THE BOURGEOIS OF CLARENDON ROAD
Mrs. Buss had surrendered at last to Eve’s persuasions, and a jobbing
carpenter had erected a section-built shed in the back garden at Bosnia
Road. The shed had a corrugated iron roof, and Mrs. Buss had stipulated
that the roof should be painted a dull red, so that it might “tone” with
the red brick houses. The studio was lined with matchboarding, had a
skylight in the roof, and was fitted with an anthracite stove. The whole
affair cost Eve about twenty-five pounds, with an additional two
shillings added to the weekly rent of her rooms. She paid for the studio
out of the money she had received from the sale of the furniture at
Orchards Corner, and her capital had now dwindled to about forty-five
pounds.
Every morning on her way towards Highbury Corner, Eve passed the end of
Clarendon Grove, a road lined with sombre, semi-detached houses, whose
front gardens were full of plane trees, ragged lilacs and privets, and
scraggy laburnums. Eve, who was fairly punctual, passed the end of
Clarendon Grove about a quarter to nine each morning, and there was
another person who was just as punctual in quite a detached and
unpremeditated way. Sometimes she saw him coming out of a gate about a
hundred yards down Clarendon Grove, sometimes he was already turning the
corner, or she saw his broad fat back just ahead of her, always on the
same side of the street.
She christened him “the Highbury Clock,” or “the British Bourgeois.” He
was a shortish, square-built man of about five-and-forty, with clumsy
shoulders, a round head, and big feet. He turned his toes out like a
German when he walked, and he always went at the same pace, and always
carried a black handbag. His face was round, phlegmatic, good tempered,
and wholly commonplace, the eyes blue and rather protuberant, the nose
approximating to what is vulgarly called the “shoe-horn type,” the mouth
hidden by a brownish walrus moustache. He looked the most regular,
reliable, and solid person imaginable in his top-hat, black coat, and
neatly pressed grey trousers. Eve never caught him hurrying, and she
imagined that in hot weather he ought to wear an alpaca coat.
They sighted each other pretty regularly for some three months before
chance caused them to strike up a casual acquaintanceship. One wet day
the Bourgeois gave up his seat to Eve in a crowded tram. After that he
took off his hat to her whenever she happened to pass across the end of
Clarendon Grove in front of him. One morning they arrived at the corner
at the same moment, and the Bourgeois wished her “good morning.”
They walked as far as Upper Street together. It seemed absurd for two
humans whose paths touched so often not to smile and exchange a few
words about the weather, and so it came about that they joined forces
whenever the Bourgeois was near enough to the corner for Eve not to have
to indulge in any conscious loitering.
He was a very decent sort of man, and his name was Mr. Parfit. He was
something in the neighbourhood of Broad Street, but what it was he did
not state, and Eve did not inquire. In due course she discovered that he
was a bachelor, that he had lived for fifteen years in the same rooms,
that he had a passion for romantic novels, and that he went regularly to
Queen’s Hall. He spent Sunday in his slippers, reading _The Referee_. A
three weeks’ holiday once a year satisfied any vagrant impulses he might
feel, and he spent these three weeks at Ramsgate, Hastings or Brighton.
“I like to be in a crowd,” he told Eve, “with plenty of youngsters
about. There’s nothing I like better than sitting on the sands with a
pipe and a paper, watching the kids making castles and pies, and
listening to Punch and Judy. Seems to make one feel young.”
She liked Mr. Parfit, and often wondered why he had not married. Perhaps
he was one of those men who preferred being a very excellent uncle
rather than a bored father, for she gathered that he was fond of other
people’s children, and was always ready with his pennies. He had a sly,
laborious, porcine humour, and a chuckle that made his cheeks wrinkle
and his eyes grow smaller. He was exceedingly polite to Eve, and though
at times he seemed inclined to be good-naturedly personal, she knew that
it was part of his nature and not a studied attempt at familiarity.
Eve was glad to have this very human person to talk to, for she found
life increasingly lonely, now that Kate Duveen had gone. Mr. Parfit had
a fatherly way with him, and though his culture was crude and raw, he
had a shrewd outlook upon things in general that was not unamusing.
