Scarsdale thought Mr. Bartlet completely and prosperously respectable. He was good “sausage and mash” served up hot at half-past seven. Before the war he would have sported a top-hat, but his post-war choice had fallen upon a grey Homburg, neat yet just a little jaunty. He wore a black morning-coat and vest, white shirt and collar, a tie with a diamond pin stuck in it, trousers with a faint white line in them, spats and very well-polished black boots. His dogginess was held on the leash. Wash-leather gloves would have seemed a little too flowery. He was content with plain, brown leather. Business was business, and Mr. Bartlet, who was responsible for a particular kind of shop-window that might cause shy people to hurry past with a flush of self-consciousness, exercised professional restraint. He was a chemist; almost he spelt it with a “y”. He cultivated a succinct and impressive manner.
On the September evening before his fortnight’s holiday, Scarsdale, having discovered himself short of socks, had dashed down into Upper Street to buy a couple of pairs before the shops closed. He was going into Wiltshire for a walking holiday, and stout socks were necessary. Returning with his small parcel he met Mr. Bartlet coming out, and looking polished and prepared for a symposium with a lady.
“Good evening, sir.”
He appeared glad at the sight of Scarsdale. He drew up by the railings, and eased a glove.
“Just going off, I hear. Weather looks set fair.”
“Yes, September’s a good month as a rule.”
“Seaside, is it?”
“No, Wiltshire.”
“Ah, Wiltshire. Believe me, Brighton suits me very well. Had three weeks there. Made me very comfortable. I hope, sir, you will have nothing but sunshine.”
He had finished easing his glove, and giving Scarsdale a genial glance, remembered something. He had not remembered it too previously. Mr. Bartlet was suave, and a diplomat.
“O, by the way, sir, would it inconvenience you—or offend you, if a friend of mine occupied your bedroom for a week? Of course, only with your consent. A favour. Someone who is coming over from Paris, on business.”
Scarsdale had no reason for refusing, and he knew the let would be useful to Miss Gall.
“For a week?”
“Yes, just seven days, sir. I can assure you—”
“I am leaving clothes—”
Mr. Bartlet smoothed the air with a gloved hand.
“I assure you—everything will be O.K. I can arrange it with Miss Gall. You will find everything—in statu quo.”
“O, that will be all right.”
“I am very much obliged to you, sir. Yes, very much obliged. I hope you will have fine weather in Wiltshire.”
Scarsdale trained to Marlborough and put up at an inn overlooking the broad High Street. He had brought nothing with him but an old infantry pack, a mackintosh, and a stick. His pack contained a pair of pyjamas, two extra shirts, socks, a spare pair of boots, and his etceteras, and they included tobacco and Ordnance Survey Map, No. 112. He passed two nights in this Wiltshire town, tramping up to Savernake, and standing for half an hour to stare down the beech avenue. At first it disappointed him a little, until his consciousness seemed to lose itself in the distant green glooms of the great aisle. And it was so still, and would have been even stiller but for the traffic on the high road. He was to find the hills more timeless and more silent when he went on to Avebury, walking across by way of Overton Down. He came to Avebury by the lane that cuts through the temple vallum on the east. He climbed a wall and scrambling up the great grass bank, lay down in the afternoon sunlight. The turf was painted with little flowers, trefoil and scabious, gold and purple. He shed his pack and lit a pipe. The strange, still immensity of the place possessed him. He looked for and counted some of the stones of the great circle.
But no words came to him, no obvious, Fleet Street, adjectival stuff. He just sat and stared. Avebury needed no letterpress.
