Online Flip Book / Download   Back to our Information Page

I

It was the second Saturday of August, 1911, when I came to London for the interview with Kersch and Co. I was just twenty-five. The summer had been almost tropical.

There used to be a train in those days that got into St Pancras, from the North, about ten in the morning. I came by it from Nottingham, left my bag in the cloakroom and went straight down to the City by bus. The heat of London was terrific, a white dust heat, thick with the smell of horse dung. I had put on my best suit, a blue serge, and it was like a suit of gauze. The heat seemed to stab at me through it.

Kersch and Co. were very nice. They were electrical engineers. I had applied for a vacancy advertised by them. That morning I was on the short list and Mr Alexander Kersch, the son, was very nice to me. We talked a good deal about Nottingham and I asked him if he knew the Brownsons, who were prominent Congregationalists there, but he said no. Everyone in Nottingham, almost, knew the Brownsons, but I suppose it did not occur to me in my excitement that Kersch was a Jew. After a time he offered me a whisky and soda, but I refused. I had been brought up rather strictly, and in any case the Brownsons would not have liked it. Finally, Mr Kersch asked me if I could be in London over the weekend. I said yes, and he asked me at once to come in on Monday morning. I knew then that the job was as good as settled and I was trembling with excitement as I shook hands and said good-bye.

I came out of Kersch and Co. just before twelve o’clock. Their offices were somewhere off Cheapside. I forget the name of the street. I only remember, now, how very hot it was. There was something un-English about it. It was a terrific heat, fierce and white. And I made up my mind to go straight back to St Pancras and get my bag and take it to the hotel the Brownsons had recommended to me. It was so hot that I didn’t want to eat. I felt that if I could get my room and wash and rest it would be enough. I could eat later. I would go up West and do myself rather well.

Pa Brownson had outlined the position of the hotel so well, both in conversation and on paper, that when I came out of St Pancras with my bag I felt I knew the way to the street as well as if it had been in Nottingham. I turned east and then north and went on turning left and then right, until finally I came to the place where the street with the hotel ought to have been. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t believe it. I walked about a bit, always coming back to the same place again in case I should get lost. Then I asked a baker’s boy where Midhope Street was and he didn’t know. I asked one or two more people, and they didn’t know either. ‘Wade’s Hotel,’ I would say, to make it clearer, but it was no good. Then a man said he thought I should go back towards St Pancras a bit, and ask again, and I did.

It must have been about two o’clock when I knew that I was pretty well lost. The heat was shattering. I saw one or two other hotels but they looked a bit low class and I was tired and desperate.

Finally I set my bag down in the shade and wiped my face. The sweat on me was filthy. I was wretched. The Brownsons had been so definite about the hotel and I knew that when I got back they would ask me if I liked it and all about it. Hilda would want to know about it too. Later on, if I got the Kersch job, we should be coming up to it for our honeymoon.

At last I picked up my bag again. Across the street was a little sweet shop and café showing ices. I went across to it. I felt I had to have something.

In the shop a big woman with black hair was tinkering with the ice-cream mixer. Something had gone wrong. I saw that at once. It was just my luck.

‘I suppose it’s no use asking for an ice?’ I said.

‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind waiting.’

‘How long?’

‘As soon as ever I get this nut fixed on and the freezer going again. We’ve had a breakdown.’

‘All right. You don’t mind if I sit down?’ I said.

She said no, and I sat down and leaned one elbow on the tea-table, the only one there was. The woman went on tinkering with the freezer. She was a heavy woman, about fifty, a little swarthy, and rather masterful to look at. The shop was stifling and filled with a sort of yellowish-pink shade cast by the sun pouring through the shop blind.

‘I supposed it’s no use asking you where Midhope Street is?’ I said.

‘Midhope Street,’ she said. She put her tongue in her cheek, in thought. ‘Midhope Street, I ought to know that.’

‘Or Wade’s Hotel.’

‘Wade’s Hotel,’ she said. She wriggled her tongue between her teeth. They were handsome teeth, very white. ‘Wade’s Hotel. No. That beats me.’ And then: ‘Perhaps my daughter will know. I’ll call her.’

She straightened up to call into the back of the shop. But a second before she opened her mouth the girl herself came in. She looked surprised to see me there.

