“You can’t help your damned good looks, my dear, but I need no one to tell me that this little woman is true blue.”
The young man was, he continued, in any case inadmissible owing to his appearance, general behaviour, and obscure foreign nationality, which had probably been hostile or at best neutral during the War. He even went so far as to insist that London society should be kept “all white,” a remark that brought Celia spluttering into the discussion.
“You can’t say the Greeks aren’t white, and they were a civilized nation when we were all stark naked and true blue.”
Her coarseness carried no weight. All that could be done was to ask Leila and Mab to tea, and her mother, who had heard how Celia had met Dicky at their flat, expressed a kindly hope that it might prove the thin end of the wedge. Papa formed so many objections he was apt to forget some of them ; but it was a pity Celia had rubbed in that the young man was a Greek, for Papa had never got over the fact that the Greeks didn’t come into the War at the time of Gallipoli; it might have just made all the difference.
“Well, Dicky couldn’t help that.”
“I know, dear, I know. Still, it was a pity.”
Mab was working too hard to come to tea, and Leila, who came late after her work, looked a very thin end of the wedge. There was something tired and hungry in her expression under her chic black hat. She had been going about with some people who were so fast that in trying to keep up with them she appeared to have got out of breath, for she talked in very short, staccato sentences, clipping out her words quickly, tonelessly, with an air of disgust, as though she did not wish to touch the nasty things for a moment longer than was necessary. The subject of her speech was generally praise, but this was obviated by its manner.
“My dear, it was a marvellous visit. Quite marvellous. Such marvellous food. Everything all wrong. You know. Pears filled with cream in the lobster salad and dates in honey with the chicken. Too marvellous. And the drinks. Oh, marvellous! I quite expected to find a liquorice boot-lace in my cocktail. The kind one used to get at four a penny.”
“Would you like me to put a bull’s-eye in your tea?”
“You are marvellous. Isn’t she, Mrs. Belamy? Are you sarcastic? And you look so quiet. When I saw you sitting under the table that day I thought you were just like somebody out of Cranford or Jane Austen or something.”
Celia bit her tongue to prevent her saying that she couldn’t remember anybody in the aforesaid works who sat under the table. She must remember that Leila was a great deal cleverer than herself and only talked nonsense on purpose. Leila said Dicky was quite a clever boy, but that she did not think he would ever get on—he was too lazy ; he lay for hours on that absurd divan of his, doing nothing. He had told her so. Of course, it probably wasn’t true. Celia thought it was. She could see Dicky lying there, doing nothing, dreaming he was an emperor. Perhaps, after all, it helped him to become one. She herself did thousands of things all day long, but it all led to nothing and she was no different.
The girl they had asked to meet Leila was very busy showing that she knew people quite as marvellous as Leila did. Then Ronny came in, which at once made the room seem full of far too many women, so that Celia thought regretfully of the men laid out in rows on Leila’s floor and wished she could have provided her with a like hospitality. She hoped that Leila would not bring in the word “brothel” again. Her mother might not have noticed it, as she never went to Shakespeare, and if she had, she could tell her that Leila was in a literary set which no doubt preferred the good old English words, but that would not go down with Ronny.
Always when Ronny came into a room full of people, she thought, “I am a fool. There’s nobody like him really. He is nice.” She knew it was to please her that he sank into a chair by Leila and talked to her in that lazily modest way of his as though he said, “Please amuse me ; I know you can do it so nicely.”
And Leila did amuse him. She seemed to know at once that the marvellous visits wouldn’t be any good ; she clipped her speech less drastically and no longer flicked her words disdainfully upon the air as if they were so much cigarette-ash. To Celia’s surprise she told him all about their road, what an amusing slum it was, oh yes, but an absolute slum ; they left their milk-cans at the front doors, and on hot summer evenings all the men on the first floors came out on the balcony in their shirtsleeves to look at the sunset and the caretakers’ children playing in the road.
