Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (47 page)

Here, then, stood ‘The Midnight Bell,’ and anyone entering its Saloon Bar of an evening would have found its chief figure, a young woman of the name of Ella, in charge. She would either be talking quietly to a customer at one end of the bar, or moving about busily dispensing those distillations to whose existence and efficacy the whole building owed its origin and peculiar design.

Ella had no idea that she was dispensing mental or spiritual states. She had no knowledge of the potency of drink, which she personally detested: she had no knowledge that she played a notable and curious part in the uproar and excitation of civilization: she had no knowledge of the oddity of her station behind that bar – a virtuous, homely, and simple-minded young woman, set up for five hours on end to withstand and
feed the accumulating strength of the behaviour of scores upon scores of strange men manifestly out, or going out, of their minds. She did not even have any conscious knowledge of the nightmare variety of her geographical surroundings. ‘We get all sorts in here,’ she would say, in her slow, amiable way. Or, ‘Oh yes. They get ever so fresh, sometimes.’ Or, ‘It’s a funny business, that’s a fact.’ And having thus peacefully called upon her wonderful inner machinery for rendering the abnormal normal without a qualm, she would not give the matter another thought.

Such was the sovereign blindness which characterized Ella’s attitude towards her own employment and the part she played north of Oxford Street at five o’clock – a mental state which, in view of its practical uses, might with greater justice be described as heaven-sent sagacity. And certainly blindness or stupidity, in the ordinary sense of the terms, were the last features to be ascribed to Ella. Indeed, the funny thing about Ella was that although she perceived and apprehended practically nothing, she unaccountably perceived and apprehended practically everything. A liar, or a braggart (and drunkards, whom Ella coped with as part of her daily task, are most often both) had only to meet her grey and friendly gaze to be irritatingly aware of this contradiction. Without knowing it herself she summed up a person or sensed a situation in a second. Nor was she by any means inarticulate. The banality of the expressions she employed in voicing her thoughts was no criterion of those thoughts’ real shrewdness or aptness. Infinitely stale and hackneyed idioms she certainly used, but this was merely because, having access to the wisdom of the ages, she used the expressions sanctified by the ages. Ella always meant what she said. She breathed life into old forms. Hence, when Ella remarked, say, that ‘the longest way round is the shortest way home’ she was not echoing a proverb as a parrot would. On the contrary, after the continually recurring experience in her everyday life, of the fact that short, hasty, or violent methods on behalf of any end generally involve the frustration of the whole endeavour, she had long sought in her thoughtful mind for some law to cover
the detached instances of this phenomenon, and had at last alighted, with joy, upon the ready-made aphorism. Similarly Ella, having observed in some of her friends or customers, the human but indefensible practice of accusing others of the very faults from which they themselves most glaringly suffered, would be heard suggesting, with delightful vividness, that ‘people in glass houses should not throw stones’ or that ‘the pot was calling the kettle black.’ A poet could have done no better. The sheer force of her sincerity made these stale maxims her own original pronouncements. And she took continuous pleasure in the exercise of this gift, though a superficial observer – learning from her lips that still waters run deep, or that you cannot burn the candle at both ends, or that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or that it is no use crying over spilt milk, or that enough is as good as a feast, or that pride goes before a fall, and innumerable other essences of wisdom – might easily mistake for dullness her genuine love of artistic self-expression.

In appearance Ella was a plain girl – which means that she was incapable of startling. She was neither startlingly attractive, nor startlingly ugly. She could attract no attention at first sight: she could therefore never hope to attract very much attention. This does not mean that she was without admirers. But they were few and far between – so few and far between that in her sadder moments she believed herself to be in some way disinherited from the main privileges and delights of other girls and women. But then something would happen which would surprise her, and instil in her mind a new estimation, possibly a too hopeful and deceptive estimation, of her powers. And then she would be disappointed, and proceed to underestimate herself again. Life thus was very difficult – as it must be for a plain, as distinguished from a downright ugly, or a downright attractive, woman. But difficulties did not disturb Ella very much.

Ella was about twenty-eight years of age, had a good figure, and was always neatly and plainly dressed. Her hair was dark, and, to be ‘in the fashion’ as she put it, she had had it shingled.

