'You have made that impossible, Clara.'
'I?'
'Yes. If I found a girl like you who wanted to marry me I might
consider it.... My aunts are furious.'
'With me?'
'Yes. You have made more of a stir than you can imagine. They tell me
you are more wicked than Cleopatra, and yet you complain that nothing
happens to you.'
She took him to the bookshop and introduced him to the bookseller, a
little gray-bearded man in a tweed suit. Verschoyle liked him and
asked him what he thought a man in his position ought to do.
'The man Jesus put you right years ago,' said the bookseller. 'Sell
all that thou hast and give to the poor.'
'But I can't,' said Verschoyle. 'I'm only a _cestui que trust_.'
To both Verschoyle and Clara the bookshop was a place of escape, a
holiday ground where they could play with ideas which to Verschoyle
were a new kind of toy. With Mann there was always a certain strain
for him, because Mann wanted something definite; but with the
bookseller and his young friends, he was at his ease, for they were
very like himself, without ambition, and outside all the press and
hurry of society. Like himself they wanted nothing except to be
amused, and like himself they hated amusement which entailed effort.
Clara, however, as usual took it seriously. The Kropotkin Memoirs had
jolted her imagination, and she saw the young men of the bookshop as
potential Kropotkins, people who stood upon the edge of an abyss of
suffering and asked nothing better than to be engulfed in the world's
misery.
The disturbance in her serenity was so great that for some weeks she
shut herself up alone to collect her ideas. The world was not so
simple as she had thought; certainly by no means so simple as it had
appeared during her three years with Charles. As she had said, London
was different. She had progressed so far with this great London of
Butcher and Verschoyle only to find through the bookshop another London
suddenly opened up before her--the London of the poor.... Poverty she
had never known, except the poverty of the world of art which is
created rather by indifference to money than by the grim lack of it.
With Charles days had been so busy, nights so happy, that it was a
small thing that every now and then she had to go hungry for a day in
order that he might not lack. The immense poverty which now she saw
everywhere in this West End of London, in courts off Charing Cross
Road, in vast workmen's dwellings, in Soho, and by her own rooms at the
back of Leicester Square, everywhere round the calculated magnificence
of the theatres, overwhelmed her and changed many of her conceptions;
first of all her attitude towards Kitty Messenger, whom she had
regarded as a vulgar nuisance, a horrible intrusion from the past. It
was impossible for her to accept her position of security above the
dirty sea of poverty.
She loathed the poor, their indolence, their coarseness, their horrible
manners, their loud mirth and violent anger.... Once outside her door
two drunken women fought. They leaned against the wall, clutching each
other by the hair, and attempted, while they breathed thick curses into
each other's glaring faces, to bite, to scratch, each to bang the
other's head against the wall.... Clara ran past them trembling in
every limb. She had never seen the uncontrolled brutality of which
human beings are capable.... But it was even worse when a policeman
arrested the two women and roughly dragged them away.
And after that she was continually coming upon similar scenes, or upon
degraded and derelict types. It was as though she had been blind and
was suddenly able to see--or had the world turned evil?
How could Verschoyle, how could Charles, how could all the well-dressed
and well-fed people be so happy while such things were going on before
their eyes? Perhaps, like herself, they could not see them. It was
very strange.
Stranger still was the release of energy in herself, bringing with it a
new personal interest in her own life. She began to look more keenly
at other women and to understand them a little better, to sympathise
even with their vanity, their mindlessness, their insistence upon
homage and flattery from their men. From that she passed to a somewhat
bewildered introspection, realising that it was extraordinary that she
should have been able to sever her connection with Charles and to
maintain the impersonal when the personal relationship was
suspended--or gone? Yes. That was quite extraordinary, and because of
it she knew that she could never live the ordinary woman's life,
absorbed entirely in external things, in position, clothes, food and
household, shops.
She remembered Charles saying that his feeling for her was at the
farthest end of love, and certainly she had never known anything like
the relationship between, say, Freeland and Julia--easy, comfortable
romance. To be either easy or comfortable had become an abomination to
her, and at bottom this was the reason for her dissatisfaction. It had
been too easy to procure the beginnings of success for Charles. They
had secured control of the machinery of the theatre, and must now act
in accordance with its grinding.
