Jacob's Room Part 16

At mid-day young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy in the town. They stand by the edge of the blue pond. The fresh wind scatters the children's voices all about. My children, thought f.a.n.n.y Elmer. The women stand round the pond, beating off great prancing s.h.a.ggy dogs. Gently the baby is rocked in the perambulator. The eyes of all the nurses, mothers, and wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. They gently nod instead of answering when the little boys tug at their skirts, begging them to move on.

And f.a.n.n.y moved, hearing some cry--a workman's whistle perhaps--high in mid-air. Now, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling out into the warm air a flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, f.a.n.n.y thought; as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart--as if he were watched as he sang, and pressed by tumult to sing. There! Restless, he flew to the next tree. She heard his song more faintly. Beyond it was the humming of the wheels and the wind rus.h.i.+ng.

She spent tenpence on lunch.

"Dear, miss, she's left her umbrella," grumbled the mottled woman in the gla.s.s box near the door at the Express Dairy Company's shop.

"Perhaps I'll catch her," answered Milly Edwards, the waitress with the pale plaits of hair; and she dashed through the door.

"No good," she said, coming back a moment later with f.a.n.n.y's cheap umbrella. She put her hand to her plaits.

"Oh, that door!" grumbled the cas.h.i.+er.

Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger-tips that drew in the paper slips were swollen as sausages.

"Pie and greens for one. Large coffee and crumpets. Eggs on toast. Two fruit cakes."

Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The lunchers heard their orders repeated with approval; saw the next table served with antic.i.p.ation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes strayed no more.

Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags.

Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough.

Every time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect to see?

The coal merchant read the Telegraph without stopping, missed the saucer, and, feeling abstractedly, put the cup down on the table-cloth.

"Did you ever hear the like of that for impertinence?" Mrs. Parsons wound up, brus.h.i.+ng the crumbs from her furs.

"Hot milk and scone for one. Pot of tea. Roll and b.u.t.ter," cried the waitresses.

The door opened and shut.

Such is the life of the elderly.

It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are three coming regularly one after another, all much of a size. Then, hurrying after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat; on it goes; somehow merges without accomplis.h.i.+ng anything; flattens itself out with the rest.

What can be more violent than the fling of boughs in a gale, the tree yielding itself all up the trunk, to the very tip of the branch, streaming and shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying in dishevelment away? The corn squirms and abases itself as if preparing to tug itself free from the roots, and yet is tied down.

Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would s.h.i.+ne through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops--as sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. Never any making believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that one is much like another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin.

"People are so nice, once you know them."

"I couldn't think ill of her. One must remember--" But Nick perhaps, or f.a.n.n.y Elmer, believing implicitly in the truth of the moment, fling off, sting the cheek, are gone like sharp hail.

"Oh," said f.a.n.n.y, bursting into the studio three-quarters of an hour late because she had been hanging about the neighbourhood of the Foundling Hospital merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down the street, take out his latch-key, and open the door, "I'm afraid I'm late"; upon which Nick said nothing and f.a.n.n.y grew defiant.

"I'll never come again!" she cried at length.

"Don't, then," Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as good-night.

How exquisite it was--that dress in Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was f.a.n.n.y the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and three-quarters in tissue paper and asked "Your pleasure?" of the next comer.

In Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown separate. In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple Bar were hats--emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep-dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet--pointed gold, or patent leather slashed with scarlet.

Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o'clock were flyblown like sugar cakes in a baker's window. f.a.n.n.y eyed them too. But coming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow fell across Evelina's window--Jacob's shadow, though it was not Jacob.

And f.a.n.n.y turned and walked along Gerrard Street and wished that she had read books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the House of Lords; and as for his finger-nails! She would learn Latin and read Virgil. She had been a great reader. She had read Scott; she had read Dumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew f.a.n.n.y at the Slade, or guessed how empty it seemed to her; the pa.s.sion for ear-rings, for dances, for Tonks and Steer--when it was only the French who could paint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the least respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?

"Fielding," said f.a.n.n.y, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her what book she wanted.

She bought Tom Jones.

At ten o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, f.a.n.n.y Elmer read Tom Jones--that mystic book. For this dull stuff (f.a.n.n.y thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes.

Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones--a mystic book; for there is something, f.a.n.n.y thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked--much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She had nothing to wear.

They are real, thought f.a.n.n.y Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece.

Some people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women never--except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herself airs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought.

Not going to music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other's clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked Tom Jones.

There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked f.a.n.n.y Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones.

"I do like Tom Jones," said f.a.n.n.y, at five-thirty that same day early in April when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite.

Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid nature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square) eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and b.u.t.ter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature--or words to that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. f.a.n.n.y laid down Tom Jones.

She st.i.tched or knitted.

"What's that?" asked Jacob.

"For the dance at the Slade."

And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red ta.s.sels. What should she wear?

"I shall be in Paris," said Jacob.

And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought f.a.n.n.y. You meet the same people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits on his knee. She flirts outrageously--with Nick Bramham just now.

"In Paris?" said f.a.n.n.y.

"On my way to Greece," he replied.

For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.

He would forget her.

A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw--a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the b.u.t.terflies are flaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris says, upon a ma.s.s of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree.

f.a.n.n.y thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book in his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fire-flies, and brought back glow-worms in pill-boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds.

It all came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her.