I Shall Not Want (43 page)

It was because of the little girl who was with her, that he was able to catch them up. She dragged behind, still craning her neck to look at the windows. And an idea came to him.

“Give her anything she wants,” he said. “Anything in the whole store. I'll pay for it.”

It was as Mary moved away again—though the child by now was staring up at him—that he saw one of the shop-girls standing at the doorway with the last balloons of her bunch in her hand. He took them from her and put them into the child's hand instead. The child took hold of them instinctively.

As soon as he had given them to her, he stopped. It was no use going further; he could not go on forever following someone who would not speak to him. Instead, he stood and watched. Already he was conspicuous; a whole group of people was observing him. But the long street might have been empty, except for the two of them, the mother and the child: they were all he saw. The three balloons with his name on them were swinging out behind and the hand that held them was jerking at the strings, playing with them.

Then at the end of the street, Mary paused: she bent down and said something to the child. He saw her take the balloons away from her and drop them into the gutter. The balloons bounced lightly for a moment and then began to blow gaily back towards him. But Mary, with the child
still looking over her shoulder at the bright new present that had been snatched from her, was hurrying on again.

John Marco turned and went back to the shop.

ii

The directors' room when he got there was loud with voices and the chink of glasses. On a table by the window the empty bottles were standing. John Marco opened the door and stood for a moment looking in.

The first person to catch his eye was Mrs. Hackbridge. Her husband had dressed her up for the part of a director's wife, and across the wide brim of her Gainsborough hat a curling ostrich feather now wound like a coiled serpent. Beneath the hat, however, her face showed thin, peaky and unmistakably Hammersmith. She had rolled back her long gloves to the wrist and was over by the buffet eating earnestly. Mrs. Skewin was there beside her. But neither she nor Mr. Skewin had dressed themselves up in the least; there in the midst of affluence they remained as living tokens of unsuccess; unchanged, unnoticed and themselves.

John Marco, however, was not allowed to remain long in the doorway unattended. It was Mr. Bulmer who greeted him. He was sitting on the board table itself with his feet in their elastic-sided boots up on a chair in front of him. He held his cigar jutting out of the corner of his mouth and raised his glass in John Marco's direction.

“The conquering hero,” he said, not very distinctly. “Come in and join us.”

The Mayor was still there; and the Lady Mayoress. She was still holding the enormous bunch of roses and maiden-hair fern that had been presented to her. They all stopped talking as John Marco entered, and Mr. Hack-bridge, who had slunk upstairs for a moment while the drinks were still going, came forward, a guilty expression on his face, with a glass of champagne for his master.

John Marco took the glass and there, in the midst of
all these people who were decently sipping the stuff, he tossed it off. Mr. Bulmer caught his eye approvingly and winked at him. Then Mr. Hackbridge began backing as inconspicuously as possible towards the door to return to his duties, and the Mayor stepped forward.

“Har you satisfied?” he asked blandly. “Ham I right in supposing that to-day has been a great success?”

John Marco told him that he was; and Mr. Bulmer got down from the table and opened another bottle of champagne.

It was after seven when the party broke up. The Mayor, with the Lady Mayoress on his arm, was the first to go; and then Mr. and Mrs. Skewin; the other directors found the gloves and handbags that their wives had mislaid; and last of all Mr. Hackbridge came to collect the uncomely Mrs. Hackbridge.

John Marco was left alone in the room now, the litter of celebration all round him. He went over to the sideboard and found a bottle of champagne, half-full, standing there. He poured himself out one glass and then another and drank them in quick succession as he had drunk the first one. He was alone, wasn't he? There was no reason why he shouldn't get drunk if he wanted to. The others had all gone off home with their wives; they weren't left solitary as he was. Even Mr. Hackbridge would find the creature who had worn the picture hat sitting by the fireside when he reached his house. And John Marco would find no one. His fireside and his bed were as unshared as a hermit's. But if he so much as raised his little finger, couldn't he have half the women in London simply for the asking? He could give them everything they wanted, now; they could have their furs and their servants and their town-carriage. At forty, with his hair just silvering a little, he was a catch; he was the most eligible man of his own acquaintance. But he was forgetting; the champagne had blurred things for a moment. He had forgotten the one thing that really mattered. He couldn't offer them anything: that was the whole irony of it. Somewhere or
other behind locked doors, with her tracts and her son for company, his help-mate and bed-fellow was waiting for him: in the eyes of God he was not one of the lonely ones.

