God's Sparrows

by Philip Child

  “Shall I see you off?”

  “No. Better not to.”

  “Why not, Dan?”

  “Too bittersweet. I’m restless. I’m better out of London. I think I’ll go back tomorrow.”

  Her mouth drooped.

  They passed the British Museum, where the problems of former men and women long since terminated, for good or ill, in dust, lingered on coldly and peacefully recorded in marble and print.

  “Beatrice, the old man on the bus was right and so, in his way, was that fakir, Teti. We have two more streets to pass and then we’ll have to say goodbye.… Have you thought — it’s a long voyage to take alone. Matt was a fine fellow; he wouldn’t want you to go through life as if it were a desert.”

  She put her clenched hands to her forehead. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “All right. I understand how you feel about it, Beatrice. We’d better say goodbye now.”

  She did not want to say goodbye. There are some arguments you support against your will; only when you have won them do you realize how much you wanted to lose them. “What’s the good of it,” she thought, “this will make us both unhappy.” She tucked his arm in hers and by looking at him in a certain way made it impossible for him to go. She said:

  “Do you like me less now?”

  “No. I think you are logical as blazes. Your head rules your heart. I’d no idea women were so cold blooded.”

  “That’s not true! … Supposing I’d said I would marry you and we had got married before you went back, would it have made a difference?”

  “Beatrice, you’ve got a devil in you. I wish I weren’t what I am. I’d take you somewhere and make you pay for asking me that.”

  “Don’t be bitter. I have a reason for asking.”

  “Well, why do you want to twist the knife in the wound? Is it fun?”

  “No, it isn’t fun. I think people get like this when they want each other and don’t.… Would it make a difference? Please tell me.”

  “You’re not stupid, Beatrice. You know how it would. I could always think of you as if you belonged to me. We would be one flesh, you know.”

  “I think it might be worse, then. We wouldn’t be together.”

  “It would be worse, but it would be better, too.”

  “Are you going to walk back to the hotel, Dan?”

  He stared at Beatrice in amazement. “I suppose so. But that’s a queer question. Why did you ask me that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Yes, I do. I want to think of what you’re doing. When you leave London the day after tomorrow I won’t know anymore, then it will be finished. Will you kiss me, Dan?”

  “Yes. Then you step over the doorstep. I shan’t pass the doorstep. That’s the easiest way.”

  “No. You won’t pass the doorstep, Dan. I understand that.”

  They kissed and Beatrice went past the doorstep. Strangely, her eyes were shining.

  Dan groaned. “Oh, my God! I wish we hadn’t.”

  “Goodbye, Dan.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He went without looking back. That was the best way. On the way back to the hotel, he did not notice people or things. They were simply shut off in another world.

  He went to the desk for mail. There was a letter from Alastair.

  The clerk smiled at him sleekly: “Mrs. Thatcher has just arrived, sir. Did you miss her at the station? She went up to your room.”

  Dan dropped Alastair’s letter and fumbled, picking it up. The clerk looked sympathetic. He thought he understood the situation. “I told them you would be wanting dinner, sir. I knew you would be back immediately.”

  “Thanks,” Dan mumbled.

  He went upstairs. He knocked at the door and went in.

  A table was set for two. Flowers on the table; a fire in the grate.… She was sitting in a Morris chair by the window. She stood up, looking at him tautly with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Do you know what you’re doing, Beatrice?”

  “Dan, please, be nice to me.”

  With an effort he made his voice sound satirical. “There is one small thing about me you don’t seem to have thought of, Beatrice. Forgive the heroics, but I’m supposed to be a gentleman.”

  She flinched as if he had struck her. “That’s brutal, Dan! What does all that matter between you and me? Why should you have scruples if I haven’t? It is not wrong. Who cares a rap about us, and whom could we hurt except ourselves? I’m lonely. I want to be loved. Let’s just be happy and not think .”

