The school was there still. Once or twice he caught a glimpse of Mr Myame in the offing, but escaped his hirsute disapproval by dodging down a side street. One boy whose name he forgot met him one day and told him that the old man had forbidden the school to speak to him. “He said you were an evil companion. What was it all about? D’jer get a girl into trouble?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Edward Albert, and nursed that gratifying suspicion. “It was sumpthing pretty awful,” he said.
Blond Bert Bloxham with the dissimilar aunt was still in the neighbourhood, though Nuts MacBryde of the warts had drifted to Clapham. Bert’s looks had never been much to boast about, and he was more than ever like a large hairy onion. But he too was in a state of feverish sexual awakening. He too was on the rack between the insanity of Nature cranking away at one end and the insanity of the social order cranking away at the other.
He began at once with reminiscences of the Hidden Hand.
“I still got that stable,” he said, “and it’s safer than ever. The O. girl’s so heavy now, she’d break the ladder if she tried it. I got some photographs there—oh, hot stuff. Show you everything. I got ’em off a man in the Strand late one night when I was doing a prowl. I’ll show you them.”
He paused. “Ever ’ad a woman yet, Tewler?.... Yes, I ’ave.” (Description.) “And I don’t care ’ow many more I ’ave. But them street walkers. You can’t be too careful. You know they don’t wash themselves. They smell. Puts you off it.” (Rough account of Precautions to take,)
“But never mind about that. That’s by the way. I got my plans. What I’m going to ’ave is a little love nest, my boy, a little love nest of my own. Up the ladder we go, eh? What price ankles? You’re going to show more than that, my gel. And ’ere we are playing Adam and Eve together. Ever played Adam and Eve, Tewler?
“Leastways that’s what I’m going to do,” said Bert, “when I get hold of a girl I fancy. And they ain’t ’ard nowadays, not like before the war. Girls ain’t the same. Nothing’s $he same. And if ever you get anybody. Old friends we are. I’ll make it as safe for you up there, o. boy. Safe as ’ouses....”
That was the sort of chance the fickle Molly had thrown away. What did she want really? Bother her! Forget her.
Adam and Eve indeed! Catch her! Catch her taking off a blessed thing! With her everlasting “Starp it.”
Presently Edward Albert found himself actually flirting in Doober’s and being competed for, actually competed for, by two energetic and interesting young women only five or six years older than himself. They were overripe virgins and they too suffered from the tortures of suppression the social order inflicted upon them. Nature urged them on and they didn’t know, they didn’t know, and an infinite futility was expected of them. What outlook had they? Older men would fall for any cheeky kid of sixteen first, and there didn’t seem to be any young men left. Such a lot of young men had being killed. What were left were Nancy boys. They were mostly objectors to war and love alike. They seemed to have turned their backs on life altogether. But here was something at once male and ostensibly harmless, that had missed all that.
The attentions of these young women seemed to him much more formidable and much more interesting than those of the Leasehold office girls, particularly after Molly let him down. He talked to them with an intermittent nervous laugh as a sort of declaration of insincerity. He didn’t dare think of kissing or hugging them or anything of that sort, he didn’t know how they’d take it, but he said the boldest things to them. Much worse than what he said to the North London Leaseholds girls, who’d snap your head off at almost anything.
They began it. They certainly began it. They wanted to win his calf love and reduce him to adoration, slavery, timid offerings, and the running of errands, which is what adolescents are for. Easier than men but not so dangerous as men. Either could have managed it, no doubt, but not both. One was a remarkable dark young woman who had been in France for some months, and had become temporarily Frenchified by that experience. Her name was Evangeline Birkenhead, she was interested apparently in the glove trade, but^in what precise capacity was never revealed. She was destined to play a much ampler rôle in Edward Albert’s life than he anticipated, and we shall have much to tell about her. She spoke French which sounded like the real thing, faster than the Belgians but only in flashes, and Miss Pooley, whose style was much more deliberate, seemed to listen first with incredulous perplexity and then with an ill-concealed delight. She would manoeuvre, Edward Albert noted, to sit within earshot of Evangeline.
Evangeline’s rival, Miss Blame, was a blonde young woman, a fluffy bleached blonde, soft-spoken and almost inarticulate, but with extremely significant, desirous eyes. She listened and looked at Edward Albert. She had a way of putting her hands on him, on his shoulders, even on his hands on the chair arm, and they were extremely soft hands. She would whisper, a warm zephyr against his cheek, She drew him out. She asked what his ambitions were.
“Jerst to go on looking at you,” said Edward Albert gallantly.
“But tell me about yourself. What do you think of Miss Birkenhead? She’s awfully clever, don’t you think?
“Clever is as clever does,” said Edward Albert darkly.
“You’re a bit in love with her?”
“’Ow could I be?”
Interrogative purr.
“’Cos I’m devoted” said the wicked flirt, and refrained from clinching matters by crooning, “to yew.”
And when Evangeline taxed him with sitting about with that Blame girl and asked what he could possibly find to talk about with her, “I jest don’t notice where I sit, when you’re about,” said Young Artfulness. “I jest don’t. And as for talking! Well, I ask you.”
Great fun! A safe game, and a harmless one, it seemed to him, not realising how vulnerable he was presently to become.
Yet the thought of marriage was already in his mind as he returned from Edinburgh in that luxurious first-class carriage, to London. He realised now that a way was opening to alleviate the fears and desires that were devastating his mind. He would look round and find a nice little wife. A thrill of anticipation followed the thought. You couldn’t be too careful, of course. A nice, healthy, simple, pure-minded girl. There were endless girls you wouldn’t dream of marrying, designing hussies, hot stuff you couldn’t trust round the corner.
And there It would be, safe at home and always handy. Just whenever you liked. No risk of entanglements; no risk of those horrible diseases, no more horrible phases of unsatisfied lust and shame. And that little wife, that smiling, yielding little wife. Church of England preferably. She’d have to be religious, otherwise you never knew, he whistled softly in his characteristic way as the reverie unfolded. They wouldn’t have a lot of children to bother them and spoil her figure. Dear old Bert had put him wise about that. And imagine it! Running up against Nuts or Bert, for example, with the little lady dressed up to the nines. “Ellow me to introduce you to Mrs Tewler!” he’d say. He’d buy her things. He’d surprise her by giving her all sorts of things. She’d just love it. “Look what I brought you now,” he’d say. Love’s young dream.
In all of this he was reckoning without Evangeline Birkenhead. He never gave her a thought until he went in to dinner that evening. “You back!” she said, and “Come over here next me and tell me about it.”
He hurried across the room to her with a provocative mixture of irony and reverence. He wasn’t going to tell anyone exactly why he had gone away or what had happened to him. He was just going to be mysterious and have a fine time with the two of them.