Old Wine and New

by Warwick Deeping

  His aching legs reminded him that they were weary of propping him up in the doorways of shops closed for the night. It was all very well for a melancholy soul to expect to be carried through this city meditating upon life and death, but all that Scarsdale’s muscles asked for was relaxation. They suggested to him that he had some money in his pocket, and that it was his business to find a bed. He left his doorway, and started to cross the Circus, and with the carelessness of a man absorbed in his own melancholy. There was the hoot of a horn. He glanced to the right, and saw the great red bulk of a bus right on him. His long legs became suddenly active. He bolted like a rabbit, and arrived with a sense of shock upon the opposite pavement. He realized that he had been terrified by that great snout and ponderous wheels. The soul of him had squirmed away from the horror of being crushed. Life! Yes, the urge to live was still in him.

  He found himself trembling. He turned up Shaftesbury Avenue. A woman’s figure brushed close to him, staring in his face, and he passed without being conscious of her perfume or her challenge. He turned up Wardour Street and penetrated into Soho. He walked, but he was walking with a purpose, searching for some niche into which he could insert himself for the night. The narrow and obscure streets were strange to him, but at last in the window of a high and narrow house he saw a card.

  “Beds.”

  His weariness welcomed the black letters. It might be a surreptitious and shabby house, but what did that matter. He stood on the doorstep and rang the bell.

  4

  A face appeared. The door had been opened stealthily, and the face itself had a stealthiness. It seemed to hang there in the dark entry like one of those waxy, deathlike countenances that appear in spiritistic photographs.

  Scarsdale addressed it.

  “I want a bed.”

  He got the impression that he was not expected to loiter upon the doorstep, and that the house did not encourage such loitering; it made a practice of swallowing visitors and of swallowing them quickly. The face spoke to him in English, but with a Latin flavour.

  “For one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come inside.”

  The door was closed, and for a moment there was darkness. Scarsdale heard a match rubbed against a box, and a gas jet flared, and he saw a very full-figured woman in black filling the passage. She surveyed him. She had a little black moustache, and a smeary obliging pallor.

  “You—all right?”

  Scarsdale believed so. He asked how much the bed would be, and she explained with an air of heavy familiarity that usually she received ten shillings for a bedroom, but since Scarsdale was alone she would accept three. And the money was to be paid in advance.

  He brought out some silver and counted out three shillings, and was led up two flights of stairs and shown into a back room. The gas was burning, but turned low, and the details of the room were indistinct.

  “Ver’—good room. Let you have it cheap.”

  She breathed heavily, for the bulk of her made the climbing of stairs a serious business; she seemed to breathe herself out of the room, and behind the closed door her descent was a heavy shuffle. Scarsdale turned up the gas and looked at the bed, and when he had looked at it he did not wish to undress. He spread his overcoat over the pillow, lining upwards, and sitting down on the one chair, took off his boots, and his collar and tie. He noticed that there was no key in the lock and no bolt on the door, so he wedged the back of the chair under the handle, turned out the gas and lay down.

  The bed seemed broken in the middle, but it was a bed. His tired body relaxed itself; his melancholy consented. He was on the very edge of sleep when he heard a creaking of the stairs, and voices. They sounded in the room next to him, a man’s voice and a girl’s. The man’s voice was a heavy, rumbling base. There were creakings, a little squeal of laughter, intimate murmurings. The partition wall seemed no thicker than cardboard, and Scarsdale felt a sudden anger against those two. His wakefulness protested irritably. He listened, while trying not to listen, and presently there was silence, a pause in the intimate ritual next door. He relaxed again, he dozed, he fell asleep.

  He woke again some time in the night. Again there were voices in the next room. The woman’s voice was the same, but the man’s voice was different. It was silly and rather shrill, and vinously amorous. Almost, Scarsdale could hear what it said.

  “Come on, you bit of Turkish delight.”

