Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (61 page)

She had now given herself away with piteous frankness, and Ella, convulsively putting out her hands as though to warm them over the fire, smiled, shuddered, and was at a loss.

‘And if he’s a Gentleman, as you say he is,’ said Mrs. Prosser, ‘there’s no reason why he
shouldn
’
t
be in earnest.’

That word Gentleman again. Ella was keenly aware that in using this term her mother was thinking timidly in terms of
social strata rather than natural behaviour, and the slavish humility it implied appalled her. She was perfectly ready in her own mind to recognize and appraise the social gulf between Mr. Eccles and herself, but to hear her mother glibly acknowledging, nay revelling in it like this, somehow offended what little family pride she had and seemed to lower them both. She had to make some sort of protest.

‘Yes,’ she said with a hint of reproach. ‘But you mustn’t go building castles in the air, you know.’

But that, of course, was the wrong thing to have said, suggesting, as it obviously did, that the air was perfectly mature for castles, that she herself was as much for castles as her mother, and that she was merely warning her mother not to tempt Providence too far in the presence of such amazing auspices. And of course she had wanted to convey exactly the opposite. This was like her unintentional admission yesterday of a Secret with Mr. Eccles – she was always getting herself tied up by what she said. What with both of them, she didn’t know where they would land her.

‘Oh no,’ said Mrs. Prosser, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ But it was quite clear that she delightedly would and did.

When Ella left her mother that evening she reflected that the slow process of years had probably at last turned the scales so that her mother was now, in point of moral wisdom and family experience, going down the decline where she would be less of a mother and resource, than a mental junior whom Ella at last would have to lead. This reflection did anything but improve the bleakness and loneliness of her situation – a depressed sense of which had been upon her all day. On the other hand, what if her mother was in the right? She had no one else to confide in, and it might well be that she was a fool, and a selfish fool, jeopardizing the happiness of others, to turn up her nose (if turning up her nose she was) at the unparalleled Mr. Eccles and all he offered. Always ready to blame herself, she could quite well see this point of view without overcoming a rebellious feeling which at certain moments could almost make her wish that she had not been faced with the dilemma at all. But then she was always in a
low, super-analytical frame of mind after leaving her mother.

Another slight shock was awaiting her that night. This occurred in the bar about five minutes after they had opened and were waiting for customers to enter.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Bob, who was glancing at the evening newspaper on his stool the other side of the bar. ‘Was that you I saw in Baker Street yesterday evening?’

‘Baker Street?’ said Ella, trying to gain time. It was curiously frightening, at the best of times, to learn that you had been looked upon, unknown to yourself – giving you a sudden defenceless sense of your objectiveness in the eyes of others.

‘I was in Baker Street,’ she said. . . .

‘Oh, then it was you. I thought it was. I was on a bus,’ said Bob, who seemed inclined to drop the matter there.

But this would never suffice Ella. What had he seen? It must have been while they were going to tea after the Cinema. Did he have hold of her arm then? Or was it when they came out? Or didn’t he take it till they got inside Regent’s Park?

‘What was I doing?’ she said.

‘What do you mean – what were you doing?’ said Bob, catching her tone of alarm, and looking up at her in an amused and slightly ironical way. ‘You were just walking along.’

She would have to brave it out.

‘Did you see “
Mr
.” “
Eccles
”?’ she said, wrapping him round and round in strenuous inverted commas in her endeavour to disclaim any responsibility for his name or his person, and pretending to wipe the bar.

‘No,’ said Bob. ‘I thought you were alone. Who’s Mr. Eccles?’

‘Oh – didn’t you see him?’

‘No – I only saw you in a flash. Who’s Mr. Eccles?’

‘Oh – don’t you remember Mr. Eccles?’

‘No. Not the slightest.’

‘He took me to the theatre – don’t you remember?’

‘Oh, him. I remember.’

‘He took me out again yesterday. He’s ever so nice,’ said
Ella, speaking as one who enlarges upon the charms of her uncle; but this did not deceive Bob.

‘Oh – so it’s come to that, has it?’ he said.

‘Come to what?’

‘I thought it would,’ said Bob. ‘When I saw you together that night.’

She knew he was just fooling with her according to their convention, but was alarmed to learn that he remembered that first evening in the bar so clearly.

‘Don’t be so silly, Bob.’

