Friendly Young Ladies (22 page)

“Well. Here we are.”

Elsie shook her head. “I don’t know. I seem to have been wondering all my life.”

“There’s no answer,” Leo said. She sat down, as Joe had sat once, on the broad painted rail, and there came into her face and the set of her body a certainty different from his, which yet somehow recalled it. She looked ahead of her, and seemed to be speaking chiefly to herself. “Innocent or guilty, one can’t get away from having caused someone to suffer. It’s a thing which is. One pays for it, somehow, in the end. We shall both pay, I suppose. We have to face that.” Her face had an inward look, as if much more than the present had gone into its decision. “Never make it inevitable for someone to hurt you. It’s a terrible wrong to do another person. Or if it happens, and you can’t prevent it, never let them know.”

Elsie found this doctrine strange and unpalatable. Suffering was, in her imagination, a noble condition, a pageant of the spirit, an Elizabethan progress of black velvet and plumes; the necessary panoply of a distinguished emotional life. Such actual suffering as she had experienced at home she would have defined as “being miserable,” a different thing in a class with acute toothache or mumps, but worse. The thought of associating such a state with Love would have horrified her, if her mind had been capable of grasping it. The pride and splendour of adolescent dream-sorrow invested her with a kind of dignity as she answered, “If one can’t feel the great things of life without suffering, one must be prepared to suffer.”

Twenty-seven looked at seventeen, across a gulf as unbridgeable as interstellar space.

“Oh, well,” said Leo, “never mind.”

Elsie stared down at her hands. She held something in them which she was turning over and over, secretly, as one might a charm. Averting her face, she said, “I know I ought to be looking out for a job, or something. I ought to start on a career. I want to do something important with my life, and be a credit to—to you and Helen. But if you wouldn’t frightfully mind having me, Leo, I would like to go on staying here, just for a bit. Well, for about two weeks, anyway. It’s—it’s rather important.”

“Of course you can stay. You know that. Why are the next two weeks so special—something about the boy-friend?” Leo spoke with exaggerated flippancy, as people do in uncertainty of mind. Elsie winced, but it was too late now, and the matter too urgent, not to continue.

“It is about Peter, actually.” Desperately she tried to make her voice sound light, matter-of-fact and sophisticated, like the voices of Helen’s friends. It was impossible to make anyone understand. “He was telling me at the station, while we were waiting for the train. He has this post for a year, so you see he gets a fortnight’s holiday. He’s taking half of it this month. He’s thinking of putting up at a hotel near here; it’s a good centre, he says, and we could see a bit more of each other. It would be rather fun. I mean, now he’s made these plans, it would seem rather rude and unkind to leave, wouldn’t it?” Leo’s face, she saw, had not changed at all. She was looking ahead of her, hard, shut in, incalculable. How was it possible, Elsie thought, that one could feel so much, and someone a couple of yards away be so untouched by it? Eagerly, like one who offers a bribe of inestimable value, she added, “He likes you and Helen very much. He told me so. He thinks you’re two very complex and unusual people. He wants to see more of you as well.”

“That’s very nice of him.” Leo got down from the rail, and threw her cigarette down into the water, where it went out with a little hiss. “We wouldn’t turn you out anyhow, I told you that. I think we shall have to rely on you, though, to do most of the entertaining. Helen has a lot of jobs on in town, and I’m getting well into the new book now.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Elsie. “Thank you ever so.” She went away, to be alone with her happiness. Leo was kind—very kind for someone who had, by her own confession, never properly been in love. Elsie pardoned her incomprehension, with a charity which, after the walk to the station by the evening Thames, she felt she could well afford; besides, she felt that Peter would approve it. But it was better to be alone. She opened her hands, hot and sticky with emotion and the sun, and looked at the trophy they contained. It was a cardboard packet which had held ten Gold Flake; Peter had thrown it aside on the way to the train, and on the way back she had gathered it up. In the safety of her room she raised it reverently to her lips, before slipping it under her pillow.

“A
RE YOU SURE,” ASKED
Helen, pausing in final doubt in front of the Corner House, “that you’ll really be all right?”