Ronny said it sounded idyllic and asked if there were a vacant first floor for him anywhere. Leila said that the disadvantage of a first floor was that the people opposite could see right into their rooms while they were dressing, and Ronny then asked if there were a vacant first floor for him opposite.
The point of view of the First Floors was, Celia perceived, very different from the Top Floors, who were remote and inaccessible among the chimney-pots, while the First Floors were dominated by their balcony. “The same balcony runs right along the entire length of the houses,” she heard Leila say, her eyes growing large with awe. “Anybody could come along any night to any of them.” Ronny then asked if there were a vacant first floor next door.
Celia began to think it was time he varied his formula. But Leila did not take advantage of these overtures to flirtation. She went on to talk quite nicely and quietly of murder. It worried her that anybody might come along from any of the houses any night and murder any of them. And the caretakers in their basement were dreadful people, an old Irishman who had been a priest and got unfrocked and had kept a pub and was always quarrelling with his wife or the Ground Floors, “so that any day we may have a horrid common murder,” said Leila, looking more and more frightened and pathetic and appealing, as though she could put up with a refined murder with all the courage of an aristocrat on the guillotine, but could not be expected to face any murder by or of one of the lower orders.
Celia went on talking to the other girl in the dreamily sympathetic little voice that she found it convenient to put on whenever she was not thinking of what she was saying. The room around her became remote ; it was floating away so that she saw it at a great distance, through somebody else’s eyes.
Several well-dressed people sat about the room in attitudes becoming to their figures and a shaded light becoming to their complexions and ate sparingly of thin bread and butter and talked in restrained voices on polite subjects, and they none of them noticed that another room was crowding in on them, pushing them out and away, a room in which someone lay and laughed and looked at them through the wrong end of a telescope so that they became absurdly small, so small it was impossible they should really be alive.
She sat up and brushed back an imaginary lock of hair from her forehead. She had had odd fancies as a child. Was this one of them, or Dicky’s? Dicky knew that Leila had come to tea, he had mentioned it in his last letter, for those big blue crackling letters of his continued to fall like rockets into the letter-box ; she was afraid to open them at the breakfast table lest her expression should betray the explosive nature of their contents.
Dicky was probably thinking about them in this room, imagining it all exactly as it was happening. It was humiliating that they should behave so closely in accordance with someone else’s imaginings, it was almost as though the someone else had invented them, and perhaps he had, for he was alive and awake and watching them and they were all so fast asleep that they never noticed they were floating away through space, faster and faster away among a whirling multitude of worlds.
“Celia, wake up,” said her mother in a sharp whisper.
And Dicky, who was lying on his divan staring at a ceiling which should have been deep blue, starred with golden fleur-delys like the alcove above the bed of that astute and unpleasant son of France and Catherine de’ Medici who wore earrings and a turban and raw beef for the complexion at night and caressed multitudes of lap-dogs—Dicky, who was blowing into the air smoke-rings which should have been a golden ball filled with perfume tossed slowly from one hand to the
other like the ball affected by Cesare Borgia to soothe his mind to contemplation—Dicky sat up suddenly and yawned and said to himself, “This is horrible! I am bored.”
He jumped up and walked up and down the room, but it was too small. He stretched his arms above his head and they knocked against the ceiling. He went to the window and craned his neck over the balustrade to look down into an empty and silent street, dark but for the one or two pallid gas-lamps and the bright blaze of Le Coche’s windows up at the top of the road. Nobody came for him, nobody knew him, he could ring up nobody, for he could not afford a ’phone.
“I might as well be in prison,” he thought, “and deservedly, for the worst crime is poverty.”
He must get free, he must get famous, he must get rich. He would write a play that would stagger the world, but he had not yet finished his article.
London lay all round him ; the edge of the sky was red with its flames. Eight million people lived close beside him, and out of them all he knew exactly eleven, for he had often counted them up, and not one of them was amusing nor rich nor likely to be helpful in any way. Eleven. You counted in chronological order round the fingers of both hands and then the right thumb down again.