‘Oh, here you are, Blanche! This gentleman here is looking for Wade’s Hotel.’

‘I’m afraid I’m lost,’ I said.

‘Wade’s Hotel,’ the girl said. She too stood in thought, running her tongue over her teeth, and her teeth too were very white, like her mother’s. ‘Wade’s Hotel. I’ve seen that somewhere. Surely?’

‘Midhope Street.’ I said.

‘Midhope Street.’

No, she couldn’t remember. She had on a sort of kimono, loose, with big orange flowers all over it. I remember thinking it was rather fast. For those days it was. It wouldn’t be now. And somehow, because it was so loose and brilliant, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It made me uneasy, but it was an uneasiness in which there was pleasure as well, almost excitement. I remember thinking she was really half-undressed. The kimono had no neck and no sleeves. It was simply a piece of material that wrapped over her, and when suddenly she bent down and tried to fit the last screw on to the freezer the whole kimono fell loose and I could see her body.

At the same time something else happened. Her hair fell over her shoulder. It was the time of very long hair, the days when girls would pride themselves that they could sit on their pigtails, but hers was the longest hair I had ever seen. It was like thick jet-black cotton-rope. And when she bent down over the freezer the pig-tail of it was so long that the tip touched the ice.

‘I’m so sorry,’ the girl said. ‘My hair’s always getting me into trouble.’

‘It’s all right. It just seems to be my unlucky day, that’s all.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Will you have a cup of tea?’ the woman said. ‘Instead of the ice? Instead of waiting?’

‘That’s it, Mother. Get him some tea. You would like tea, wouldn’t you?’

‘Very much.’

So the woman went through the counter-flap into the back of the shop to get the tea. The girl and I, in the shop alone, stood and looked at the freezer. I felt queer in some way, uneasy. The girl had not troubled to tighten up her kimono. She let it hang loose, anyhow, so that all the time I could see part of her shoulder and now and then her breasts. Her skin was very white, and once when she leaned forward rather farther than usual I could have sworn that she had nothing on at all underneath.

‘You keep looking at my kimono,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s very nice,’ I said. ‘It’s very nice stuff.’

‘Lovely stuff. Feel of it. Go on. Just feel of it.’

I felt the stuff. For some reasons, perhaps it was because I had had no food, I felt weak. And she knew it. She must have known it. ‘It’s lovely stuff. Feel it. I made it myself.’ She spoke sweetly and softly, in invitation. There was something electric about her. I listened quite mechanically. From the minute she asked me to feel the stuff of her kimono I was quite helpless. She had me, as it were, completely done up in the tangled maze of the orange and green of its flowers and leaves.

‘Are you in London for long? Only to-day?’

‘Until Monday.’

‘I suppose you booked your room at the hotel?’

‘No. I didn’t book it. But I was strongly recommended there.’

‘I see.’

That was all, only ‘I see.’ But in it there was something quite maddening. It was a kind of passionate veiled hint, a secret invitation.

‘Things were going well,’ I said, ‘until I lost my way.’

‘Oh?’

‘I came up for an interview and I got the job. At least I think I got the job.’

‘A bit of luck. I hope it’s a good one?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is. Kersch and Co. In the City.’

‘Kersch and Co?’ she said. ‘Not really? Kersch and Co.?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why, do you know them?’

‘Know them? Of course I know them. Everybody knows them. That is a bit of luck for you.’

And really I was flattered. She knew Kersch and Co.! She knew that it was a good thing. I think I was more pleased because of the attitude of the Brownsons. Kersch and Co. didn’t mean anything to the Brownsons. It was just a name. They had been rather cold about it. I think they would have liked me to get the job, but they wouldn’t have broken their hearts if I hadn’t. Certainly they hadn’t shown any excitement.

‘Kersch and Co.,’ the girl said again. ‘That really is a bit of luck.’

Then the woman came in with the tea. ‘Would you like anything to eat?’

‘Well, I’ve had no dinner.’

‘Oh! No wonder you look tired. I’ll get you a sandwich. Is that all right?’

‘Thank you.’

So the woman went out to get the sandwich, and the girl and I stayed in the shop again, alone.

‘It’s a pity you booked your room at the hotel,’ she said.

‘I haven’t booked it,’ I said.