  Dan walked to the window and looked out. You could hear the hum of the Strand below them. People going to theatres. He took out his cigarette case and put it back. Silly thing to do! He could see her satchel on the floor. When he knocked, she must have been looking for something in it — a box of cigarettes, perhaps. It lay open and he could see flimsy things inside it.… He did not want to look at her yet.

  He said, trying to smooth agitation from his voice, “It isn’t too late yet. Let’s do this the right way, Beatrice. You’re a nice girl and I’m not a cad.… We’d be sorry after the war if we didn’t.”

  Beatrice turned from him and sat down, staring moodily into the fire. It was as if she realized she had lost. “There isn’t any ‘after the war.’ Not for me anyway.… You want to make me into something I can’t be. I’ve told you, Dan. I loved Matt and I’ve never got over it and I never will. That’s why I won’t marry you. I have a conscience, too. I’m not just being a loose woman.”

  Scourging himself to anger, he said harshly: “I’m to fall in love with you; we’re to love each other — after a fashion. Then we are to say goodbye politely and think of something else. Is that it?”

  She gasped and they stared at each other, each seeing a stranger. Why was he saying these things? He felt as if someone other than he was uttering his thoughts. But he could not check the words that poured forth bitterly.

  “You are hugging a dream. It isn’t natural for a living human being to go on crying over spilt milk for the rest of her life. It’s morbid. Matt was a fine chap. Better than me, perhaps. But he is jolly well dead. And death’s something you can’t get over. After all these years, you don’t still love him as you did. You only think you do.… And what’s more, Beatrice, if you liked me well enough to become my mistress — well, that’s the word for it, isn’t it? — then you’d like me well enough to marry me.”

  Beatrice gazed at the luckless young man who had spoken his mind to a woman; she gazed at him with hate.

  “That’s enough! That’s quite enough! Now you are being a cad!”

  They were at cross purposes and at the mercy of one of those antagonisms that arise between a man and a woman when they desire each other and when the desire has not been fulfilled.

  After a moment her hand fluttered into the crook of his elbow. “Hopeless, isn’t it, Dan? I can’t reach you. You’ve a right to feel like that if you want to. I can see that. Now we’d better really say goodbye.… No, don’t come down with me. I want to say it here.… We’d better not kiss. You turn and look through the window and say goodbye, and I’ll say it, too. Then, when you turn round again, I’ll be gone.”

  “I’m sorry, Beatrice. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m half-crazy , I think.”

  They said goodbye. From her voice he could tell she was crying. When he turned round, she was gone.…

  The telephone rang: “About your dinner, sir?” asked a smooth voice.

  “You can eat it yourself if you like.”

  “I beg pardon, sir?”

  Dan slammed the receiver on the hook.… The flowers on the table. He took them and hurled them into the fire. His face twisted and he groaned: “Goddamn it all! Goddamn it to hell!”

  V

  In the inner confessional of the mind, Dan fought obstinately
to retain the comfort of bitterness against Beatrice. “What if I misunderstood her motives? … Her motives? Quite cynical. She justified herself with a lot of balderdash about making me happy. Lot she cared about me! She loved Matt and she wanted an affair with me because she hadn’t the pluck to go on facing the loss of him. She’s a coward.”

  He was in a thoroughly evil mood.

  “Damn women! You go along a London street and you pass a lot of them. You pass them and they look at you for an instant or not at all, and it makes the world seem pretty damned unreal.… What am I doing with myself, anyhow, these days? Nothing. I am simply standing still waiting for d—

  “I won’t say that! Father despised a man who pitied himself.

  “Waiting for death to come along and pluck my sleeve. I ought to come to my senses. Sound phrase, that!”

