Nearly all Nathaniel Street was in darkness when he returned there
that night. At No. 5 they were still up, and he could hear them
singing; a rum lot at No. 5. Across the street there was a light or
two and a gramophone going somewhere. But that was all. No. 9 was in
complete darkness; obviously they had all gone to bed, Edgar too, for
when Edgar was out, Mrs. Pelumpton always left a light in the hall
for him, a courtesy she did not extend to her two lodgers, Park and
Turgis. If they were so late, they had to grope. Very, quietly, slowly
and painfully, for he had walked all the way from Maida Vale, partly
because he wanted to arrive late and so avoid any questions, and was
tired out, aching all over, Turgis crawled upstairs to his room at the
top. There he lit the tiny gas mantle, and then sat down on his bed,
resting his head in his hands.
All his face felt stiff. Laboriously, he removed his soaking shoes,
and was not surprised to find that his socks were wet. He put a match
to the little gas-fire, which exploded with a startling bang in that
stillness. He did not take his socks off, but held out in turn the
sole of each foot towards the gas-fire and watched it steam. He had no
slippers; he was always meaning to buy some, but never did. He stared
at his reflection, holding the cracked little mirror in the wooden
frame near the gaslight. There was a bruise on the ridge of his rather
prominent nose; dried blood caked about the nostrils; a long smear down
one cheek and just above one eyebrow. The eyes, red-rimmed, stared
back at him in despair. In all his life he had never hated himself as
much as he did then. The cracked face in the black wooden frame began
to twitch a little, and he banished it. The water he had used before
going out was still in the basin, and now he soaped his hands in it and
rubbed them over his face, until his eyes smarted. When he had finished
wiping his face, he looked at it again in the mirror, and found that
the smears and dried blood had gone, but that the bruise was more
marked than before. He did not look long. His face, pale and silly,
disgusted him. Going through his pockets, he discovered a crumpled
cigarette and had the first smoke for several hours. He remembered the
last one, when he was on his way to Maida Vale, not five hours ago. Not
five hours ago! A hundred years ago.
The haze had completely vanished from his mind, leaving a dreadful
clarity. He saw himself quite clearly, and loathed what he saw. He
knew now that Lena was simply a little flirt, who had happened to be
bored, her friends being away, when he first called at the flat with
the money, and had amused herself with him for a few hours because she
had nothing better to do and, for the time being, his obvious worship
entertained her. Then the minute somebody better came along, she had
dropped him at once, and had afterwards been so annoyed that she had
disliked the very sight of him. Now it seemed all quite clear, and
it was unbelievable that he could not see it like that before, that
he could have gone on dreaming away and hanging about to see her and
deluding himself. He did not even hate her now. She simply did not
interest him.
What did interest him, however, was the figure he cut himself, and that
was what he saw with such terrible clearness. As he sat drooping on
the bed, pulling away mechanically at the last inch of the cigarette,
he put himself through a pitiless cross-examination. How could he ever
have thought that he could make a girl like Lena fall in love with
him, a girl who was pretty, who could meet all kinds of fellows, who
had lived in places like Paris, who had a father with money? The very
thought of Mr. Golspie crushed the last grains of self-respect in him.
What had he, Harold Turgis, been fancying himself for? What was he?
What could he do? What had he got? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Only a
silly face, with a big useless nose and a trembling mouth and eyes
that began to water almost if anybody looked hard at them. He threw the
stump of his cigarette at the dirty saucer in front of the gas-fire,
missed it, and had to go down painfully on his knees and retrieve the
glowing end.
He returned to the bed and curled up on it, his eyes fixed on some
photographs, cut out of a film weekly, pinned up on the opposite
wall; but he did not see the photographs, for he was staring through
them, through the wall, into the future, a vague darkness, in which
he, a small lonely figure, moved obscurely. His job was gone. He had
finished with Twigg & Dersingham and Angel Pavement. Perhaps they
might have given him a rise soon; he might have had Smeeth’s job and
seven or eight pounds a week before long, a proper home and carpets
and armchairs and a big wireless set of his own; and now it might be
a long time before he got a job as good as the one he had just lost.
What could he do? A bit of typing and clerking, that was all, and
anybody could do that; even girls could do it; some of them, really
educated ones like Miss Matfield (yes, and what had she been doing
with Mr. Golspie?), just as well as he could. And when he had queued
up and looked at advertisements and written letters and trailed round
and waited and got a job at last, what then? What would he get out
of it? Nothing. He saw the world before him with no happiness in it,
only foolish work and weariness, and unnamed fears, a place of jagged
stones, shadows, dim menacing giants.
Having got so far, he could go no further. A little voice, like that
of some tiny erect indignant figure in a great gloomy assembly, spoke
up now, protesting. It was not right. It was not fair. There had been
a time when it had looked as if everything was going to be quite
different. Something had gone wrong. Where, how had it gone wrong?
He could be happy; he could be as happy as anybody, if only he had
a chance to be; and why hadn’t he a chance to be? Here!--if he’d a
chance, he could be a lot happier than Park or Smeeth or even Mr.
Dersingham--yes, he could! Then why shouldn’t he be? What was wrong?
What _was_ it, what _was_ it? The little voice asked these questions,
but no answer came. No answer. It was as if the erect figure suddenly
collapsed and the gloomy assembly remained untroubled, unstirring.