‘Oh! I thought you said you’d booked it. Oh! My fault. You haven’t hooked it?’

‘No. Why?’

‘We take people in here,’ she said. ‘Over the café. It’s not central of course. But then we don’t charge so much.’

I thought of the Brownsons. ‘Perhaps I ought to go to the hotel,’ I said.

‘We charge three and six,’ she said. ‘That isn’t much, is it?’

‘Oh, no!’

‘Why don’t you just come up and see the room?’ she said. ‘Just come up.’

‘Well—’

‘Come up and see it. It won’t eat you.’

She opened the rear door of the shop and in a moment I was going upstairs behind her. She was not wearing any stockings. Her bare legs were beautifully strong and white. The room was over the café. It was a very good room for three and six. The new wallpaper was silver-leaved and the bed was white and looked cool.

And suddenly it seemed silly to go out into the heat again and wander about looking for Wade’s Hotel when I could stay where I was.

‘Well, what do you think of it?’ she said.

‘I like it.’ She sat down on the bed. The kimono was drawn up over her legs and where it parted at her knees I could see her thighs, strong and white and softly disappearing into the shadow of the kimono. It was the day of long rather prim skirts and I had never seen a woman’s legs like that. There was nothing between Hilda and me beyond kissing. All we had done was to talk of things, but there was nothing in it. Hilda always used to say that she would keep herself for me.

The girl hugged her knees. I could have sworn she had nothing on under the kimono.

‘I don’t want to press you,’ she said, ‘but I do wish you’d stay. You’d be our first let.’

Suddenly a great wave of heat came up from the street outside, the fierce, horse-smelling, dust-white heat of the earlier day, and I said:

‘All right. I’ll stay.’

‘Oh, you angel!’ ‘

The way she said that was so warm and frank that I did not know what to do. I simply smiled. I felt curiously weak with pleasure. Standing there, I could smell suddenly not only the heat but the warmth of her own body. It was sweetish and pungent, the soft odour of sweat and perfume. My heart was racing.

Then suddenly she got up and smoothed the kimono over her knees and thighs.

‘My father has just died, you see,’ she said. ‘We are trying this for a living. You’ll give us a start.’

Somehow it seemed too good to be true.

II

I know now that it was. But I will say more of that later, when the time comes.

That evening I came down into the shop again about six o’clock. I had had my tea and unpacked my things and rested. It was not much cooler, but I felt better. I was glad I had stayed.

The girl, Blanche, was sitting behind the counter, fanning herself with the broken lid of a sweet-box. She had taken off her kimono and was wearing a white gauzy dress with a black sash. I was disappointed. I think she must have seen that, because she pouted a bit when I looked at her. In turn I was glad she pouted. It made her lips look full-blooded and rich and shining. There was something lovely about her when she was sulky.

‘Going out?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought of going up West and celebrating over Kersch and Co.’

‘Celebrating? By yourself?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’m alone. There’s no one else.’

‘Lucky you.’

I knew what she meant in a moment. ‘Well,’ I said, almost in a joke, ‘why don’t you come?’

‘Me?’ she said, eyes wide open. ‘You don’t mean it. Me?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I do mean it.’

She got up. ‘How long can you wait? I’ll just change my dress and tell mother.’

‘No hurry at all,’ I said, and she ran upstairs.

I have said nothing about how old she was. In the kimono she looked about twenty, and in the white dress about the same age, perhaps a little younger. When she came down again that evening she looked nearer twenty-six or twenty-seven. She looked big and mature. She had changed from the white dress into a startling yellow affair with a sort of black coatee cut away at the hips. It was so flashy that I felt uneasy. It was very tight too: the skirt so tight that I could see every line of her body, the bodice filled tight in turn with her big breasts. I forget what her hat was like. I rather fancy I thought it was rather silly. But later she took it off.

‘Well, where shall we go?’ she said.

‘I thought of going up West and eating and perhaps dropping in to hear some music.’

‘Music. Isn’t that rather dull?’

‘Well, a play then.’

‘I say,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s go up West. Let’s go down to the East End instead. We can have some fun. It’ll do you good to see how the Jews live. If you’re going to work for a firm of Jews you ought to know something about them. We might have some Jewish food. I know a nice place.’