For some weeks she was paralysed and could do nothing but sit and
brood; hardly thinking at all consciously, but gazing in upon herself
and the forces stirring in her, creeping up and up to take control of
her imagination that had hitherto been entirely free and in undisputed
mastery of her being. This was a time of the acutest agony. She would
not surrender. Without knowing what was being demanded of her she
cried, 'I will not, I will not.' But the forces stirring in her were
implacable, and changed her whole physical sensation of being. Her
body changed, her figure altered most subtly and imperceptibly, her
face gained in strength and beauty, but she loathed the change, because
it was taking place without reference to her own will, or her own
imagination, which for the first time in her life was baffled.... It
was appalling to her, who had always found it so easy to direct the
lives of others, to find her own life slipping with a terrible velocity
out of control.... No thought, no notion of her recent days was now
valid. At the very worst stage of all even simple movements seemed
incomprehensible. When she caught sight of her own lovely arm that had
always given her a thrill of pleasure, it now repelled her as something
fantastic and irresistibly comic, revoltingly comic at this time when
she was a prey to so much obscure suffering, so deep that she could
trace it to no cause, so acute that she could discern in it no purpose.
She found it almost her sole relief to read, and she devoured among
other curious works which she found at her bookshop, General Booth's
_Darkest London_ and Rose's _The Truth about the Transvaal_. Novels
she could not read at all. Fiction was all very well, but it ought to
have some relation to human emotions as they are. After her aerial
life in Charles's imagination she needed a diet of hard facts, and, as
usual, what she needed that she obtained. Both Booth and Rose dealt
with the past, but that made them the more palatable, and they
reassured her. The facts she was now discovering had been present to
other minds and her own had not unsupported to bear the whole weight of
them.... In her untouched youth she had always accepted responsibility
for the whole universe, and so long as her life had been made easy,
first of all by her grandfather, and then by Charles, the burden had
been tolerable, and she had been able to mould the universe to make
them comfortable. But now that life was suddenly for no apparent
reason incredibly difficult, the burden was greater than she could
bear, and it relieved her to find in these two books the utterance of
suffering consciences..... As she read Rose she remembered a saying of
her grandfather's, 'The British make slums wherever they go because in
every British mind there is a slum.'
She could find relief in the books, but she could not stay the welling
up of the mysterious forces which swamped the clarity of her mind and
made her usually swift intuition sluggish.
Very thankful was she that she had steered Charles into the Imperium
before this cataclysm broke in her.... She could well be alone to sort
out if possible the surfeit of new impressions from which she was
suffering. She no longer had thoughts but only obsessions. London....
London.... London.... The roaring traffic: the crowds of people:
Coventry Street by night: the illuminated theatres: the statue in
Piccadilly Circus: the hotel in which she and Charles had stayed on
their first night in London: the painted faces of the women: policemen:
commissionaires: wonderful cars lit up at night, gliding through the
streets with elegant ladies in evening dress reclining at their ease,
bored, mechanical, as hard and mechanical as the cars that carried them
through the streets: the drunken women fighting outside her door: the
woman opposite her windows who kept a canary in a cage and watered so
lovingly the aspidistra on her window-sill: tubes: lifts: glaring
lights and white tiles.... London.... London.... London....
Through it all there ran a thread of struggling, conscious purpose
which kept her from misery and made it impossible for her to succumb.
Deep in her heart she knew that she could not; that she had escaped;
that it would never be for her an awful, a terrible, an overwhelming
thing to be a woman.
With that knowledge there came an exultation, a pride, a triumphant
sense of having come through an almost fatal peril, the full nature of
which had yet to be revealed. And she had wrestled through it alone.
Her childish detestation of her womanhood was gone. She accepted it,
gloried in it as her instrument and knew that she would never be lost
in it.
For ever in her mind that crisis was associated with Kropotkin's escape
from prison, and she was full of a delighted gratitude to the little
bookseller who had lent her the book, the second volume, the first
having been borrowed.
