"Isn"t it wonderful?" he said, trying to break the neck of a ginger-beer bottle. He had forgotten the opener.
After supper they sat outside the flapping tent, waiting for the moon that never came. Large clouds scurried across the sky.
"Darling," he whispered, "to think we have waited seven years for this. At last we are alone together, really alone. I couldn"t have waited any longer."
"No, nor could I. Isn"t this the most romantic thing that"s ever happened?"
They sat for a few minutes more.
"I think I"ll go in the tent," she said.
She disappeared, and he stood outside, smoking a cigarette.
His legs shook and his hands trembled. "This is the most beautiful moment in my life," he thought.
A sudden gust of wind blew at his hair. There was a patter in the trees, and a large cloud, hovering overhead, seemed to burst swiftly and silently.
"Darling," she called softly.
He tiptoed inside. Another gust of wind blew across the heath, followed by the sheeting rain.
Two minutes later the tent fell in.
The grey dawn crept into the sky. The battered remains of white canvas fluttered hideously in the wind, like the torn rags of some long-dead explorer. A young man hammered at the pegs with the undaunted perseverance of the very great.
His clothes were sodden, his shoes were pulp. His bride, crouched in the fork of a tree, watched him with dull eyes. At last he admitted defeat, and kneeling in the comparative shelter of a gorse bush, he kept up a monologue that sounded like a chapter from James Joyce.
And the rain fell and the wind blew. Once a still small voice spoke from the fork of a tree.
"Darling," it said, "I believe we"d have been happier at Bournemouth, after all."
Two figures stood side by side on the edge of the London road.
"I tell you it was here we left the car," he repeated for the twelfth time. "I remember this patch of stones."
"I"m sure it was further back," she said; "there was a broken tree stump."
"Well wherever it was, it"s not there now. It"s been stolen; that"s all."
There was a sharp note of irritation in his voice. It is not every man who spends his wedding night in a gorse bush. And now the car was gone, and in it their two suitcases nothing remained to them but the clothes they wore.
"Perhaps," she suggested, "this is a calamity that has been sent to test us."
He said so-and-so, and so-and-so.
She looked about her vaguely.
"I don"t see how they would help us," she told him. "Besides, I don"t see any. No, darling, the only thing to do is to smile and be brave. After all, we have each other."
"Darling, forgive me," he said.
Hand in hand, they wandered along the road.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast . . .
They walked for hours, but in the wrong direction. They found themselves in Tring. They had lunch and walked again; they found themselves in Watford.
They caught buses, they caught trains; they found themselves in London.
It was nine in the evening once more. The day had pa.s.sed slowly, horribly, yet with a subtle swiftness.
As children lost in a wood, they wandered up and down the Euston Road. Shabby, rain-bespattered and unwashed, they looked like the remnant of a hunger strike march.
Suddenly her shoe b.u.t.ton burst. Stifling a groan, she bent her weary back to fix the strap.
As she did so, her wedding ring slipped off her finger and rolled into a drain . . .
They stood on the doorstep of a lodging-house.
"My wife and I want a room for the night," he said. "We camped out yesterday, and then our car was stolen, and so was our luggage."
The woman glanced at the girl"s left hand.
"My wife lost her ring, too," he added.
The woman sniffed and shrugged her shoulders.
"You seem to have lost a good many things."
"We are telling the truth," he said coldly.
"I don"t believe a word of your story," answered the woman, "but I won"t turn you out this time of night."
Meekly they followed her upstairs.
"The lady can have this room, and the gentleman the one at the end of the pa.s.sage. This is a respectable house, and I"m a respectable woman."
She frowned down at them, her arms akimbo.
"And I"m a very light sleeper."
There seemed no more to be said.
She turned and left them in the pa.s.sage.
"Good heavens! Have I got to creep like a thief to my own wife?" he whispered fiercely.
"Hush! she may hear," she whispered back.
"Darling," he said, "you go to your room and wait for me. I"ll pretend to go to mine, and then I"ll come along to yours."
"Supposing the boards creak?"
"I"ll risk it. Darling, I love you."
"So do I."
He began to undress in his own room. The lodgings might be uncomfortable, but they were better than a gorse bush.
What an appalling day it had been! But she had behaved marvellously. Any other girl would have gone home to her family.
To think he had waited for her seven years . . .
He opened the window, and as he did so the door of his own room slammed.
There was a noise of something falling on to the floor. He turned, and saw that the handle of the door had slipped off into the pa.s.sage outside, while the useless k.n.o.b lay at his feet . . .
The next morning he bought her a wedding ring at Woolworth"s.
