Читать книгу The Anxious Days - Philip Gibbs - Страница 13

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Compton disengaged himself from the Admiral’s conversation and walked through St. James’s Square, up Duke Street into Jermyn Street, and so to Piccadilly. Not much difference outwardly since his last walk that way. There were the same old shops in which he had been accustomed to buy his boots and ties and socks as a young naval man, particular about his appearance when out of uniform. He stood staring at some coloured prints of hunting scenes. He had bought a set of them for his rooms in Charles Street before he married Phyllis. His sister Beatrice had them now, unless she had sold them or given them away to one of his nieces.

It is queer how old memories come to a man who has been absent from London for some time. He remembered standing outside this very shop and being accosted by a pretty girl who said she was the daughter of a clergyman. He could remember her appearance as though it were yesterday. She was wearing a brown dress with a floppy hat. She had fluffy fair hair and blue eyes. She said her name was Joyce. Extraordinary remembering it after thirty years!

And it was to Stewart’s at the corner of Bond Street, where he now stood, that he took Phyllis to tea the day he proposed to her. He had two boiled eggs for his tea because he had come up from Portsmouth in a train without a luncheon car. Phyllis was frightfully shy, and he thought her the prettiest thing God had ever created, and before putting her into a hansom cab—he was going to dine with her people that night—he kissed her gloved hand, and she blushed as though he had embraced her in the middle of Piccadilly.

For a few minutes Compton stood outside Stewart’s, motionless. Taxis and motor-cars of all types were streaming in a tide of traffic towards the Circus. He was passed on the pavement by a hurrying crowd of people unknown to him, but he saw ghosts among them: women whom he had met here before the War, pretty and elegant and gay; men who had been pals of his when they were in their twenties and thirties. They had gone to the Alhambra and the old Empire on many a night. They had dined at Frascati’s and the Café Royal. Some of them had flirted with Phyllis in a friendly way, with no harm meant. Some of them had had rooms in Jermyn Street or Duke Street, and had crowded them with little parties after theatres and suppers, turning on gramophone records—rather new then—and standing drinks to young naval men and boys in line regiments with undeveloped hair on their upper lips, and under orders for India.

What had become of all that crowd? Most of them seemed to have gone. The War had accounted for many of them. Others were on the Riviera as retired colonels. Some of his contemporaries in the Navy had been “axed” after the War and were out in Kenya, or farming in a small way at home, or running garages. One of them had turned his country house into an hotel for week-enders. Another had started a boarding-house in Ebury Street. This crowd in Piccadilly, all in a hurry to get somewhere, was not his crowd. No familiar face passed him. No friendly hand was raised to say “Welcome back, old boy!” ... Until, by an odd chance, at the corner of Arlington Street, by the Ritz Hotel, one of these people in a hurry—a woman—turned quickly, came back, and put her hand on his arm.

“Stephen! Good heavens! When did you get back? How thin and fit you look!”

“My dear Monica! By all the gods, it’s wonderful to meet you like this! I thought you were down in darkest Bermondsey. Aren’t you one of the new Labour members?”

It was Mrs. Pomeroy who had been elected to South Bermondsey, according to the results posted up in Horridge’s. Helen Lambert had spoken about her.

She looked a little worn and worried, he thought, but still with more than a trace of that beauty, spiritual and elusive, to which he had first given homage twenty-five years ago when she was a girl of eighteen.

She stood smiling at him with searching eyes, as though measuring any change that had happened in him since their last meeting.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m an M.P., and rather frightened about it! But it was great fun fighting the Election. They’ve been wonderfully kind to me in Bermondsey.”

“Why are you on the wrong side?” asked Compton. “I can’t forgive you.”

His eyes showed that he had already forgiven her, though he might be puzzled.

“I have an idea I am on the right side,” she answered, laughing for a moment. “I’m on the side of the underdogs, and the dwellers in mean streets, who have a pretty rough deal of it now in a time of unemployment.”

“Aren’t they on the dole?” asked Compton.

She smiled at him again.

“If they can get it. Do you want them to starve?”

“It’s all very bewildering,” said Compton. “I can’t get the hang of things.... Do you still play Chopin?”

She raised her gloved hands and laughed.

“Not often. I’m a working woman. Up to the neck in my constituency. Poor relief. Babies’ crèches. Women’s clubs. Slum dwellings. Committee meetings.”

“Too bad!” said Compton. “You look tired, my dear. You’re working too hard.”

“It’s worth it,” she told him. “One gets into touch with the real things of life, and the real people. In the front line trenches.... How’s your pretty Margaret? I haven’t seen her since she came down from college.”

“I came back last night,” said Compton. “I’ve just had a glimpse of her. She’s acting for a bit, and keen on it. An amazingly attractive young woman who has grown up beyond recognition, so that I feel shy of her.”

“How nice for her to have you back!” exclaimed Mrs. Pomeroy.

“She has her own friends,” said Compton, as though not quite sure that it was nice for Madge to have him back.

Mrs. Pomeroy seemed to understand.

“Oh, of course! She’ll want her own life.”

“I want her comradeship,” said Compton. “I’ve been craving for it. I’ve been damned lonely, you know—looking after coolies in Malay forests.”

He was not whining. He spoke the words with a laugh, as though making a joke of that exile.

“We’re holding up the traffic,” said Mrs. Pomeroy. “I must fly.”

He held her hand and prevented her from flying.

“When can I come and see you? Are you still in the same flat? Can you spare a cup of tea now and then to an ancient ghost?”

She looked doubtful about that cup of tea.

“One evening,” she suggested. “The same address. I’m frightfully busy, but I put papers on one side when the clock strikes ten.”

“You mean you don’t want me to come?” he asked, with a comical air of dejection.

“I mean I want you to come. I shall love you to come.”

He raised her gloved hand and touched it with his lips.

She smiled at him with a flutter of eyelashes and fled from him towards a crawling taxi, which she hailed.

Compton strode on slowly towards Leicester Square, a little emotional after this meeting with Mrs. Pomeroy, whom he called Monica in his mind and heart. After Phyllis’s death—poor darling—she had been very kind. She and Pomeroy had had him round to their flat in Westminster whenever he liked to drop in. She had played Chopin to him, exquisitely. Beyond all words, he had admired her courage and devotion to Pomeroy when he was stricken with a painful and fatal disease, which had ended a brilliant career at the Bar—and her happiness. Frightfully tragic! But she hadn’t let this tragedy weaken her spirit. She was all spirit and courage, as he had seen in those old Suffragette days when she went to prison for her convictions. He had utterly disagreed with her—he had hated those militant women as a rule—but Monica had almost converted him to her belief in Women’s Rights, and he had had the luck to rescue her from the brutality of a mob, as he would have done for any woman, of course.

He reckoned up her age. Eighteen, twenty-five years ago. Forty-three! Well, she didn’t look a day older than thirty-eight. Her eyes were still humorous and lit by an inner flame of the spirit. She had gone over to Labour. He was sorry for that, not believing in the Labour programme, which seemed to him the half-way house to anarchy; but of course she was doing it with humanitarian ideas, and because she loved the underdogs—“the dwellers in mean streets”, as she called them. She hadn’t been very warm in her invitation to him, but he would take a chance one evening. She was one of his old crowd. He couldn’t afford to let her go....