He put up at the “George”, occupying a front room overlooking the village street, and the green hollow of the sacred place. He was very comfortable at the “George”. They gave him good meat and cheese, and bread that was bread, and cream, and butter, that made him feel greedy. He sat on the seat with the cobbled pavement spreading before him, and smoked his pipe, and watched the village dogs, and a cat and her kittens. He talked to people; it seemed so easy to talk to people in such a place. He walked. He tramped to Barbury, and to Oldbury and saw the White Horse and the old Bath road and the monument. He sat in the beech-wood on the north of the camp, and heard it suddenly filled with rustlings, whisperings, voices of the old folk perhaps, of the multitudinous dead. “Look, man is here, man imprisoned in the flesh, not live as we are.” He lay about on the hills on the sweet, downland turf, and watched the clouds and their shadows moving over the grey-green slopes. It was another world, spacious, luminous, intimate yet strange. It made him feel curiously impersonal, freed from the fret of time. Sometimes he thought of Fleet Street and the publishing house of Hurst & Storey, and of all those little scribbling figures, and the rumbling machines, and the yelling men and boys who sold papers. “Speshul,—speshul.” How silly it all seemed! Modern man was making such an absurd hubbub. And about what?
3
On a still and golden afternoon at the end of his first week he found himself in the little village of Oare, and about to climb Martinsell Hill. Someone directed him down a lane, and he saw Martinsell above him steep and smooth and solitary. He had been told to turn up through some allotments. He would find the path, and he found it going up past a little grove of Scotch firs. He noticed a lynchet; he supposed it to be a lynchet. He climbed slowly, for the turf was dry and slippery, and the hill very steep. Four times he stopped for breath and to look about him, and to see the landscape spreading, and opening like a great green leaf. It was tranquil and splendid. A faint breeze blew.
He came to the end of the spur and noticed some old pit dwellings. And then he found the Giant’s Grave. It puzzled him. At first he took it to be part of a vallum, and only when he had climbed it and walked along its ridge did he realize that it was a Long Barrow.
He went on. The path skirted a wire fence, and he had walked about a hundred yards when a rabbit scuffled in the longish grass at the bottom of the fence. He was surprised, for the rabbit sat crouching there instead of bolting from the fatal figure of man. And then Scarsdale realized that the little beast was caught in a snare; its eyes were all red and bulgy; its flanks heaved. He bent down. The rabbit made a leap, was yanked back into stillness by the steel wire. It crouched panting. Scarsdale looked about him. There was not a soul to be seen, and kneeling down, he got hold of the wire. The loop had bitten deep into the animal’s neck, and to slacken it he had to insinuate a finger in the loop. It aggravated the construction. The little beast gurgled and choked; almost it seemed comatose and too far gone to struggle. Scarsdale’s hands trembled with excitement, but he managed to slack the noose and to slip it over the rabbit’s head.
Was it too late? He stroked the fur. The bloodshot eyes had closed, but they opened again.
“Poor bunny.”
The brown body seemed to tighten and gather itself together. The animal crawled a yard, and gave a series of little tentative leaps. It crouched for a moment, and then went bobbing over the grass, to disappear over the green shoulder of the hill.
Scarsdale stood up. He was alone with the landscape.
“Good luck, Brer Rabbit. I suppose you can be a nuisance, and that there may be too many of you just as there are too many of us.”
He strolled on a little way and then sat down on the steep slope of the hill, looking south. He could see for miles and miles, but he was not conscious of the landscape. He was thinking of that rabbit in the snare, and how instantly his compassion had gone out to the live thing, and yet—too—he had felt guilty. He had cheated a fellow-man. He had sinned against tradition.
His thinking became personal. His fingers fumbled at his soft linen collar as though to slacken it. And suddenly
he had a feeling that he too was in a snare, a noose that did not immediately throttle him because he kept still and did not struggle. Fate allowed him just a little liberty, the right to travel a yard this way and a yard that. But if he struggled, if he tried to escape, the noose would tighten and choke him. Yes, he and old Frater, and Jeans and Doble were four men with steel wires round their necks. Rabbits.
Chapter Nineteen
On returning from Wiltshire Scarsdale discovered in Miss Gall’s manner a little edge of anxiety. She met him in the hall, and offered to carry his suitcase up for him, a thing he could not allow.
“You do look brown, sir.”
“Out in the sun all day.”
“I hope you will find everything in order. We were most careful, sir, to put everything back.”
