You had five copies; it’s pretty stiff, you know–means you’ve had ’em before, doesn’t it? What?”
“Well, Mr. Mont, anything that’ll give me a chance, I don’t mind confessin’. I have ‘ad a few previous, and it’s just about kept my wife alive. You’ve no idea what that pneumonia’s like for poor people.”
Michael pushed his fingers through his hair.
“How old’s your wife?”
“Only a girl–twenty.”
Twenty! Just Fleur’s age!
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bicket; I’ll put it up to Mr. Desert; if he speaks for you, perhaps it may move Mr. Danby.”
“Well, Mr. Mont, thank you–you’re a gentleman, we all sy that.”
“Oh! hang it! But look here, Bicket, you were reckoning on those five copies. Take this to make up, and get your wife what’s necessary. Only for goodness’ sake don’t tell Mr. Danby.”
“Mr. Mont, I wouldn’t deceive you for the world–I won’t sy a word, sir. And my wife–well!”
A sniff, a shuffle–Michael was alone, with his hands plunged deeper, his shoulders hunched higher. And suddenly he laughed. Pity! Pity was pop! It was all dam’ funny. Here he was rewarding Bicket for snooping ‘Copper Coin!’ A sudden longing possessed him to follow the little packer and see what he did with the two pounds–see whether ‘the pneumonia’ was real or a figment of the brain behind those dolorous eyes. Impossible, though! Instead he must ring up Wilfrid and ask him to put in a word with old Danby. His own word was no earthly. He had put it in too often! Bicket! Little one knew of anybody, life was deep and dark, and upside down! What was honesty? Pressure of life versus power of resistance–the result of that fight, when the latter won, was honesty! But why resist? Love thy neighbour as thyself–but not more! And wasn’t it a darned sight harder for Bicket on two pounds a week to love him, than for him on twenty-four pounds a week to love Bicket?…
“Hallo!… That you, Wilfrid?… Michael speaking… One of our packers has been sneaking copies of ‘Copper Coin.’ He’s ‘got the sack’–poor devil! I wondered if you’d mind putting in a word for him–old Dan won’t listen to me… yes, got a wife–Fleur’s age; pneumonia, so he says. Won’t do it again with yours anyway, insurance by common gratitude–what!… Thanks, old man, awfully good of you–will you bob in, then? We can go round home together… Oh! Well! You’ll bob in anyway. Aurev!”
Good chap, old Wilfrid! Real good chap–underneath! Underneath–what?
Replacing the receiver, Michael saw a sudden great cloud of sights and scents and sounds, so foreign to the principles of his firm that he was in the habit of rejecting instantaneously every manuscript which dealt with them. The war might be ‘off ‘; but it was still ‘on’ within Wilfrid, and himself. Taking up a tube, he spoke:
“Mr. Danby in his room? Right! If he shows any signs of flitting, let me know at once.”…
Between Michael and his senior partner a gulf was fixed, not less deep than that between two epochs, though partially filled in by Winter’s middle-age and accommodating temperament. Michael had almost nothing against Mr. Danby except that he was always right–Philip Norman Danby, of Sky House, Campden Hill, a man of sixty and some family, with a tall forehead, a preponderance of body to leg, and an expression both steady and reflective. His eyes were perhaps rather close together, and his nose rather thin, but he looked a handsome piece in his well-proportioned room. He glanced up from the formation of a correct judgment on a matter of advertisement when Wilfrid Desert came in.
“Well, Mr. Desert, what can I do for you? Sit down!”
Desert did not sit down, but looked at the engravings, at his fingers, at Mr. Danby, and said:
“Fact is, I want you to let that packer chap off, Mr. Danby.”
“Packer chap. Oh! Ah! Bicket. Mont told you, I suppose?”
“Yes; he’s got a young wife down with pneumonia.”
“They all go to our friend Mont with some tale or other, Mr. Desert–he has a very soft heart. But I’m afraid I can’t keep this man. It’s a most insidious thing. We’ve been trying to trace a leak for some time.”
Desert leaned against the mantelpiece and stared into the fire.
“Well, Mr. Danby,” he said, “your generation may like the soft in literature, but you’re precious hard in life. Ours won’t look at softness in literature, but we’re a deuced sight less hard in life.”
“I don’t think it’s hard,” said Mr. Danby, “only just.”
“Are you a judge of justice?”
“I hope so.”
