My Place in the Bazaar Page 4

  But no. I warned myself. That would not do. What did it matter what he said next, or at what exact point she … for whatever he did, and whatever she did, the story as I had elected to tell it could only end one way—a row of dots, and a short concluding paragraph: ‘Next morning, her dark hair scattered across the pillow, she woke in a strange room …‘

  That has been done so often. In how many novels has not that dark hair been scattered over that pillow. It was theatrical, vulgar, the sort of plot that occurs to one in the coffee-room of one’s club after a heavy lunch and half a litre of red wine.

  In a dejected mood I caught at Leicester Square the tube that would carry me to Earls Court. But warmth revives us and as the train rattled westwards, I began to think that though I must discard the seduction motif, there might be possibilities in the last train to Brighton. Suppose that the man had for a long time besieged the girl unsuccessfully, and that on the refusal of his third proposal he had decided that he would never secure the hand of his beloved unless he managed to compromise her honour?

  That might work out. He would steal her money at the restaurant; they would reach the booking-office where the scene I have already described would be enacted. There would be the return to the flat, the discovery that the porter was out, and that he had forgotten to cash the cheque he had written out that morning.

  ‘What am I to do?’ she’d ask.

  With well-simulated confusion, he would assure her that he would not mind a ‘shake-down’ on the sofa, and that if she would take his room …

  ‘But I couldn’t! How could I? What would my mother say?’

  A little touch that would place the mother before the reader’s eye—a plump, heavy woman with a small unsatisfactory husband.

  A woman of strong passions, that unrelieved had focused themselves on a rigid observance of the properties.

  ‘But what else can you do?’ the young man would ask. In the end she would consent to pass the night there, and next morning they would arrive at Brighton together with the milk, to be received by the mother in a cold, melancholy room with the fire smoking dismally. Her hands would be on her hips, she would say one word, ‘Well!—then listen while the young man stammered his explanations. Of course she would not believe him; he had never expected that she would, and would have been miserably disappointed if she had. He would listen to her threats and tirades, then, at the right moment, he would draw himself up to his full height.

  ‘Madam, your accusations are untrue; the door of the room in which your daughter slept was locked all night. I slept on the sofa. But to prove my honour, and to vindicate hers, I am prepared—and shall be proud—to marry your daughter.’

  A slow smile would spread across the mother’s face. Honour saved, a daughter off her hands; and at last the daughter, moved by his chilvary, might even fall in love with her knight-errant.

  I considered this solution during the short walk from Earls Court station to my flat. It was original. I had never seen it done before. Such a situation is common enough in modern fiction. But the mistake is usually genuine, and that scene in the dismal parlour is the prelude to long years of married misery. Occasionally the affair is arranged by the girl, if she can trust her lover’s lack of enterprise. But for a man to plan such an escapade—that would indeed be new. And I went to sleep contented, thinking that the next day would pass pleasantly in congenial work.

  But a poem by a poetess, now little read, contains the lines:

  Colours seen by candlelight

  Do not look the same by day

  and when the sun shone next morning through my bedroom window my plot seemed less original. It was only a conceit, after all. It said ‘black’ to someone else’s ‘white’; it turned an old coat inside out, and though it would no doubt cause some surprise if I were to walk down Kensington High Street with my coat inside out, it would be the same coat.

  That is not the way to write a good story—to tack an old situation on a new one. I should have to find a different ending. But the days passed and no solution came until a friend, to whom I related the incident, made a pertinent remark.

  ‘If the girl could see her face reflected in the photograph, why did she not see the young man take the money from her purse?’

  I sat in surprised silence. Why had I not thought of that before?

  ‘But if she saw, why didn’t she say something?’ I said.

  ‘It’s your job to discover that.’

  And for the next few days I searched for reasons for her silence.

  At last I began to see the glimmering of a tale, the fifth, that I had constructed about this romantic couple. This is what I saw: a shy young man from the provinces comes to London with an introduction to some wealthy friends. There is an attractive daughter with whom he feels that he could very easily fall in love. He suggests timidly that it would be nice if she would show him ‘round the sights’, for he wants to see London, and has no other friends in it. As her parents have advanced views, or perhaps because the daughter has succeeded in impressing her views upon them, his suggestion is accepted: the result is a lunch at the Criterion, a theatre, and tea afterwards. The afternoon passes so pleasantly that he suggests a dinner. He would like to see Soho.

  ‘But I must go back and ask my mother first,’ she says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course; it’s very nice of her to let me out at all.’

  He admires this sense of duty, which is probably only an excuse for a change of frock. And so she returns home to tell her mother how well everything is progressing, while he goes to the little Soho restaurant to engage a table. While he is waiting for her, he makes a horrible discovery. He has only a pound left; what is he to do? He picks up the menu and sees that it will be impossible to dine in anything like the way he wishes for less than thirty shillings. He is a stranger; the restaurant will not give him credit. There is no one to whom he can go for a loan; he cannot ask the girl on their first day together to lend him money. And so, all through the dinner there hangs over his head the menace of that piece of folded paper. What will happen? He remembers seeing once in Manchester the proprietor pitch an impecunious client headlong into the street. They could hardly do that to him. He would be too big, but he will be disgraced in the girl’s eyes. He has not the presence to carry off such a scene with honour. He will stammer and mumble, and try to explain and look foolish; probably in the end he will leave his watch in bail, while the girl will stand, ashamed of him and contemptuous.

