Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (54 page)

‘It was ever so kind of you,’ she tried, and since she could shirk it no longer, she turned her head and met his eyes.

‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles, gazing at her in a hypnotized, semi-squinting way, and all at once she felt his arm round her waist.

His face was now so near to hers that she found herself squinting back. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, blindly, in complete prostration of the intellect.

But this was no answer for Mr. Eccles.

‘M’m?’ he said, and then, again, as his hold round her waist was made firm, ‘What?’ . . .

‘You shouldn’t be doing this, you know,’ said Ella. ‘Should you?’

‘M’m?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘What?’

Could the unfortunate murmuring man say nothing but ‘What?’ Hysteria would seize her in a moment and she would start giggling.

‘I said you shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said. ‘Should you?’

‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘What?’ . . .

It was no good. Mr. Eccles was in a trance, and would go on saying ‘What’ till midnight and beyond if left in peace. She definitely would have to leave him.

‘Well, I really must be going,’ she said putting her hand on his arm, as though to release herself.

‘What?’ said Mr. Eccles, ignoring this, and pressing her towards him with such vigour and suddenness that they both swayed, and righted themselves with the greatest difficulty. ‘What?’

‘Well –
what
?’ said Ella, now losing her patience a little.

‘M’m?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘You Little Devil, you. What?’

Oh Lord, thought Ella, what a terrible, versatile,
unaccountable man! At the last moment he was piling sheer quizzing rakishness on top of all else. What was she expected to do now – stay and be Satanic? She couldn’t do it.

‘Well, I really must go,’ she said writhingly. ‘Will you come in and see me again soon?’

‘Aren’t you a Little Devil?’ said Mr. Eccles. ‘What?’

There was nothing for it – she would have to be firm, and risk offending him. She took hold of his arm with both her hands, and freed herself.

‘You come in and talk about it some other time,’ she said and awkwardly seizing his hand to shake it she added ‘So long. Thanks ever so much. Good-night,’ and fled – half running from him in a way which she hoped he would construe as maidenly overcomeness.

‘What?’ she heard Mr. Eccles protesting as she fled, but she did not dare look back, and in a few moments she was out of sight.

‘The Midnight Bell’ was closed to the public, but she let herself in by the side door, and ran upstairs unobserved.

With the sound of Mr. Eccles’ ‘Whats’ still ringing in her ears, she undressed hastily, got into bed, and lay pondering in the dark.

‘
What
?’ But why should he ask
her
What? It was she, surely, who should question him. And after hour upon hour of fumbling and advancing and lurking he had thrown not a speck of light on the mystery of his pursuit. Instead of making himself clear when it came to the crises all he could say was ‘What?’ . . .

What indeed? What? What?
What?

She gave the problem up, and slept the dead sleep of exhaustion.

T
HE DECEPTIVE JUICE
Sleep, while it no doubt actually reconstructed and refreshed Ella’s nervous resources, always gave the appearance, first thing in the morning, of having wrecked them. Ella was always at her worst when she woke, and her heart would misgive her fearfully. So soon as she was conscious her mind would go stalking anxiously through the debris of yesterday, certain of signs of calamity and wreckage, and seeking to discover what precise shape they had taken, and for what she was to be indicted by herself. Never did she fail to fix upon something to make the jagged worst of, moved by a hateful yet deliberate impulse. As the day wore on the streams of health and positiveness flowed once more in the dried-up channels, and she was her proper self.

This morning she was not long at a loss for her problem. She turned on the pillow and Mr. Eccles towered up above and around her. Nor was she long in ascertaining which peak in the vast range of that problem she was to single out as the focussing point for self-recrimination. It was the final one – the parting – the querying and hideous clumsiness of the parting. She had as good as run away from him, and she had not the slightest doubt, now, that her rudeness had ‘put him off.’ Put him off for good, probably. Not that she was by any means certain that she did not desire to put him off – if she came to think about it later she might decide that that was exactly what she wanted. But that was not the question. She had put him off against her conscious will and by virtue of her own silliness or ineptness; she was landed resentfully with the fact that she had put him off, and the fiends of her customary early morning mood seized the opportunity to scourge her.