“Try four years’ hell, and have another go.”
“I really don’t see the connection. The experience you’ve been through, Mr. Desert, was bound to be warping.”
Wilfrid turned and stared at him.
“Forgive my saying so, but sitting here and being just is much more warping. Life is pretty good purgatory, to all except about thirty per cent. of grown-up people.”
Mr. Danby smiled.
“We simply couldn’t conduct our business, my dear young man, without scrupulous honesty in everybody. To make no distinction between honesty and dishonesty would be quite unfair. You know that perfectly well.”
“I don’t know anything perfectly well, Mr. Danby; and I mistrust those who say they do.”
“Well, let us put it that there are rules of the game which must be observed, if society is to function at all.”
Desert smiled, too: “Oh! hang rules! Do it as a favour to me. I wrote the rotten book.”
No trace of struggle showed in Mr. Danby’s face; but his deep-set, close-together eyes shone a little.
“I should be only too glad, but it’s a matter–well, of conscience, if you like. I’m not prosecuting the man. He must leave–that’s all.”
Desert shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, good-bye!” and he went out.
On the mat was Michael in two minds.
“Well?”
“No go. The old blighter’s too just.”
Michael stivered his hair.
“Wait in my room five minutes while I let the poor beggar know, then I’ll come along.”
“No,” said Desert, “I’m going the other way.”
Not the fact that Wilfrid was going the other way–he almost always was–but something in the tone of his voice and the look on his face obsessed Michael’s imagination while he went downstairs to seek Bicket. Wilfrid was a rum chap–he went “dark” so suddenly!
In the nether regions he asked:
“Bicket gone?”
“No, sir, there he is.”
There he was, in his shabby overcoat, with his pale narrow face, and his disproportionately large eyes, and his sloping shoulders.
“Sorry, Bicket, Mr. Desert has been in, but it’s no go.”
“No, sir?”
“Keep your pecker up, you’ll get something.”
“I’m afryde not, sir. Well, I thank you very ‘eartily; and I thank Mr. Desert. Good-night, sir; and good-bye!”
Michael watched him down the corridor, saw him waver into the dusky street.
“Jolly!” he said, and laughed…
The natural suspicions of Michael and his senior partner that a tale was being pitched were not in fact justified. Neither the wife nor the pneumonia had been exaggerated; and wavering away in the direction of Blackfriars Bridge, Bicket thought not of his turpitude nor of how just Mr. Danby had been, but of what he should say to her. He should not, of course, tell her that he had been detected in stealing; he must say he had ‘got the sack for cheeking the foreman’; but what would she think of him for doing that, when everything as it were depended on his not cheeking the foreman? This was one of those melancholy cases of such affection that he had been coming to his work day after day feeling as if he had ‘left half his guts’ behind him in the room where she lay, and when at last the doctor said to him:
“She’ll get on now, but it’s left her very run down–you must feed her up,” his anxiety had hardened into a resolution to have no more. In the next three weeks he had ‘pinched’ eighteen ‘Copper Coins,’ including the five found in his overcoat. He had only ‘pitched on’ Mr. Desert’s book because it was ‘easy sold,’ and he was sorry now that he hadn’t pitched on some one else’s. Mr. Desert had been very decent. He stopped at the corner of the Strand, and went over his money. With the two pounds given him by Michael and his wages he had seventy-five shillings in the world, and going into the Stores he bought a meat jelly and a tin of Benger’s food that could be made with water. With pockets bulging he took a ‘bus, which dropped him at the corner of his little street on the Surrey side. His wife and he occupied the two ground floor rooms, at eight shillings a week, and he owed for three weeks. ‘Py that!’ he thought, ‘and have a roof until she’s well.’ It would help him over the news, too, to show her a receipt for the rent and some good food. How lucky they had been careful to have no baby! He sought the basement. His landlady was doing the week’s washing. She paused, in sheer surprise at such full and voluntary payment, and inquired after his wife.
“Doing nicely, thank you.”
“Well, I’m glad of that, it must be a relief to your mind.”
“It is,” said Bicket.
The landlady thought: ‘He’s a thread-paper–reminds me of a shrimp before you bile it, with those eyes.’
“Here’s your receipt, and thank you. Sorry to ‘ave seemed nervous about it, but times are ‘ard.”
“They are,” said Bicket. “So long!”
With the receipt and the meat jelly in his left hand, he opened the door of his front room.