‘What’s silly?’

‘You don’t think –’

‘Think what?’

‘You don’t think I’d –’

‘Why not? I thought he was very nice.’

‘Did you?’ (Here was a surprise, if you liked!)

‘Yes,’ said Bob, ‘nice looking, too.’

‘Nice looking? . . .
Him
?’ said Ella. (A funny sort of way to speak about the man to whom you were betrothed! But she was so disconcerted, and Bob’s view was above all others of such vital importance to her, that she could not help it.)

‘Yes,’ said Bob, ‘I thought he was very nice looking.’

‘
Nice
looking, perhaps,’ said Ella, meaning that he looked a nice person – a very different thing, ‘But not nice looking.’

‘No,’ said Bob, ‘I mean nice looking.’

‘But, Bob,’ said Ella, ‘He’s Old. . . .’

‘Is he? I didn’t notice it.’

Was Bob just trying to be perverse, or had she herself got an entirely wrong slant on Mr. Eccles? Looking back, she could see now that her own opinion at one time had not differed so very much from Bob’s. In those early days she definitely had thought Mr. Eccles nice looking, for his age, and it had not occurred to her to think of him as Old. It was only in his capacity as a practicable marrying proposition that his elderliness had been brought to the fore, and that his relative nice looks had been therefore discounted. But Bob couldn’t know anything about that.

‘Well, he’s Getting on,’ she said. ‘At any rate.’

‘So are we all,’ said Bob.

‘Yes. I suppose we are,’ said Ella, and decided she would have to think about all this later. Mr. Eccles with the stamp of Bob’s approval was a very different Mr. Eccles. If Bob passed him, then surely he was passed – in her eyes there could be no fiercer test. In that case there was no reason why she should not be able to shed that lurking feeling of something remotely indecent – yes, indecent, she had to admit it – in Mr. Eccles’ advances, and look him squarely in the face and judge him on his merits.

‘Of course,’ said Bob, ‘if you’ve got so many people running after you. . . .’

Was this a conspiracy? First her mother – now Bob. They clearly thought it was a wonderful idea – and they would throw her into his arms between them. She did not know whether she liked Bob going on like this, or not. On the one hand it had the gratifying result of improving Mr. Eccles’ appearance – and therefore the appearance of her entire commitment – a hundredfold in her eyes. On the other hand, it came just at the time when she had been seeking to identify and establish the causes of her inner rebellion, and so put her in further confusion. Also it hammered home yet again Bob’s hopeless indifference to her, in his carefree acquiescence in the elderly Mr. Eccles as a partner for her – an acquiescence which she could not help suspecting might be due to certain inner categories and associations in his mind which would have been different had she been a more attractive woman.

‘Don’t be so silly, Bob,’ she said, employing her usual method of closing a topic with Bob, and seeing how profitless and possibly painful it would be to go on discussing the man to whom she was engaged with the man she loved.

I
T WAS SUNDAY
. By ten o’clock Ella was busy at her tasks in the bar, wondering what it was, breathing in the air, which made it so overpoweringly, all-permeatingly Sunday – so that she would have known it was Sunday morning if all the almanacal evidence in the world had spoken to the contrary.

Was it because she had risen an hour later? Was it because six million people encircling her had risen an hour later? Was it the fineness of the weather? (There had been such a long succession of bright days on Sunday lately that she had got a queer subconscious impression that that was why it was called Sunday.) Was it the disquieting way in which this Sunday sunshine served to intensify rather than remove her depression of spirits – casting, as it did, churchy beams and shadows into the poorly lit bar, and making her think of God – a subject which she still could not get the hang of and which always dejected her? Was it the familiar sight of the fat Sunday paper, with its menu of thick ultrasensationalism on this holy and paradoxical day? Was it the diminished, almost stilled, roar of the traffic in the Euston Road in the distance? Was it the sound of the milkman, who alone among tradesmen was left over from the week, and whose voice yodelled in solitary mournfulness over the land of streets? Was it the instinctive knowledge of the aspect of those streets – empty here, teeming there with a proletariat arrayed in its collarless Sunday best – shuttered, littered, despondent? It was something of all these well-known Sunday things, taken in conjunction with a well-known lingering taste in Ella’s mouth of the sausages they were always given for breakfast on Sundays, which made her feel the day in the intuitive depths of her being.

