… But was my marriage to Mavis something to con fess, like a crime?
… I felt my face growing hot in the dark; and, remembering my uncle’s constant allusions to my incurable habit of blushing, burned hotter. No one had the right, I told myself, to make game of a man because he blushes at a word. There is cruelty in that – schoolboy insensibility. You might as reasonably make mock of a man because he has one leg shorter than the other…. And as for making a joke of my red hair – why, if you condoned that kind of humour, you condoned, in effect, the persecution of negroes because they are black….
I remembered a boy who was at school with me, at Eatonstowe. His name was Ward, and he was an albino. None of the other boys bore him any grudge – yet how pitilessly they persecuted him! One day somebody sent him a message saying that his cousin had come to see him; and there was a pink-eyed white mouse in a cardboard box…. Yet he was silent. He made a pet of this mouse, kept it in his pocket. It used to run up his sleeve and sit on his shoulder. He used to take the mouse to bed with him…. One morning, poor Ward woke us all up before the bell, I remembered: he had turned over in his sleep, and smothered the mouse; and that was the first time I had ever heard that lonely boy cry … and oh, the desolate hopelessness of it, the woe, the helpless grief! It struck us silent, and afterwards we offered Ward toffee and fruit; but he would never speak to us any more, and soon his guardian took him away from school…. Us, I remembered; because I – God forgive me – had been among the worst of Ward’s persecutors. Why? Because, before he had come to school, it had been I who was the butt of the form, on account of my fantastically red hair. It had been a relief to have someone else to persecute….
Then I remembered Fatty Onslow, who had been the worst bully of the lot – a monstrously fat boy who, having been mercilessly teased for three terms, suddenly developed a giant’s strength, which he tyrannously used like a giant. I had thought I should never forgive the things he did to me…. Yet, when I ran into him fifteen years later, in Pall Mall, he was as quiet and gentle a fellow as you ever met … and died, as I wished I might die, heroically, in the North Sea. ‘Stand by to ram!’ he roared, bleeding to death – and, with his destroyer, rammed and sank a German cruiser.
Such, again, was my Uncle Arnold, I thought. Only there was, perhaps, too much of the fourth-form bully left in him – that was all. I blamed myself for letting him treat me so. There was, I reasoned, never a man on earth who would not respect another, however puny, who was devoid of fear … and I was rotten with fear, eaten up with it!
In this respect, only Mavis understood me, because she was sensitive, too. It was she who made it clear to me that I was not really a coward; only sensitive. She loved the colour of my hair, she said, because it reminded her of something out of Dubinushki’s setting for the Valse des Fleurs…. My heart ached then as I thought of Mavis.
She had had a hard life, poor girl. Almost literally, she had danced herself out of nowhere——
– Hey, wait a minute! I said to myself, trying to reason with myself – what do you mean, out of nowhere? She is still nowhere. But she relies upon you to help her dance her way somewhere.
Mavis depended upon me so absolutely. She had such faith in me, and relied so utterly upon my given word – and I had sworn to see her through her career…. It is generally an excellent thing to have a woman pin all her faith and hope on you … but it may be sometimes a very bad thing. It takes a broad back to bear the weight of a woman’s trust. A woman’s unstinted faith may put a strong man’s head among the stars; on the other hand, it may put a weak man’s head into the gas oven. And I am a weak man.
Yes, I contemplated suicide that night in my uncle’s house; and I wish I had had the courage to commit it….
I had come, paying my duty-visit, with the intention of borrowing a little money – a matter of some few hundred pounds. Before I knew Mavis, I had regarded myself as quite a rich man: my uncle allowed me eight hundred pounds a year, and over and above that I had my salary, four hundred pounds a year from the High Commissioner’s office where I worked. Twenty-four pounds a week was affluence, to me. I had my little flat in Knightsbridge; my books and my gramophone records: my little self-indulgences. I could even lend a little to my friends. But after I fell in love with Mavis, somehow I could never make ends meet.
I met her at a meeting of the Little Ballet Group, in Russell Square. She performed the dance Riabouchinska used to do, with the little metal fawn … only Mavis was smaller than Riabouchinska: an animated ivory figurine, most beautiful! Mavis lived, she told me, only for The Ballet. But her health was not very good; one of her lungs was questionable – she had had a hard time of it in her early youth. Her father drank, her mother kept a little general store in a side street off the Gray’s Inn Road…. She had been sent out to work in a factory at the age of fourteen. But she wanted to dance – dancing was her life, she said, again and again.
She did that Fawn Dance in a borrowed costume, stained with someone else’s grease-paint. When I went to congratulate her, after the dance, and saw her weeping so forlornly in the little dressing-room, it was as if a hand came out of the foggy night and squeezed my heart into my throat.
Mavis had such humility…. Now, here is a joke: it was I, of all created creatures, who coaxed and persuaded her into artistic arrogance! Seeds of my own destruction? Yes, perhaps I sowed them. It was I who said to Mavis: ‘You must not wait and hope; you must insist, demand!’ I, mark you! …
She insisted. She demanded. I believe there is nothing quite so persuasive as the eloquence of a weakling who, genuinely despising himself for what he is, preaches in favour of that which he would be if he could.
I made Mavis hard. Soon my twelve hundred pounds a year was nothing. And, in talking my doctrine of Strength – Strength – Strength, I found that I had talked myself into contempt and out of existence as the man who had comforted the thin little girl when she was crying in the dressing-room.
I do not know whether Mavis had overestimated my fortune. I am sure I made my financial position pretty clear: eight hundred a year from my uncle, four hundred a year from my office. She thought herself lucky, at that time, if she drew a hundred and fifty a year, and had enough, at the end of the week, to satisfy her landlady in Bernard Street.
But when Mavis and I came to be together, the money went like water. There had to be supper parties, cocktail parties, and luncheon parties; because she had to ‘meet people’. And could she meet people in a shabby dress? Of course not. And could I do her discredit by appearing less elegantly turned out than an adagio dancer? No. I went to Savile Row for my suits, to St James’s for my shoes, and to Bond Street for my shirts. Again, could we live in three little rooms in Knightsbridge? Knightsbridge, yes; three rooms, no. We needed a big lounge for ‘people’, and impressive furniture.
I got into debt. I mortgaged myself. And, at last, when the dressmakers, and the other tradesmen, were pressing for settlement of their accounts, I had gone to my uncle to borrow five hundred pounds, and found myself with my allowance cut in two.
Mavis would have something to say about this!
I had not lied when I told my uncle that I could not live without her. She was all I had ever loved. Weary of turning over in my mind what I should say to her when I returned home, I began to consider ways and means of killing myself.