  His sudden anger died away into a kind of tired disgust, and presently he fell asleep again, and in spite of the provocations of that other room he slept till daylight.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The second day of Scarsdale’s sojourn in the wilderness presented him with other problems. He removed himself early of that smeary and surreptitious house, and was shaved for the sum of threepence by a little Italian barber, and spent eight-pence on his breakfast. He had some tobacco left in his pouch, and he went to smoke a pipe in the Embankment Gardens, but the wind had veered to the east and the day was grey and raw.

  Someone on the same seat, intrigued by the smell of Scarsdale’s pipe, cadged a fill from him.

  “Haven’t had a whiff for two days.”

  He crammed as much tobacco as possible into the bowl of a briar, and then borrowed Scarsdale’s matches.

  “Blasted cold this morning. Where did you doss down?”

  Scarsdale’s hand waited for the box, for matches were precious.

  “Lodging-house.”

  “Cost you something. I know a garage where the chap on night duty lets you doss down in a toff’s car for a tanner.”

  It was not the cadger who persuaded Scarsdale to go elsewhere, but the raw east wind. His meals had been scrappy, tea and bun affairs, for the last twenty-four hours, and he was feeling the cold. It seemed to trickle down his spine, and he supposed that if this second day was to be a day of sitting, it would have to be done indoors. He wandered into Charing Cross station, and tried one of the waiting-rooms, but the place was like himself, so utterly depressed, that he went elsewhere. He discovered that it was a free day at the National Gallery, and he took refuge there, and sat on one of the red plush seats. He did not look at the pictures, not even at the Duchess of Devonshire or Mrs. Siddons, for his eyes were aching, and any object that suggested colour and beauty seemed to add to his inward ache. He sat in that particular room for more than an hour, and then he got the impression that one of the attendants was watching him suspiciously, and he rose and removed himself to another room. He sat in five successive rooms until an emptiness reminded him that he would have to squander a few more pennies.

  The day dragged on. Another night was approaching, and Scarsdale’s melancholy became tinged with fear. He realized that a man’s impulse to submerge himself might soon recoil upon itself when it found itself in contact with slimy, tarnished things. He had the horror of that room upon him, and there were other horrors from which his fastidiousness shrank, even as the soul of a child shrinks from certain strange, succulent, smeary objects. A man may be more afraid of dirt than of death, and as the day drew on this liveness asserted itself. He grew restless. He went out to face the coming of the London night, and he stood a moment under the great portico. He saw the buses, and the queues waiting on the pavement, the clerks, typists and shopgirls. London was crowding home, and in him there glowed a sudden anguish, a yearning. He too wanted to go home. He wanted to feel that someone waited for him, that he mattered, that he had a corner in this distressful and thunderous city into which he could steal. Home, somewhere where a man could wash, and take off his clothes and lie down, a door that could be locked, a little silence, a friendly and familiar face.

  He was conscious of something breaking in him. It was as though the sack of his self burst open and spilled its load of melancholy upon the flagstones. His knees shook, but not with fear. He yearned. The impulse was vehement, and he did not attempt to control it. He began to walk. He walked fast and jerkily like a man moved by some inward and passionate urge. He
went up through Soho and Bloomsbury into St. John’s Street, and up the gradual ascent to Islington. He was conscious of excitement, a kind of thickness of the throat when he found himself in the Essex Road.

  He came to the flight of steps leading to the lower end of Astey’s Row. He had always thought this end of the Row ugly and bare, with its row of houses close to the New River railings. Scarsdale hurried past these houses, but as he drew towards the other end of Astey’s Row his pace slackened. He had obeyed an impulse, but now mere impulse was at an end, and he was confronting finality, a gate, a door, a person, failure, shame. What was he going to do? He realized that he had had no clear purpose in his mind; he had allowed emotion to move him, to carry him back to Eleanor Richmond’s gate.

