The evening became night. To say that she gave in would not be true; but she acknowledged my intention, though with a very bad grace. To say that I had got so far without hurting her would be nonsense. We were set on aims that contradicted each other; they could not be reconciled, and no gloss on earth could make them so. But at least in Aunt Milly’s understanding we had not split or parted. She did not consider it a break. I had promised to go and have tea at her house each Sunday afternoon.
It was a warm, wet evening late in May when I first went as a lodger to my room in Lower Hastings Street. The room was at the top of the house, and was no larger than my attic at home. From the window I looked over slate roofs, the roofs of outhouses and sheds, glistening in the rain. Beyond, there was a cloud of sulphurous smoke, where a train was disappearing through a tunnel into the station yard.
I had brought all my possessions in two old suitcases — another suit, two pairs of flannels, some underclothes, a few books and school photographs. I left them on the floor, and stood by the window, looking over the roofs, my heart quickening with a tumult of emotions. I felt despondent in the strange, cheerless room, and yet hopeful with the hope that I saw so often in my mother; anxious, desperately anxious that I might have chosen wrong, and at the same time ultimately confident; lonely and also free.
There was everything in the world to do. There was everything in front of me, everything to do — yet what was I to do that moment, with an evening stretching emptily ahead? Should I lie on my bed and read? Or should I walk the streets of the town, alone, in the warm wet night?
Part Two
Towards a Gamble
During the summer after my mother’s death I used to walk to the office in the warm and misty mornings; there was a smell of rain freshening the dusty street, and freshening my hopes as well, as I walked along, chafing at another wasted day ahead.
I ticked off names, names written in violet ink that glared on the squared paper. I read each date of birth, and underlined in red those born before 31 August 1908. I gazed down into the sunlit street, and my mind was filled with plans and fancies, with hope and the first twist of savage discontent. My plans were half-fancies still, not much grown up since my first days in the office, when I walked round the town hall square at lunchtime and dreamed that I had suddenly come into a fortune. I still made resolutions about what to read, or what prospectus to write for next, with an elation and sense of purpose that continued to outshine the unromantic act of carrying the resolution out. But there was some change. I had my legacy. I was angry that I could not see my way clear, I was angry that no one gave advice that sounded ambitious enough. Gazing down, watching the tramcars glitter in the sun, waiting with half an ear for Mr Vesey’s cry of complaint, I began to suffer the ache and burn of discontent.
Yet I was sidetracked and impeded by that same discontent. There were days when the office walls hemmed me in, when Mr Vesey became an incarnate insult, when I was choking with hurt pride, when Darby in all kindness gave me grey and cautious advice. Those were the days when I felt I must be myself, break out, not in the planned-for distant future, but now, before I rusted away, now, while my temper was hot.
It was a temptation then to show off, get an audience by any means I could, and at that age I could not resist the temptation. I scarcely even thought of trying, it seemed so natural and I got so fierce a pleasure. I had a quick, cruel tongue, and I enjoyed using it. It seemed natural to find myself at the ILP, getting myself elected on to committees, making inflammatory speeches in lecture halls all over the town. Only the zealots attended in the height of summer, but I was ready to burst out, even before a handful of the converted, and still be elated and warm-tempered as we left the dingy room at ten o’clock of a midsummer evening and found ourselves blinking in the broad daylight. The town was not large enough for one to stay quite anonymous, and some of my exploits got round. A bit of gossip even reached Aunt Milly, and the next Sunday, when I visited her house for tea, she was not backward in expressing her disapproval.
To myself, I could not laugh that attack away as cheerfully as I did most of Aunt Milly’s. I was practical enough to know that I was doing nothing ‘useful’. As I strolled to my lodgings (‘my rooms’, I used to call them to my acquaintances, with a distinct echo of my mother, despite my speeches on the equality of man) late on those summer nights, I had moments of bleak lucidity. Where was I getting to? What was I doing with my luck? Was I so devoid of will, was I just going to drift? Those moments struck cold, after the applause I had won a few hours earlier with some sarcastic joke.
But once on my feet again, with faces in front of me, or distracted in a different fashion by Jack Cotery and his talk of girls, I was swept away. My own chilling questions were just insistent enough to keep me going regularly to the law classes at the School, and that was all. I intended to get to know George Passant, and I may have had some half-thought that his advice would be grander than that of Darby and the rest; but my first expectations were forgotten for ever, in the light of what actually happened. I had not, however, forced myself into his notice before the School closed for the summer holidays. Occasionally I saw him from my office window, for the firm of Eden and Martineau occupied a floor on the other side of Bowling Green Street. On many mornings I watched George Passant cross over the tramlines, wearing a bowler hat tilted back on his head, carrying a briefcase, swinging a heavy walking stick. I was due at nine, and he used to cross the street with extreme punctuality half an hour later.
All that summer, when I was not what Aunt Milly denounced as ‘gassing’, I spent lazy lotos-eating evenings in the company of Jack Cotery. At school he had been too precocious for me; now he was a clerk in the accounts branch of a local newspaper, he ate his sandwiches at midday in the same places as I did, and we drifted together. He had become a powerfully built young man, still short but over-muscled; he had the comedian’s face that I remembered, fresh, lively, impudent, wistful. His large ardent eyes shone out of his comedian’s face, and his voice was soft and modulated, surprisingly soft to come from that massive chest and throat. He was eighteen, a few months my senior; and he was intoxicated by anything that could come under the name of love. In that soft and modulated voice he talked of girls, women, romance, passion, the delights of the flesh, the incredible attraction of a woman he had seen in the tram that morning, the wonderful prospect of tracking her down, the delights not only of the flesh but of first hearing her voice, the delight that the world was so made that, as long as we lived, the perfume of love would be scattered through the air.
It was talk that I was ready and eager to hear. Not primarily because of the interest of Jack himself, though, when I could break through the dreams his talk induced, he was fun in his own right. In his fashion, he was kind and imaginative. It had been like him, even as a boy, to try to console me on that shameful morning of the ten-shilling note. When one was in his company, he lavished all his good nature, flattering and sweet as honey.
But he was the most unreliable of friends.
He was also a natural romancer. It came to him, as easy as breathing, to add to, to enhance, to transmogrify the truth. As a boy he had boasted — utterly untruthfully — how his father had plenty of money. And now ‘I’m on the evening paper,’ he could not resist saying, when someone asked his job, and proceeded — from the nucleus of fact that he worked in the newspaper office — to draw a picture of his daily life, as a hard drinking, dashing, unstoppable journalist. He had enough of a romancer’s tact to point out that the glamour of the journalist’s occupation had been grossly overdrawn. He shrugged his shoulders like a disillusioned professional.