Buch lesen: «A Bed of Roses», Seite 12

Farwell rose abruptly and left Victoria singularly stirred. He was a personality, she felt; something quite unusual. He was less a man than a figment, for he seemed top heavy almost. He concentrated the hearer's attention so much on his spoken thought that his body passed unperceived, receded into the distance.

While Victoria was changing to go, the staff room somehow seemed darker and dirtier than ever. It was seldom swept and never cleaned out. The management had thoughtfully provided nothing but pegs and wooden benches, so as to discourage lounging. Victoria was rather late, so that she found herself alone with Lizzie, the cashier. Lizzie was red-haired, very curly, plump, pink and white. A regular little spark. She was very popular; her green eyes and full curved figure often caused a small block at the desk.

'You look tired,' she said good-naturedly.

'I suppose I am,' said Victoria. 'Aren't you?'

'So so. Don't mind my job.'

'Mm, I suppose it isn't so bad sitting at the desk.'

'No,' said Lizzie, 'pays too.'

'Pays?'

Lizzie flushed and hesitated. Then the desire to boast burst its bonds. She must tell, she must. It didn't matter after all. A craving for admiration was on her.

'Tell you what,' she whispered. 'I get quite two and a kick a week out of that job.'

Victoria's eyebrows went up.

'You know,' went on Lizzie, 'the boys look at me a bit.' She simpered slightly. 'Well, once one of them gave me half a bar with a bob check. He was looking at me in the eye, well! that mashed, I can tell you he looked like a boiled fish. Sort of inspiration came over me.' She stopped.

'Well?' asked Victoria, feeling a little nervous.

'Well.. I.. I gave him one half crown and three two bob pieces. Smiled at him. He boned the money quick enough, wanted to touch my hand you see. Never saw it.'

Victoria thought for a moment. 'Then you gave him eight and six instead of nine shillings?'

'You've hit it. Bless you, he never knew. Mashed, I can tell you.'

'Then you did him out of sixpence?'

'Right. Comes off once in three. Say "sorry" when I'm caught and smile and it's all right. Never try it twice on the same man.'

'I call that stealing,' said Victoria coldly.

'You can call it what you like,' snarled Lizzie. 'Everything's stealing. What's business? getting a quid for what costs you a tanner. I'm putting a bit extra on my wages.'

Victoria shrugged her shoulders. She might have argued with Lizzie as she had once argued with Gertie, but the vague truth that lurked in Lizzie's economics had deprived her of argument. Could theft sometimes be something else than theft? Were all things theft? And above all, did the acceptance of a woman's hand as bait justify the hooking of a sixpence?

As Victoria left for home that night she felt restless. She could not go to bed so soon. She walked through the silent city lanes; meeting nothing, save now and then a cat on the prowl, or a policeman trying doors and flashing his bull's eye through the gratings of banks. The crossing at Mansion House was still busy with the procession of omnibuses converging at the feet of the Duke of Wellington. Drays, too heavily loaded, rumbled slowly past towards Liverpool Street. She turned northwards, walked quickly through the desert. At Liverpool Street station she stopped in the blaze of light. A few doors away stood a shouting butcher praying the passers-by to buy his pretty meat. Further: a fishmonger's stall, an array of glistening black shapes on white marble, a tobacconist, a jeweller – all aglow with coruscating light. And over all, the blazing light of arc lamps, under which an unending stream of motor cabs, lorries, omnibuses passed in kaleidoscopic colours. In the full glare of a lamp post stood a woman, her feet in the gutter. She was short, stunted, dirty and thin of face and body. Round her wretched frame a filthy black coat was tightly buttoned; her muddy skirt seemed almost falling from her shrunken hips. Crushed on her sallow face, hiding all but a few wisps of hair, was a battered black straw hat. With one arm she carried a child, thin of face too, and golden-haired. On its upper lip a crusted sore gleamed red and brown. In her other hand she held out a tin lid, in which were five boxes of matches.

Victoria looked at the silent watcher and passed on. A few minutes later she remembered her and a fearful flood of insight rushed upon her. The child? Then this, this creature had known love? A man had kissed those shrivelled lips. Something like a thrill of disgust ran through her. That such things as these could love and mate and bear children was unspeakable; the very touch of them was loathsome, their love akin to unnatural vice.

As she walked further into Shoreditch the impression of horror grew on her. It was not that the lanes and little streets abutting into the High Street were full of terrors when pitch dark, or more sinister still in the pale yellow light of a single gas lamp; the High Street itself, filled with men and women, most of them shabby, some loudly dressed in crude colours, shouting, laughing, jostling one another off the footpath was more terrible, for its joy of life was brutal as the joy of the pugilist who feels his opponent's teeth crunch under his fist.

