BOSNIA ROAD
It is a suggestive thought that the characteristic effects of our
execrable climate have nowhere shown themselves more forcibly than in
the atmosphere of the London suburbs. That these suburbs are in some
subtle respects the results of our melancholy grey skies no one can
doubt. Even the raw red terraces scattered among the dingier and more
chastened rows of depressed houses, betray a futile and rather
boisterous attempt to introduce a butcher-boy cheerfulness into a world
of smuts and rain. The older, sadder houses have taken the tint of their
surroundings. They have been poised all these years between the moil and
fog of the city, and a countryside that was never theirs, a countryside
that is often pictured as wrapped in eternal June, but which for nine
months out of the twelve knows grey gloom, mud, and rain.
Their activities alone must have given the modern English such
cheerfulness as they possess, while the climate has made them a nation
of grumblers. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution saved us from our
weather.
Coal and power came and gave us something to do. For what has been the
history of England, but the watering of the blood of those who came to
dwell in her. It is not necessary to thank the Roman rule for the
decadence of the Britons, when their Saxon conquerors in turn sank into
sodden, boorish ignorance. The Normans brought red blood and wine to the
grey island, but by the fifteenth century the blend had become coarse,
cruel, and poor. With the Elizabethans, half the world rushed into new
adventure and romance, and England revived. But once again the grey
island damped down the ardour, the enthusiasms and the energies of the
people. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the population
was stagnant, the country poor, coarse and apathetic. Then King Coal
arose, and lit a fire for us, and a few great men were born. We found
big things to do, and were renewed, in spite of our climate. Yet the
question suggests itself, will these subtle atmospheric influences
reassert themselves and damp us down once more in the centuries that are
to come?
Eve Carfax had elected to live in a London suburb, and had chosen
Highbury, perhaps because of childish recollections of pleasant half
holidays spent there with a friend of her mother’s, afternoons when
muffins and fancy cakes had made bread and butter superfluous, and a
jolly old lady had discovered occasional half-crowns in her purse. Eve
had taken two rooms in a little red house in Bosnia Road. Why it should
have been called Bosnia Road she could not imagine. Each house had a
front door with stained glass and a brass letter box, a tiny strip of
front garden faced with a low brick wall topped by an iron railing, an
iron gate, and a red tiled path. All the houses looked exactly alike.
Most of them had a big china bowl or fern pot on a table or pedestal in
the window of the ground floor room. There was no originality either in
the texture or the draping of the curtains. None of the houses in Bosnia
Road had any of that sense of humour possessed by the houses in a
village street. There were no jocular leerings, no rollicking leanings
up against a neighbour, no expressive and whimsical faces. They were all
decently alike, respectably uniform, staring at each other across the
road, and never moved to laughter by the absurd discovery that the
architect had unconsciously perpetrated a cynical lampoon upon the
suburban middle classes.
When one is fighting for the bare necessities of life, one is not
conscious of monotony. For Eve, as an adventuress, it had been a
question of gaining a foothold and a grip on a ledge with her fingers,
and her energies had been concentrated on hanging to the vantage she had
gained. She had had good luck, and the good luck had been due to Kate
Duveen.
Kate Duveen was an old friend, and Eve had hunted her out in her
Bloomsbury lodgings on the third day of her coming to London. They had
been at school together before the Carfaxes had taken a cottage in
Surrey. Kate Duveen was a brown, lean, straight-backed young woman, with
rather marked eyebrows, firm lips, and shrewd eyes. She was a worker,
had always been a worker, and though more than one man had wanted to
marry her, she had no desire either for marriage or for children. She
was a comrade rather than a woman. There was no colour either in her
face or in her dress, and her one beauty was her hair. She had a
decisive, unsentimental way with her, read a great deal, attended, when
possible, every lecture given by Bernard Shaw, and managed to earn about
two hundred pounds a year.
It was Kate Duveen who had introduced Eve into Miss Champion’s
establishment.
Miss Champion’s profession was somewhat peculiar, though not unique. Her
offices were in a turning off Oxford Street, and were situated on the
first floor. She was a kind of universal provider, in the sense that she
supplied by means of her female staff, the various needs of a cultured
and busy public. She equipped men of affairs and politicians with
secretaries and expert typists. There were young women who could
undertake mechanical drawing or architects’ plans, illustrate books,
copy old maps and drawings, undertake research work in the British
Museum, design fashion plates, supervise entertainments, act as mistress
of the revels at hydros and hotels. Miss Champion had made a success of
the venture, partly because she was an excellent business woman, and
partly because of her personality. Snow-white hair, a fresh face, a fine
figure. These points had helped. She was very debonair, yet very
British, and mingled an aristocratic scent of lavender with a suggestion
of lawn sleeves. Her offices had no commercial smell. Her patrons were
mostly dilettanti people with good incomes, and a particular hobby,
authorship, public affairs, china, charities. Miss Champion had some
imagination, and the wisdom of a “Foresight.” Good form was held sacred.
