“I should think it very, very improbable.”
“You don’t know.”
“In a way I don’t care. As I told you, I’m not
especially optimistic about making money and being successful. I’m just
doing everything because I must—because I don’t seem to be able
to get what I want any other way. It’s a personal thing. I don’t
really care a bit about showing off before other people, though I’d be
willing enough to do it for a living. I just want to play the fiddle,
that’s all.”
“I think I understand.”
“I really believe you do, and I’m certain nobody else
does.”
“Except Isaac?”
“Ah yes, except him.” They both laughed. “You’ll
like his face, I think. He’s terribly ugly, so people say, but I never
noticed it particularly.”
“He has understanding, anyhow.”
“Yes. He knows how it is that so many things don’t matter when
once you’re certain what does matter. At his cinema, for instance, he
has to play the most awful music from three every afternoon until eleven at
night, but he doesn’t mind. He says very often he doesn’t even
hear
it.”
“I can believe that. Often I don’t hear my own congregation
singing a very bad hymn_ tune half a semitone fiat. I suppose I’ve got
used to it.”
“Isn’t that a pity, though, in your case? You’d have
hated it at one time, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I did hate it, then.”
“And nowadays you don’t bother?”
“I try not to. Somehow, though it perhaps sounds foolish to say so,
I’m a bit afraid of bothering. It would be so easy for me to bother too
much.”
“You weren’t afraid years ago.”
“Oh, heavens, no. I was keen enough till—oh, till I realised
it wasn’t much use being keen. When I was in my teens and early
twenties I used to scribble down tunes nearly every night. My parents died
when I was young, and I went to live with a rather fine old dissenting
preacher in a small Kentish village. There was a family of seven daughters. I
remember some of them used to sing—the usual kind of songs people did
sing in those days—and I sometimes tried to teach them things of my
own, but it was never much of a success. I’m sure the fault was chiefly
mine—they were probably written in impossible keys. It was the youngest
girl, by the way, who afterwards became my wife.”
“Were you very much in love with her?”
The question, so artless and direct, took him by surprise, so far as
anything, in the mood he was in, could have done so; he reflected for a
second and then evaded with: “Don’t you think people who marry
are usually in love at the time?”
“At the time? Do you mean only that?”
He felt her keen, eager mind in sharp contact with his own; it was
exciting and a little uncanny, the way she could open up long avenues of
speculation, not so much by her questions as by the questions that her
questions suggested. He did not know what to say in answer, but the taxi
rescued him from the problem by drawing in and halting at the kerbside. He
paid the driver and then, as the cab drove away, stared around with a renewed
sense of strangeness; there they were, the two of them, marooned at that
rather forlorn hour of the morning amidst a waste of empty pavements and tall
unlit houses. “This way,” she said, leading him into a narrow
side turning that appeared to expand further on into a sort of enclosed yard.
“These used to be stables belonging to those big houses, but now
they’re mostly garages. My friends are lucky because the garage they
live over belongs to a man who spends half the year abroad. They’re
really quite comfortable places to live in. This way. I suppose as it’s
so late I’d better use the key.”
She took a Yale key from her bag and unlocked a door that gave directly on
to the yard. A dark interior was revealed, and a second later, when she had
switched on the light, a small lobby with a flight of stairs ascending to a
first floor. “We’ll go up,” she said, “they’re
probably in the studio.” She climbed the stairs, with Howat following
her. All this seemed to be happening, so far as he was aware, in a curious
dream, a dream in which the most fantastic things followed one another with a
kind of preposterous reasonableness. At the top of the stairs was a landing
with several closed doors; she opened one of them, switched on a light, and
gazed around. The room was empty, but it bore signs of having been fairly
recently inhabited. Used glasses stood on a Sheraton sideboard, and there was
a cabinet gramophone with a record still on the turntable. It was a rather
cosily furnished room, in which one window had evidently been enlarged to
give a good north light. There were several bookcases, a baby grand piano,
and an easel supporting a half finished and not very attractive portrait of a
ballet- dancer.