So we took a bus and went. In the Mile End Road we had a meal. I didn’t like it. The food didn’t smell very nice. It was spiced and strong and rather strange to eat. But Blanche liked it. Finally she said she was thirsty. ‘Let’s go out of here and have a drink somewhere else,’ she said. ‘I know a place where you can get beautiful wine, cheap.’ So we went from that restaurant to another. We had some cheese and a bottle of wine—asti, I think it was. The place was Italian. The evening was stifling and everywhere people were drinking heavily and fanning themselves limply against the heat. After the wine I began to feel rather strange. I wasn’t used to it and I hardly knew what I was doing. The cheese was rather salt and made me thirsty. I kept drinking almost unconsciously and my lips began to form syllables roundly and loosely. I kept staring at Blanche and thinking of her in the kimono. She in turn would stare back and we played a kind of game, carrying on a kind of conversation with glances, burning each other up, until at last she said:

‘What’s your name? You haven’t told me yet.’

‘Arthur,’ I said. ‘Arthur Lawson.’

‘Arthur.’

The way she said it set my heart on fire. I just couldn’t say anything: I simply sat looking at her. There was an intimacy then, at that moment, in the mere silences and glances between us, that went far beyond anything I had known with Hilda.

Then she saw something on the back of the menu that made her give a little cry.

‘Oh, there’s a circus! Oh, let’s go! Oh, Arthur, you must take me.’

So we went there too. I forget the name of the theatre and really, except for some little men and women with wizened bird faces and beards, there is nothing I remember except one thing. In the middle of the show was a trapeze act. A girl was swinging backwards and forwards across the stage in readiness to somersault and the drum was rolling to rouse the audience to excitement. Suddenly the girl shouted ‘I can’t do it!’ and let loose. She crashed down into the stalls and in a minute half the audience were standing up in a pandemonium of terror.

‘Oh! Arthur, take me out.’

We went out directly. In those days women fainted more often and more easily than they do now, and I thought Blanche would faint too. As we came out into the street she leaned against me heavily and clutched my arm.

‘I’ll get a cab and take you home,’ I said.

‘Something to drink first.’

I was a bit upset myself. We had a glass of port in a public house. It must have been about ten o’clock. Before long, after the rest and the port, Blanche’s eyes were quite bright again.

Soon after that we took the cab and drove home. ‘Let me lean against you,’ she said. I took her and held her. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Hold me. Hold me tight.’ It was so hot in the cab that I could hardly breathe and I could feel her face hot and moist too. ‘You’re so hot,’ I said. She said it was her dress. The velvet coatee was too warm. ‘I’ll change it as soon as I get home,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll have a drink. Some ice-cream in lemonade. That’ll be nice.’

In the cab I looked down at her hair. It was amazingly black. I smiled at it softly. It was full of odours that were warm and voluptuous. But it was the blackness of it that was so wonderful and so lovely.

‘Why do they call you Blanche? I said. ‘When you’re so black. Blanche means white.’

‘How do you know I’m not white underneath?’ she said.

I could not speak. No conversation I had ever had with a woman had ever gone within miles of that single sentence. I sat dazed, my heart racing. I did not know what to do. ‘Hold me tight,’ she said. I held her and kissed her.

I got out of the cab mechanically. In the shop she went straight upstairs. I kept thinking of what she had said. I was wild with a new and for me a delicious excitement. Downstairs the shop was in darkness and finally I could not wait for her to come down again. I went quietly upstairs to meet her.

She was coming across the landing as I reached the head of the stairs. She was in the kimono, in her bare feet.

‘Where are you?’ she said softly. ‘I can’t see you.’ She came a second later and touched me.

‘Just let me see if mother has turned your bed back,’ she whispered.

She went into my bedroom. I followed her. She was leaning over the bed. My heart was racing with a sensation of great longing for her. She smoothed the bed with her hands and, as she did so, the kimono, held no longer, fell right apart.

And as she turned again I could see, even in the darkness, that she had nothing on underneath it at all.

III

On the following Monday morning I saw Kersch and Co. again and in the afternoon I went back to Nottingham. I had been given the job.

