ago. Julia Marwood was dead, dead as Cleopatra, Guinevere, and Joan of Arc.
2
But the other Julia lived, Tom Flood’s Julia, Mr. Jimson’s Julia, the young woman of the new age, hard, hurrying, vivid and urgent, with a fallacious bloom upon her skin of the grape. Velvet may be out of fashion in a world of steel, and in the bright and casual crowd of youth that envisages a new reality. Tommy Flood had his flat. Julia had found it for him, and in a Chelsea mews she had located two old coach-houses cheek-by-jowl capable of housing a couple of cars. Youth’s hands met over the machine, as their mouths had met in the heather.
The new mysteries were being demonstrated to Julia, though youth has learnt to control that other mystery and to join in the festival of Venus and Adonis without the spilling of blood or the embarrassments of babies. And Tommy was decarbonizing and tuning up the precious infant, and Julia attended both as mother and nurse. Sunday was the car’s Sabbath. She put on blue overalls, and rubber gloves, and the rites of the mechanical Sabbath were explained to her.
Old Wine and New Page 18