One was the fat old friend of his father’s who asked him to Sunday dinner once a month and reminded him how he used to tip him as a boy and grew very deaf when Dicky lisped out, “I’m quite a boy still, Mr. Levene.” All the same, a dinner was a dinner, and his right thumb continued to count as Mr. Levene.
And one was the cross old aunt who took snuff and had been dying for weeks but wouldn’t leave anything to Dicky when she did, so it was superfluous of her skinny elderly daughter to assure him that she would dispatch him a telegram the moment she had passed away. The old aunt had been good for a fiver at Christmas, but it would not be worth while to keep up with the cousin, so that the telegram’s only significance for Dicky would be two vacancies for his right forefinger and middle finger.
And the third finger was for the perennially grass-widow who kept a gramophone in a studio where people dropped in casually and danced carelessly and drank Serbian wine and Alsatian tea with rum in it and ate German sausage and played Russian music on the mouth-organ, but Dicky did not think it was right to be quite as foreign as all that, and the Serbian wine tasted like sweet ink, and the dancing was so careless that a girl sprained her ankle one night, and anyway he did not much care for foreigners and did not want to be taken up either by one or as one, so that he had snubbed both the English lady who had told him he was so thrillingly like a Yashmak, or perhaps she meant a Moujik, and the Slavonic-looking girl who had told him she was not being quite true to herself because she was living with an Englishman who only gave her pearls when she craved for sympathy.
“Well, I haven’t got either,” Dicky had said with quite English brutality, and advised her to stick to the pearls.
The little finger was for an actor he had met when he was in the Birmingham Repertory who sometimes sent him free seats.
The left thumb was for a musical comedy star who had been flattered by the impudence with which he had forced his way to her dressing-room and occasionally had him to supper after the show, but never to meet people, because, as she explained with engaging bonhomie, her social reputation wasn’t strong enough yet to stand his clothes.
The left forefinger and middle finger were for the Jimmys, but they wavered.
The third finger was for that man Chance down the road with whom he had chummed up in Le Coche’s shop owing to their taste in common for olives. Whenever they met there now, buying a bit of cheese or cold meat, they would enliven the dully necessary purchase by standing each other an olive.
The left little finger was for Mab and the right thumb came down again for Leila.
The right forefinger waved tentatively in the air ; he would so like to tuck it safely into his hand for Gordon, his editor in the New Day, who had taken three of his articles and had seemed rather amused with him the only time he had condescended to see him. That would count. That would mean the first forefinger on the first rung of the ladder. But though he could pretend he was Henri III or Cesare Borgia he could not pretend that he really knew Gordon.
The forefinger, however, no longer remained in the air. It came down now for Celia. She was not amusing and not really rich—just a dress allowance that had trained her to be extravagant. But she was essential to him. She burned like a steady pale flame, lighting up all sorts of unexpected corners in his mind. He did not know what sort of a mind she had herself, probably none, but that did not matter. She was just right, her clothes were part of her, even her gloves were sympathetic.
It jarred him to think of her with Leila, who wasn’t right, as he had known as soon as he began to know Celia. She hadn’t time to be, poor dear, with all her other activities, and she was too conscious of the fact that she had been born right and that made it all the more of a strain now that for one reason and another she felt she was becoming déclassée.
Dicky smiled to think that he had at first been rather impressed by Leila, that when she and Mab took the first floor he had noticed that they had nothing to do with the Jimmys Underneath and had begun to cool off himself. When Jimmy brought a wife into his two-roomed flat that showed you what he was, and though she was a jolly little thing she had a vibrant cockney accent. He had thought Jimmy rather grand till then, with his drawl and his old furniture. It all showed what a lot there was to learn and he liked learning it, he learned fast ; he was glad he was a low young man with not even one finger on the ladder, for there were all the more worlds for him to conquer.
He would make a hundred thousand out of that play. His terms would cause managers, editors, and publishers to swoon in terror, yet they would clamour for them ; his short stories would go for £1,000 each.