In the flurry of her escape she had not given him a chance to mention a further meeting, and she could not conceive him bothering to come near ‘The Midnight Bell’ again. Well, that was that – she had Put him Off, and she supposed she was relieved in a way. But was not this Putting Off symptomatic of the general miscarriage of her technique and manners? Was she not always Putting people Off with her childishness and
self-consciousness? Why must she always be so critical, why couldn’t she have let Mr. Eccles go on saying ‘What’ and embracing her? Another girl would have encouraged and put him at his ease. It was always the same with her. Who did she think she was, that she could be so fastidious? And she proceeded on these heads to loathe and castigate herself.

As she dressed she heard Bob dressing in the next room, and the vigour of his personality seemed to emanate through the wall into her room. How full of confidence and triumph his evenings and mornings seemed. Could a man who bumped about and washed himself like that have any self-castigations or longings? Maybe he had, but in her general sense of yearning for him and everything she did not have, her imagination could not fly so high as to visualize any.

After breakfast, however, Ella’s introspections, as usual, imperceptibly vanished as she busied herself in the bar. By demonstrating her brisk command over one inanimate object after another, she set up a symbolic process which put her soul in countenance, and by ten o’clock she was the despotic marshal of a fiercely trained army of tumblers, and her vital self. Furthermore Mr. Eccles was on the shelf along with the tumblers.

This morning, also, there was a diversion in the bar. Yesterday the Governor’s young grandson, whose school had broken up owing to an epidemic, and whose parents were out of London, had come as a treat to stay at ‘The Midnight Bell.’ He had done this before during the holidays, and Ella knew him well, as it was his custom to ‘help’ her in the mornings in the bar before the house was opened.

For this healthy yet loathsome little boy, with his green school cap, sturdy body, bare chapped knees, and nauseatingly ruddy complexion, Ella had the greatest affection – or at any rate fondly believed she had. Her feeling, that is to say, was founded purely on the fact that he was a child, or ‘kid’ as she called it, and demanded no basis in behaviour. In Ella’s amiable yet curiously conventional mentality, the idea of not ‘loving’ a ‘kid,’ of not considering a ‘kid’ to be ‘great,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ ‘plucky,’ ‘grand,’ ‘fine’ – in fact
singular and outstanding in all he uttered and accomplished – was unthinkable or practically blasphemous.

‘Here’s Master Eric come to help you, Ella,’ the Governor would say, and Ella having expressed delight, he would ‘help’ her all the morning. That is to say he would fetch a few things, carry a few things, hum to himself, moon about, wander out on to the pavement where Bob was cleaning the brass, be called in, be stopped pulling at the beer engine, be found tormenting the dog, cause shrieking oscillations by fooling about with the wireless, or fire off a pea-shooter at the bottles – irregularly punctuating these enjoyments either by standing on his head against the wall and looking as though he was going to choke, or standing up against the bar, kicking at the woodwork in his ennui, and cross-examining Ella on points of technical or athletic knowledge.

Subtly and precociously realizing his position as the youngest heir to the establishment and the apple of the all-powerful Governor’s eye, he reserved a special air of arrogance and condescension towards the barmaid, calling her ‘Ella’ in an authoritative and feudal tone, and continually making clear the difference in their social states of grace.

His main delight, however, was to tie Ella up into intellectual knots. Bursting as he was with knowledge, electrical and otherwise, lately imbibed at school, they were both aware in their different ways that he was her intellectual and controversial master, and he might well have afforded to show some tact and forbearance on this head. Nevertheless, he was unable to refrain from seizing any and every opportunity to wipe the floor with her.

Indeed, if the opportunity was not there, he had no hesitation in making it. Thus, this morning, kicking his shoes against the woodwork, and seeing Ella putting some bottles on the shelf, ‘I wonder what the H
₂
O Content of those bottles is,’ he said with an unimpressive air of innocent detachment.

‘Yes. I wonder,’ said Ella, suspecting a trap, and hoping the matter would drop here.

‘What do you
think
?’ pursued Master Eric, who had no idea of letting it go like that.

‘I really don’t know,’ said Ella.

‘Yes – but you must be able to think.’

‘No,’ said Ella, with a judicial air. ‘I really couldn’t say.’ And then she had an inspiration. ‘What do
you
think?’

‘I was asking you.’

‘Well, you tell me.’

There was a pause in which Master Eric went on spasmodically banging at the woodwork with his feet, and, putting his head on one side, he traced a pattern with his finger on the bar.

