Читать книгу Marge Askinforit - Barry Pain - Страница 4

I have been studying the beautiful pages of the autobiography of my Great Example—hereinafter to be called the G.E. It is wonderful to be admitted to the circle of the elect, week after week, at the low rate of twopence a time. Why, I’ve paid more to see the pictures.

Considering the price, one ought not to carp. The G.E. says in one extract that she has lost every female friend she ever had, with the exception of four. In a subsequent extract she names six women whose friendship has remained loving and true to her since girlhood. She speaks of a four-line stanza as a couplet. She imputes a “blasphemous tirade” to a great man of science who certainly never uttered one. She says that she had a conversation with Lord Salisbury about the fiscal controversy, in which he took no part, the year after his death. But why make a fuss about little things like this? If you write in bed at the rate of one thousand words an hour, accidents are sure to happen.

But there is just one of the G.E.’s sentences that is worrying me and keeping me awake at night. Here it is—read it carefully:

“I wore the shortest of tweed skirts, knickerbockers of the same stuff, top-boots, a cover-coat, and a coloured scarf round my head.”

And all very nice too, no doubt. But consider the terrific problem involved.

She does not say that the skirt and knickerbockers were made of the same kind of stuff. If she had, I could have understood it, and my natural delicacy would for ever have kept me from the slightest allusion to the subject.

What she does say is that the skirt and knickerbockers were made of the same stuff. That is very different, and involves hideous complications.

Firstly, it must mean that the knickerbockers were made out of the skirt. Well, there may have been surplus material from that coloured scarf, and it is not for me to say. But, secondly, it must also mean that the skirt was made out of the knickerbockers. Oh, help!

No, I positively refuse. I will not say another word. There are limits. Only an abstruse theologian with a taste for the more recondite niceties of obscure heresies could possibly do justice to it.

All change, please. The next item on the programme will be a succinct account of my ebullient girlhood.

I cannot say that I loved the Warren, my ancestral home. The neighbours called it the Warren, but I can’t think why. The Post Office said it was No. 4, Catley Mews, Kentish Town, and dear papa—who always had the mot juste—sometimes said that it was hell.

We were a high-spirited family with clean-cut personalities, penetrating voices, short tempers, high nervous tension, and small feet. Don’t you wish you were like that?

All the same, there were only the four rooms over the stable. At times there were fifteen or sixteen of us at home, and also the lodger—I shall speak of him presently. And when you have five personal quarrels, baby, the family wash, a sewing-machine, three mouth-organs, fried bacon, and a serious political argument occurring simultaneously in a restricted establishment, something has to go. As a rule, dear papa went. He would make for Regent’s Park, and find repose in the old-world calm of the parrot-house at the Zoo.

But there is always room on the top—it is a conviction on which I have ever acted. When I felt too cramped and stifled in the atmosphere of the Warren, I would climb out on the roof. There, with nothing on but my nightgown, tennis shoes, and the moonlight, I would dance frenetically. The tiles would break loose beneath my gossamer tread and, accompanied by sections of gutter, go poppity-swish into the street below and hit all manner of funny things. I fancy that some of the funny things complained. I know the police called, and I seem to remember rather a nasty letter from the landlord’s agent. I had a long interview with mamma on the subject. She pointed out that if I slipped and fell I should probably make a nasty dent in the pavement, and with many tears I promised to relinquish the practice.

I used to ride on the Heath when I had the opportunity, but I cannot pretend that I was up to the standard of the G.E. I do not think I ever rode up a staircase. I certainly never threw my horse down on the marble floor of the hall of the Warren. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, the Warren had not got a hall, and if it had had a hall, the hall would not have had a marble floor. Secondly, the horses I rode were likely to be wanted again, being in fact the ponies that unsuspecting tradesmen stabled at Catley Mews. Bogey Nutter looked after them, and I could always do what I liked with Bogey. He was perhaps the most profuse proposer I ever met. At one time he always proposed to me once a day and twice on Bank holidays. I was such a dashing, attractive creature, what?

As to my education, a good deal depends on what is meant by education. The kind that was ladled out at the County Council establishment made little effect upon me. But I was pretty quick at figures, and knew that an investment of half-a-crown at eleven to eight should bring me in a profit of three-and five—provided that the horse won and the man at the fishmonger’s round the corner paid up. My brother Lemberg had the same talent. If he bought a packet of fags and paid with a ten-shilling note, he could always negotiate the change so that he made ninepence for himself and had the cigarettes thrown in. His only mistake was in trying to do it twice at the same shop, but the scar over his right eye hardly shows now. A sharp-cornered tobacco-tin was not the thing to have hit him with anyhow.