“Of course I will. Really.” Elsie spoke with convincing stoutness; if her plans for the rest of the afternoon had involved a traverse of Snowdon instead of central London she would have been hardly more terrified, but equally determined. Through the broad canyon of Oxford Street, London surged past her, full of its mysterious preoccupations, its compound smells fresh in her unaccustomed nose; dust and petrol, passing perfumes of women, green leaves in a drift of wind vanishing swiftly into the sickliness of warm gear-oil and overclothed humanity, a waft of beer from a crawling dray. Helen, her pencil-case and drawing-block under her arm, seemed already in anticipation to have vanished into it, merging as easily into this strange jungle as a bird into its tree, one more neat female figure among the dozens hurrying past.

“The District Railway back,” Helen reminded her, “from Charing Cross to King’s Cross. I’ll meet you under the clock at five. And don’t worry about getting lost. If you do in London, it can’t mean anything more than wasting half an hour. Any bobby will put you right. Or almost anyone else, for the matter. I’ll have to take this bus. See you at five.” She vanished, in what seemed the clap of an eye, into a hot red monster which a traffic jam had slowed down beside them. Elsie was alone, with three hours, London, and the four pounds in her handbag, all to spend. She looked about her. Down the side-street on her left were large, quiet, rich houses, and a humble-looking barrow piled astonishingly with peaches and grapes and roses. Beside her, a shop window was full of complicated corsets, at which a fat woman was wistfully staring. A man in a purple suit and brown boots collided with her as she swayed indeterminately in midstream, said “Pardon me,” and was swallowed up almost before she knew he had been there. A perambulator was bearing down on her. Like a swimmer caught in a current, she began to move along.

Had Peter, she wondered, ever passed over this pavement where her own feet fell? Almost anyone who lived in London must, she supposed, have done so at some time. She tried to imagine him, a yard or two ahead of her, outside this sweetshop window, for instance, where the mechanical chromium arms manipulated an endless rope of nougat. Perhaps he might, in reality, suddenly appear, emerging without warning like the man in the purple suit, and saying “Hullo, Elsie,” while she was confused and all unready; in a hurry, full, like all these other confident people, of concerns about which she knew nothing. The thought made her feel more than ever bewildered and lonely—Peter, herself, her love, her very consciousness, minute as light-motes in the endless powder of the Galaxy. She walked on, trying to look busy and purposeful and like other people, growing more desolate at every step.

Like a beacon promising harbour, she saw in the middle of the street the reassuring mass of a policeman on point duty. He was directing someone, with the inexhaustable patient courtesy of his kind, and the apparent ease of a juggler who, keeping three balls in the air already, casually adds a fourth. She was already making towards him when she remembered. That rock of changeless security was for others, not for her. Probably her description was copied neatly into his notebook, along with the distinguishing marks of burglars and those whom Scotland Yard was anxious to interrogate. She was outside the law. Receding quickly into the crowd again, she walked on, eyeing the passing faces with nervous distrust, her mother’s stories recurring to her one after another. A comfortable-looking woman with three children in tow seemed, at last, a reasonable risk.

“Excuse me. But can you tell me, please, how I could get to St. Jerome’s Hospital?”

The woman could; her eldest boy, she explained, had had his tonsils out there. Elsie boarded the bus she had recommended, and, almost at once it seemed, was being carried away from the crowd and glitter into narrow, dingy streets. The wide polished shops, with windows like glasshouses of rare flowers, gave place to small tobacconists, fried fish emporia, and secondhand clothes dealers; the word “Noted” occurred with increasing frequency on their signs. The bus threaded a street-market, swarming and raucous; inside it grew hotter and hotter, and the close air began to make her feel sick. Another turning, and they ran between huge, black, sinister warehouses; round again and there were tenements, great houses foundered and rotting, where grey washing hung from the windows and dirty children played last across the road. She began to grow anxious; had she taken the wrong bus after all? But no, she had asked the conductor, when she got on. Perhaps she ought to have changed; in a moment or two she would ask again.

The conductor put his head inside.

“St. Jerome’s Orspital,” he shouted, looking straight at her.

The bus slowed down; she got dizzily to her feet. In another moment she was alone, among the piping, scuffling children, seeing the shrine of her pilgrimage straight ahead.

