“Pluck be damned,” said Maurice, with a plunge into anger.
“It’ll all go no further—” He slapped his own mouth, as Maurice had done in the rain at the Russet Room window. “I don’t know what came over me, Mr. Hall. I don’t want to harm you. I never did.”
“You blackmailed me.”
“No sir, no…”
“You did.”
“Maurice, listen, I only—”
“Maurice, am I?”
“You called me Alec … I’m as good as you.”
“I don’t find you are!” There was a pause before the storm; then he burst out: “By God, if you’d split on me to Mr. Ducie, I’d have broken you. It might have cost me hundreds, but I’ve got them, and the police always back my sort against yours. You don’t know. We’d have got you into quod, for blackmail, after which—I’d have blown out my brains.”
“Killed yourself? Death?”
“I should have known by that time that I loved you.” With these words, the rows of old statues seemed to totter before their eyes. Maurice added quietly, “Too late … everything’s always too late … I don’t mean anything, but come outside, we can’t talk here.” They left the enormous and overheated building, seeking darkness and rain. On the portico Maurice stopped and said bitterly, “I forgot. Your brother.”
“He’s down at Father’s—doesn’t know a word—I was but threatening—”
“—for blackmail.”
“Could you but understand…” He pulled out Maurice’s note. “Take it if you like … I don’t want it … never did … I suppose this is the end.”
Assuredly it wasn’t that. Unable to part yet ignorant of what would come next, they strode raging through the last glimmering of the sordid day. Maurice recovered his self-control. In a deserted square, against railings that encircled some trees, they came to a halt, and he began to discuss their crisis.
But as he grew calm, Alec grew fierce. It was as if that old gentleman, Maurice’s teacher, had established, or reestablished, the infuriating inequality between them, so that he struck as soon as the other had grown tired of striking. He cried out to Maurice from the depths of his anguish, “It rained harder than this in the boathouse, it was yet colder. Why did you not come?”
“Muddle.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You’ve to learn I’m always in a muddle. I didn’t come or write because I wanted to get away from you without wanting. You won’t understand. I even got myself hypnotized to see if I could change. But in the trance you kept dragging me back and I got awfully frightened. I knew something was evil, but I couldn’t tell what, so I kept pretending it was you.”
“What was it?”
“The … situation.”
“I don’t follow. Why did you not come to the boathouse?”
“My fear—and your trouble has been fear too. Ever since the cricket match you’ve let yourself get afraid of me. That’s why we’ve been trying to down one another so, and still are.”
“I wouldn’t take a penny from you. I wouldn’t hurt your little finger,” he growled, and he rattled the bars that kept him from the trees.
“But you’re still trying hard to hurt me, in my mind.”
Alec failed to stifle his rising tears: “Why do you go and say you love me?”
“Why do you call me Maurice?”
“Oh, let’s give over talking. Here—” and he held out his hand. Maurice took it, and they knew at that moment the greatest triumph an ordinary man can win. They saw now how natural it was that their abandonment to each other at Penge should have led to peril. They knew too little about each other—and too much. Hence fear. Hence cruelty. They held and they held: their gaze at each other was steady, firm, warm as the grip of their hands.
Alec rejoiced in Maurice’s victory over him, because now his soul was free of its torment. Presently he spoke. Spasms of remorse and apology broke him; he began to tell his friend everything, no longer ashamed. He spoke of his relations. No one knew he was in London—Penge thought he was at his father’s, his father at Penge—it had been difficult, very. Now he ought to go home—see his brother with whom he would travel to Argentina, his brother connected with trade, and his brother’s wife. He came of a respectable family, he repeated, he bowed down to no man, not he, and he was as good as any gentleman. But while he bragged he took Maurice’s arm. They both deserved such a caress—the feeling was strange. Then words died away, and they stood still.
In the silence and the stillness, Alec was afraid. Then he found his courage and said, “Stop with me.”
Maurice swerved to face him. By now they were in love with each other consciously. Alec’s heart was beating violently. He said, “Sleep the night with me. I know a place.”