  He came to her gate. He rested his hands on it; he looked at the dark windows, and up at the dim branches of the great plane-tree. A great yearning tempted him. He wanted to pass through that gate and open the door and go in, but something in him resisted. He felt that he could not do it, and admit to himself that he was willing to return as a self-confessed sponger, a fellow who could cadge from a woman. And from her! He stood there in anguish. A part of him was cowardly and unashamed. It could not compel the whole Scarsdale to enter, but it loitered, and hoped. If only she would come out and find him there! It was possible. If he could cling to the knees of a coincidence. He shivered with a kind of suspense. He watched the door, and his eyes stood out like the eyes of a rabbit on Martinsell Hill. He allowed his poor, beggarly self to wait at her gate, hoping and yearning.

  And suddenly he turned away and walked on. Misery overwhelmed him. Never had he known such a pang, such gulpings of despair. He crossed the Canonbury Road, and diverged along Aylwin Terrace. His legs were a mechanism carrying him along. He staggered; he brushed against railings. He felt that he was walking toward the end of things, toward a vague, obscure finality, blackness, oblivion.

  Yet, a minute after he had left the gate, the door of the little house had opened, and she had stood there looking out into the night. She had listened. It was as though she had felt the nearness of him, his hesitant, helpless anguish.

  2

  Scarsdale’s legs carried to the old familiar places. They were reminiscent legs, prosy and platitudinous and reproachful. They took him into Canonbury Square and placed him opposite Miss Gall’s house, and allowed him to look at the lighted windows, the comfortable glow that was Mr. Bartlet. They moralized. They as much as said “Had we been blessed with any sort of headpiece better than a bag of rice we should not be loafing about here in a pair of tired trousers, but being the legs of a sentimental idiot we bear what we bear. That man Bartlet knows his public. Our lord and master is a fool.”

  They moved Scarsdale on. Since he had always been such a creature of habit they considered that it was sufficient for them to carry him along the old grooves, down St. Mary’s Road and into Highbury Grove. They brought him to the Fields, but at this hour of the night the Fields were closed, and no seat was available. Scarsdale followed the railings, and in due course he came to Highbury Terrace, it’s cliff-like façade patterned with windows, some bright, some dark. He walked the length of the terrace, thinking of his luncheon seat beyond the railings, and the sparrows and the bags of buns. He returned. He found himself looking for the number of the house to which Eleanor Richmond came each day. He recognized it and paused. The house had a massive green door and a graceful white fanlight over it, and two spacious, arched lower windows. They seemed to stare blankly at Scarsdale. “We do not know you, seedy stranger.” He walked slowly on.

  But what of the night? It was November, and a ground fog had settled over the Fields, a thin mist that was sufficiently raw to make the night less sympathetic. Scarsdale felt cold, though he had arrived at that state when a man accepts the strangest of happenings, and is ready to resign himself to doorsteps. But a London doorstep was too public and too chilly, and Scarsdale discovered a lane or mews at the back of the Highbury Terrace gardens. There were dark old walls and stables and outlines of holly trees, and on the left a row of cottages set well back. This diverticulum was silent and deserted, and Scarsdale explored it, vainly imagining that some stable door might have been left open. The black hood of a van loomed up out of the darkness, and from the wall close to it a familiar aroma and a suggestion of warmth rose from a pile of steaming horse-manure which had been flung out of a stable and stacked against the wall.

  Scarsdale paused. It occurred to him that he might explore the van, and as he moved toward it a sudden voice addressed him. It was a child’s voice, solicitous and apprehensive.

  “Please, sir, we ain’t doing any ’arm here.”

  Scarsdale was astonished. He bent down, he peered.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Me, sir, and ’im.”

  Scarsdale felt for his matchbox and struck a light. He beheld a very small girl wearing spectacles cuddling a fat and solid infant on a pile of empty sacks between the manure heap and a canvas sheet that hung from the tail-board of the van. The infant was asleep. The round spectacles glimmered.

  “Oo,—I thought you was a policeman.”