  He had a ticket for the Shaftesbury Theatre, but discontented, he left after the first act and decided to walk back to the hotel. Coventry Street was crowded with men in uniform from the four corners of the Empire and from the allied armies. A tentative butterfly touch on his arm and a voice breathed out of the darkness: “Are you lonely tonight?” He put his head down and ploughed on. A restaurant door, opening, poured light over passersby. He caught a glimpse of a small, dapper Chinese, in a grey felt hat and horn-rimmed glasses, looking like a pet mouse, talking with a prostitute. Darkness absorbed them, and from it, the woman’s voice floated back to him: “Jesus! Did you see him looking at us?” and a reckless laugh. It seemed to his inflamed senses that everywhere sex confronted him.

  He went back to the hotel and sat in the lounge watching people living their lives about him. He, sitting alone, shared his mood with too much drink. Without altering his mood, it made him reckless.

  About midnight the sirens sounded a warning and gunfire began to the east and south. At first it was faint, but soon the anti-aircraft barrage swept over the sleeping roofs of London in swift onslaught. An air raid suited his mood. In the deserted streets, walking alone in a tempest of sound, lust would exhaust itself beneath the battering of impersonal violence.

  He went through the swing door of the hotel, in spite of the commissionaire’s protest, just as the last pedestrians came scurrying in from the street. Maroons were bursting red and green in the sky. Police whistles rose above the prolonged drumming of gunfire. Belated taxis were drawn up at the curb and deserted by their drivers. Spent shrapnel bullets pattered onto the sidewalk, and now and then the sharp explosion of a gun, fired from a roof somewhere nearby, cracked sharply above the drumming of the barrage. Shells burst high up and swirled momentarily in little whirligigs of light. Searchlights probed the sky with delicate fluttering fingers, intersecting, disengaging, sweeping from horizon to horizon. The flashes of guns firing danced over the city like flitting marsh lights; Dan could see them over the line of roofs and on the skyline at the end of the long corridor of the Strand.

  Presently, he heard someone approaching. The sound was the staccato footfall of high heels: a woman, then. But she was not walking fast. At night, he ruminated, women usually walked clip-clop , clip-clop , at the speed of a quick heartbeat, as if they were afraid of being accosted. Somebody who was tired.… Her figure loomed before him: a woman bent forward with her eyes on the ground, walking as if in a daze. She did not see him.

  Just as she came abreast of him, something mortal cleaved the air and close! — hurtling down with a vicious yaup . It smote the street and sent bits of cobblestone whirring through the air to whack against the walls of houses. Dan flinched and then laughed aloud. It was a dud shell. “I’ve gone soft after a fortnight’s leave.”

  But the woman was terrified. She stumbled and Dan caught her as she fell. She struggled and fought him and began to sob and scream hysterically.

  “Are you hit? Are you hit?”

  He saw that she was not hurt; simply frightened out of her wits and hysterical. He shook her and said brutally: “Stop that! You’re not hurt.… What are you doing out?” he asked her when she had become calmer.

  After an instant she answered him, her voice was sullen, a little hoarse. “I’ve got to earn my livin’ same as anyone else, mister.”

  “I see,” said Dan.

  The girl — a quality in her voice told him she was young — leaned her head back and relaxed her body against his. “I can’t stand looking up with them things bursting up there. It seems like the whole sky is falling on you.” The hysteria caught hold of her again.

  “Stop it! Stop that, do you hear!”

  It was no time for a woman, any woman, to be out, Dan thought. He could not blame her for being terrified, but somehow her craven fear, that shameless shrieking, had disgusted him.

  She seemed to feel his disgust. “Yes, I was afraid. I can’t stand them things coming down from the sky.”

  “You’ll be right enough now; the shelling has died down a bit. Where do you live? I’d better see you home.”

  That struck her as amusing and she began to laugh. “Yes, you’d better, sweetheart. Someone might molest me.… I don’t mind it with a roof over me head. It’s when they come down out of the sky, naked, like. The sky’s kind of big when it’s dark with them things. It’s kind of big. It’s kind of big —”

  “Now don’t start that again.”

  “I won’t. I’m all right.”