They were silent again, with eyes downcast. Alec was shivering, he didn’t know whether from the rain, from fear of rejection or terror of being accepted, or from his fierce longing. He glanced up at Maurice, likewise shaken, who pleaded, “I can’t, I’ve an engagement.” A formal dinner party awaited him of the sort that brought work to his firm and that he couldn’t possibly cut. Yet, with Alec beside him, he had almost forgotten its existence. “I have to leave you now and get changed. But look here: Alec, be reasonable. Meet me another evening instead—any day.”
“Can’t come to London again—Father or Mr. Ayers will be passing remarks.”
“What does it matter if they do?”
“What’s your engagement matter?”
They were silent again. Then Maurice said, “All right. To hell with it,” and they walked on together in the rain.
9
“Alec, wake up.”
An arm twitched.
“It’s time we talked plans.”
Alec snuggled closer, more awake than he pretended, warm, sinewy, happy. Happiness overwhelmed Maurice too: when he tried to speak, having Alec in his arms made him forget what he wanted to say. Light drifted in upon them from the outside world, where it was still raining. A strange hotel, a casual refuge, protected them from their enemies a little longer.
“Time to get up, boy. It’s morning.”
“Git up, then.”
“How can I, the way you hold me!”
“Aren’t yer a fidget, I’ll learn ya to fidget,” Alec said in his best parody of his own Dorset accent. He tickled and nibbled till his lover squirmed. He wasn’t deferential anymore. The British Museum had cured that. This was ’oliday, London with Maurice, all troubles over, and he wanted to drowse and waste time, to tease and make love.
Maurice wanted the same, but years ago his father’s death had made him—the oldest child, the only boy, with two younger sisters and a mother to protect—feel like the head of a family, a habit of mind he’d held on to. Now the oncoming future preoccupied him. Alec, attuned to his mood, tamed himself. The brightening light through the window began to make their coziness unreal. Something had to be said and settled. O for the night that was ending, for the sleep and wakefulness, the toughness and tenderness mixed, the sweet temper, the safety in darkness. Would such a night ever come again?
“You all right, Maurice?”—for Maurice had sighed. “You comfortable? Rest your head on me more, the way you like more … that’s it, more, and Don’t You Worry. You’re With Me. Don’t Worry.”
Alec had redeemed himself. Since throwing off the poisonous intentions, he’d been himself, honest and kind, loving and merry. “Nice, you and me like this…,” he said, their lips so close now that it was scarcely speech. “Who’d have thought … First time I ever seed you I thought, ‘Wish I and that one…’ just like that … ‘wouldn’t I and him…’ and it is so.”
“Yes, and that’s why we’ve got to fight.”
“Who wants to fight? There’s bin enough fighting.”
“All the world’s against us. We’ve got to pull ourselves together and make plans, while we can.”
“Why d’you want to go and say a thing like that for, and spoil it all?”
/> “Because it has to be said. We can’t allow things to go wrong and hurt us again the way they did down at Penge.”
“Don’t talk to me about Penge. Oo! Mah! Penge, where I was always a servant and ‘Scudder do this’ and ‘Scudder do that’ and the old lady, what do you think she once said? She said, ‘Oh, would you most kindly of your goodness post this letter for me, what’s-your-name?’ What’s-yer-name! Every day for six months I come up to Clive’s bloody front porch for orders, and his mother don’t know my name. She’s a bitch. I said to ’er, ‘What’s yer name? Fuck yer name.’ I nearly did too. Wish I ’ad too. Maurice, you wouldn’t believe how servants get spoken to. It’s too shocking for words. That Archie London you’re so set on is just as bad, and so are you, so are you. ‘Haw, my man,’ and all that. You’ve no idea how you nearly missed getting me. Near as nothing I never climbed that ladder … ‘He don’t want me really,’ and I went flaming mad when you didn’t turn up at the boathouse … a place I always fancied … got the key on me still, as a matter of fact … looking over the pond … very quiet, now and then a fish jumps, and cushions the way I arrange them…”
Having chattered himself out, he was silent. His voice died away into sadness, as though truth had risen to the surface of his pond and was unbearable.
