(From _John o'London's Weekly_)
1922
After Hal Burnham had banged himself with his usual vigour out of the
house, Dickie sat quite inconsolably staring in front of him at a
favourite picture on his wall; a dim, sombre effect of quays and masts
and intent hurrying men; his neat little brows were pulled down in a
worried frown, his childish mouth was puckered.
Was it accurate and just, what Hal had said? Or, simpler still, was it
true?
"What you damn well need, Dickie, old son, is life in the raw. You're
living in a lady's work-box here."
It was a bludgeoning return for the courteous attention with which
Dickie had that evening listened to his friend's experiences of travel,
for Hal was not even a good raconteur; he started an anecdote by its
point, and roughly slapped in the scenery afterwards; he had likewise a
habit of disconnecting his impressions from any sequence of time; also
he exaggerated, and forgot names and dates; and even occasionally
lapsed into odd silence just when Dickie was offering himself
receptively for a climax.
And then the inevitable: "Well--and what have _you_ been doing
meanwhile?"
Dickie was not in the least at a loss; he had refurnished his rooms, to
begin with; and that involved a diligent search in antique shops and at
sale rooms, and one or two trips across country in order not to miss a
real gem. And they had to be ready for comfortable habitation before
the arrival of M. and Mlle. St. André for their annual stay with him--a
delightful old pair, brother and sister, with peppery manners and
hypercritical appreciation of a good cuisine--but so poor, so really
painfully poor, that, as Dickie delicately put it: "I could not help
knowing that it might make a difference to them if I postponed their
visit, of less trivial annoyance, but more vital in quality, than with
other of my friends for whom I should therefore have hurried my
preparations rather less--this is in confidence, of course, my dear
Hal!" He had set himself to complete his collection of Watts's Literary
Souvenirs--"I have the whole eleven volumes now----" And he had been a
guest at two charming house-parties in the country, and at one of them
had been given the full responsibility of rehearsing a comic opera in
the late eighteenth-century style. "Amateurs, of course. But I was so
bent on realizing the flavour of the period, that I'm indeed afraid
that I did not draw a clear enough line between the deliciously robust
and the obnoxiously coarse----"
"Coarse--_you_!" Hal guffawed. And then--out came the accusation which
was so disturbing little Dickie.
Life in the raw! Why did the phrase make him want to clear his throat?
Raw--yes, that was the association--when you opened your mouth and the
fog swirled in. Newsboys scampering along a foggy street that was
neither elegant nor squalid, but just a street of mixed shops and mixed
traffic and barrows lit with a row of flapping lights, and men and
women with faces that showed they worked hard to earn a little less
than they needed.... Public-houses.... Butchers' shops with great
slabs of red meat.... Yes, and a queue outside the picture palace--and
a station; people bought the evening papers as they hurried in and out
of the station. "'Ere yer are, sir," and on the sheets were headlines
that blared out all the most sordid crimes of the past twenty-four
hours, ignored during a sober morning of politics and commerce, but
dragged into bold view for the people's more leisured reading.
Newsboys in a foggy street on a Saturday night--thus was Dickie's first
instinct to define "life in the raw...." Then he discovered that this
was only the archway, and that the crimes themselves were life in the
raw--and the criminals.
But one must get nearer by slow degrees.
If at all.
Hal had said that he was living in a lady's work-box. Dickie was
sensitive, and not at all stupid. His penetration was quite aware that
Burnham's remark was not applied to the harmonizing shades of the walls
between which he dwelt, nor to the soft, mellow pattern of his silky
Persian rugs, nor to his collections--heavens, _how_ he collected!--of
glowing Sèvres china, of Second Empire miniatures, of quaint old
musical instruments with names that in themselves were a tender tinkle
of song, and of the shoes that had been worn by queens.
All these things were merely accessories: his soul making neat, tiny
gestures, shrugging its shoulders, pointing a toe. What Hal meant was
that Dickie dared not live dangerously.
"What am I to do?"
He raised wistful, light brown eyes to the picture which was the one
incongruous touch to the dainty perfection of his octagonal
sitting-room. He had bought it at a rummage sale; it was unsigned, and
the canvas, overcrowded with figures, had grown sombre and blurred; yet
queerly Dickie liked the suggestion of powerful, half-naked men; the
foreign quay-side street, with a slatternly woman silent against a
doorway, and the clumsy ship straining to swing out to a menacing sea
beyond.
All these things that he would never do: strip and carry bales on his
back; linger in strange doorways and love hotly an animal woman who was
unaccomplished and without grace and breeding; and then embark on an
evil-smelling hulk that would have no human sympathy with his human
ills.
He had done a little yachting, of course; with the Ansteys the year
before last.
His lips bent to a small ironical smile as he reflected on the
difference between "a little yachting" and the sinister fascination of
that ugly, uninspired painting....
Slowly he got up and went out; that is to say, he very precisely
selected the hat, gloves, coat, and silk muffler suitable to wear, and
as precisely put them on. Then he blew up the fire with an
old-fashioned pair of worked brass bellows; turned out the lamp; told
Mrs. Derrick--who would have died in his service every day from eight
to eight o'clock, but would not crook a finger for him a minute before
she entered the house nor five seconds after she left it--that he was
going for a walk and would certainly be back at a quarter to seven, but
probably before; and then went out.
For this was the natural way for Dickie Maybury to behave.
At twenty to seven he returned, with a sheaf of news-papers--raucous,
badly-printed papers with smudged lines and a sort of speckled film
over the illustrations, and startlingly intimate headlines to every
item of news.