  He tries to make the meal last as long as possible; they have two coffees and a liqueur and many cigarettes. But the moment comes at last when she begins to collect her things. ‘I must go now. It has been a lovely evening. Thank you so very much.’

  He looks in misery at the piece of folded paper. Then, just as he is preparing to request an interview with the patron, the temptation comes; her bag lies open facing him; she is looking the other way. He sees money. Here is the way out; perhaps she will not notice she has lost it. She is rich. At any rate, he must run the risk. And, as she tidies her hair in the glass, she sees him take her money.

  She is shocked, terribly, but it is easy to understand her silence; her curiosity is whetted, she is interested in the young man, and guesses that one day it may very well be that she will feel more than interest for him. Money is of no great concern to her.

  I could see the scene clearly enough; it would provide me with excellent opportunities for dramatic dialogue; the growing uneasiness of the man with the girl’s gradual appreciation of it and wonder at the cause of it, the hope, perhaps, that is the beginning of love. A good scene, but it would be impossible not to write a good scene round such an episode. But, even as I saw it, I knew that it would be useless. To what climax could it work other than the old cliché—‘I knew it all along’. It would be kept as a surprise; the reader would not be told that the girl had seen the theft reflected in the looking-glass. The story would describe the progress of their courtship; the heart searchings o
f the young man. ‘If I tell her, will she despise me?’ How the machinery would creak, how often it has been done before; and at last the stage would be set for the confession.

  ‘I have something I must tell you, dear’. And she would smile and stroke his hair.

  ‘Silly, I knew it all along!’

  How trite, how banal! And the fact that it might be true would not redeem it. We are plagiarists in life as we are in books, and there are certain motives that are now impossible in a story, although they occur in life. They have been used too often. What a weariness overcomes us when we discover in a novel of matrimonial dispute that the wife is about to become a mother, so that in consequence the hero cannot run off with his secretary.

  No doubt it is an affair of frequent occurrence; impending maternity frustrates an impending honeymoon. Autumn lays waste the spring. But no self-respecting novelist would allow ‘the little stranger’ to extricate him from a difficulty. In the same way, no self-respecting novelist would allow a heroine ‘to know it all along’. It is a motif that has served its purpose. When a coin has passed through many hands the signs and figures on it are worn away; it is valueless and is returned to the mint; which is the proper place for the ‘little stranger’ and ‘I knew it all along’.

  That is one of the chief problems for the contemporary storyteller. Real events cannot necessarily be translated into fiction.

  Turgenev is always obvious. He employs none of the devices of surprise and of suspended interest on which the writer of talent depends for his effects. The waters of Turgenev’s narratives are so smooth, so clear, and bring the river-bed so close to us that we hardly realize how deep they are. It is not till we see the blunders which others make with the Turgenev technique that we realize to what an extent he is supreme. And it is such a simple technique. The passage of youth; the waning power of love; the recompenses of middle age; memory and regret, and a serene twilight that harmonizes and consoles. It is of these things that Turgenev speaks—simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy, returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love; a man sits in a garden, and remembers. It looks so easy; and yet, in mediocre work, how the machinery creaks. How artificial becomes the excuses for recollection. A violin playing in a certain restaurant, after many years, a tune to which the hero danced when young. A narrative that closes where it began, in the same place, on the same note, with the same sentence. What is pattern in Turgenev becomes in lesser writers a series of devices.

  Now having attempted five different stories, all of them unsatisfactory, I know it is my duty to provide a conclusion that shall be unexpected and that shall ridicule my previous conjectures. I know that I ought to meet in the restaurant at a later date the hero or heroine, or both of them together, and learn the true story. There should be—I know it—a punch in the last paragraph; but that is exactly what I cannot give, for I do not know the real end of the story and have been unable to invent one.

  Unsatisfactory, but intriguing too. In a world where so much is ordered by the inviolable laws of mathematics, it is pleasant to find something that is incomplete. For the first time in my life I was the witness of a dramatic episode, the sort of thing that one would not see again in a thousand years. It was a fragment in the lives of two people, and it must remain a fragment, a baffling, fascinating fragment. I am glad to have it so. Such another moment will not come to me. When the voice of the lecturer begins to fade, when the sun beats down upon the mound at Lord’s and the cricket becomes slow: at all times when the mind detaches itself from its surroundings I shall return in memory to that evening at the restaurant. It will be a treasure for all time, a book in which I shall read forever without weariness. Perhaps one day I shall hit upon the meaning of it; but I hope not. I prefer to keep it an enigma, to be able to shut my eyes and watch the growing embarrassment of a young man who is planning an unnatural theft, to see a young girl stand in the doorway of a restaurant, a fur cap fitting tightly over her head, a gloved hand raised across her throat.