His wife was sitting before a very little fire. Her bobbed black hair, crinkly towards the ends, had grown during her illness; it shook when she turned her head and smiled. To Bicket–not for the first time–that smile seemed queer, ‘pathetic-like,’ mysterious–as if she saw things that one didn’t see oneself. Her name was Victorine, and he said: “Well, Vic.? This jelly’s a bit of all right, and I’ve pyde the rent.” He sat on the arm of the chair and she put her hand on his knee–her thin arm emerging blue-white from the dark dressing-gown.
“Well, Tony?”
Her face–thin and pale with those large dark eyes and beautifully formed eyebrows–was one that “looked at you from somewhere; and when it looked at you–well! it got you right inside!”
It got him now and he said: “How’ve you been breathin’?”
“All right–much better. I’ll soon be out now.”
Bicket twisted himself round and joined his lips to hers. The kiss lasted some time, because all the feelings which he had not been able to express during the past three weeks to her or to anybody, got into it. He sat up again, “sort of exhausted,” staring at the fire, and said: “News isn’t bright–lost my job, Vic.”
“Oh! Tony! Why?”
Bicket swallowed.
“Fact is, things are slack, and they’re reducin’.”
There had surged into his mind the certainty that sooner than tell her the truth he would put his head under the gas!
“Oh! dear! What shall we do, then?”
Bicket’s voice hardened.
“Don’t you worry–I’ll get something”; and he whistled.
“But you liked that job.”
“Did I? I liked some o’ the fellers; but as for the job–why, what was it? Wrappin’ books up in a bysement all dy long. Let’s have something to eat and get to bed early–I feel as if I could sleep for a week, now I’m shut of it.”
Getting their supper ready with her help, he carefully did not look at her face for fear it might “get him agyne inside!” They had only been married a year, having made acquaintance on a tram, and Bicket often wondered what had made her take to him, eight years her senior and C3 during the war! And yet she must be fond of him, or she’d never look at him as she did.
“Sit down and try this jelly.”
He himself ate bread and margarine and drank cocoa, he seldom had any particular appetite.
“Shall I tell you what I’d like?” he said; “I’d like Central Austrylia. We had a book in there about it; they sy there’s quite a movement. I’d like some sun. I believe if we ‘ad sun we’d both be twice the size we are. I’d like to see colour in your cheeks, Vic.”
“How much does it cost to get out there?”
“A lot more than we can ly hands on, that’s the trouble. But I’ve been thinkin’. England’s about done. There’s too many like me.”
“No,” said Victorine; “there aren’t enough.”
Bicket looked at her face, then quickly at his plate.
“What myde you take a fancy to me?”
“Because you don’t think first of yourself, that’s why.”
“Used to before I knew you. But I’d do anything for you, Vic.”
“Have some of this jelly, then, it’s awful good.”
Bicket shook his head.
“If we could wyke up in Central Austrylia,” he said. “But there’s only one thing certain, we’ll wyke up in this blighted little room. Never mind, I’ll get a job and earn the money yet.”
“Could we win it on a race?”
“Well, I’ve only got forty-seven bob all told, and if we lose it, where’ll you be? You’ve got to feed up, you know. No, I must get a job.”
“They’ll give you a good recommend, won’t they?”
Bicket rose and stacked his plate and cup.
“They would, but that job’s off–overstocked.”
Tell her the truth? Never! So help him!
In their bed, one of those just too wide for one and just not wide enough for two, he lay, with her hair almost in his mouth, thinking what to say to his Union, and how to go to work to get a job. And in his thoughts as the hours drew on he burned his boats. To draw his unemployment money he would have to tell his Union what the trouble was. Blow the Union! He wasn’t going to be accountable to them! HE knew why he’d pinched the books; but it was nobody else’s business, nobody else could understand his feelings, watching her so breathless, pale and thin. Strike out for himself! And a million and a half out o’ work! Well, he had a fortnight’s keep, and something would turn up–and he might risk a bob or two and win some money, you never knew. She turned in her sleep. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘I’d do it agyne…’
Next day, after some hours on foot, he stood under the grey easterly sky in the grey street, before a plate-glass window protecting an assortment of fruits and sheaves of corn, lumps of metal, and brilliant blue butterflies, in the carefully golden light of advertised Australia. To Bicket, who had never been out of England, not often out of London, it was like standing outside Paradise. The atmosphere within the office itself was not so golden, and the money required considerable; but it brought Paradise nearer to take away pamphlets which almost burned his hands, they were so warm.