She stood on the pavement, her handbag clutched in her hands, staring up at its tall black front, at the iron balconies with their red-blanketed beds, the great dim windows, the covered ways roofed with sooty glass connecting block with block, at the vast hoarding, peeled in places with wind and weather, which cried aloud for money in astronomical sums. At a side-door, marked
OUT-PATIENTS
, a slow, sullen stream of humanity, derelict, dirty, crutched, plastered and bandaged, was trickling in, without purpose it seemed and without hope. Within, somewhere, a child screamed. A collarless man brushed past her; she saw, with horror, that half his face was painted over in patches of purple. As if the devil were after her, she ran to the other side of the street, narrowly missing a van, and stood panting, her stomach sinking inside her, to look again.

From here she could read the hoarding, which before had been just over her head. It told her, with two-foot emphasis, that St. Jerome’s Hospital was fifty thousand pounds in debt.

She squeezed her bag in her hand, trying to deny her misery. This was where Peter spent his nights and days. Where was the austere, aseptic whiteness she had seen in hospital films, the polished metal, the crystal glass, the great wide silent spaces, the background she imagined every night before she went to sleep? The dirt, the squalor, the suffering were like a physical weight, a stifling blanket pressing on her spirit. At this very moment he must be somewhere within, in the dark of this evil labyrinth, where her mind must now forever stop short, afraid to follow him; in which he too must surely suffer some unknown, assimilating change. Heat and wretchedness, and the prevailing smells, made an oppression inside her so that she did not know whether she wanted to faint, or weep, or be sick. Suppose she were really to faint, and they should rush upon her and carry her inside, and call Peter to attend to her? The shockingness of this notion revived her like sal volatile. She perceived one consolation; the place, as the hoarding assured her, was on the verge of having to close down. Perhaps it would.

She had no sooner formed the thought than shame overwhelmed her. Peter’s heroism was proven now, if she had never believed in it before. Here was his life-work, at its last gasp for money, and she had actually been glad! Her soul expanded under the light of adoration. She crossed the road, and, groping in her bag, pushed a ten-shilling note into the big wooden box under the hoarding. Comforted and uplifted, she walked back to the stopping-place for her returning bus.

She reached King’s Cross ten minutes early, and Helen was ten minutes late; but she waited happily. The thought of her ten shillings warmed her through. Presently it would be taken out of the box and with it, perhaps, an instrument would be bought, or some expensive drug which the hospital with its load of debt could not afford; and in some critical emergency, Peter himself would use it and, it might be, save someone’s life, and would never know it had come from her.

“Hullo.” Helen appeared out of the hot crowd, fresh and clean as if she had stepped out of her own bedroom. “I’m sorry I’m late. How did you get on?”

“Awfully well, thank you. I didn’t get lost at all.”

“And you bought a frock?” Helen stole a glance full of kindly interest and hidden misgiving at the nameless bag.

“Yes. It was rather a bargain. They reduced the price specially for me, wasn’t it nice of them? It’s sort of jade green, with a gold collar. An afternoon frock, you know. Would you like just to peep at it, or shall we wait till we get in the train?” Her fingers were busy already with the string.

Helen looked, and paused appalled, weighing the possibility of getting the thing changed. Not a chance, she reflected, at the kind of place where that had come from. She gave her warm, gentle smile, and fixed the string back into its holes again.

“It’s sweet,” she said. “You must let me see you in it tonight.”

The rushes that half filled the little backwater stood up all round the punt, cutting off their field of vision from everything but the sky. Sounds from the main river came muted by distance and the afternoon heat. The air was still.

They were both working, with the length of the punt between them; Joe with his elbow and writing-pad propped on the flat end, Leo on her stomach at the other. They had been at it for more than two hours; the shadows had shifted, leaving them in the sun, and its warmth was beginning to make them lazy. Neither had announced the fact, for fear of disturbing the other. Their pauses for thought became more frequent, longer and less intense. Joe crooked his arm under his head, and half shut his eyes. Leo found a young frog in the rushes, sat it in her palm to admire its dapper bronze, and let it flop back in the river again. Encouraged by this sign of levity, Joe heaved himself up and swore at his manuscript, quietly, in the manner which invites comment without insisting on it.