On the October evening with which this story commences,
a gentleman, entering the Saloon Bar of ‘The Midnight Bell’ about five minutes after the place had opened, caused Ella’s heart to flutter, but not with love.

T
HE SALOON BAR
was a narrow apartment about thirty feet long, with a substantial wooden bar going its whole length, and opening out at the inner end into the Saloon Lounge – a bright general room with tables and chairs for the drinker not pressed by time. Ella stood behind the bar, near the till. Thus, on her right, she had a view into the Lounge, wherein Bob, the waiter of ‘The Midnight Bell,’ was at this moment pouring coal upon the fire, and poking it up into a blaze.

No other customer had as yet entered, and an air of chilly desolation, like that of an empty theatre before the play, made itself felt amidst the harsh electric light, and labelled, bottly sparkle of Ella and Bob’s surroundings. This despondent air was added to by the coldness and darkness of the evening outside – the coldest and darkest yet in the declining year – and the fact that the mind had not yet fully adapted itself to the recent switch over from Summer time – that brutal onslaught upon the nervous rhythm and infinitesimal aesthetic adjustments of the modern Londoner.

The first thing that anybody would notice about the newcomer, who now came forward to the bar with a hearty and yet remotely sinister ‘Good evening’ to Ella, was that he was by no means an old man. That fact was promulgated in his entire demeanour. His bright blue eyes, his decided walk, his quick smile, his erect stature, the nervous turns of his body and movements of his arms, all said the same thing. It might have been argued by some that this intense propaganda of youthfulness in itself made him appear older than he actually was, but that is beside the point. The next thing to be noticed about him was that he was by no means an ugly or utterly
insignificant man. Though time (he was fifty-two years old) had whitened his hair and short moustache, though he was of but medium height, though he wore black boots and dressed himself in the conservative collars, ties and garments of a respectable middle-aged clerk, there was yet something about his face, something firm, keen, and comparatively young, which attracted attention. It may have been the sparkling blue of the eyes, it may have been the fine head of wiry white hair, it may have been that thick close-cropped moustache – whatever it was, it was something closely allied to a
military
look, and something which could not pass unnoticed, if only for the reason that he himself was so forcibly conscious of it.

The third and final thing to be noticed at a first glance concerning this newcomer was that he was wearing a new hat. Indeed this feature at the moment enveloped and predominated over all the others. There are new hats and new hats. No man in the history of the world had ever worn a hat quite as gloriously and fervidly new as this. Not that it was a hat which, amidst a crowd of new hats in a hatter’s shop, would have in any way been distinguished from its brothers (it was just an ordinary new dove-grey trilby with edges bound with grey silk). It was from its wearer, from its wearer’s would-be unconcerned and yet all-pervading self-consciousness of what lay on his head, that it gained its beautiful and vigorous novelty. You could see at a glance that for the time being the man lived in and through his hat. You could see that it cost him sharp torture even to put it on his head, where he could not see it, and it had to take its chance. You could see him searching incessantly for furtive little glimpses of his hat in mirrors, you could see him pathetically reading the fate of his hat in the eyes of strangers, you could see him adjusting his tie as a sort of salute to his hat, as an attempt to live up to his hat. You could see him striving to do none of these things.

It has been said that along with the heartiness of his first ‘Good Evening’ to Ella there was a certain sinister quality. What caused this? First and foremost, necessarily, his new hat. But there were other, subterranean causes as well.
Rigorously as Ella tried to deny it to herself, she inwardly believed that there was something minutely foreboding in his whole demeanour towards her. That was why her heart had fluttered a little as he came in.

‘Good evening,’ she said, courageously smiling, and meeting his eyes. Her next instantaneous impulse was to exclaim ‘Hullo – you’ve got a new hat’ – but she controlled it. Nor, arduous as the feat of restraint was, did she allow her eyes to convey the same message in the short pause that followed.

‘You going to have your usual, Mr. . . . Er . . .?’ she added.