They moved to lodgings where the landlady was deaf, and where the door of the room bolted and double-locked.
It seemed to them that the world was theirs. The only trouble was that they had no money.
He left her alone while he looked for a job, and as soon as his back was turned she crept away to an agency. They must both work if they wished to live in comfort together.
How wonderful their life would be the quiet suppers, the long evenings . . .
And, later, children playing about the floor.
They met at half-past six, he with his jaw set, a feverish glint in his eye.
"Darling, I"ve got a job," he said.
"How splendid!"
"It"s all I could get, but it"s better than nothing. Anyway, we"ll have to-morrow in the day-time, all to-morrow."
"Oh! no," she told him. "I"ve got a job, too. I"m a daily companion to a lady in Golders Green. My hours are from nine until seven."
He stared at her as one who has heard sentence of death.
"You don"t mean what you"re saying!"
"Why! Whatever"s the matter?"
"My hours are just the reverse. From seven until nine."
"What do you mean?"
"Darling, I"m a night porter at a bank in Acton."
Piccadilly.
She sat on the edge of a chair swinging her legs. Her frock of black satin was too tight for her, and too short; as she tilted on her chair the dress rose above her knees, and I could see the beginning of a ladder in her stocking, hastily mended, the thread jumbled in a knot. Her hair was unnaturally light and over-waved; the vivid red of her lipstick, smudged and thick, toned badly against the pallor of her face dusted with a mauve powder. Her patent shoes were thin for walking, and cheap. The toes were too stumpy and the heels too high. She had thrown off her black coat, the collar and the cuffs of which boasted an imitation fur, and her hat, a minute piece of velvet worn at the back of her head, now lay at her feet. Around her throat was a necklace of scarlet beads that clashed with her mouth. Her face was thin, the skin drawn tightly across her cheekbones, and her eyes silly doll"s eyes, like blue china stared sullenly in front of her.
Every now and then she puffed at a cigarette, pursing up her lips as a child would do, vainly attempting smoke rings, playing at bravado. She had sprinkled herself freely with scent, but even so it could not altogether hide the smell peculiar to one whose skin is rarely washed, whose clothes are seldom cleaned, whose body is under-nourished. She looked at me under her lashes, and then shrugged her shoulders, throwing aside her cigarette, forcing a smile that went ill with her appearance, that belonged to someone who must have been dead a long while. Then she began to talk at last, her voice hard and metallic, real-ising that I was not a man but a dummy thing without feeling, a note-book in my hand. "Newspaper boy, that"s it, is it?" she said. "You"ve got to earn your living the same as I have. It"s a dirty job, isn"t it? When some fellow has left his wife for a new girl your boss sends you round to nose out where it was done and who with. Or else a kid is run over by a tram, and you call on the mother to hear how much blood he spilt. I guess you"re popular all right in homes where things have gone wrong. I guess it gives you a sort of pleasure, doesn"t it, to poke your fingers into people"s lives? You"d think there was trouble enough without a boy like you trampling with heavy feet on something that ought to be kept dark and secret.
"What"s it all for, can you tell me? So that Mr Smith can get a thrill to himself thinking, "I might have been that chap unfaithful," so that Mrs Smith can wonder, "Might have happened to my kid?" No I"m not clever, I"m not wise. But I kind of get time for thinking things now and again. Well, what do you want me to tell you? I"ve no secrets, not these days. I don"t know anyone that"s been murdered, nor run over, nor left sudden, nor waiting for a baby. I haven"t any friends to speak of. I rub along better on my own. You know I find the talk of other people silly. Seems as though whatever they say it wouldn"t make a pennyworth of change if they"d left it all unsaid. The weather now ah! that"s different if you like. Weather means a lot to me. You understand that, don"t you? I hate the rain I can"t afford to have it rain. And I hate the fog I hate the winter they"re bad times for me. But for Lady Stuck-up in her fur coat and her car, it doesn"t hurt her. She"s all right. And Miss Prim selling stockings behind a counter, she"s all right. Half the world don"t worry when it rains.
"But me, looking out of this window and seeing the sky like a dripping bucket, and saying to myself, "Will it stop before night?" and "Will my shoes let in the wet again?" Yes, and the chap who sells sunshades we worry. Come on, tell me it takes all sorts to make a world. They told me that in school. I don"t know why you want to ask me questions. Is it that you"re doing a piece in your paper called "Confessions of the Great"? I"ve seen that sort of stuff before. "How I became an Actress", by Florrie Flapdoodle, or "My First Step Towards the Church", by the Archbishop of Bunk. You want to pry into the lives of humble people like myself. "As a Kid I loved handling Corpses," said the Undertaker. Is that it? So you want me to give it you, hot and strong, straight from the shoulder.