Later, he and she, sitting in the one armchair–advantage of being thin–pored over these alchemised pages and inhaled their glamour.
“D’you think it’s true, Tony?”
“If it’s thirty per cent. true it’s good enough for me. We just must get there somehow. Kiss me.”
From around the corner in the main road the rumbling of the trams and carts, and the rattling of their window-pane in the draughty dry easterly wind increased their feeling of escape into a gas-lit Paradise.
Chapter IX.
CONFUSION
Two hours behind Bicket, Michael wavered towards home. Old Danby was right as usual–if you couldn’t trust your packers, you might shut up shop! Away from Bicket’s eyes, he doubted. Perhaps the chap hadn’t a wife at all! Then Wilfrid’s manner usurped the place of Bicket’s morals. Old Wilfrid had been abrupt and queer the last three times of meeting. Was he boiling-up for verse?
He found Ting-a-ling at the foot of the stairs in a conservative attitude. “I am not going up,” he seemed saying, “until some one carries me–at the same time it is later than usual!”
“Where’s your mistress, you heraldic little beast?”
Ting-a-ling snuffled. “I could put up with it,” he implied, “if YOU carried me–these stairs are laborious!”
Michael took him up. “Let’s go and find her.”
Squeezed under an arm harder than his mistress’, Ting-a-ling stared as if with black-glass eyes; and the plume of his emergent tail quivered.
In the bedroom Michael dropped him so absent-mindedly that he went to his corner plume pendent, and couched there in dudgeon.
Nearly dinner time and Fleur not in! Michael went over his sketchy recollection of her plans. To-day she had been having Hubert Marsland and that Vertiginist–what was his name? – to lunch. There would have been fumes to clear off. Vertiginists–like milk–made carbonic acid gas in the lungs! Still! Half-past seven! What was happening to-night? Weren’t they going to that play of L.S.D.‘s? No–that was tomorrow! Was there conceivably nothing? If so, of course she would shorten her unoccupied time as much as possible. He made that reflection humbly. Michael had no illusions, he knew himself to be commonplace, with only a certain redeeming liveliness, and, of course, his affection for her. He even recognised that his affection was a weakness, tempting him to fussy anxieties, which on principle he restrained. To enquire, for instance, of Coaker or Philps–their man and their maid–when she had gone out, would be thoroughly against that principle. The condition of the world was such that Michael constantly wondered if his own affairs were worth paying attention to; but then the condition of the world was also such that sometimes one’s own affairs seemed all that were worth paying attention to. And yet his affairs were, practically speaking, Fleur; and if he paid too much attention to them, he was afraid of annoying her.
He went into his dressing-room and undid his waistcoat.
‘But no!’ he thought; ‘if she finds me “dressed” already, it’ll put too much point on it.’ So he did up his waistcoat and went downstairs again. Coaker was in the hall.
“Mr. Forsyte and Sir Lawrence looked in about six, sir. Mrs. Mont was out. What time shall I serve dinner?”
“Oh! about a quarter past eight. I don’t think we’re going out.”
He went into the drawing-room and passing down its Chinese emptiness, drew aside the curtain. The square looked cold and dark and draughty; and he thought: ‘Bicket–pneumonia–I hope she’s got her fur coat.’ He took out a cigarette and put it back. If she saw him at the window she would think him fussy; and he went up again to see if she had put on her fur!
Ting-a-ling, still couchant, greeted him plume dansetti arrested as at disappointment. Michael opened a wardrobe. She had! Good! He was taking a sniff round, when Ting-a-ling passed him trottant, and her voice said: “Well, my darling!” Wishing that he was, Michael emerged from behind the wardrobe door. Heaven! She looked pretty, coloured by the wind! He stood rather wistfully silent.
“Hallo, Michael! I’m rather late. Been to the Club and walked home.”
Michael had a quite unaccountable feeling that there was suppression in that statement. He also suppressed, and said: “I was just looking to see that you’d got your fur, it’s beastly cold. Your dad and Bart have been and went away fasting.”
Fleur shed her coat and dropped into a chair. “I’m tired. Your ears are sticking up so nicely to-night, Michael.”
Michael went on his knees and joined his hands behind her waist. Her eyes had a strange look, a scrutiny which held him in suspense, a little startled.