At a corner, near a public house blazing with lights, a small crowd watched two women who were about to fight. They had not come to blows yet; their duel was purely Homeric. Victoria listened with greedy horror to the terrible recurrence of half a dozen words.

A child squirmed through the crowd, crying, and caught one of the fighters by her skirt.

'Leave go.. I'll rive the guts out 'o yer.'

With a swing of the body the woman sent the child flying into the gutter. Victoria hurried from the spot. She made towards the West now, between the gin shops, the barrows under their blazing naphtha lamps. She was afraid, horribly afraid.

Sitting alone in her attic, her hands crossed before her, questions intruded upon her. Why all this pain, this violence, by the side of life's graces? Could it be that one went with the other, indissolubly? And could it be altered before it was too late, before the earth was flooded, overwhelmed with pain?

She slipped into bed and drew the horsecloth over her ears. The world was best shut out.

CHAPTER XXII

Thomas Farwell collected three volumes from his desk, two pamphlets and a banana. It was six o'clock and, the partners having left, he was his own master half an hour earlier than usual.

'You off?' said the junior from the other end of the desk.

'Yes. Half an hour to the good.'

'What's the good of half an hour,' said the youth superciliously.

'No good unless you think it is, like everything else,' said Farwell. 'Besides, I may be run over by half past six.'

'Cheerful as ever,' remarked the junior, bending his head down to the petty cash balance.

Farwell took no notice of him. Ten times a day he cursed himself for wasting words upon this troglodyte. He was a youth long as a day's starvation, with a bulbous forehead, stooping narrow shoulders and narrow lips; his shape resembled that of an old potato. He peered through his glasses with watery eyes hardly darker than his grey face.

'Good night,' said Farwell curtly.

'Cheer, oh!' said the junior.

Farwell slammed the door behind him. He felt inclined to skip down the stairs, not that anything particularly pleasant had happened but because the bells of St Botolph's were pealing out a chime of freedom. It was six. He had nothing to do. The best thing was to go to Moorgate Street and take the books to Victoria. On second thoughts, no, he would wait. Six o'clock might still be a busy time.

Farwell walked down the narrow lane from Bishopsgate into St. Botolph's churchyard. It was a dank and dreary evening, dark already. The wind swept over the paths in little whirlwinds. Dejected sparrows sought scraps of food among the ancient graves where office boys munch buns and read of woodcarving and desperate adventure. He sat down on a seat by the side of a shape that slept, and opened one of the books, though it was too dark to read. The shape lifted an eyelid and looked at him.

Farwell turned over the pages listlessly. It was a history of revolutionists. For some reason he hated them to-day, all of them. Jack Cade was a boor, Cromwell a tartuffe, Bolivar a politician, Mazzini a theorist. It would bore Victoria.

Farwell brought himself up with a jerk. He was thinking of Victoria too often. As he was a man who faced facts he told himself quite plainly that he did not intend to fall in love with her. He did not feel capable of love; he hated most people, but did not believe that a good hater was a good lover.

'Clever, of course,' he muttered, 'but no woman is everlastingly clever. I won't risk finding her out.'

The shape at his side moved. It was an old man, filthy, clad in blackened rags, with a matted beard. Farwell glanced at him and turned away.

'I'd have you poisoned if I could,' he thought. Then he returned to Victoria. Was she worth educating? And supposing she was educated, what then? She would become discontented, instead of brutalised. The latter was the happier state. Or she would fall in love with him, when he would give her short shrift. What a pity. A tiny wave of sentiment flowed into Farwell's soul.

'Clever, clever,' he thought, 'a little house, babies, roses, a fox terrier.'

'Gov'nor,' croaked a hoarse voice beside him.

Farwell turned quickly. The shape was alive, then, curse it.

'Well, what d'you want?'

'Give us a copper, gov'nor, I'm an old man, can't work. S'elp me, Gawd, gov'nor, 'aven't 'ad a bite..'

'That'll do, you fool,' snarled Farwell, 'why the hell don't you go and get it in gaol?'

'Yer don't mean that, gov'nor, do yer?' whined the old man, 'I always kep my self respectable; 'ere, look at these 'ere testimonials, gov'nor,.' He drew from his coat a disgusting object, a bundle of papers tied together with string.

'I don't want to see them,' said Farwell. 'I wouldn't employ you if I could. Why don't you go to the workhouse?'

The old man almost bridled.

'Why? Because you're a stuck up. D'you hear? You're proud of being poor. That's about as vulgar as bragging because you're rich. If you and all the likes of you went into the House, you'd reform the system in a week. Understand?'

The old man's eyes were fixed on the speaker, uncomprehending.

