Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (38 page)

‘Yes, it’s a dirty job, I know,’ she said, as though she had frequently experienced nausea in the same task. (He probably worked in a garage, or it was his employer’s car.)

‘It is and all,’ he replied. ‘And it seems my car collects all the dirt there is in London.’

‘Have you got a car, then?’ It simply leaped out of her before she could stop herself.

‘Of course I have. What do you think?’

‘Oh – I just wondered. . . .’ She blushed again. She was deeply chagrined by the blush and by herself. She had allowed him to see that she was hopelessly impressed at his having a car. It was simply incredible – the way these people, these base inferiors, were getting the better of her. But could car-owners
be called inferiors? Perhaps she herself was ‘out of it.’ Perhaps Violet was right, and there was more to this ‘getting off’ than she had imagined. But how on earth did he come to have a car?

‘I’m always deciding to get rid of it,’ he went on. ‘But somehow I never bring myself to do it. You get attached to a thing you’ve had for a long time, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You do.’

Glancing at the clock she saw that it was practically eight o’clock, and took another sip at her port, judging that she could finish the rest at one go in a moment, and then depart.

‘I could get a good price for it, too,’ he continued. ‘There’s an old friend of mine – an old boy I know down at Brighton – old Major Rogers – he’s always wantin’ to take it off my hands, but I’m blessed if I can let it go.’

Major!
What was this? It was on the tip of her tongue to say ‘Do you know a Major, then?’ But luckily she controlled herself in time. An old friend of his? Things were going from bad to worse.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One feels like that.’

Who the devil did this apeish little man think he was? If such a one owned a car and consorted with Majors, what were the standards of to-day? She knew how odd the protest was, coming from one in her own lowly situation, but she was unable to curb it. Jenny’s soul, if she but knew it, was charged through and through with a vigilant snobbery and awareness of class, and now it rebelled hotly against so uncouth an off-shoot of democracy. One thing she did perceive, however. He was, though not without delicacy, showing off. He had the makings of a ‘swank-pot.’

‘Fond of Motoring?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’m very fond of it, really,’ she replied. ‘’Specially in the summer months.’

Jenny would have spoken more honestly had she said that she was fond of the prospect of Motoring in the summer months, for she had never been in a motor-car in her life.
Hitherto an occasional pillion had formed the sum of her experience in this direction.

‘I must take you out,’ he said. ‘One of these fine days.’

‘I should like to,’ said Jenny, and there was a silence.

Jenny looked about her, and idly wondering whether she would really like to go out with Andy in a car, and in what manner he would behave in such an event, fell into a sort of dream. Looking at the clock again, she saw that it was two minutes past eight – time she finished up her port and went. Though, of course, she could easily wait until five past, or ten past, if it came to that. Strictly speaking she could make it easily in twenty minutes; she had only said she must go at eight o’clock in order to get away.

She all at once realized that now she was in here, in the warm fuggy air, she was somewhat loth to move. The thought of a ’bus ride was like the thought of a cold bath; physically speaking, she would like to stay on here indefinitely. Laziness. Or was it the port? She had heard that drink made you sleepy. She sipped at it again.

Suddenly Andy drained off his glass, and banged it down on the table.

‘We’ll have some more of these,’ he said. ‘Waiter!’

‘Here,’ said Jenny. ‘Not for me.’

But the waiter was already above them.

‘Four more ports, please, waiter,’ said Andy.

‘Four one and twos?’ The man had vanished.

‘I
ain
’
t
goin’ to have another,’ she said.

‘Go on,’ said Andy derisively.

‘I ain’t,’ she repeated, but all Andy did was to look at her in a mocking way.

Quite evidently his soul was not ruffled by the slightest intimation that she was serious, and she did not see what form of protest she could make against such a glance. In fact, there was no protest. All she could do now, if she really wished to go, was to get up and briefly and discourteously depart. But to one so long and arduously trained in the practice of pleasing strangers, to one so wary of her genteel dignity, so
morbidly fearful of participating in the minutest dimension of a Scene, such a line of action was a practical impossibility. It looked as though she must stay.