‘Another lovely Sunday,’ said the Governor, passing through the bar, and she felt worse than ever.

Yet another cause of her instinctive conviction of the Sabbath was the fact that she was booked to walk in Regent’s Park with Mr. Eccles in the afternoon. Three weeks or more had now passed since Mr. Eccles had first dived with her into
the darkness of that park with such momentous consequences, and it had now become a regular practice on Sunday afternoons to walk therein with ‘Ernest.’ Yes – by dint of strenuously and continuously applied hydraulic pressure, he was almost ‘Ernest’ to her now, though she did not think she would ever be quite able to dispel the inverted commas.

It was strange, she reflected, how she had grown into a habit of mind wherein this walk in the Park, and ‘Ernest’ in general, had come to be taken for granted as belonging to a natural order of things. Little more than three weeks had passed, yet it now seemed as though there had never been a time when the problem of ‘Ernest’ had not been with her as it was now, like a hidden anxiety grown almost stale to the perplexed sufferer – still the focal point of all her waking thoughts and speculations, but seen in the light of day-to-day resignation. You could not keep up the breathless wonderment of those first few meetings for ever. In fact there were moments when ‘Ernest’ was simply a bore.

‘Ernest,’ too, was perhaps not quite the bouncingly enthusiastic creature he had been. Without having made (and she was in a way thankful for it) any further practical allusions to the future or the esoteric meaning of their supposed ‘Engagement,’ he had nevertheless succeeded in taking whatever relationship they did bear to each other for granted, and seemed quite content to jog along in their present course indefinitely.

She noticed, too, that everything being apparently settled in his mind, he had lost much of his self-consciousness, and talked less about her and more about himself – his likes and dislikes, his approvals and disapprovals – rather with an air of giving her a Short Course in himself for her present convenience and future reference. In fact, Railings apart, he seemed curiously to have lost interest in her as a human being, and Ella’s good-natured attempt to disregard this was in no way aided by her discovery of the fact that he definitely had a Temper. He had a peculiar way, particularly when crossing traffic (which always drove him mad) of going yellow in the face and saying ‘Come on!’ or ‘Make up your mind then!’
with uncontrollable spleen. Also he would behave very sharply on entering cinemas when they couldn’t find each other and were trying stumblingly to sit on air in the darkness. Indeed there were sometimes whole meetings with him when he bore that yellow look on his countenance, and she had to be careful all the time. But he made up for this with extreme cheerfulness at other moments, and the forbearing Ella respected his seniority in years and for the most part took it all in the day’s work.

Their arrangement was, as usual on Sundays, to meet at Great Portland Street Station at five past three. To-day she was there at three minutes past, and found him waiting for her. She was in quite good spirits herself, for she always found that the brooding gloom of the Sabbath could be almost kept at bay in the afternoons as opposed to the hopeless mornings and evenings. But she had only to glance at him to diagnose that it was one of his yellow days.

Not that anyone less sensitive than Ella to his moods would have known this. He raised his hat and smiled, and at once took her arm, as was his habit (though Ella could never quite feel happy about it, or cease to marvel at the fate which had ordained that they should thus be linked in their own eyes and those of the world), and they immediately afterwards launched upon their first skirmish with the traffic in crossing over to Marylebone Church.

This was always one she dreaded, as it was a tricky corner even for those who did not lose their heads, and Mr. Eccles today behaved more like someone in a padded cell than someone in a public thoroughfare, pushing her forward, dragging her back like a shying horse, epileptically clasping her lest she made a move, and finally, when they were over, laying all the blame on her with ‘It’s better really to make up one’s mind from the beginning, isn’t it?’

Not a very good start. She tried to be cheerful as they walked along the other side, but he relapsed into monosyllables, as he always did after quarrelling with the traffic. Nor had any real improvement taken place by the time they had entered the Park at York Gate, and were walking up the
main avenue towards the Zoo amidst the winter-gripped flower beds and the rippling murmur of a post-prandial Sunday crowd gratefully disporting its undistinguished self in the sun – a sight which always saddened Ella for no exact reason she knew. In fact at last she got so cast down with her silent companion (having had a sudden vision of being married to Mr. Eccles and walking staidly in the Park like this every Sunday afternoon for the rest of her life) that she had the courage to remonstrate.