“We’ll meet in your boathouse yet.”
“No, we won’t,” Alec wailed, like a child. He pushed Maurice away; his chest heaved mournfully; then he pulled him close, pressing their hearts together with violence, and embraced him as if the world were ending. “You’ll remember that anyway.” He got out of bed and looked down out at the grayness, his arms hanging empty. As playful as he’d been when they woke, now he was bereft. “I could easy have killed you,” he said quietly, thinking he knew not what—that death would hurt less than parting?
“Or I, you.”
Yes, of course it was true … They were as well matched for fighting as for love. Yesterday, when Maurice talked about shooting himself, his mortal rage had scared Alec. Today Alec felt it too: “Where’s my clothes and that gone?” He was dazed. “It’s so late. I h’aint got a razor even, I didn’t reckon staying the night … I ought—I got a train to catch at once or Fred’ll be thinking things.”
“Let him.”
The calm voice stopped Alec’s rummaging. He gazed at Maurice reclining on the bed, his skin glowing from their hours of love. He looked serene, confident, and satisfied, and indeed he was. His manner had changed. As Alec no longer deferred to him, so Maurice no longer patronized; rather, he spoke frankly, one friend to another. This new equality was more than Alec could endure; he went back to poking around for his clothes.
“My goodness, if Fred seed you and me just now,” he said, sounding prissy again.
“Well, he didn’t.”
“Well, he might have—” He knew he was making no sense. “What I mean is, tomorrow’s Thursday, isn’t it, Friday’s the packing of the ship, Saturday the Normannia sails from Southampton, so it’s goodbye to Old England.”
“You mean that you and I shan’t meet again after now.”
Pierced by Maurice’s sadness, Alec could not bring himself to face him, so he played cocky. “That’s right. You’ve got it quite correct.”
And if it wasn’t still raining! Wet morning after yesterday’s downpour, wet on the roofs and the museum, at home and on the greenwood. Maurice said, “This is just what I want to talk about. Why don’t we arrange so as we do meet again?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why don’t you stay on in England?”
Alec felt the floor drop away from under his feet. Terrified, he whizzed around and snarled, “Stay? Miss my boat, are you daft? Of all the bloody rubbish I ever heard. Ordering me about again, eh, you would.”
He was struggling to escape to someplace familiar and safe, where Maurice was a toff who believed it his birthright to command such a menial as Alec and was therefore worthy of contempt. But Maurice would not follow him there, indeed could not, because for him such a place no longer existed: “It’s a chance in a thousand we’ve met, we’ll never have the chance again and you know it. Stay with me. We love each other.”
Alec closed his eyes. We love each other. Not a confession, but rather a statement of fact. Maurice was speaking for both of them with an authority Alec had no wish to deny. He tried to escape once more, to argue from reason, or at least practicality, but it all sounded childish and false: “I dessay, but that’s no excuse to act silly. Stay with you, and how and where?” He picked up the hideous blue suit. “What’d your ma say if she saw me, all rough and ugly the way I am?”
In fact he appeared especially graceful at the moment, the pale light silhouetting his taut figure and glorious hair. There was a natural elegance about Alec, a refinement in his features and the shape of his limbs, not the mere vestige of adolescence, but rather a quality that would be his all his life. His beauty took Maurice’s breath now—like that of the carved image on the column from the temple at Ephesus they’d seen yesterday, Hermes guiding the soul of Eurydice to the underworld. But his beloved was infinitely more beautiful because he was alive with a bright, bright spirit. “She never will see you,” he said. “I shan’t live at my home.”
“Where will you live?”
“With you.”
“Oh, will you? No, thank you. My people wouldn’t take to you one bit, and I don’t blame them. And how’d you run your job, I’d like to know?”
“I shall chuck it.”
“Your job in the city what gives you money and position? You can’t chuck a job.”
“You can when you mean to,” said Maurice gently. “You can do anything once you know what it is.” Nothing surprised Maurice in this talk, not his own brashness nor Alec’s resistance. But who could conjecture the outcome? “I shall get work with you.”