'Better still, go and throw any bit of dirt you pick up at a policeman,' continued Farwell. 'See he gets it in the mouth. You get locked up. Suppose a million of the likes of you do the same, what d'you think happens?'

'I dunno,' said the old man.

'Well, your penal system is bust. If you offend the law you're a criminal. But what's the law? the opinion of the majority. If the majority goes against the law, then the minority becomes criminal. The world's upside down.' Farwell smiled. 'The world's upside down,' he said softly, licking his lips.

'Give us a copper for a bed, guv'nor,' said the old man dully.

'What's the good of a bed to you?' exploded Farwell. 'Why don't you have a drink?'

'I'm a teetotaller, guv'nor; always kep' myself respectable.'

'Respectable! You're earning the wages of respectability, that is death,' said Farwell with a wolfish laugh. 'Why, man, can't you see you've been on the wrong tack? We don't want any more of you respectables. We want pirates, vampires. We want all this society of yours rotted by internal canker, so that we can build a new one. But we must rot it first. We aren't going to work on a sow's ear.'

'Give us a copper, guv'nor,' moaned the old man.

Farwell took out sixpence and laid it on the seat. 'Now then,' he said, 'you can have this if you'll swear to blow it in drink.'

'I will, s'elp me Gawd,' said the old man eagerly.

Farwell pushed the coin towards him.

'Take it, teetotaller,' he sneered, 'your respectable system of bribery has bought you for sixpence. Now let me see you go into that pub.'

The old man clutched the sixpence and staggered to his feet. Farwell watched the swing doors of the public bar at the end of the passage close behind him. Then he got up and walked away; it was about time to go to Moorgate Street.

As he entered the smoking-room, Victoria blushed. The man moved her, stimulated her. When she saw him she felt like a body meeting a soul. He sat down at his usual place. Victoria brought him his tea, and laid it before him without a word. Nelly, lolling in another corner, kicked the ground, looking away insolently from the elaborate wink of one of the scullions.

'Here, read these,' said Farwell, pushing two of the books across the table. Victoria picked them up.

'Looking Backwards?' she said. 'Oh, I don't want to do that. It's forward I want to go.'

'A laudable sentiment,' sneered Farwell, 'the theory of every Sunday School in the country, and the practice of none. However, you'll find it fairly soul-filling as an unintelligent anticipation. Personally I prefer the other. Demos is good stuff, for Gissing went through the fire.'

Victoria quickly walked away. Farwell looked surprised for a second, then saw the manageress on the stairs.

'Faugh,' he muttered, 'if the world's a stage I'm playing the part of a low intriguer.'

He sipped his tea meditatively. In a few minutes Victoria returned.

'Thank you,' she whispered. 'It's good of you. You're teaching me to live.'

Farwell looked at her critically.

'I don't see much good in that,' he said, 'unless you've got something to live for. One of our philosophers says you live either for experience or the race. I recommend the former to myself, and to you nothing.'

'Why shouldn't I live for anything?' she asked.

'Because life's too dear. And its pleasures are not white but piebald.'

'I understand,' said Victoria, 'but I must live.'

'Je n'en vois pas la nécessité,' quoted Farwell smiling. 'Never mind what that means,' he added, 'I'm only a pessimist.'

The next few weeks seemed to create in Victoria a new personality. Her reading was so carefully selected that every line told. Farwell knew the hundred best books for a working girl; he had a large library composed mostly of battered copies squeezed out of his daily bread. Victoria's was the appetite of a gorgon. In another month she had absorbed Odd Women, An Enemy of the People, The Doll's House, Alton Locke, and a translation of Germinal. Every night she read with an intensity which made her forget that March chilled her to the bone; poring over the book, her eyes a few inches from the candle, she soaked in rebellion. When the cold nipped too close into her she would get up and wrap herself in the horsecloth and read with savage application, rushing to the core of the thought. She was no student, so she would skip a hard word. Besides, in those moods, when the spirit bounds in the body like a caged bird, words are felt, not understood.

Betty was still hovering round her, a gentle presence. She knew what was going on and was frightened. A new Victoria was rising before her, a woman very charming still, but extraordinary, incomprehensible. Often Victoria would snub her savagely, then take her hand as they stood together at the counter bawling for food and drink. And as Victoria grew hard and strong, Betty worshipped her more as she would have worshipped a strong man.

Yet Betty was not happy. Victoria lived now in a state of excitement and hunger for solitude. She took no interest in things that Betty could understand. Their Sunday walks had been ruthlessly cut now and then, for the fury was upon Victoria when eating the fruits of the tree. When they were together now Victoria was preoccupied; she no longer listened to the club gossip, nor did she ask to be told once more the story of Betty's early days.