‘I suppose you know,’ he said at last, in a steady voice, ‘what H
₂
O is?’

‘Yes, of course I do,’ said Ella, but there was no ‘of course’ about it. True, she had a hazy notion that H
₂
O was an infinitely recondite (but rather unnecessary) way of alluding to plain drinking water, but she was by no means certain even of this.

‘What is it then?’ asked Master Eric.

‘Ah’. . . said Ella.

‘I don’t believe you know,’ said Master Eric. ‘Do you?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Ella, seeing that she would have to burn her boats. ‘It just means water. Don’t it?’

‘Of
course
it means
water
,’ said Master Eric sharply. ‘But what does
H
₂
O
mean – what do the
letters
mean?’

‘Oh,’ said Ella, ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘But you said you knew what H
₂
O meant.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes – didn’t you?’

‘Yes. I suppose I did.’

‘Well – then – you didn’t know after all.’

Ella did not answer this.

‘Did you?’

‘No, I suppose I didn’t.’

‘You are Silly,’ said Master Eric, coolly pointing to facts. ‘Aren’t you?’

And because he was a ‘kid,’ and could do no wrong in her eyes, instead of doing what she should have done, that is, smacked his head, hit him in the solar-plexus and kicked him
out of the bar, Ella merely remarked ‘Oh well,’ reflected that he had ‘caught her out,’ and hoped he would change the subject.

‘As a matter of
fact
,’ said Master Eric, speaking as one who knew that the information was scarcely worth scattering on to such stony ground, ‘H
happens
to mean Hydrogen, and O
happens
to mean Oxygen.’

‘Oh,’ said Ella. ‘Really?’

‘And those two
happen
to make up water – that’s all.’

‘Oh.’

‘Funny – isn’t it,’ said Master Eric with searing sarcasm.

At this moment the Governor entered the bar.

‘Well, what are
you
talkin’ about, little ’un?’ asked the Governor, but the little one did not reply.

‘He’s been explaining,’ said Ella blithely, ‘all about Hydrogen and Oxygen, and I don’t know what.’

‘My word – you know more than me anyway,’ said the Governor, and ‘Yes – he’s a bright boy all right,’ said Ella. . . .

And the Governor winked at Ella, and Ella looked back at the Governor with a confidential pride and joy in the youngster that was boundless.

In this way the morning passed, and at eleven o’clock the house was opened, and Ella was kept hard at work till three, when it closed again. She then went upstairs and put on her hat and mackintosh in order to go out into the rain and visit her mother – a visit which was overdue, since to-day was Friday and she usually went on Thursday, her day off.

T
HE PARENTS OF
this submissive girl dwelling in Pimlico, she walked along to the top of the Tottenham Court Road for a bus, which went at a good speed down the Tottenham Court Road itself; pulled up and rushed forward in dashes
along Oxford Street; lined up in a sort of buses’ bread line in Bond Street, advancing inch by inch; sped down Piccadilly by the side of Green Park; whizzed furiously and giddily round the great open spaces of Hyde Park Corner, and landed her in the pouring rain in the vicinity of the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria, where the rich were leaving for happier climes. For this transportation she contributed threepence to the Company’s funds, and had about ten minutes’ walk ahead of her, threading her way through the least flourishing quarters of tobacco-cum-sweetshoppy Pimlico, and at length arriving at the corner of a decomposing street, where stood a decomposing house with four floors, a basement, and railings. Here, sandwiched between five or six other grim and doubtful
ménages
, lived Ella’s mother and stepfather.

This, in fact, was Ella’s home and background. Also, in a manner, it was her secret, for those who saw the neat, beer-pulling, chaffing Ella in the bar of ‘The Midnight Bell’ carried social introspection no further than the epithet ‘barmaid,’ and it no more occurred to them to suspect that she had some such human background and spiritual resource, that she carried on a complete life of her own in other words, than it would have occurred to them to suspect her of murder or arson. Not even the Governor or Bob suspected. Actually, however, Ella looked at the matter from exactly the contrary angle. To her this was her real life, and wherever her mother was was necessarily her home; and however frequently she might leave it, and lodge apart in order to slave her life out elsewhere, she could never regard such departures as anything but prolonged ventures or enforced excursions launched from this fixed centre in her heart. Such are the cool misapprehensions of a harsh and disinterested world.