On going into his bedroom to unpack Scarsdale found the room exactly as he had left it. There were clean sheets, clean towels, and even the bottoms of the drawers had been lined with fresh white paper, and yet there was a something. He stood with his head up, almost like a stag sniffing the wind. Yes, he could detect a faint perfume that pervaded the room, and hung in the curtains and lingered around the bed. He was puzzled, until he remembered that Mr. Bartlet had spoken of Paris, and that this perfume was like the scent of a tuberose, a French essence, feminine, white faced, and delicately powdered. It stirred in Scarsdale an instinctive restlessness.
He did not ask Miss Gall any questions. When she brought him his tea she had the face of a woman who had opened windows wide, while shutting and shuttering her disapproval. Her little grey bob of hair had an austerity. She made conversation, spreading it much as she spread the clean white tablecloth.
“You must have had good weather, sir.”
“Splendid. Only one day’s rain.”
“And you walked a great deal?”
“Miles and miles. You can walk in Wiltshire.”
She left him, and he sat down to his tea, and feeling himself still provoked by that suggestive perfume, he was moved to suppose that Mr. Bartlet was in the drapery trade, and that his business friend from Paris might have been a fashion expert, a creator of frocks, or a purveyor of lingerie.
Afterwards he went out and walked, though walking in London was very different from tramping in Wiltshire. Yet, he liked his London. Especially did he feel an affection for this neighbourhood, the newness and the oldness of it, its mellow Victorian flavour. It had variety, quick contrasts, emotion, a tang and a provocation. Like the rest of the world it was changing rapidly; its very shabbiness emphasized the transmutation. It was noisier. There were streets in which the houses were peeling, shedding plaster and stucco, and exposing the naked woodwork of windows and doors. There were houses that lay and decayed like corpses. The scum of a slum atmosphere was oozing in. The people of twenty years ago had gone elsewhere, and their places had been taken by people who were dirtier and cheaper, monstrous fat women bulging in greasy ulsters, and carrying shiny black shopping bags. Yet Scarsdale could stroll along streets that remained much as he remembered them thirty years ago, such streets as Aylwin Place and St. Mary’s Road and the Grove, and Highbury New Park. And rising like a cliff on the high ground Highbury Terrace confronted all this newness, this sliming up of a new, cheap ooze, and stood unchanged, solid and clean and pleasantly selfish.
As for the Essex Road it had for Scarsdale a fascination and a horror. It made him think at times of a canal into which life had tossed haphazard decaying cabbages and orange peel and bits of bread, and rabbit skins. It clanged and clattered. It was full of the strange, cheap feverishness of the urban age. It was both frowsy and flashy. It suggested silk stockings and plump bodies that were not often washed. Sometimes to Scarsdale the Essex Road was terrifying. It was as though it presented to the eyes of the observer, not Pallas, or Artemis, but the goddess Proletaria, a monstrous lady bulging in a greasy ulster.
But on this September evening his footsteps tended towards Highbury Fields. He sat down on the familiar seat, and listened to the strange, distant uproar of the streets. In the Fields themselves hundreds of children seemed to maintain an incessant, meaningless shouting. They played in crowds. That was the strange part of it, life was a crowd affair. Crowds of shops, crowds of buses and cars, crowds of human shapes all looking as though the factory of life turned out about a dozen brands and was satisfied.
Though the Wiltshire hills remained, and would remain, a refuge to the separative few, and yet if the Essex Road were suddenly transferred to Barbury Hill its population would flee from it back to the buses and the shops. Crowd man was afraid of the open spaces; nature bored him; stars and a vastness of sky were too challenging. Better to be snug in a pub or a cinema, and avoid the divine and shining face of reality.
Strange folly!
But had he been so wise? Could he afford to despise and to pity the rabbit of Martinsell? He had put his head into nooses. Fatuous impetuosities! The Julia Marwood affair, and that cheque! She had never repaid him; she had never offered to repay him! Rather extraordinary! He had not seen her since the night when he and Harry had watched the confluence of two shadows on a blind. A romantic gesture had cost him five hundred pounds, but there had been further folly, folly of another order. A year or so ago someone had whispered to him “Buy Solfatara Oils. A dead cert. I’ve had the straight tip from the man who knows.” And Scarsdale had put three hundred pounds into “Solfatara Oils,” and had seen seven-eighths of the capital vanish in the slush of a slump.