“They don’t seem here,” she said, and then caught sight
of a letter on the mantelpiece addressed, in a very conspicuous scribble, to
herself. She tore open the envelope and a few seconds later exclaimed:
“They’ve gone away for the week-end—some friends called and
invited them suddenly.” She handed Howat the note; it was signed
‘Finola’, and in the course of a few dozen roughly pencilled
words conveyed an explanation, an apology, good wishes for the future, a hope
that she would be sure to come again when next she was in London, and a
command for her to make herself thoroughly comfortable during that last night
at the studio. “That’s Finola,” she added, and pointed to a
portrait on the wall of a pale thin-lipped woman with prominent cheek bones
and a necklace of large green beads. “She painted that of herself, but
it doesn’t flatter. I’m sorry you couldn’t have met
her—and her husband. But its really just like them to go rushing off in
such a hurry.”
“I’m sorry, too. I like their room. It’s got a sort of
genial untidiness about it.”
“They’re like that themselves—genial and untidy.
I’m very fond of them both, though I’ve only known them for a few
days. It’s queer how a room can sometimes make you feel at home,
isn’t it?”
“Yes, this one does, I admit. It’s the casualness of
it—everything just comfortably anyhow.”
“They
are
casual—the way they just go off at a
moment’s notice like this, for instance. Somehow I don’t feel
it’s at all impolite of them.”
“No, it’s almost a charming characteristic. This room makes me
wish my own wasn’t so stiff and formal. But I’m afraid
that’s in the hands of my sister-in-law. She has the strictest ideas
about tidying up. I can just imagine how shocked she’d be by a place
like this.”
“Yes, I know. I met her once. I found her just a bit
terrifying.”
“She’s very good-hearted, of course. I don’t know what
my wife would do without her, with all that great house to look
after.”
“Why don’t you move into a smaller house?”
“I think that’s what I would do if I had my own
way.”
“I’m sure you’d be happier.”
“Yes…Those enormous houses were part of a different social system
altogether. I’d be just as comfortable and certainly much better off
living over a garage. After all, what does it matter where you
live?”
“Provided you’re happy in what you’re doing…I like
that picture over there, don’t you? They picked it up at a sale the
other day—they’re always picking things up. That’s why the
place is in such a glorious muddle. I don’t believe they ever
‘furnished’, as people say. I imagine they just began with an
almost empty room and let things accumulate.”
“Not a bad way. Better than going to a shop and buying vanloads of
standardised stuff all at once.”
She was leaning against the mantelpiece with her heels on the fender-rail
when suddenly she slipped and caused a little clatter of fire-irons. The
noise awoke him from the almost trance-like gossip in which he had been
taking part; it was as if both of them, more or less unconsciously, had been
talking hard to obscure the fact that they were alone in someone else’s
studio at half- past one in the morning, and would soon be saying good-bye,
never to meet again.
He looked at his watch. “Really, I ought to go. It’s very
late.”
“Yes, I suppose it is…Oh, you haven’t seen that photograph
of Isaac. It’s in their other room—I’ll get it for
you.”
She rushed away and reappeared a few seconds later with a cabinet-sized
photograph of a rather fleshy, genial-looking man, obviously a Jew, with a
high domed forehead and deep-set eyes that more than made up for coarse
features in the lower part of the face. Howat studied it closely and with a
certain willingness to be impressed. “Yes, he’s an
interesting-looking man,” he said at length.
She was standing near him, gazing over his arm at the photograph.
“He—he’s a musician,” she responded, with a sudden
stammer in her voice.
I know—I can believe ii. He felt a warm spring of sympathy rising in
him, and beyond it, a tinge of whimsical envy; the girl, he realised, was
fond of this man in a way which it was not given to many men to experience;
and he had a vague sensation of desire, of desire to share the rays of such
eager, comradely affection. He felt, amidst the flurry of that desire—I
wish she were my daughter; and then he thought of his own daughter, cramming
away at her text-books, and rejecting all in life that did not assist in her
melancholy progress from matriculation to ‘inter’ and from
‘inter’ to ‘final’; he thought, dispassionately:
Mary’s a rather unattractive girl, she’ll probably never marry,
it’s just as well she is keen on degrees and things. Yet why, be
reflected, was there such a tremendous difference, between his own
daughter’s ambitions and this girl’s musical career in Vienna,
between his daughter’s Latin verbs and the German lessons he had given
to Elizabeth Garland? He felt that there
was
a difference, absolutely
and in kind; but
why?