But curiously, for a reason I could not explain, I was no longer excited. I kept thinking of Blanche. I suppose, what with my engagement to Hilda Brownson and so on, I ought to have been uneasy and a little conscience-stricken. I was uneasy, but it was a mad uneasiness and there was no conscience at all in it. I felt reckless and feverish, almost desperate. Blanche was the first woman I had known at all on terms of intimacy, and it shattered me. All my complacent values of love and women were smashed. I had slept with Blanche on Saturday night and again on Sunday and the effect on me was one of almost catastrophic ecstasy.

That was something I had never known at all with Hilda: I had never come near it. I am not telling this, emphasising the physical side of it and singling out the more passionate implications of it, merely for the sake of telling it. I want to make clear that I had undergone a revolution: a revolution brought about, too, simply by a kimono and a girl’s bare body underneath it. And since it was a revolution that changed my whole life it seems to me that I ought to make the colossal effect of it quite clear, now and for always.

I know, now, that I ought to have broken it off with Hilda at once. But I didn’t. She was so pleased at my getting the Kersch job that to have told her would have been as cruel as taking away a doll from a child. I couldn’t tell her.

A month later we were married. My heart was simply not in it. I wasn’t there. All the time I was thinking of and, in imagination, making love to Blanche. We spent our honeymoon at Bournemouth in September. Kersch and Co. had been very nice and the result was that I was not to take up the new appointment until the twenty-fifth of the month.

I say appointment. It was the word the Brownsons always used. From the very first they were not very much in love with my going to work in London at all and taking Hilda with me. I myself had no parents, but Hilda was their only child. That put what seemed to me a snobbish premium on her. They set her on a pedestal. My job was nothing beside Hilda. They began to dictate what we should do and how and where we ought to live, and finally Mrs Brownson suggested that we all go to London and choose the flat in which we were to live. I objected. Then Hilda cried and there was an unpleasant scene in which Pa Brownson said that he thought I was unreasonable and that all Mrs Brownson was trying to do was to ensure that I could give Hilda as good a home as she had always had. He said something else about God guiding us as He had always guided them. We must put our trust in God. But God or no God, I was determined that if we were going to live in a flat in London the Brownsons shouldn’t choose it. I would choose it myself. Because even then I knew where, if it was humanly possible, I wanted it to be.

In the end I went to London by myself. I talked round Hilda, and Hilda talked round her mother, and her mother, I suppose, talked round her father. At any rate I went. We decided on a flat at twenty-five shillings a week if we could get it. It was then about the twentieth of September.

I went straight from St Pancras to Blanche. It was a lovely day, blue and soft. It was a pain for me merely to be alive. I got to the shop just as Blanche was going out. We almost bumped into each other.

‘Arthur!’

The way she said it made me almost sick with joy. She had on a tight fawn costume and a little fussy brown hat. ‘Arthur! I was just going out. You just caught me. But mother can go instead. Oh! Arthur.’ Her mother came out of the back room and in a minute Blanche had taken off her hat and costume and her mother had gone out instead of her, leaving us alone in the shop.

We went straight upstairs. There was no decision, no asking, no consent in it at all. We went straight up out of a tremendous equal passion for each other. We were completely in unison, in desire and act and consummation and everything. Someone came in the shop and rang the bell loudly while we were upstairs, but it made no difference. We simply existed for each other. There was no outside world. She seemed to me then amazingly rich and mature and yet sweet. She was like a pear, soft and full-juiced and overflowing with passion. Beside her Hilda seemed like an empty eggshell.

I stayed with the Hartmans that night and the next. There were still three days to go before the Kersch job began. Then I stayed another night. I telegraphed Hilda, “Delayed. Returning certain to-morrow.’

I never went. I was bound, heart and soul, to Blanche Hartman. There was never any getting away from it. I was so far gone that it was not until the second day of that second visit that I noticed the name Hartman at all.

‘I’m going to stay here,’ I said to Blanche. ‘Lodge here and live with you. Do you want me?’

‘Arthur, Arthur.’

‘My God,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’ I simply couldn’t bear the repetition of my name. It awoke every sort of fierce passion in me.

Then after a time I said: ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘About another girl. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to hear. I could tell you about other men.’

‘No, but listen,’ I said. ‘I’m married.’ I told her all about Hilda.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It makes no difference. You could be a Mormon and it wouldn’t matter.’