He set down his wine glass so clumsily that the stem shattered against the bottle and he was left holding the broken fragment in his hand. When he let the piece fall to the table, and heard the silly tinkle that it made, he knew that he was just a little drunk already. And the thought of women, not of any one woman in particular, but the whole sex of them, now came pressing in on him. He remembered faces that he had seen in a crowd long since, and then forgotten; his mind became full of pictures and he surrendered to them. He recalled the way in which women, respectable, well-groomed women, out in the Park with their husbands, had eyed him as he had passed. And other women—less respectable. Weren't the streets full of them? Wouldn't any other man have forgotten his wretchedness that way? At the thought, a wave of coldness and desire ran through him. The evening was still young, and in the darkness outside, the whole Babylon of London lay at his doorstep. For one night at least he could forget everything in life that he had lost.

He looked up and saw Mr. Hackbridge standing there.

“There's something I ought to report, sir,” he said hesitatingly. “One of the counterfoils from the Hosiery is missing. I've spoken very severely to the young lady about it....”

But John Marco was not listening. With his hat tilted on the back of his head and with his gold-knobbed cane in his hand, he had gone out of the doorway without answering. His face was flushed and his step on the stairway outside sounded heavy and uncertain.

iii

Out there in the Park, the women who had suddenly filled his mind, were standing in their numbers; and he
went among them. Singly, and in twos and threes, they made a moving pattern of invitation. And some instinct seemed to draw them to him. They came close, leaving their cheap heavy scent hanging over him. But he only peered into their strange pale faces and passed on. Somehow, by their openness, their eagerness, they were destroying the very thing that he was seeking hard to find.

And he remembered suddenly that previous night when he had gone alone into the Park. It had been to decide that night; to decide whether at last to break the cords that were still binding him to Mary and unite his life with Hesther's instead. He had made his decision; and the reward, a thousand-fold, had come to him. It was because he had decided, that he was a rich man now, rich and growing richer. His mind clung to the thought and tried to embrace it; to be rich, that was the great adventure. There was nothing on earth now, even this brief space of pleasure that he was seeking, that he could not purchase.

Ahead of him, in the yellow saucer of light that one of the lamps made around it, a woman was standing. He looked at her and his step quickened. She was young, little more than a girl, it seemed, and solitary; she evidently did not consort with the others of her kind. His heart began racing and his lips were dry. The evil, the wickedness, of what he was contemplating momentarily overwhelmed him.
“For of this such are they which creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away by divers lusts:”
The words came into his memory and accused him. He hesitated. But already the figure ahead of him had sauntered idly away into the shadows and he pressed on, following her more urgently, more desperately, than before. The rest of the dark parkland, the rest of London, the rest of his own life even, was blotted out; and only the fascination of the dim form in front remained.

As he drew near, she turned slowly and paused. He spoke to her and she came up and walked beside him, taking hold of his arm as she went. At her touch the desire within him mounted and he thrust his own arm about her
roughly. Her body was slight and yielded to his weight; the tenderness of youth still seemed to cling to it.

“This is sin,” John Marco told himself. “Sin. But she will help me to forget.”

Then as she came into the glow of the next lamp he saw her face. She was glancing sideways and her eyes met his. But her eyes were grey, the heavy gold of her hair was drawn into a coil on the white neck. He started and drew back. It was no longer her face that he was seeing: it was Mary's. But this face was smiling, the red mouth was parted; and he remembered Mary's face as she had turned away from him that afternoon, how cold and bitter it had been. His mind cleared suddenly with the memory, and he saw the woman in front of him as she really was—her loose, stupid lips and the streety simper. “I have lost Mary, to win this,” he reflected. “It is this for which I am giving away my soul.” And, putting out his arm, he thrust her angrily away from him.