The answer eluded him, and was lost, anyhow, in
a renewal of desire as he laid the photograph on the table and began
buttoning his overcoat. Oh, I
wish
she were my daughter, he kept
thinking, and as he saw her clear unswerving eyes still fixed on the
photograph, he thought further: There’s something in you that means all
that I’ve been meaning, all those ideas I’ve been trying to
spread, everything I’ve been groping for in a blind way for
years…
“Well,” he said, smiling at her.
She moved back to the mantelpiece and stood again with her heels on the
fender-rail. “Must you go?” she said, casually.
“Well…it’s late, isn’t it?”
“I’m going to make myself some coffee before I go to bed.
“I think perhaps—”
“It’s probably too late for you to find a taxi in the streets.
There’s a telephone in the other room—I could ring for one when
you wanted it.”
“Well…”
“Take off your coat for a few minutes. I’ll light the fire.
After all, they told me to make myself comfortable, didn’t
they?”
She knelt on the rug to strike a match, and the gas-fire lit with a loud
pop. When she rose he saw that her eyes were wet with tears.
“I’d—I’d much rather—you didn’t go
till—till I’ve made you some coffee,” she said, in a level
voice.
“All right,” he answered cheerfully. He took off his overcoat
and almost flung himself into one of the deep armchairs that lay about.
“I agree with you,” he added, with a sort of forced nonchalance,
“this room does make one feel at home. You’ll have a job to turn
me out of it if you’re not careful.” He laughed and she laughed
also, and then went out to the little kitchenette that adjoined the
studio.
He lounged by the fire while she made coffee. A certain
outward excitement died down in him, and he began to feel very cosy and
tranquil and quietly talkative, so that when she brought the coffee and sat
opposite him at the other side of the fire, they both plunged into chatter
about the concert and music and other topics as casually as if the time and
the place had been utterly normal. He felt, as he sat there, that he would
like nothing better than for such a thing to happen after every long day of
his life—to talk thus, and drink coffee, with her at the other side of
a fire. It was something else in life that he had missed, and was now
enjoying with all the more relish because till then he had never even guessed
its existence—this pleasant comradely domesticity of two persons
sitting up late to talk together after everyone else had gone to bed. A
dreamy tenderness enveloped him as he gazed across at her; and gradually, in
the midst of that tenderness, there grew in him the thought that she was
beautiful. Like the lovely figurehead of a ship, he had imagined formerly,
but now he imagined much more—she seemed to him rather like every
beautiful thing there ever was or had been in the world—like Brahms,
Raphael, William Blake…
They talked for over half an hour before he said he would have to go.
“Really, I must—it’s nearly half-past two, and I
don’t believe there’s a night-porter at my hotel. I assure you I
don’t want to go a bit—I’m so comfortable here.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, I’m hating the thought of going out into that cold
street, but it’s got to be.”
“I’m hating the thought of you going.”
“Yes, it’s lonely for you by yourself. You’re not
nervous, are you, in a strange place?”
“No, no…” She seemed all at once filled with regret too
intense even to try to conceal. “I’ll go then and ring for a cab
for you.”
She hurried away and he heard her switch on the light in some further
room. Left alone, he had a disconcerting vision of Browdley as it would await
him on the morrow, of his prim and comfortless study, of the routine of weeks
and months and years reaching into the future, of being an old man some day.
Such thoughts induced him in a gloom which was all the harder to endure after
his previous serenity—come now, he thought, as she returned,
let’s say good-bye and get it over quickly. “I think I’d
better go down and wait in the street,” he said, “the man will
never find his way through that narrow entry. No, you mustn’t come with
me, it’s far too cold. Don’t bother to come down
even—I’ll let myself out. Thanks for the coffee. And remember
what I said—if there’s ever any way I can help you, write and
tell me…The very best of luck…Good-bye, Elizabeth…Goodbye, my—my
dear girl…” He did not look at her while he was speaking—come
on, come on, he urged himself, don’t linger and make it all more
difficult…