Kensington would fling wide her gates to him, Princes’ Gate, Queens’ Gate, and Emperors’ Gate would open their everlasting doors and the King of Glory would come in. Colonel Belamy would beg him to be his son-in-law, the exquisitely expensive Celia would be a conqueror’s spoil, and their marriage would not impede him ; he would spurn Kensington beneath his feet and march on Mayfair.
New York would bow her head beneath his yoke, the Americas would be subject once again to slavery, Paris would be his plaything, over Germany he would cast out his film rights.
But he had not yet finished that article.
Chapter VIII
It was no use. He could not write in this state of uncertainty. Leila might come back at any moment. There was just a chance that Celia might come back with her. He could not write. If he stayed any longer staring down into the street he would throw himself over the parapet and there would be another suicide in Rainbow Road, for a man in a top floor had done that just lately. He had heard the fat caretaker next door telling someone in the road about it when, enormous, rheumatic, wrapped in a red shawl, she heaved herself up the area steps like the hippopotamus in the Zoo coming up out of its tank. But she did not happen to mention whether the young man had committed suicide because he had no decent clothes and no ’phone and only knew eleven people in London.
He came away from the window and walked up and down his room. He went into his bedroom, which just held a camp-bed and a square attic window full of sparkling night sky, and a cracked mirror enclosing the Portrait of a Sad Young Man and the washstand that he had bought for half a crown in the New Cut and painted scarlet with a pot of enameline that had run out just as he was finishing and it had not been worth while to buy another, so that the fourth scarlet leg showed a darkly varnished foot with a sinister suggestion of a cloven hoof.
Whether in the dark or the light there was nothing to console him in the bedroom ; it was a beastly hole.
“Here I keep my dreams,” he murmured, sitting on the camp-bed, which creaked in expostulation ; but he knew it was not true, for he kept them in the other room, and was always sound asleep as soon as he had rolled into bed. Even in his most yearning moments,
he could never manage to hatch his dreams in the Celtic Twilight Sleep home. It was disconcerting not to know yet what sort of writer he really was.
What was that step on the stairs? It wasn’t for the First Floors ; it had gone past them. It wasn’t for the Second Floors ; it had gone past them. Someone was coming for him, someone that the Ground Floors had let in for the only time in their aloof and concentrated lives. With the spring of a jack-in-the-box he was out of his bedroom and hanging over the banisters to see, dark against the gas-jet below, a head from which issued two prongs like the horns of a snail.
It was only the caretaker In curling-pins and a sage-green blouse imperfectly confined by her skirt, she peered up at him through the bars of the banisters as a lean and hungry soul in Hell might address God.
“Excuse me, sir, but if I might ask you——”
“Come up, come up, Mrs. McCarthy,” came the eager welcome which betrayed the loneliness of divinity. He was thankful to talk to anyone ; besides, any moment he might draw a plum. Last time she had said, “Those First Floors now, they’re a good hot cup o’ tea.” Leila had been quite offended when he told her ; you never knew when Leila was going to remind you that her father had been an admiral.
“What’s McCarthy been doing now?” he asked ingratiatingly. “Have you caught him under the sofa again at the old girl’s next door?”
“Oh no, sir ; and mind you I never said there was anything in that beyond drink and low company. Mrs. Page next door lets down the whole road she does, going about in a shawl all the time even when she goes to the pub ; and Mr. McCarthy being an Irishman may like a drop occasionally, but he never forgets that he’s a defrocked priest. But those Ground Floors——”
He must get her off the Ground Floors. What he wanted to hear about was the first of his predecessors in the house, a young actor on the Second Floor who used to bring home parties from the theatre and play the piano till four o’clock, and when Mrs. McCarthy came up in the morning to do for him, there they all was lying about in arm-chairs most disgraceful. But she had had a tenderness for the actor, and all the other caretakers round had too, he had such curly red hair he had and he used to sing in his bath so that you heard him in the back-yards you did, and when he went to the War they all clubbed together to buy him a lucky charm, but he was killed all the same, poor young gentleman.
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