  She walked beside him, not offering to talk, and he for his part, though it was ridiculous not to be able to talk to her simply as if she were a human being, could think of nothing to say. The touch of her body clinging to him with fright had whipped desire to life. He said politely, and his voice sounded unnatural in his own ears:

  “The air raids must be hard on Londoners.”

  She gave him a quick, sidelong look.

  “Oh, it isn’t so bad. I was in Paris all summer and that was worse. They had air raids there, too. And it seems worse, somehow, when people are jabbering at you in French; makes you feel a stranger, like. So I packed me things and nipped back to London. I don’t hold with the French, anyhow. Stingy beasts, that’s what they are.”

  She stopped before a short flight of steps leading to a door with a polished brass doorknob — a respectable looking place, Dan thought — and began to fumble in her purse for a latchkey. She found it and opened the door into a dark hall. She turned her head over her shoulder and said in a different voice: “Well, here we are. Coming in?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say: “No. Goodnight.” But he waited too long and found himself inside, and the door closing behind them muffled down the barrage to a duller rumble.

  “We’re safe here. A roof makes all the difference, don’t it? But my sister doesn’t know that. She goes crazy when the guns start.”

  He followed her up a narrow flight of stairs into a room lit by gas. Naively, he expected the room to look sordid. It did not. It was simply a lower-middle-class room. On the wall was a lithograph of a little girl and a dog in garish colours. There was a chest of drawers with one of the knobs off and a walled-in mantelpiece whose sole function was to uphold a dish of wax fruit. A door led into another room.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Don’t you like my room? Sit on the bed. Ain’t it soft?”

  “It’s all right. I was wondering what had become of the framed text, ‘God bless our home.’”

  “That’s better. Now you’re gay.”

  Madam Wanton, when he looked her full in the face, was not alluring. Her face was young, but the woman had fled from her eyes and she had a prostitute’s mouth, raddled and set hard in the harlot’s curve, as if disgust had been permanently etched upon it.

  “’Ere. What’s the matter with me? What’s in your gentleman’s mind, I’d like to know?” She gave him a look and began to laugh. “I thought you were a regular babe, at first. Well, don’t mind me, officer. I’ll like what you like and give you wo
rse.” Her look threw mud on their common humanity.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gipsy, they call me. But I ain’t really a gipsy. Lily’s my name. I don’t hold no truck with gipsies. Dirty people without no home of their own.”

  She sat on the side of the bed murmuring a lewd song about Adam and Eve sitting on the grass. Her eyes invited him to defile the spirit shamefully — and like it.

  He cried, “Shut up!” with a burst of sudden rage he could not account for.

  “Now, then! Mr. Impatient!”

  Then, not far away, there was a loud crash. He had completely forgotten the air raid which, suddenly, seemed to resent having been overlooked. There was another crash so near them that Dan could hear the whine and patter of falling debris. The windows rattled in their casements, and somewhere in the house, glass tinkled from a window broken by the blast. The sharp sound of a girl’s voice shrieking with sudden fear came from the room beyond the closed door. Without explaining or turning to look back at him, Lily ran to the door, swung it open, and banged it shut behind her. Dan had time to see a bed on which sat a trembling girl who looked about twelve.

  Her cries subsided almost at once to a whimpering, and he could hear Lily’s voice in a soothing murmur. There was another salvo of crashes, far off this time. No further danger; they seldom dropped two in the same place.

  After about ten minutes the girl quieted down, and presently, the door opened and Lily reappeared looking back through the door as she closed it.

  “Who’s that?” asked Dan.

  “My sister. She’s that frightened of air raids. Makes her sick at her stomick. She ain’t strong.” She put up her hand to her forehead and rubbed it as if to clear her mind. “Sometimes I really wonder what we are all coming to. Reely, I do. This war.… I’m sorry, sir, I ’aven’t been givin’ you much of a time, ’ave I?” Her tone, thought Dan, was positively that of an apologetic shopgirl. Visibly, she pulled herself together. “Jesus,” she said, “let’s have a drink!”