London, too, was in the thick of the mud and muck of a wet winter, and
Eve found that she was growing more susceptible to the depressing
influence of bad weather. It spoilt her morning’s walk, and caused a
quite unnecessary expenditure on trams and ’buses, and roused her to a
kind of rage when she pulled up her blind in the morning and saw the
usual drizzle making the slate roofs glisten. She associated her new
studio with rain, for there always seemed to be a pattering sound upon
the corrugated iron roof when she shut herself in to work.
She grew more moody, and her moodiness drove her into desperate little
dissipations, such as a seat in the upper circle at His Majesty’s or the
Haymarket, a dinner at an Italian restaurant, or a tea at Fuller’s. She
found London less depressing after dark, and learnt to understand how
the exotic city, with its night jewels glittering, appealed to people
who were weary of greyness. Her sun-hunger and her country-hunger had
become so importunate that she had spent one Sunday in the country,
taking train to Guildford, and walking up to the Hog’s Back. The Surrey
hills had seemed dim and sad, and away yonder she had imagined Fernhill,
with its fir woods and its great pleasaunce. She had felt rather like an
outcast, and the day had provoked such sadness in her that she went no
more into the country.
The extraordinary loneliness of such a life as hers filled her at times
with cynical amusement. How absurd it was, this crowded solitude of
London; this selfish, suspicious, careless materialism. No one bothered.
More than once she felt whimsically tempted to catch some passing woman
by the arm, and to say “Stop and talk to me. I am human, and I have a
tongue.” After tea she would often loiter along Regent Street or Oxford
Street, looking rather aimlessly into the shops, and studying the faces
of the people who passed; but she found that she had to abandon this
habit of loitering, for more than once men spoke to her, looking in her
face with a look that made her grow cold with a white anger.
It was inevitable that she should contrast this London life with the
life at Fernhill, and compare all other men with James Canterton. She
could not help making the comparison, nor did the comparison, when made,
help her to forget. The summer had given her her first great experience,
and all this subsequent loneliness intensified the vividness of her
memories. She yearned to see Lynette, to feel the child’s warm hands
touching her. She longed, too, for Canterton, to be able to look into
his steady eyes, to feel his clean strength near her, to realise that
she was not alone. Yes, he was clean, while these men who passed her in
the streets seemed horrible, greedy and pitiless. They reminded her of
the people in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, people with grotesque and
leering faces, out of whose eyes nameless sins escaped.
The flat in Purbeck Street offered her other contrasts after the rain
and the wet streets and the spattering mud from the wheels of
motor-buses. It was eccentric but unwholesome, luxurious, and
effeminate, with suggestions of an extreme culture and an individual
idea of beauty. Coming straight from a cheap lunch eaten off a
marble-topped table to this muffled, scented room, was like passing from
a colliery slum to a warm and scented bath in a Roman villa. Eve noticed
that her shoes always seemed muddy, and she laughed over it, and
apologised.
“I always leave marks on your white carpet.”
“You should read Baudelaire in order to realise that a thing that is
white is of no value without a few symbolical stains. Supposing I have a
glass case put over one of your footprints, so that Adolf shall not wash
them all away?”
That was just what she disliked about Hugh Massinger. He was for ever
twisting what she said into an excuse for insinuating that he found her
charming and provocative. He did not play at gallantry like a gentleman.
A circuitous cleverness and a natural cowardliness kept him from being
audaciously frank. He fawned like a badly bred dog, and she liked his
fawnings so little that she began to wonder at last whether this fool
was in any way serious.
One morning it snowed hard before breakfast for about an hour, and by
one o’clock London was a city of slush. Eve felt depressed, and her
shoes and stockings and the bottom of her skirt were sodden when she
reached the flat in Purbeck Street. Adolf smiled his usual smile, and
confessed that Mr. Massinger had not expected her.
“Ma Donna! I never thought you would brave this horrible weather.”
He threw a book aside and was up, solicitous, and not a little pleased
at the chance of being tender.
“I suppose English weather is part of the irony of life!”