"Listen, you funny little fellow with your notebook and your inky fingers. I"ll tell you a story. Maybe it"s true, maybe it isn"t. You can make what you like out of it and print it in big letters in the "Sunday Muck": "What Led to My Entering the Profession", by Mazie."
You see, in a kind of way, everything happened because of superst.i.tion. I"ve always been mad for superst.i.tion. Walking under ladders, crossing my salt, bowing to the moon, hunting up pa.s.sages in the Bible. Even now it"s the same. Every morning I open my Bible to see if it"s going to be my lucky day. Laughing at me? I tell you I"m serious. A girl I knew found "G.o.d shall send a pestilence unto ye," and in a fortnight she had it. She didn"t laugh. All she knew was that it didn"t come from G.o.d . . . We"re like that, every one of us. Believing in legends, believing in symbols, believing in signs the only things we don"t believe in are fairies.
Listen if I wasn"t superst.i.tious I"d be a housemaid now in Park Lane. It"s a fact. I"d be wearing a cap and an ap.r.o.n. I"d be emptying the slops of some overfed old countess. I"d be meeting my boy Thursday night under a lamp-post and going to a picture house for one-and-three-penny-worth of cuddle. And, look at me I"m free, I don"t owe anything to no one, I belong to myself. Haven"t I got a room of my own? Once I was a kid that didn"t know a thing. I went into service straight from the Soldiers" Orphan Home. A kitchenmaid in Kensington, that was me. No, I hadn"t got any relations. Never knew my parents. The fellow who met my mother on a foggy night must have worn a uniform, else I wouldn"t have been sent to the Soldiers" Orphan Home. I was happy because I was ignorant. I used to scrub myself every day with soap and wear flannel next the skin. I didn"t know any better. I thought if I rose from under-housemaid to upper maybe I"d save enough at fifty to live quiet in the country.
I wanted to marry, too. I thought if you kissed a boy he took you straight away to church. Then I met Jim. Jim didn"t take me to church nor did he kiss me much, but he taught me a whole lot of things housemaids don"t need to know. I felt for Jim what girls in books feel for the fellow on the cover. You know, he has big eyes and curly hair. Jim"s hair was straight and he had a cast in one eye, but I didn"t worry. I don"t know if there"s a name for it what Jim and I had. In the pictures they call it Love. In the newspapers they call it an Offence. I didn"t call it nothing, but it seemed all right to me. I had a pain in my heart when he wasn"t there. I"d wait around in the rain; I wouldn"t work proper. I thought maybe he"d leave me if I didn"t look nice. So I gave up washing and bought some scent and powder, and he said I was fine. He used to say to me, "Look here, Mazie, service isn"t any good to you. You"re too smart." "Why," I"d tell him, "I can"t do anything else." "Of course you can," he"d say, "there"s heaps of things you could do. Service is drab. It doesn"t lead you nowhere." When I told him maybe one day I"d get to upper housemaid he laughed.
"Are you going to waste your days planning what"ll come to you when you"re fifty?" he said. "I thought you"d got more sense."
I told him he was mean, but I thought about it all the same. I thought maybe he"d look down on me if I stayed in service. "If I leave my place you"ll have to find me a job," I said. He looked queer then, he didn"t say much, but next time we went together he petted me so I felt I"d do anything he wanted as long as I didn"t have to lose him. "I treat you all right, don"t I?" he said. "How do you think I earn money to take you out and give you good times?"
"I don"t know. You work, don"t you?"
"Yes, I work, Mazie, but not the way you mean."
"Well, tell me," I said.
Then he laughed, slyly, winking at me. "Look at this," he said, and he took a necklace out of his pocket and jingled it up and down before my eyes.
"Where"d you find that?" I asked him.
"Took it off an old lady," he said.
Then I understood. Jim was a thief. I was scared. I cried, I said I wouldn"t have any more to do with him. I was honest, I said. "All right," he laughed, and went off, not coming near me for three weeks.
That taught me. I saw I couldn"t do without him. I wrote him he could steal the Crown Jewels if he liked, as long as he took me back. I thought p"raps I could reform him and one day I"d save enough money to keep him and buy a little house in the country. I gave in my notice to the lady in Kensington. I saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt in a paper for an under-housemaid in a place in Park Lane.
I showed it to Jim. "That"s me," I said. He laughed. "You can"t do that," he said. "You come and get rich my way."
I put the advertis.e.m.e.nt in my bag.