'Do you know you're sweated?' she said suddenly one day.

Betty's eyes opened round and blue.

'Sweated,' she said. 'I thought only people in the East End were sweated.'

'The world's one big East End,' snapped Victoria.

Betty shivered. Farwell might have said that.

'You're sweated if you get two pounds a week,' continued Victoria. 'You're sweated when you buy a loaf, sweated when you ride in a bus, sweated when they cremate you.'

'I don't understand,' said Betty.

'All profits are sweated,' quoted Victoria from a pamphlet.

'But people must make profits,' protested Betty.

'What for?' asked Victoria.

'How are people to live unless they make profits?' said Betty. 'Aren't our wages profits?'

Victoria was nonplussed for a moment and became involved. 'No, our wages are only wages; profit is the excess over our wages.'

'I don't understand,' said Betty.

'Never mind,' said Victoria, 'I'll ask Mr Farwell; he'll make it clear.'

Betty shot a dark blue glance at her.

'Vic,' she said softly, 'I think Mr Farwell..' Then she changed her mind. 'I can't, I can't,' she thought. She crushed the jealous words down and plunged.

'Vic, darling,' she faltered, 'I'm afraid you're not well. No, and not happy. I've been thinking of something; why shouldn't I leave the Club and come and live with you.'

Victoria looked at her critically for a moment. She thought of her independence, of this affection hovering round her, sweet, dangerously clinging. But Betty's blue eyes were wet.

'You're too good a pal for me, Betty,' she said in a low voice. 'I'd make you miserable.'

'No, no,' cried Betty impulsively. 'I'd love it, Vic dear, and you would go on reading and do what you like. Only let me be with you.'

Victoria's hand tightened on her friend's arm.

'Let me think, Betty dear,' she said.

Ten days later, Betty having won her point, the great move was to take place at seven o'clock. It certainly lacked solemnity. For three days preceding the great change Betty had hurried away from the P.R.R. on the stroke of nine, quickly kissing Victoria and saying she couldn't wait as she must pack. Clearly her wardrobe could not be disposed of in a twinkling. Yet, on moving day, at seven o'clock sharp (the carrier having been thoughtfully commanded to deliver at five) a tin trunk kept together by a rope, a tiny bath muzzled with a curtain, and a hat box loudly advertising somebody's tea, were dumped on the doorstep. The cart drove off leaving the two girls to make terms with a loafer. The latter compromised for fourpence, slammed their door behind him and lurched down the creaking stairs. Betty threw herself into Victoria's arms.

Those first days were sweet. Betty rejoiced like a lover in possession of a long-desired mistress; stripping off her blouse and looking very pretty, showing her white neck and slim arms, she strutted about the attic with a hammer in her hand and her mouth full of nails. It took an evening to hang the curtain which had muzzled the bath; Betty's art treasures, an oleograph of 'Bubbles' and another of 'I'se Biggest,' were cunningly hung by Victoria so that she could not see them on waking up.

Betty was active now as a will o' the wisp. She invented little feasts, expensive Sunday suppers of fried fish and chips, produced a basket of oranges at three a penny; thanks to her there was now milk with the tea. In a moment of enthusiasm Victoria heard her murmur something about keeping a cat. In fact the only thing that marred her life at all was Victoria's absorption in her reading. Often Betty would go to bed and stay awake, watching Victoria at the table, her fingers ravelling her hair, reading with an intentness that frightened her. She would watch Victoria and see her face grow paler, except at the cheeks where a flush would rise. A wild look would come into her eyes. Sometimes she would get up suddenly and, thrusting her hair out of her eyes, walk up and down muttering things Betty could not understand.

One night Betty woke up suddenly, and saw Victoria standing in the moonlight clad only in her nightgown. Words were surging from her lips.

'It's no good… I can't go on… I can't go on until I die or somebody marries me… I won't marry: I won't do it… Why should I sell myself?.. at any rate why should I sell myself cheaply?'

There was a pause. Betty sat up and looked at her friend's wild face.

'What's it all mean after all? I'm only being used. Sucked dry like an orange. By and by they'll throw the peel away. Talk of brotherhood!.. It's war, war.. It's climbing and fighting to get on top.. like crabs in a bucket, like crabs..'

'Vic,' screamed Betty.

Victoria started like a somnambulist aroused and looked at her vaguely.

'Come back to bed at once,' cried Betty with inspired firmness. Victoria obeyed. Betty drew her down beside her under the horsecloth and threw her arms round her; Victoria's body was cold as ice. Suddenly she burst into tears; and Betty, torn as if she saw a strong man weep, wept too. Closely locked in one another's arms they sobbed themselves to sleep.