Immeasurably increased was her understanding through this sudden
convulsion of her life, and she was very proud of the loyalty to her
instinct which had made her wrestle through it alone; and now, when she
saw women absorbed in external things, she knew that they had taken
refuge in them from just such convulsions in which, had they attempted
to face them, they must have been swamped. They clung to external
things to prevent themselves being lost in the whirlpool of the
internal world of womanhood.... Ah! It was supreme to be a woman, to
contain the most fierce and most powerful of all life's manifestations,
to smile and to distil all these violent forces into charm, to suffer
and to turn all suffering into visible beauty.
If Clara now had any easy pity it was for men, who live always in
fantasy, lured on by their own imaginings in the vain effort to solve
the mystery of which only a true and loyal woman has the key.
When once more she approached her external life it was through the
bookshop, where she found her friend the bookseller munching his lunch
of wheaten biscuits and apples in the dingy little room at the back of
his shop.
He offered her an apple. She took it and sat on a pile of books tied
up with a rope.
'You're looking bonny,' he said.
'I think I'll come and be your assistant.'
'A fine young leddy like you?'
'I might meet some one like Kropotkin.'
'Ah! Isn't that grand? There's none o' your Dumas and Stevensons can
beat that; a real happening in our own life-time.... But I can no
afford an assistant.'
'Oh! You always seem to have plenty of people in your shop.'
'These damned publishers put their prices up and up on the poor
bookseller, and my brains are all my capital, and I will not sell the
stuff that's turned out like bars o' soap, though the authors may be as
famous as old Nick and the publishers may roll by in their cars and
build their castles in the countryside.... I sell my books all the
week, and I grow my own food on my own plot on Sundays, and I'll win
through till I'm laid in the earth, and have a pile o' books to keep me
down when I'm dead as they have done in my lifetime.'
He thrust a slice of apple into his mouth and munched away at it, rosy
defiance of an ill-ordered world shining from his healthy cheeks.
On his desk Clara saw his account book, a pile of bills, and old
cheques, and it was not difficult to guess the cause of his trouble.
'I'm sure I should sell your books for you.'
'You'd draw all London into my shop, young leddy, as you'll draw them
to the playhouse; but bookselling is a dusty trade and is not for fair
wits or fine persons.'
Clara looked out into the shop, and was happy in its friendliness. A
lean, hungry-looking man came in, bought a paper, and stayed turning
over the books. She could not see his face, but something in his
movement told of quality of wit and precise consciousness. He seized a
book with a familiar mastery, as though he could savour and weigh its
contents through his finger-tips, glanced through it, and put it away
as though it were finally disposed of. There was a concentrated
absorption in everything he did that made it definite and final. He
was so sensitive that at the approach of another person he edged away
as though to avoid a distasteful impact.... Very shabby he was, but
distinguished and original. After taking up half a dozen books and not
finding in them any attraction, he stopped, pondered, and moved out of
the shop quite obviously having clearly in his mind some necessary and
inevitable purpose.
His going was a wrench to Clara, so wholly had she been absorbed in
him; but though she longed to know his name she could not bring herself
to ask her old friend who he was. That did not matter. He was, and
Charing Cross Road had become a hallowed place by profound experience,
the bookshop a room beyond all others holy.
For some time longer, Clara sat in silence with her old friend, who lit
his after-luncheon pipe and sat cross-legged, blinking and ruminant.
She stared into the shop, and still it seemed that the remarkable
figure was standing there fingering the books, pondering, deciding.
Her emotions thrilled through her, uplifted her, and she had a
sensation of being deliciously intimate with all things animate and
inanimate. She touched the desk by her side, and it seemed to her that
life tingled through her fingers into the wood. She smiled at the old
man, and his eyes twitched, and he gave her a little happy sidelong
nod. She wanted to tell him that the world was a very wonderful place,
but she could only keep on smiling, and as she left the shop, the
bookseller thrust his hat on the back of his head, scratched his beard,
and said,--
'Pegs! I said to Jenny she'll bring me luck. But she's wasted on yon
birkie ca'd a lord.'