  1921

  World Tour 1926—1927

  In the summer of 1924, a friend of the cricket field, A. D. Peters, set up in business as a literary agent. I was one of his first clients, and my financial position improved rapidly. In the spring of 1926 I was able to resign my desk in Henrietta Street and sail round the world.

  Travel in those days was not expensive. A first-class ticket on the Messageries Maritimes, which included four months board and lodging, cost £166. My itinerary ran: Marseilles, Suez, Ceylon, Singapore, Java, Australia, the New Hebrides, Tahiti, Panama, the West Indies. I could break the journey as often as I liked within a period of two years. At that time there was no difficulty in booking a passage at the last moment. Ships were rarely crowded.

  The trip began with a leisurely cruise round the Mediterranean, which provided me with the material for the story ‘The Making of a Matron’.

  The Making of a Matron

  If anyone had told me in the spring of 1924 that I should return to London from a world tour in 1927 to find Olivia Marshall a married woman with two children and an unparalleled reputation for decorum, I should have hooted riotously and asked him what he had been drinking. For Olivia in those days was the dowager’s pet example when tea-cups rattled over the failings and inadequacies of the modern woman. ‘You’ve only got to look, my dear, at that Marshall girl, to see what all that leads to.’ Nor can it be pretended that her conduct had been unlavish in its provision of opportunities for the lifted eyelid. All things considered, it would have been surprising if it had.

  When the war began Olivia was sixteen years old. And during the most unsettled period that up to now an unsettled world has known, she was allowed to grow up in ways of her own choosing. She had no brothers. Her father’s service was spent exclusively in the East whence leave was scanty and spasmodic. Her mother, whose diary was black with promises to attend hospital and Y.M.C.A. committee meetings, considered that she had fulfilled her maternal obligations when she had secured her daughter’s enrolment at a canteen patronized by royalty. Meantime a London that was living at the electric pressure of a perpetual ninety-six hours’ leave had dispensed with chaperones. Of such circumstances the outcome could scarcely have been more than one of chance. And chance was not over-charitable to Olivia. There was an extremely pleasant subaltern in the Guards, but a machine-gun bullet at Givenchy ended that.

  Then there were attempts, half-hearted, somewhat desperate attempts to fill an interval; a series of experiments that terminated in a gunner major who behaved rather more than rottenly. Chance was not over-charitable; and by the time it was all over Olivia had come to feel that life was a show without a very great deal to it; nothing anyhow that it was worth making any particular song and dance about. So that when anything that seemed at all likely to be amusing came her way, she thought, ‘Oh well, why shouldn’t I?’ an attitude in which she persisted gallantly till one day she noticed that it was more often ‘I might as well, after all’ that she was saying. Between which and ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ there is a world of difference. For whereas ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ is the defiant protestation of a faith, ‘I might as well’ is no more than a shrug of the shoulders, a limp acceptance. ‘I suppose,’ thought Olivia Marshall, ‘that I’m getting bored.’

  And indeed life did seem to her rather a boring business as she hurried down Queen’s Gate at ten minutes past one on a bleak Sunday in mid-January. It was nice, of course, to be going to lunch with June. June was a darling and her food was admirable, and there were sure to be plenty of amusing people there to keep the conversation winding brightly and satirically down the perilous paths of personalities. She could think of no house to which she could more readily be going. But ev
en so, she had lunched a great many times at June’s during the last three years; and there were only a certain number of ways of serving sole, only a certain number of secrets one could reveal about even the most intimate of one’s acquaintances, only a certain number of different types of person in the world to meet, only a certain number of opening gambits to a flirtation, only a certain number of different ways, when it came to that, of doing anything. ‘And I know every one of them,’ reflected Olivia mournfully as she hurried along Sumner Place, wondering whether it was for one or half-past or quarter-past she had been invited.

  ‘One o’clock, I think it must have been,’ she said, as she surveyed the number of variously graded hats that were stretched out along the wide oak table in the hall; a suspicion that was confirmed by the atmosphere of slightly constrained anticipation that she found awaiting her in the silver-walled, cerulean-ceilinged drawing-room.

  ‘Darling Olivia,’ murmured Jane, ‘so punctually unpunctual.’

  ‘But, precious, I thought you said quarter-past.’

  ‘And how often has dear Olivia lunched here, and how often have I told her “No, not quarter-past, dear; one!” Still, let me see now, now you’re here.…’ And casting a many-bangled arm about Olivia’s waist, June Graham lowered a sleek and unhatted head upon her shoulder and levelled a slow, vague glance upon the assembled company. ‘Let me see now, you know everybody, I think.’

  Olivia did not. But she knew that June, whose acquaintance was larger probably than that of any other London hostess, would find it difficult to remember at a moment’s notice, the names of all her guests. So she nodded her head placidly. She had caused enough confusion already by arriving late. Besides, did names matter very much? They were only differently coloured labels for the same thing.