And after that, because it mattered nothing to her, it mattered nothing to me. There is no conscience in passion. When I did think of Hilda and the Brownsons it was like the squirt of a syphon on to a blazing furnace. I really had no conscience at all. I walked out of one life into another as easily as from one room into another.

The only difficulty was Kersch and Co. It was there that Hilda would inquire for me as soon as I failed to turn up.

Actually I got out of the Kersch difficulty as easily as I got out of the rest. I didn’t go back there either.

IV

I went on living with Blanche until the war broke out. I got another job. Electrical engineers were scarcer in those days. Then, as soon as the war broke out, I joined up.

In a way it was almost a relief. Passion can go too far and one can have too much of it. I was tired out by a life that was too full of sublimity. It was not that I was tired of Blanche. She remained as irresistible to me as when I had first seen her in the green and orange kimono. It was only that I was tired of the constant act of passion itself. My spirit, as it were, had gone stale and I needed rest.

The war gave it me. As soon as I came home for my first leave I knew it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Blanche and I went straight back to the almost unearthly plane of former intimacy. It was the old almost catastrophic ecstasy.

I say almost catastrophic. Now, when I think of it, I see that it was really catastrophic. One cannot expect a woman to feed off the food of the gods and then suddenly, because one man among a million is not there, to go back on a diet of nothing at all. I am trying to be reasonable about this. I am not blaming Blanche. It is the ecstasy between us that I am blaming. It could not have been otherwise than catastrophic.

I always think it odd that I did not see the catastrophe coming before it did. But perhaps if I had seen it coming it would have ceased to be a catastrophe. I don’t know. I only know that I came home in 1917, unexpectedly, and found that Blanche was carrying on with another man.

I always remembered that Mrs Hartman looked extraordinarily scared as I walked into the shop that day. She was an assured, masterful woman and it was not at all like her to be scared. After a minute or so I went upstairs and in my bedroom a man was just buttoning up his waistcoat. Blanche was not there, but I understood.

I was furious, but the fury did not last. Blanche shattered it. She was a woman to whom passion was as essential as bread. She reminded me of that. But she reminded me also of something else. She reminded me that that I was not married to her.

‘But the moral obligation!’ I raged.

‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s no more than kissing to me. Don’t be angry, honey. If you can’t take me as I am you’re not bound to take me at all.’

And in the end she melted my fury. ‘What’s between us is different from all the rest,’ she said. I believed her and she demonstrated it to me too. And I clung to that until the end of the war.

But when I came home finally it had gone farther than that. There was more than one man. They came to the shop, travellers in the sweet-trade, demobilised young officers with cars. They called while I was at my job.

I found out about it. This time I didn’t say anything. I did something instead. I gave up what the Brownsons would have called my appointment.

‘But what have you done that for?’ Blanche said.

‘I can’t stand being tied by a job any more,’ I said. ‘I’ll work here. We’ll develop the shop. There’s money in it.’

‘Who’s going to pay for it?’

‘I will.’

Just before I married Hilda I had nearly a hundred and fifty pounds in the bank. I had had it transferred to a London branch and it was almost all of it still there. I drew it out and in the summer of 1919 I spent nearly £80 of it on renovating the Hartman’s shop. Blanche was delighted. She supervised the decorations and the final colour scheme of the combined shop and café was orange and green.

‘Like your kimono,’ I said. ‘You remember it? That old one?’

‘Oh! Arthur. I’ve got it.’

‘Put it on,’ I said.

She went upstairs and put it on. In about a minute I followed her. It was like old times. It brought us together again.

‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘That first day, when I came in. You hadn’t anything on underneath, had you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d just had a bath and it was all I had time to slip on.’

‘By God, kiss me.’

She kissed me and I held her very tight. Her body was thicker and heavier now, but she was still lovely. It was all I asked. I was quite happy.

Then something else happened. I got used to seeing men in the shop. Most of them shot off now when they saw me, but one day when I came back from the bank there was a man in the living-room.

He was an oldish chap, with pepper and salt hair cut rather short.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘what’s eating you?’ I got to be rather short with any man I saw hanging about the place.

‘Nothing’s eating me,’ he said. ‘It’s me who wants something to eat.’

‘Oh! Who are you?’

‘My name’s Hartman,’ he said.