“If YOU got pneumonia,” he said, “I should go clean out of curl.”
“Why on earth should I?”
“You don’t know the connection–never mind, it wouldn’t interest you. We’re not going out, are we?”
“Of course we are. It’s Alison’s monthly.”
“Oh! Lord! If you’re tired we could cut that.”
“My dear! Impos.! She’s got all sorts of people coming.”
Stifling a disparagement, he sighed out: “Right-o! War-paint?”
“Yes, white waistcoat. I like you in white waistcoats.”
Cunning little wretch? He squeezed her waist and rose. Fleur laid a light stroke on his hand, and he went into his dressing-room comforted…
But Fleur sat still for at least five minutes–not precisely ‘a prey to conflicting emotions,’ but the victim of very considerable confusion. TWO men within the last hour had done this thing–knelt at her knees and joined their fingers behind her waist. Undoubtedly she had been rash to go to Wilfrid’s rooms. The moment she got there she had perceived how entirely unprepared she really was to commit herself to what was physical. True he had done no more than Michael. But–Goodness! – she had seen the fire she was playing with, realised what torment he was in. She had strictly forbidden him to say a word to Michael, but intuitively she knew that in his struggle between loyalties she could rely on nothing. Confused, startled, touched, she could not help a pleasant warmth in being so much loved by two men at once, nor an itch of curiosity about the upshot. And she sighed. She had added to her collection of experiences–but how to add further without breaking up the collection, and even perhaps the collector, she could not see.
After her words to Wilfrid before the Eve: “You will be a fool to go–wait!” she had known he would expect something before long. Often he had asked her to come and pass judgment on his ‘junk.’ A month, even a week, ago she would have gone without thinking more than twice about it, and discussed his ‘junk’ with Michael afterwards! But now she thought it over many times, and but for the fumes of lunch, and the feeling, engendered by the society of the ‘Vertiginist,’ of Amabel Nazing, of Linda Frewe, that scruples of any kind were ‘stuffy,’ sensations of all sorts ‘the thing,’ she would probably still have been thinking it over now. When they departed, she had taken a deep breath and her telephone receiver from the Chinese tea chest.
If Wilfrid were going to be in at half-past five, she would come and see his ‘junk.’
His answer: “My God! Will you?” almost gave her pause. But dismissing hesitation with the thought: ‘I WILL be Parisian–Proust!’ she had started for her Club. Three-quarters of an hour, with no more stimulant than three cups of China tea, three back numbers of the ‘Glass of Fashion,’ three back views of country members ‘dead in chairs,’ had sent her forth a careful quarter of an hour behind her time.
On the top floor Wilfrid was standing in his open doorway, pale as a soul in purgatory. He took her hand gently, and drew her in. Fleur thought with a little thrill: ‘Is this what it’s like? Du cote de chez Swann!’ Freeing her hand, she began at once to flutter round the ‘junk,’ clinging to it piece by piece.
Old English ‘junk’ rather manorial, with here and there an eastern or First Empire bit, collected by some bygone Desert, nomadic, or attached to the French court. She was afraid to sit down, for fear that he might begin to follow the authorities; nor did she want to resume the intense talk of the Tate Gallery. ‘Junk’ was safe, and she only looked at him in those brief intervals when he was not looking at her. She knew she was not playing the game according to ‘La Garconne’ and Amabel Nazing; that, indeed, she was in danger of going away without having added to her sensations. And she couldn’t help being sorry for Wilfrid; his eyes yearned after her, his lips were bitter to look at. When at last from sheer exhaustion of ‘junk’ she sat down, he had flung himself at her feet. Half hypnotised, with her knees against his chest, as safe as she could hope for, she really felt the tragedy of it–his horror of himself, his passion for herself. It was painful, deep; it did not fit in with what she had been led to expect; it was not in the period, and how–how was she to get away without more pain to him and to herself? When she HAD got away, with one kiss received but not answered, she realised that she had passed through a quarter of an hour of real life, and was not at all sure that she liked it… But now, safe in her own room, undressing for Alison’s monthly, she felt curious as to what she would have been feeling if things had gone as far as was proper according to the authorities. Surely she had not experienced one-tenth of the thoughts or sensations that would have been assigned to her in any advanced piece of literature! It had been disillusioning, or else she was deficient, and Fleur, could not bear to feel deficient. And, lightly powdering her shoulders, she bent her thoughts towards Alison’s monthly.
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