“Good heavens! Your shoes and skirt are wet!”
“A little.”
He piled two or three cushions in front of the fire.
“Do sit down and take your shoes and stockings off, and dry your skirt.”
She sat down and took off her shoes.
“Stockings too! I can be very fatherly and severe. Do you think it
immodest to show your bare feet? You must have a liqueur; it will warm
you.”
“I would rather not.”
“Oh, come! You are a pale Iseult to-day.”
“Thank you, I would rather not.”
“Then Adolf shall make us coffee.”
He rang the bell.
“Adolf, coffee and some biscuits! And bring that purple scarf of mine.”
The scarf arrived first, and Massinger held it spread over his hands
like a shop-assistant showing off a length of silk.
“Two little white empresses shall wear the purple. No work this
afternoon. I am going to try to make you forget the weather.”
Adolf came in noiselessly with the coffee, set it on a stool beside Eve,
and departed just as noiselessly, and with an absolutely expressionless
face. The way he had of effacing himself made Eve more conscious of his
existence.
The fire was comforting, so was the coffee. She could have slipped into
a mood of soothed indolence if Massinger had not been present. But his
leering obsequiousness had disturbed her, and she found herself facing
that eternal problem as to how a woman should behave to a man who
employed her and paid for her time. Was it necessary to quarrel with all
this sentimental by-play? She still held to her impression that he was a
very great ass.
“This detestable climate! It brutalises us. It makes one understand why
the English drink beer, and love to see the red corpses of animals hung
up in shops. A gross climate, and a gross people.”
Eve had wrapped the purple scarf round her feet.
“If we could be sure of a little sunshine every other day!”
She was staring at the fire, and Massinger was studying her with an
interested intentness. Thought and desire were mingled at the back of
his pale eyes.
“Sunshine—clear, yellow light! Don’t you yearn for it?”
“Who does not? With the exception of the people who have been baked in
the tropics.”
“And it is so near. The people who are free can always find it.”
He lay back against the cushions on the lounge, his eyes still on her,
and shining with an incipient smile.
“You leave the grey country at dusk, and travel through the night, and
then the dawn comes up, all orange and gold, and the cypresses hold up
their beckoning fingers. There the sea is blue, and there are flowers,
roses, carnations, wallflowers, stocks, and mimosa; oranges and lemons
hang on the trees, and the white villas shine among palms and olives.”
His voice became insinuating, and took on its sing-song blank-verse
cadence.
“Have you ever seen Monte Carlo?”
“No.”
“It is a vulgar world to the vulgar. But that delectable little world
has an esoteric meaning. The sun shines, and it is easier to make love
under a blue sky. And then, all those little towns on the edge of the
blue sea, and the grey rock villages, and the adventures up mule-paths.
Think of a mule-path, and pine woods, and sunlight, and a bottle of red
wine.”
She laughed, but with a tremor of self-consciousness.
“It is useful to think of such things, just to realise how very far away
they are.”
“Nothing is far away, when one has the magic carpet of gold. Have the
courage to dream, and there you are.”
He got up, wandered round the room with a wavering glance at her, and
then came across to the fire.
“Just think of ‘Monte’ and the sunlight, and the gay pagan life. It is
worth experiencing. Dream of it for a week in London. Are you getting
dry?”
He went down suddenly on one knee and felt her skirt, and in another
moment he had touched one of her feet.
“The little white empress is warm. How would she like to walk the
terraces at Monte Carlo?”
Eve kept very still. She had an abrupt glimpse of the meaning of his
suggestions, and of all that was moving towards her in this man’s mind.
Intuition told her that she would rebuff him more thoroughly by treating
him as a sentimental idiot than by flattening him with anger, as if he
were a man.
“Please don’t do that. It’s foolish, and makes me want to laugh. I think
it’s time we were serious. I am ready for work.”
For an instant his eyes looked sulky and dangerous.
“What a practical person it is.”
“And what a long time you have taken to find that out. I’m afraid I’m
not in the least sentimental.”
Hugh Massinger went back to the lounge like a cat that has been laughed
at.
* * * * *