I looked straight at his hair. It was Blanche’s father. And in a minute I knew that he was out of prison.

I don’t know why, but it was more of a shock to me than Blanche’s affairs with other men. Blanche and I could fight out the question of unfaithfulness between ourselves, but the question of a criminal in the house was different.

‘He isn’t a criminal,’ Blanche said. ‘He’s easily led and he was led away by others. Be kind to him, honey.’

Perhaps I was soft. Perhaps I had no right to do anything. It was not my house, it was not my father. Blanche was not even my wife. What could I possibly do but let him stay?

That summer we did quite well with the new café. We made a profit of nine and very often ten or eleven pounds a week. Hartman came home in May. In July things began to get worse. Actually, with the summer at its height, they ought to have been better. But the takings dropped to six and even five pounds. Blanche and her mother kept saying that they couldn’t understand it.

But I could. Or at least I could after a long time. It was Hartman. He was not only sponging on me, but robbing the till too. All the hard-earned savings of the shop were being boozed away by Hartman.

I wanted to throw him out. But Blanche and her mother wouldn’t hear of it. ‘He’s nothing but a damned scoundrel,’ I shouted.

‘He’s my father,’ Blanche said.

That was the beginning of it. I date the antagonism between us and also the estrangement between us from that moment. It was never the same afterwards. I could stand Blanche being nothing more or less than a whore, but it was the thought of the old man and the thought of my own stupidity and folly that enraged me and finally almost broke me up.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have written the word whore, and I wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for the fact that, as I sit here, my heart is really almost broken.

V

I am sitting in what used to be my bedroom. We have changed it into a sitting room now. We ought to have it done up. We haven’t had new paper on it for seven or eight years.

I am just fifty. I think Blanche is just about fifty, too. She is out somewhere. It’s no use thinking where. Passion is still as essential to her as bread. It means no more to her and I have long since given up asking where she goes. And somehow—and this is the damnable part of it all—I am still fond of her, but gently and rather foolishly now. What I feel for her most is regret. Not anger and not passion. I couldn’t keep up with her pace. She long since outdistanced me in the matter of emotions.

Mrs Hartman is dead. I am sorry. She was likeable and though sometimes I didn’t trust her I think she liked me. Hartman still hangs on. I keep the till-money locked up, but somehow he picks the locks, and there it is. He’s too clever for me and I can’t prove it. I feel as if, now, I am in a prison far more complete than any Hartman was ever in. It is a bondage directly inherited from that first catastrophic passion for Blanche. It’s that, really, that I can’t escape. It binds me irrevocably. I know that I shall never escape.

Last night, for instance, I had a chance to escape. I know of course that I’m a free man and that I am not married to Blanche and that I could walk out now and never come back. But this was different.

Hilda asked for me. I was in the shop, alone, just about six o’clock. I was looking at the paper. We don’t get many people in the café now, but I always have the evening paper, in case. This district has gone down a lot and the café of course has gone down with it. We don’t get the people in that we did. And as I was reading the paper the wireless was on. At six o’clock, the dance band ended and in another moment or two someone was saying my name.

‘Will Arthur Lawson, last heard of in London twenty-five years ago, go at once to the Nottingham Infirmary, where his wife, Hilda Lawson, is dangerously ill.’

That was all. No one but me, in this house I mean, heard it. Afterwards no one mentioned it. Round here they think my name is Hartman. It was as though it had never happened.

But it was for me all right. When I heard it I stood stunned, as though something had struck me. I almost died where I stood, at the foot of the stairs.

Then after a bit I got over it enough to walk upstairs to the sitting-room. I did not know quite what I was doing. I felt faint and I sat down. I thought it over. After a minute I could see that there was no question of going. If it had been Blanche — yes. But not Hilda. I couldn’t face it. And I just sat there and thought not of what I should do but what I might have done.

I thought of that hot day in 1911, and the Kersch job and how glad I was to get it. I thought about Hilda. I wondered what she looked like now and what she had done with herself for twenty-five years and what she had suffered. Finally I thought of that catastrophic ecstasy with Blanche, and then of the kimono. And I wondered how things might have gone if the Hartrnans’ ice-cream freezer had never broken and if Blanche had been dressed as any other girl would have been dressed that day.

And thinking and wondering, I sat there and cried like a child.