For autobiographical purposes always treat a deficiency as if it were a gift. The G.E. was apparently a duffer at arithmetic, but she tells you so in a way that makes you admire her for it. All the same I wish I had been one of those factory-girls that she used to reclaim in their dinner-hour; I am fundamentally honest, but I never could miss a chance when it was thrown at me.

My education in dancing was irregular, as that greasy Italian did not wheel his piano round every week. However I acquired sufficient proficiency to attract attention, and that is the great thing in life. The Italian offered me twopence a day to go on his round with him and dance while he turned the handle. I told Signor Hokey-pokey what I thought of the offer, and I have some talent for language, if not for languages. So, as he could not get me, he did the next best thing and bought a monkey.

I was by far the most spiritual of the family. But my brother Minoru attended chapel regularly, until they stopped collecting the offertory in open plates and substituted locked boxes with a slot in them. He found another chapel that seemed more promising, but he attended it only once. I shall always consider that the policeman was needlessly rough with him, for Minoru said distinctly that he would go quietly.

My sisters and myself had a fascination for the other sex that was almost incredible. At one time we had a Proposal Competition every week; each of us put in sixpence, and the girl who got the greatest number of proposals took the pool. Casey or I generally won. Then one week I encountered on the Heath the annual beanfeast of the Pottey Asylum for the Feeble-minded, and won with a score of a hundred and seven, and I think the others said it was not fair. Anyhow, the competitions were discontinued.

Really, the way our lodger pestered my sisters and myself with his absolute inattentions is difficult to explain. Anyone might have thought that he did not know we were there. While the Proposal Competitions were on, not one of us thought it worth while to waste time on the man. We could get a better return for the same amount of fascination in other quarters. Afterwards I thought that possibly his employment in the milk-trade might be the cause of his extraordinary mildness, and that it would be kind to offer him a little encouragement.

He usually went for a walk on Sunday mornings, and one Sunday I said that I would accompany him.

“Better not,” he said. “Looks to me like rain.”

“But you have an umbrella,” I pointed out.

“Aye,” he said, “and when two people share one umbrella, they both get all the drippings from it and none of the protection. You take a nice book and read for a bit.”

“No,” I said. “I’m coming with you, and though it’s Leap Year, I definitely promise not to propose to you.”

“Well,” he said, “that makes a difference.”

I thrust my arm into his gaily and confidentially, and he immediately unhooked. We went on to the Heath together.

“I was once told by a palmist,” I said, “that I had a mysterious and magnetic attraction for men.”

“Those palmists will say anything,” he said. “It’s just the other way round really.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “I know I have an unlimited capacity for love—and nobody seems to want it.”

“Ah,” he said, “it’s a pity to be overstocked with a perishable article. It means parting with it at a loss.”

What could I say to a brute like that? And I had nobody there to protect me.

“I wish,” I said, “that you’d look if I’ve a fly in my eye.”

“If you had, you’d know,” he answered. “The fly sees to that.”

Some minutes elapsed before I asked him to tie my shoe-lace.

He looked down and said that it was not undone.

I simply turned round and left him, I was not going to stay there to be insulted.

However, he must have been ashamed of himself, for two days later he sub-let his part of the floor in one of the rooms at the Warren to an Irish family. If he was not ashamed, he was frightened.

Yet, curiously enough, that cowardly brute moulded my future.

The influx of the Irish family into the Warren drove me out of it. It made me feel the absolute necessity for a wider sphere.

On leaving home I took an indeterminate position in a Bayswater boarding-house. At any rate, my wages and food were determined, but my hours of work were not.

A boarding-house is a congeries of people who have come down. The proprietoress never dreamed that she would have to earn her own living like that—though she gets everything to a knife-edge certainty in the first week. Then in the drawing-room you have military people who have thundered, been saluted, been respected—and superseded. And nobody can make worse clothes look better. The cook explains why she’s not in Grosvenor Square, and the elderly Swiss waiter says that he has been in places where pace was not everytink. If you’re out looking for depression, try a boarding-house.

I stayed there a week and then said I was going. The lady said she knew the law and I couldn’t. So I said I would stay, and was sorry that the state of my nerves would mean a good deal in breakages.

I left at the end of the week.