What a rabbit!
2
Looking out of the sitting-room window next morning while waiting for Miss Gall to arrive with his coffee and bacon, Scarsdale discovered a neat little coupé drawn up opposite the door of No. 24A. The body of the car was bright blue with the wings and upper works black. A chauffeur in a blue uniform as new as the car’s paint, was giving the radiator a polish.
Miss Gall came into the room with the breakfast-tray, and Scarsdale withdrew from the window.
“Who does the car belong to?”
“Mr. Bartlet, sir. He’s using it to take him to and from his business.”
With his after-breakfast pipe alight Scarsdale resumed the year’s routine. He walked to Highbury Corner and caught the usual red bus, and as it thundered and banged along Upper Street he was moved to reflect upon the virtues of habit. The Wiltshire hills were the Wiltshire hills, and a man might dream on them for a week, or hunt earthworks and flints, and almost feel himself back in the Stone Age, but life has other urgencies. The soul of the city dweller is the soul of the city dweller, and though Scarsdale might sometimes marvel at the crowd culture, he himself belonged to it. London wore her civic crown, and round her smutty and ample skirts her children gathered. She kept them. She might wear a crown of gold and shoes and stockings of dubious texture, but she was London, immense, human, with a bosom big with milk, and in her eyes an ironic, jocund kindness.
Scarsdale felt good. He was glad to be back, most strangely glad to be back. He walked fast down the Charing Cross Road. He was making for that hutch of habit in which he and old Frater and Jeans and Doble nibbled together, and quarrelled and argued, and yet felt it to be theirs. It represented security, warmth, food, work. It was the slip of fibrous tissue in which as cells of the great organism they functioned. Scarsdale was three minutes late. The others had arrived. Old Frater was seated at his table. Jeans was scraping out the bowl of a very foul pipe. And Scarsdale’s return caused neither comment or commotion. Doble, rustling a sheaf of papers, and sniffling, did not trouble to look up.
“ ’Morning everybody.”
Old Frater’s was the only welcoming face.
“Had a good time?”
“Splendid.”
Jeans, after scraping the blade of the penknife on the window-sill, looked hard at Scarsdale. His eyes had a red-lidded cynical curiosity. He said nothing, but closed his penknife with a snap, and sat down beside Doble.
The morning started on its way. Old Frater handed over some proofs to
Scarsdale, and papers rustled and chairs squeaked, and Doble sniffed. Otherwise there was silence, and yet it was not quite the silence natural to that familiar room. It was uneasy, tense, expectant, and it seemed to express its uneasiness in the creaking chairs and in Doble’s sniffing. Scarsdale, becoming gradually aware of a strangeness in the atmosphere, glanced appraisingly at the other three. It seemed to him that Doble’s back and shoulders were heavy with depression, and that old Frater’s eyes looked worried.
The morning continued. There were comings and goings. Scarsdale’s chair had developed a hardness; it was not like Wiltshire turf. Then Jeans got up with an irritable glance at Doble, and began to fill his mephitic pipe.
“How’s the cold, Doble?”
“Haven’t god a gold.”
“You keep me fumigating. Heard the news, Scarsdale?”
“No. What’s that?”
“Calder & Pearson are buying us. Official. A nice little lottery for us.”
So that was it. The room’s uneasiness was explained. Amalgamation!
“Nothing definite,—I suppose?”
“Smart’s had notice in the ‘Publicity’, and two old duds have moved out of the ‘Accounts’.”
Almost Scarsdale felt old Frater wince.
The luncheon-hour arrived, and the three of them went forth, leaving Doble to his sandwiches. It was not a happy meal. They were uneasy; they talked uneasily, but not one of them mentioned the crisis whose shadow lay across the September day. Scarsdale noticed that old Frater lunched on a roll and butter and a cup of coffee. He was in a panic of carefulness, and he had no stomach for eggs on toast. Jeans had a tougher soul, and no incumbrances. He ate steak and kidney pudding.
Old Wine and New Page 20