It was no good. Every bit of him, from the damp soles of his feet to
his tangled hair (which seemed to have a separate and equally miserable
existence of its own, this night), agreed that it was no good. He stood
up. He looked about him, as if searching the little room in despair
for something to touch, to hold, to cling to, now that the night was
pouring in, through the decayed woodwork of the window frame, through
the cracked mortar and the foul old stone, its malevolent influences,
its beckoning and gibbering ghosts. The calm, the clarity, were gone;
the dream fumes rose and drifted again; but when he moved, he still
moved slowly, as if led here and there by uncertain spectral hands. He
fastened the window tight, and stuffed paper in its various crevices.
The door fitted badly, and he had to stuff more paper, indeed all
the paper he had, between the door and the frame, and then in the
keyhole. He turned off the gas from the tiny mantle, leaving the room
uncertainly illuminated by the gas-fire. For a moment he considered the
dying glow of the mantle. Could he use that gas? If he had a tube he
could, but he hadn’t a tube; and if he turned it on full, it gave out
so little gas that it would be painfully, horribly slow doing anything
to him. No, the gas-fire was the thing. He had only to turn it out now,
wait a minute or two until the burners had cooled, then put a hand
to that tap again, lie on his bed and hear the gas hissing out for a
minute or two, fall asleep and all would be over.
He sat on the floor, in front of the fire, leaning his elbow against
the side of his bed. Staring at the three twisted glowing pillars of
the fire, he contemplated with sombre satisfaction his approaching
end. It would be painless, that he knew, for he had once talked to a
man in the Pavement Dining Rooms, and this man had a brother who was a
policeman, and this policeman had had a lot of experience with people
who had done it with gas and he gave it as his opinion that they all
passed quietly away in their sleep without a bit of pain and fuss
and worry: it was far easier getting out of the world altogether than
taking a train to the City at Camden Town Tube Station. They would
find him in the morning, peacefully asleep. There would be an inquest
and it would get into the papers. Some of them, Mr. Golspie and Lena,
perhaps, would have to give evidence. Mrs. Pelumpton, too. Had the
deceased been strange in his actions lately, had he something on his
mind? A promising young fellow--would anybody say that? Tragic End,
Young Clerk’s Fatal Romance. Who would be really sorry? Nobody. No, no,
one or two, perhaps a lot of people; you never knew. Poppy Sellers, for
instance; Miss Matfield had said that little Poppy, poor kid, was keen
on him; so that she ought to be sorry, very sorry; perhaps it would be
the great sorrow of her life--“He meant everything to me, that boy. I
worshipped him”--he could hear these, and other heart-broken phrases
from the pictures, coming from a rather vague Poppy Sellers, very pale
and dressed in black. It made him feel sorry himself, and it was the
pleasantest feeling he had had for hours, quite warm and luxuriant.
“A very sad case, gentlemen,” said the coroner, mournfully. “Here you
have a young man full of promise----” Turgis interrupted him, for
somehow Turgis was there too: “It’s all right saying that _now_,” he
cried to them all, triumphant in his bitterness, “but why didn’t you
do something about it before? It’s too late now, and you know it is.
Too late, too late! Let this,” he continued sternly, “be a warning to
you.” But that was silly. He would be dead and gone. Perhaps he ought
to leave a letter; they usually left letters; but he hated writing
letters, and he knew there was no ink in the room. No, of course, he
hadn’t any ink! He’d nothing! He might as well finish it off now, and
show them all, the rotten swine!
As he arrived at this savage conclusion, he noticed for the first time
that the three little glowing pillars of the gas-fire were dwindling.
They shrank rapidly until they were nothing but quivering blue blobs
that shot up once and popped, shot up again and popped, then popped out
altogether. No more gas. He hadn’t a shilling, he had only eightpence.
He couldn’t even commit suicide, couldn’t afford it.
After a short silence, an unusual sound, a most strange sound, a
fantastic and incredible sound, came from the side of the bed and
travelled round the dark little room. It came from Turgis, and he may
have been crying, he may have been laughing, or doing both at once. He
was certainly not committing suicide.
He made a great deal of noise now. Putting out a hand, quite
instinctively, to the tap of the gas-fire, he touched something hot in
the darkness there, gave a sharp cry, and banged his hand on the floor.
Then he stumbled to the window to pull out the paper, and somehow the
window stuck and he pushed so hard that when it did open, the rotten
old woodwork of the frame partly gave way, and as it suddenly flew
open and the night air rushed in, there was a loud crack. The door was
noisier still. He was determined to get all the paper away, but it was
not easy and he was impatient, and he began pulling away at the knob of
the door until at last the door suddenly swung in and he sat down with
a bump, the knob still in his hand. It was then that he heard sounds
from below, and saw through the open door a light travelling jerkily
upwards. The next minute he was looking at the extraordinary figure of
Mr. Pelumpton, who was standing outside in his nightshirt, holding a
candle.
“Now let’sh ’ave reashon, let’sh ’ave reashon,” said Mr. Pelumpton
reproachfully. “Bangin’ and knocking the housh about like that! The
mishish thought shomebody was breakin’ in. ’Ave a bit o’ shensh, boy,
jusht ’ave a bit o’ shensh! Can’t go on like that, thish time o’ night.
It’sh all very well going out an’ ’aving a pint or two an’ coming in
late--done it myshelf in me time--but that’sh no reashon for carrying
on like that, ish it? Blesh me shoul!--like a nearthquake, jusht like a
nearthquake. Now jusht get yourshelf to bed quietly, boy, and let other
people shleep even if you can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Turgis told him. “It was an accident. I’m all right. I’m
not drunk or anything.”
“Well, you might be in the ratsh, properly in the ratsh, green
sherpentsh all round you, the way yer going on,” said Mr. Pelumpton
severely, as he withdrew.
In ten minutes, Turgis was fast asleep.