He had left her now: he had put a sovereign into the woman's hand—it had closed over it like a child's—and had gone away leaving her there in the darkness. He was a sane man again, sane and lonely and exhausted. And as he walked his lips were moving.

“Thanks be to God for saving me,” he was repeating over and over again. “Thanks be to God for saving me.”

And as he said it, he was aware that the presence—compound of the Reverend Ephraim Sturger, Eliud Tuke and the great Jehovah of old—was still with him.

Still with him, and probably always would be.

The Opening sale was over ; and the January Sale, too. The windows were discreet and dignified again. There were no more balloons and no free teas. But nevertheless John Marco Limited was still full. For a whole-mile radius around Tredegar Terrace every woman who set out with the light of purchase in her eye turned instinctively in the direction of this mammoth monument of temptation.

And then came away flattered and gratified. Simply to step into the central hall with its brass work and its galleries was to enjoy life on a larger scale. There was intoxication in it. The bright canary-coloured paper in which the parcels were wrapped, the bright canary-coloured vans which delivered the stuff, and the two page boys in their bright canary-coloured uniform, at the main entrance—they were a later idea of John Marco's: he blamed himself bitterly for not having had them there for the opening ceremony—all added to the gaiety of the thing and made the spending of money seem fun, and not something serious. Everything about the place was so wantonly luxurious that it made even quite frugal, economical little women wanton and luxurious, too.

Not, of course, that the shop was cheap to run like that. The yellow vans, the coach-builder had pointed out, would have to be re-painted every twelve months; and the two dwarfish page boys had to change their costumes as often as a diplomat, even though Mr. Hackbridge had instructed them to spread a sheet of newspaper beneath them before they sat down anywhere.

There were other extravagances, too; extravagances that shocked the lean heart of Mr. Skewin and the acid eye of Mr. Lyman in the Counting House. There was the
Floristry Department, for example. It occupied one entire bay in the ground floor, like a gaudy, scented sub-colony of Kew. John Marco would not have it filled with chrysanthemums and marguerites and bunches of corn flowers that people could afford to buy. Flowers like that, he argued, could be bought at any street corner. Instead, there were sprays of white lilac out of season, and hot-house mimosa, and orchids that were like sin set in a vase. And naturally half the stock was left unsold every night. It had to be carried away by the bucketful to be disposed of to the staff, and to anyone else who would buy it, at the sheerest rubbish prices. John Marco knew all about this of course. He had a daily report from all the departments put onto his desk at nine o'clock every morning, and it was always the Floristry that was on the wrong side of the sheet. And on the fourth or fifth occasion on which Mr. Lyman's long, thin finger hovered over the Floristry deficit John Marco only laughed at him.

“Put the whole thing down to advertising,” he said. “That's what it is really. Brings the women in. That's what's wrong with men like you, Lyman. You don't understand women: you've got no experience of them.”

And Mr. Lyman, who had four daughters and supported his wife's sister as well, smiled obediently and said, “Quite so, sir.”

But the daily reports were not John Marco's only contact with the business. There was his regular morning tour as well. This began at ten-thirty, as soon as the morning's post had been gone through, and even during those early months it had already assumed a kind of awful significance, like a Captain's inspection on a ship. The sight of John Marco, with Mr. Hackbridge walking beside him like an adjutant, was one of the alarms of living; after he had passed, the assistants began behaving like human beings again.

It was on one of these occasions as he was entering the Millinery Saloon, with his shop manager pounding heavily
after him across the thick, pile carpet, that he saw Eve Harlow again. She was very different by now from the girl whom Mr. Hackbridge had enjoyed bullying in those early days when he had been engaging staff. Her dark hair was now piled high on top of her head like a fashionable lady's. And her dress was smarter. She had somehow contrived to make herself a woman about town on fifteen shillings a week. He stood there looking at her and wondered how it was that he had not noticed her before: she had been working for him for over six months and during that time he had never thought of her apart from the eighty or ninety other identical young ladies who streamed into the shop at eight forty-five every morning making it a seraglio, and out of it again at seven-fifteen every night, leaving it like a tomb.