I Shall Not Want (29 page)

“In that case,” said Mr. Skewin rising from his chair and clasping his two hands together because they were trembling, “we're just wasting each other's time. I might as well be going.”

John Marco let him get as far as the door and then called him back.

“One moment, Mr. Skewin,” he said. “What about the lease? I might be able to take that off your hands.”

“There's seven years to run,” Mr. Skewin said bitterly. “Seven years from Christmas.”

“That wouldn't worry me,” John Marco replied; “not if the rent was right.”

“It's a hundred a year,” said Mr. Skewin. “Two pounds a week for the shop and the rooms above.”

John Marco tapped his fingers on the desk.

“It's too much,” he said. “I only pay ninety-five for the other shop.” He paused. “But if it's any help to you I'll take it over. When can I have possession?”

“Possession?”

Mr. Skewin did not seem able to comprehend the word. He just stood there with his lips moving and no sound coming from them.

“I suppose you could move in at once,” he said at last, in a limp crushed voice that faded away on his lips. “We shan't be stopping.”

“I shan't need the rooms above, at once,” John Marco said slowly. “The shop will need doing up first.”

“As you please,” said Mr. Skewin wearily. “It won't be any concern of mine.”

John Marco rose and held out his hand. But Mr. Skewin ignored it. His eyes had become very moist and his lower lip was quivering.

“You're a hard man,” he blurted out suddenly. “A very hard one.”

John Marco regarded him coldly, running his eye up and down him as he stood there.

“I don't understand you, Mr. Skewin,” he replied.

“Oh yes, you do,” Mr. Skewin answered. “You understand perfectly. You tried to squeeze me out of business and you succeeded.”

John Marco laughed. A brief, unsmiling laugh.

“I might have been the one to fail,” he said. “I took the risk. You didn't.”

But Mr. Skewin did not appear to be listening. He went straight on as though John Marco had not spoken.

“A fellow Amosite, too,” he was saying. “One of the Brethren.”

“I don't mix religion with business,” John Marco answered.

He turned his back on Mr. Skewin as he said it and walked over towards the window. But Mr. Skewin followed him until he was only a step behind.

“That's your fault,” he said. “You ought to mix religion with everything.” He spoke as an elderly man addressing a young one: he was the evangelist now and not the petitioner. “You're shutting God out of your life, Mr. Marco, that's what you're doing.” He raised his forefinger and tapped John Marco on the shoulder. “Why don't you draw back before it's too late?” he said. “Why don't you go down on your knees and pray? If you persist you'll find yourself pierced through with many sorrows.”

John Marco turned on him. His face was flushed and angry.

“Do you want to dispose of your lease or don't you?” he demanded.

But again Mr. Skewin did not seem to hear him. His mind was continuing on another and a different level,
the level of Mr. Surger and the Apostle Paul, of Mr. Tuke and the blessed St. James. Sixty years of Amosism had left its mark.

“Perilous times shall come,” he threatened. “Don't forget what the Bible says about men who love themselves, covetous, boastful. Start weeping and howling for your miseries that shall come upon you. You'll find that your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth eaten. ...”

John Marco turned and walked past him.

“Go back to your shop,” he ordered. “I won't listen to you.”

“That's what Mr. Tuke said about you,” Mr. Skewin replied. “He said that you'd closed your ears to the Voice.”

John Marco was at the door now: he was holding it open for Mr. Skewin. His moment of anger had ebbed away again, leaving him cold and self-controlled.

“He said that, did he?” he remarked quietly. “Then I shall tell Mr. Tuke to hold his tongue.”

Mr. Skewin's exhibition of feeling had been pathetically foolish of course. To have said anything at all in the circumstances was a simply appalling blunder; a blunder that no man of the world could possibly have committed, and it was one that drove Mrs. Skewin nearly frantic when she heard of it. But Mr. Skewin was not a man of the world: that was the whole point. He was an Amosite. He had nothing in the world to gain and everything to lose by saying anything; and his words in consequence had a disembodied, impersonal ring about them. Despite the fact that they were uttered in a small, choking voice, it was as though the Bible itself, open at the Epistles, had spoken and been wise.

Throughout the afternoon John Marco kept recalling stray sentences that Mr. Skewin had spoken. “Weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you”: he had heard that so many times; it was one of Mr. Tuke's favourite pieces. John Marco remembered suddenly with
sinister vividness those rich men whose flesh was going to be devoured by the fiery rust of the tarnished gold and the cankering silver. And he realised with a sudden sickness close to his heart that he was a rich man himself now. But St. James could not have meant quite that—not industrious shop-keepers, not honest men who worked for their livings. He was thinking of the great sultans of this world whose souls are mortgaged to their treasures. St. James could never have intended his words for one of the Brethren. Then the sound of his own words, “I don't mix religion with business,” came back to him. They did not sound like the words of one who had been an Amosite, and he halted. John Marco was still sufficiently a son of the Tabernacle not to question that the Devil could sometimes put such a sentence into men's mouths.

But he thought of other rich men who had apparently defied salvation and got away with it, and his mind felt easier. There were good and bad among the rich just as there were among the poor: there must be. It couldn't be
all
rich men who were condemned, or Bayswater would simply collapse of its own iniquity and Paddington be saved. And it was a part of his destiny to be rich. The commercial grave of Mr. Skewin was merely the first milestone on the way. There would be other Mr. Skewins who would have to be sacrificed before he finally got there; other Miss Foxell's to be outwitted before he reached Jerusalem. And, as he left the shop that night, he did not doubt that he could pass all the rivers of commerce one by one as he came to them.

ii

It was a golden evening. The sun, setting somewhere amid the houses behind Notting Hill, was lighting up the tops of the buildings like a line of bonfires and casting a glow of amber into the street below. The whole air was bright; and Tredegar Terrace, with its long line of windows, was like a hall of mirrors in Heaven.