  “No,—I’m not a policeman.”

  “Speak soft, sir, and don’t wake ’im.”

  The match went out. Scarsdale spoke softly.

  “That’s all right. I’m not interfering. But what are you doing here?”

  “Dad’s in drink.”

  “Oh.”

  “ ’E don’t know what ’e’s doing when ’e’s in drink. ’E broke the lamp one night. ’Taint safe to stay in the ’ouse. I brought Bert out ’ere.”

  Scarsdale was touched, and beyond his own pain.

  “Haven’t you got a mother?”

  “No. She died when Bert was born. I’m his mother.”

  Scarsdale’s nostrils were full of the pungent scent of the manure. What a sentimental occasion! The shapes of the two children were dim to him. He wondered.

  “But haven’t you any neighbours, friends?”

  “I just ’ad to do a guy, sir. Dad, ’e frightens people when ’e’s in drink. ’E’ll be all right tomorrer.”

  “But—the cold?”

  He lit another match and examined the pair of them huddled up close to that steaming heap. Then he blew out the match and took off his overcoat. He thought, “What does it matter to me? It simply doesn’t matter what happens.” In the darkness he spread the coat over the two.

  “You take this. I don’t want it. I’m out for the night too. I’m going to try this van.”

  “Oo,—thank you, sir. I’ll put it over ’im. But won’t you be wantin’ it.”

  “Not till the morning.”

  Scarsdale scrambled over the tail-board of the van. He found some straw there. It occurred to him that the two children would be warmer in the van. But no. They lay in that little nook with the pile of manure radiating heat. They had some sacks with his coat. He scraped up some of the straw and lay down.

  3

  Scarsdale did gather together some fragments of sleep, in spite of the cold and the hardness of the floor-boards. He had dreams, bad dreams. He woke up in a pit of unmentionable gloom. Once, he scrambled to his feet and lit a match and looked down at the two children, and saw that they were asleep, and completely covered by his coat. A thin vapour seemed to rise from the pile of manure. He lay down again, and in spite of his misery felt a little warmth of exultation over the lending of that coat. Youth mattered, whereas he was at the end of things, one of the very superfluous, and not like that gallant little mother in spectacles, the small madonna of the manure heap.

  He fell asleep again, as he had fallen asleep at times during the war, with a feeling of disgust at life’s hopelessness, and again he had bad dreams. He was stodging about in an icy and chaotic mud patch; his feet seemed to adhere to the squelch, and as he pulled at them his legs and back ached. And he was cold, cold to his inmost vitals. He woke again some time before dawn, and his waking state was the semblance of his dre
am transmuted into reality. His head and eyes ached, and so did his back. He was cold, but this coldness was different; it seemed part of him, in the very midst of him, and not a superficial chilliness, a stagnation of the blood in skin and feet and fingers. He understood the phrase—“Cold to the marrow.” It was as though he would never be warm again in this world.

  And suddenly he knew that he was going to be ill, and he was afraid. His aching, half-frozen body protested. It assured him with qualms of inward nausea that it had suffered sufficiently, and that it would bear no more. He sat up and felt giddy. He noticed that his overcoat was hanging over the tail-board of the van. So, the little mother in spectacles had carried “ ’im” home, and had not despoiled the stranger of his coat. Scarsdale reached for it; he put it on, and buttoned the coat up and turned up the collar. He stuffed his hands into the pockets. His teeth were chattering.

  The van became a place of horror. He realized that someone would come and find him here and perhaps make a scene, and he felt too weak and too cold and too sick for such adventures. He would try and warm himself. He got up and proceeded to scramble over the tail-board of the van, and nearly fell over it. His hands clawed at the edge. Those half-frozen members—his feet—hardly seemed capable of appreciating the solid earth. He staggered. He clutched. And then he remembered that he had left his hat inside the van; it would have to stay there; he was incapable of recovering it. It did not occur to him that the tail-board of a van could be lowered.