Over and above this, however, she found that half of her honestly desired to stay. As well as the courage, she lacked the pure inclination to go which she had felt a few moments ago. A new sensation had replaced it. A permeating coma, a warm haze of noises and conversation, wrapped her comfortably around – together with something more. What that something more was she did not quite know. She sat there and let it flow through her. It was a glow, and a kind of premonition. It was certainly a spiritual, but much more emphatically a physical, premonition of good about to befall. It was like the effect on the body of good news, without the good news – a delicious short cut to that inconstant elation which was so arduously won by virtue from the everyday world. It engendered the desire to celebrate nothing for no reason.

She asked herself whether this was intoxication. She decided that at any rate it was a foretaste of it, and in a flash understood what had been a closed book to her until now – the temptations and perils of alcohol. She decided that she was growing up – that yet another of the veiled mysteries of the world had been illuminated by experience. Experience – that was the thing. Sitting there, she exulted in experience.

There still remained the problem of whether she would drink this second port which was coming. She could easily refuse it and content herself with sitting on in the warmth for a little. She decided to leave this matter over until it came. It was now five past eight. She would leave at twenty past. She reckoned that that would make her only five minutes late for Tom at the most.

The waiter returned. Andy paid for the drinks and at once raised his glass. ‘Well – here we go,’ he said.

Without thinking Jenny lifted her responding glass along with the others, and drank. The thoughtless and mechanic movement solved her problem for her. Without sophistry of any kind, she now felt herself committed to the whole glass.
Two ports! – she was surprised and diverted by her daring. ‘I shall come to a bad end,’ was what she very nearly humorously said, but she luckily restrained herself from again betraying her
gaucherie
in this company. And that she lacked tact and experience, that they had slightly the better of her, she was now almost ready to admit. She was now anxious to maintain an equal status rather than a superior eminence.

The fresh round of drinks re-established a communal sense in the four of them.

‘Well – what part of the world do you two girls come from?’ asked Rex.

‘I live round here,’ said Violet, and nodding at Jenny added. ‘She’s over at Chiswick.’

‘You live at Chiswick?’ said Andy. ‘That’s where I used to live.’

‘Well – I shall be shortly,’ said Jenny.

‘Oh yes?’ said Andy, and paused. ‘Are you in – er – business over there, then?’

‘No – not exactly in business. I’m with two old ladies.’

Jenny thought this a rather deft escape from the bald acknowledgment that she was a humble servant girl. But Violet had no fear of the truth.

‘In other words she’s in service,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how she sticks it.’

‘Oh well,’ said Rex. ‘Everyone to their taste.’ But Andy gave no sign of what he felt.

Jenny felt that she could have torn Violet’s eyes out. Not only had she taken it on herself to state the unvarnished facts: she had revealed Jenny ignominiously trying to escape from them.

After a pause, the talk circulated again, and before long Andy and Jenny were again left out in silence. Jenny felt she had lost ground which she could scarcely recover now. Were they in the right? Was there something mean and debasing in being ‘in service,’ in being a ‘skivvy’? Well – there was in a way: she knew that. But she was ‘born to that class,’ and that was that.

To what class, then, did these three imagine they belonged,
that they should look down upon her occupation? Surely they did not esteem themselves above her: their accents and manners precluded that: and she was the better of Violet any day. But if they were all of the same class, why did she not think as they did? Suppose she herself was in error. Suppose she had not rightly appraised her own quality; suppose ‘skivvys,’ in the ordinary way, were extracted from a stratum lower than her own? Suppose she ought to seek, as her due, something better?

This was a new line of thought – not without allurement.
Ought
she to remain a servant girl? By merely detachedly propounding such a question, she felt that she was in a manner betraying her kind present employers – the two old women at Chiswick a few miles away – the ‘ever such nice old people.’ But if it came to that, she was letting them down outrageously by being in here at all. Were these dangerous speculations – the insidious promptings of alcohol? If so, she had better stop drinking at once. She took another sip.

At this point Andy leaned over to her, and spoke in a confidential way.

‘Pretty girl like you don’t want to be in service,’ he said.