“What work?”
“We’ll find out.”
“Find out and starve.”
“No. There’ll be enough money to keep us while we have a look round. I’m not a fool, nor are you. We won’t be starving. I’ve thought that much, while I was awake in the night and you weren’t.”
There was a pause. Alec had already decided he must refuse, so he went on more politely: “Wouldn’t work, Maurice. Ruin of us both, can’t you see, you same as myself.”
“I don’t know. Might be. Mightn’t. ‘Class.’ I don’t know. I know what we do today. We clear out of here and get a decent breakfast and we go down to Penge or whatever you want and see that Fred of yours. You tell him you’ve changed your mind about emigrating and are taking a job with Mr. Hall instead. I’ll come with you. I don’t care. I’ll see anyone, face anything. If they want to guess, let them. I’m fed up. Tell Fred to cancel your ticket, I’ll pay for it, and that’s our start of getting free. Then we’ll do the next things. It’s a risk, so’s everything else, and we’ll only live once.”
His words electrified Alec. He wanted to respond by crushing their hearts together again. But he would not succumb. He laughed cynically and continued to dress. His manner, driven by fear and mistrust, resembled yesterday’s. “Yours is the talk of someone who’s never had to earn his living,” he said. “You sort of trap me with ‘I love you’ or whatever it is and then offer to spoil my career. Do you realize I’ve a definite job awaiting me in the Argentine? Same as you’ve got here. Pity the Normannia’s leaving Saturday. Still, facts is facts, isn’t it, all my kit bought as well as my ticket and Fred and wife expecting me.”
Maurice saw through the brassiness to the misery behind it. But what did it matter? No amount of their misery would prevent the Normannia from sailing. Alec buttoned the jacket of his damned scratchy suit. He looked at his sun-browned hands. They’d grow pale, he imagined, with office work abroad. “Well, I’m off,” he said, and then added, flippantly, to seal the barrier between them, “Pity we ever met, really, if you come to think of it.”
“That’s all right too,” said Maurice, looking away from him as he
unbolted the door.
“You paid for this room in advance, didn’t you, so they won’t stop me downstairs? I don’t want no unpleasantness to finish with.”
“That’s all right too,” said Maurice again, still looking away.
In the corridor, after he’d closed the door behind him, Alec felt Maurice hoping for his return. He hurried downstairs and told the front desk that he was leaving now and the gentleman in #9 would be checking out shortly. Back out on the street, in the rain, he looked up at their window. Then his eyes began to smart, and he knew from experience what was coming. Head down, he walked as fast as he could back to St. Pancras.
10
On this particular Wednesday the Scudders opened their home to visitors; Aderyn laid her sideboard with shortbread and jams and two kinds of cordials; Elwood set out whiskey and stout. Neighbors were calling to say goodbye to the boys and Fred’s bride, Jane Atkins. Aderyn explained to her guests that her younger son, expected last night, had postponed his arrival till morning because he was needed at Penge. “Conscientious to a fault,” she bragged, with no doubt he’d be joining them shortly. But when Alec at last did appear, he was hardly looking his best: bedraggled, wet, and (granted his beard was sparse) in need of a shave. She feared he was ill. Fred frowned at his little brother’s mud-streaked trousers and unbarbered hair. Elwood took his youngest aside to ask if he’d been drinking. When Alec protested he’d had not a drop, his father suggested that perhaps a tot of rye might then be in order. Alec disappeared into his old bedroom to tidy himself. He swallowed the whiskey and made up his mind to show the villagers he could not be happier about the limitless horizons of his new life overseas.
The clouds were breaking just as the Blunts arrived—Ivanhoe, Mabel, and Phyllis, aged six months, arrayed in a satin blanket in her mother’s arms. The baby’s presence turned the cottage into an aviary of feminine chatter. The men drifted outdoors. Van and Alec strolled off together. Van slipped his arm around Alec’s waist and squeezed slyly. “You don’t seem quite yourself,” he said. “Homesick before you’ve set sail?”
Alec Page 9