His ‘usual’ was a half pint of bitter, and she called him ‘Mr. . . . Er . . .’ because she did not know his name, and felt that she ought to, since he seemed definitely to have made up his peculiar mind lately to become a client of ‘The Midnight Bell.’ She was an adept at calling people Mr., Mrs., or even Miss ‘. . . Er . . .’ It was not a questioning ‘Er?’ – such as to ask what
is
the name please. It was the dreamy, cool, assured ‘Er’ of one who had so intimate a knowledge of the surname that she did not have to go through the formality of pronouncing it.

‘Yes – I’ll have my usual, I think,’ he said, in his suave gentlemanly tones, and she had already turned away to get it for him.

‘Isn’t it cold, to-night?’ she said, as she tugged at the beer engine. ‘I’m half frozen.’

‘Yes. It is.’ He seemed a little preoccupied as she put his beer in front of him, and took his money with her barmaid’s ‘Ta.’

‘By the way,’ he said, with another smile, ‘I don’t think you
know
my name, yet, do you?’

‘Why, no. I don’t believe I do. What is it?’ She replied thus at once in a smiling and off-hand way, as she busied herself with putting his money in the till: but secretly she knew that her worst misgivings had received further nourishment. It was not that she minded the innocent deceptiveness of her ‘Er’ being disclosed. It was not that his observation was one which might easily have cropped up in the give-and-take of conversation across the bar. It was the way in which it was said, and
the grin with which it was accompanied. Moreover the ‘
yet
’ scared her. ‘You don’t know my name
yet
.’ What did that infer? What else, but that there was some obligation on her part to know his name in the end, that she had by suggestion admitted some compact with him wherein the knowing of his name was a necessary, an immanent step leading to involvements beyond? She felt entrapped in the meshes of that ‘
yet
,’ and her spirit strove to escape. How had he established the right to make this claim on her? He had only been coming in here for the last three or four weeks, and she had only spoken to him a dozen times at the most. Had she ‘encouraged’ him? No. She had been polite; she had been kind. She was polite and kind to all her customers. It had been he who had singled her out, who, from little casual greetings and remarks on the weather, from little desultory chats about nothing when there were not enough people in the bar to occupy her fully, had step by step led on to the present state of affairs, in which he seemed to have made her his subtle yet consistent objective on entering the bar, and had taken more and more to coming in early, when she was not busy, and conversation might be sustained. And she had respected and returned his growing friendliness. To that extent of course she had ‘encouraged’ him. She had ‘liked’ him. Who, in her place, could have dreamed of being landed with this ‘
yet
’? He was an old man. It was true that he was wonderfully ‘young,’ but he was an old man. That being so, if the smallest suspicion had ever crossed her mind, she had been justified in dismissing it from her mind as ridiculous introspection. And if it came to that, was all this ridiculous introspection on her part? Could not his ‘yet’ be interpreted as deriving from a mere desire to establish his adoption of ‘The Midnight Bell’ as his particular public-house in the future? She wished she could believe so. That, at any rate, was what she must assume in front of him for the time being.

Of all these thoughts Ella gave no sign, as she busied herself with the till, and cheerfully answered ‘Why no. I don’t believe I do. What is it?’

He did not reply to this at once, but stood there smiling. It
was very awkward. She wished to Heaven that Bob would come in from the Lounge (where he appeared to be messing about with an electric switch), and put an end to this
tête-à-tête
. She would have to confide in Bob, and enlist his services in handling this elderly man.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What is it?’ She was compelled by his absurd reticence to speak with a certain archness, and she resented it bitterly.

‘Well – as a matter of fact,’ he said, rummaging in an inner breast pocket, ‘I believe I’ve got a card somewhere.’

‘Oh yes? . . .’ she murmured courteously, and had another view of his glorious new hat, as he bent his head down, not unlike a parrot diving into its feathers, to rummage more deeply. For a moment she had forgotten the new hat. Now, at the instant it was brought to her attention again, she felt the sudden grip of a hideous suspicion that this new hat itself was somehow aimed at her – that in newness it outshone all worldly new hats by virtue of the very fact that it was aimed at her – that the new hat was yet another manoeuvre in some weird strategy going on inside his head. But she dismissed the suspicion again as absurd. After all, why on earth shouldn’t the man get a new hat if he wanted to?