She was very particular as to that old-fashioned word “deportment.” Her
gentlewomen had to be gentlewomen, calm, discreet, unemotional, neat
looking lay figures, with good brains and clever hands.
Kate Duveen had introduced Eve to Miss Champion, and Miss Champion
happened to have a vacancy that Eve could fill. A patron was writing a
book on mediæval hunting, and wanted old pictures and woodcuts copied.
Another patron was busy with a colour-book called “Ideal Gardens,” and
was asking for fancy plates with plenty of atmosphere. There was some
hack research work going begging, and designs for magazine covers to be
submitted to one or two art editors, and Eve was lucky enough to find
herself earning her living before she had been two weeks in town.
The day’s routine did not vary greatly. She breakfasted at a quarter to
eight, and if the weather was fine she walked a part or even the whole
of the way to Miss Champion’s, following Upper Street and Pentonville
Road, and so through Bloomsbury, where she picked up Kate Duveen. If it
was wet she trammed, but she detested the crush for a seat, being a
sensitive individualist with a hatred of crowds, however small. Some
days she spent most of her time in the Museum reading-room, making notes
and drawings which she elaborated afterwards at her desk at Miss
Champion’s. If she had nothing but illustrating to do or plates to paint
she spent all the day at the office. They were given an hour for lunch,
and Eve and Kate Duveen lunched together, getting some variety by
patronising Lyons, the Aerated Bread Company, and the Express Dairy in
turn. After these very light lunches, and much more solid conversations,
came four or five hours more work, with half an hour’s interval for tea.
Eve reached Bosnia Road about half past six, often glad to walk the
whole way back after the long sedentary hours. At seven she had meat
tea, the meat being represented by an egg, or three sardines, or two
slices of the very smallest tongue that was sold. Her landlady was
genteel, florid, and affable, with that honeyed affability that is one
of the surest signs of the humbug. She was a widow, and the possessor of
a small pension. Her one child, a gawk of a youth, who was an
under-clerk somewhere in the City, had nothing to recommend him. He was
a ripening “nut,” and advertised the fact by wearing an enormous collar,
a green plush Homburg hat, a grey suit, and brown boots on the Sabbath.
Some time ago he had bought a banjo, but when Eve came to Bosnia Road,
his vamping was as discordant and stuttering as it could be. He had a
voice, and a conviction that he was a comedian, and he could be heard
exclaiming, “Put me among the Girls,” a song that always moved Eve to an
angry disgust. Now and again he met her on the stairs, but any egregious
oglings on his part were blighted before they were born.
“She’s a suffragette! I know ’em.”
That was what he said to his mother. Had he been put among such girls,
his little, vain Georgy Porgy of a soul would have been mute and awed.
Eve’s evenings were very lonely. Sometimes Kate Duveen came up from
Bloomsbury, but she was a busy woman, and worked and read most nights.
If it was fine, Eve went out and walked, wandering round outside
Highbury Fields, or down the quiet Canonbury streets, or along Upper
Street or Holloway Road. It was very dismal, and these walks made her
feel even more lonely than the evenings spent in her room. It seemed
such a drifting, solitary existence. Who cared? To whom did it matter
whether she went out or stayed at home? As for her sitting-room, she
could not get used to the cheap red plush suite, the sentimental
pictures, the green and yellow carpet, the disastrous ornaments, the
pink and green tiles in the grate. Her own workaday belongings made it a
little more habitable, but she felt like Iolanthe in a retired licensed
victualler’s parlour.
The nights when Kate Duveen came up from Bloomsbury were full of
intelligent relief. They talked, argued, compared ambitions and ideals,
and trusted each other with intimate confessions. Several weeks passed
before Eve gave Kate Duveen some account of that summer at Fernhill, and
Kate Duveen looked stiff and hard over it, and showed Canterton no
mercy.
“It always seems to be a married man!”
Eve was up in arms on the other side.
“He was different.”
“Oh, yes, I know!”
“Kate, I hate you when you talk like this.”
“Hate me as much as you like, my dear, you will see with my eyes some
day. I have no patience with men.”
Eve softened her passionate partisanship, and tried to make her friend
understand.
“Till one has gone through it one does not know what it means. After
all, we can’t stamp out Nature, and all that is beautiful in Nature. I,
for one, don’t want to. It may have made me suffer. It was worth it,
just to be loved by that child.”
“Children are not much better than little savages. Don’t dream
sentimental dreams about children. I remember what a little beast I
was.”
“There will always be some part of me that you won’t understand, Kate.”
“Perhaps. I’ve no patience with men—selfish, sexual fools. Let’s talk
about work.”
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