Not displeased by the compliment, of which she had been the recipient often enough from strangers, but which on this occasion had been in a rather mortifying interval delayed, she smiled.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ she said, taking another sip at her port. ‘You got to live, ain’t you?’

She looked again at the clock and saw that it was a quarter past. She had only five minutes more.

‘Oh yes – you got to live,’ said Andy. ‘But that ain’t the way for a beautiful girl like you.’

Beautiful! He wasn’t half going it, wasn’t he?

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ she said, and added, in an awkward way ‘even if I was,’ and nearly blushed again.

There was a pause.

‘Oh no,’ said Andy, sternly repeating himself. ‘Not for a
beautiful girl like you.’ He was evidently anxious to thrust the compliment home, and Jenny suspected that very soon others would be following on its heels, that, in fact, a new feeling was in the air and he had (as she put it to herself) ‘commenced operations.’

‘What would you suggest, then?’ she said, allowing a note of responsive raillery to creep into her voice, though she in no way savoured the idea of a flirtation with such an oddity as Andy.

‘What do I suggest for you?’ he said, getting a little further away from her and looking at her appraisingly.

‘Well – what?’

‘You? . . .’ said Andy, looking her up and down in the same way. ‘You ought to be a mannequin by the look of you.’

‘Oo!’ said Jenny, and smiling self-consciously, took another sip at her port.

‘Yes, you ought. A Mannequin. That’s what you ought to be.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘You find me the job, an’ I’ll take it.’

‘I’ll find you the job all right,’ was his rather unexpected reply.

She made no reply, but fingered her glass, and looked mockingly at it.

‘I bet!’ she said, and there was a prolonged silence, in which she was aware that he was looking at her.

‘Don’t you believe me?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Jenny. ‘I don’t.’

‘Don’t you, though. Then I’ll tell you this,’ said Andy. ‘I’ve only got to send you along to my friend Ned Hall, an’ he’d give you one like a shot.’

His friend Ned Hall? Give her one like a shot? Who was this funny little man? Was he to be taken, by any wild stretch of the imagination, seriously?

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet he would.’

‘That he would,’ said Andy. ‘He’d give it to you as soon as look at you, if I sent you along. He’s the oldest pal I got. I’ve known Ned since he was in knickerbockers.’

‘Go on,’ said Jenny. ‘Who is he, then?’

‘What? Ned? Ned Hall? He’s got four or five shops round here, and two in the West End. I’ve known him since he was in knickerbockers.’

He seemed to set great store by his friend’s knickerbockers, which actually did not strike Jenny’s imagination so vividly as his shops.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Has he? What sort of shops?’

‘Ladies’ Wear,’ said Andy briefly, as though she ought to have known.

‘Well,’ said Jenny. ‘I shall have to think about it.’

‘You certainly should. That’s what you ought to be. A Mannequin. You’re cut out for the job.’

There was another pause while Andy lit a fresh cigarette from the old one. Jenny took another sip at her port.

A Mannequin. Cut out for the job. Was there any truth in that? She felt the port trickling down inside, and it seemed that a kind of light fell upon her. Was it not abundantly clear that she
was
cut out for the job?

A Mannequin. To what other end had this singular and as yet unexploited endowment – her much-debated prettiness – been destined? And she was definitely pretty. Everybody said she was pretty. Even those two old girls could not forbear saying how pretty she was. Violet said she was pretty – lovely. He himself had said she was beautiful. A Mannequin. This was really a revelation.

And he had said he would get her the job. Did he mean it? But she had only just got a job. She was going too fast. She must pull up a bit. She believed she had had a bit too much to drink. She looked at the clock. In a minute it would be twenty past, and at twenty past she had decided to go.

‘Go on,’ said Andy. ‘Don’t keep on looking at that clock. You know you don’t want to go.’

It was a rather more diffident Jenny that repelled the suggestion.

‘Afraid I’ve got to,’ she said. ‘In a moment.’

‘Go on,’ said Andy. ‘He ain’t as important as all that, is he?’

‘Oh, no. He ain’t very important,’ said Jenny.