Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 24

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The tea-tray had been removed, and Scarsdale lit a pipe and sat down at his desk which stood in the left-hand window facing the square. His elbows settled themselves familiarly on the blurred black leather. He noticed that the ink-pot had been filled, and that his wooden penholder lay in the tray. Some impulse made him open the top right-hand drawer, and he saw in it a pile of unused manuscript paper faintly tinged with yellow, a packet that he had opened in the early days of the war.

He sat with his elbows on the desk, meditating. He had been less than two hours in this quiet house, and its quietude was the same, and yet it was changed with mayhap and peradventure; its muteness did not spell repose, but suspense, suffering. He had come back to it as to a pleasant niche in the structure of civilization, and it was no longer a niche, but somehow a draughty passage between yesterday and to-morrow.

For Miss Lydia Gall had disturbed him. The simple and stark verities of No. 24A Canonbury Square had brought home to him with a certain grimness the problem of getting a living in the world of 1919. Four lumps of sugar in a bowl! And the woman’s starved face! Yes, she must have been short of food for months, living with her poor pride in this silent empty house. Money! Was it possible that he had lost his feeling for money, his sense of the inexorable values? He had been fed and housed and clothed, and he had returned full of a vague optimism to pick up his pen, and resume the profession of scribbler.

He glanced at the open drawer and its pile of paper. So much blank paper to be covered! And about what was he going to write? He would write as he had always written upon various aspects of life, on matrimony, and children, and going to the seaside, and on French and Italian art. His monthly articles in Harvest had been very well liked by people who found it nice to feel “highbrow” at the rate of twelvepence a month.

But why this sudden fretfulness? His job as sub-editor of the Sabbath had been kept open for him, for Taggart the editor had written to him in France less than a month ago, assuring him that he was not forgotten. He supposed that he would continue to review books for the Scrutator and the Sunday Standard, and that he would resume the production of his monthly articles for Harvest. He ought to be able to earn a sure six hundred a year.

But this restless mood would not be stayed. He did not want to sit still, and he closed the drawer with its supply of blank paper, and went to his bedroom for his hat and overcoat. The hat was a bowler, and when he recrowned himself for the first time with that strange, peaceful headgear, it sat uneasily upon his head. He caught sight of himself in the glass, and was aware of a certain grotesqueness. The black excrescence seemed to make his narrow face look even more narrow.

On the stairs he met Miss Gall coming up, still anxious and propitiatory.

“O, Mr. Scarsdale, your coat! I forgot to tell you. The moth’s been in it.”

“This overcoat?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t notice anything. Will it matter?”

“There is a hole right in the middle of the back. And I had camphor in the drawers—too.”

“Well, never mind to-night. It’s rather chilly.”

“I’m so sorry. I’ll be able to get more coal now.”

Scarsdale went out wearing the coat. Let moth and rust go hang, for he felt a sudden urge toward action, and a curiosity, a desire to see and to feel, to touch and appraise the new world even in Highbury and Islington. He made his way to Highbury Grove, and walked up to where the bare trees of the Fields began beyond two red villas. Highbury Grove had a dismal sobriety, but Scarsdale had an affection for it because it was not new, and brought back memories of his boyhood, and expeditions to Maskelyne & Cook’s, and the Zoo, and the Lowther Arcade. He turned into the Fields. Yes, the trees were bigger, and on the higher ground one did gain the illusion of distance and of a grey landscape shut in by suburban cliffs. Some boys were kicking a football about, and their raw young voices reminded him too much of the war. Further on he heard a blackbird singing, and the song seemed to ascend as a plaintive and rich lament against a sky of harvest gold.

These open spaces could not satisfy Scarsdale’s curiosity. They had no seal to lay upon his mood of restlessness. They were so artificial, asphalt and iron railings, a bituminous and metallic rus in urbe. His urge and his curiosity tended toward the streets, even though they were the “Bitter streets”, and flowing with unfamiliar faces. This new England, even in Islington, what was it like?

He walked down into Upper Street, and strolled along it. He was not wilfully in search of impressions; he wanted to look and to listen. Dusk was at hand, and lights were beginning to shine in the street lamps and in the shop windows. But surely he had never seen this suburban highway so full of girls and of women? And he began to feel that this feminine flux perplexed and troubled him. But what was it exactly? It was not an individual crowd; it seemed to parade in little, frothy freshets, noisily, assertively. It talked loudly in front of the windows; it advertised a sort of flashy insolence.

He found himself looking at faces, and he was surprised at the number of young faces in the street. Also, what was it about these faces that challenged his sentimental attitude toward woman? Hardness? Yes, that was it, even the young faces looked hard, bright and bold and hard. Not being a sensualist he did not divine that other quality, the insurgent sex, the raw flesh that is uncovered when war and pestilence and upheaval tear away the clothes of conventional repression.

From faces his glance began to rest on legs. Legs! Yes, how very unobservant of him! This was a new world of legs. The curtain of convention had gone up considerably. It surprised him. Also it surprised him to find that legs were alluring, and quite unexpectedly shapely. They looked softer, more softly curved—than the faces.

Also, he realized that none of these girls looked at him. They passed him by as though he had lost the lure of youth, the subtle something that challenges and invites. Possibly he was a little piqued. He paused and observed a reflection of himself in a chance mirror, and saw a long, lean, dark figure with high shoulders, and a narrow face under that black bulge of a hat. He got the impression of middle age, of a vague shabbiness.

His restlessness was not relieved. He turned back at last from the lights and the flux of humanity, and diverged into a side street. It was dark here, secret, solitary. He passed the opening of a passage. Someone giggled.