The street that ran off it—Lexington Street—was a poorer affair altogether; it was the trading place of the lesser kind of shopkeepers—greengrocers, dairymen, confectioners. The last shop of all was a photographer's; a black velvet curtain ran across the back of the window and against this the specimens of the craftsman's art were arranged. There were wedding groups, freshly christened infants and the studio portraits of plump young ladies. John Marco noticed the shop with a kind of pitying contempt; it was so small, so undistinguished, and tucked so far away down the wrong kind of thoroughfare. From time to time a new photograph was put in the window as a kind of token that business was still flourishing. But in the ten years in which he had passed it he had never seen anyone going in or coming out of it. And they were always the same, these photographs; the same groups, the same infants, the same young ladies.

But to-night John Marco stopped suddenly as he passed the shop. There
was
a new picture there. It was a wedding group again; but not an ordinary one. This time it was of Mary's wedding.

It was not even, as such photographs go, a particularly good one; it teased the sitters. Against the lattice background of the studio, the guests all wore the startled expressions of people astonished at finding themselves being photographed at all. The faces were simply so many caricatures in sepia; the staring eyes of the gentlemen popped up over the unaccustomed high collars, and the bridegroom's hat was upside down on the floor beside him, with the fingers of his yellow gloves protruding like the pincers of a hermit crab. Only Mary remained as he remembered her. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap staring straight at the camera; staring straight into it and beyond, it seemed to him.

John Marco stood gazing at the photograph. All his dreams and ambitions lay broken somewhere within the confines of the frame. A strange feeling of remoteness came over him. There on that glossy oblong of paper was
imprisoned one life; here on the other side of the shop window he was in the middle of another. And in a way-it was this photograph that seemed to make it final and irretrievable. What he had seen from the gallery of the Tabernacle that day was only transient; the image on paper before him was enduring. Future generations could look on it and see how Mary Kent and Thomas Petter had become man and wife. It was an unfading statement of a world to which he did not any more belong.

He glanced up and down the street and then entered the shop. The door gave a little silly ping in his face and he found himself in the cheap painted interior. There was a pause and then the proprietor himself appeared in a brown velvet coat. He wore the professional expression of someone so artistic that he would have to go almost into a trance before he could bring himself to release the shutter. But a thick streak of worldly sense evidently lurked somewhere. For as soon as he learned that John Marco actually wanted to
buy
something he whisked back the velvet curtain and produced the photograph. It was while he was standing there with the wedding group in his hand that an idea came into the photographer's mind.

“I've got a separate one of the bride,” he said, “if you'd be interested.”

John Marco's mouth tightened.

“I'd like to see it,” he said quietly.

There in the dim interior of that little studio he realised again how hopelessly and inextricably entangled their lives were, his and Mary's.

“Here it is,” said the photographer when he had returned. “Quite one of my successes.”

He was holding out the photograph at arm's length and John Marco took it from him. It was more than a photograph, this one: it was Mary herself with her grave eyes smiling at him. But were they smiling? There was that same sadness that he had seen as she had looked up that day in the Tabernacle; it was as though she had been photographed remembering that one moment.

“Just look at the detail in that lace,” the photographer urged enthusiastically. “Notice the stalks of those lilies.”

John Marco did not answer immediately. Then he turned to the photographer.

“How much is this one?” he asked.

“Cabinet size in best art paper it would be a guinea,” he said. “You can choose your own frame.”

John Marco drew out his sovereign case and put the money down on the counter.

“I'll take it,” he said.

It was then that the velvet jacket got the better of the business man.

“But this is only a rough print,” he said. “One of the edges is folded.”

“I'll take it as it is,” John Marco repeated.

“Very well.” The photographer shrugged his shoulders and went to the back of the shop. “I'll try to make up in the mounting,” he promised.

Five minutes later John Marco emerged from the shop, the thin, flat parcel under his arm. With this in his possession the future seemed less lonely somehow, less divided. It was something secret, something in a sense that he would share with Mary.

The house in Clarence Gardens by now looked very different from the decayed mansion which had stood there in Mr. Trackett's day. The stucco had been scraped and repainted—it had been like scraping history to strip those walls—and the panels of the front door were newly picked out like coach-work. The whole place under its new coat of cream was undeniably smart; in the evening sunlight it shone like a milky iceberg. There were flowers, too, in the window boxes, bright blood-red geraniums which formed yet one more suspended terrace in those miraculous hanging Gardens of Bayswater which outrivalled Babylon.

John Marco looked and was pleased. He had agreed at last to this re-decorating, this huge expenditure. He had felt that he owed it to his success: it did him no good
in business to live in a house which looked as though ghosts inhabited it.

Inside, however, the house was still Mr. Trackett's; John Marco had not agreed to their spending money where no one but themselves would notice. The crimson wall paper, the heavy Axminster carpet with its faded flowers, the bulging mahogany hall stand—it was all the same.

He went straight up to his room and turned the key in the lock. It had become almost instinctive by now, this locking himself away; it was the measure of his separation from the household. Then with clumsy, impatient fingers he undid the string of his parcel—and he was looking into Mary's eyes again. The sad smile which he remembered comforted him; and he saw now that across the forehead the brows were puckered in a little frown.

He sat there for some time holding the portrait in his hand. The frame was smooth and he ran his fingers over it caressingly. At that moment Mary Petter, preparing her husband's supper in the little kitchen over the shop in Harrow Street, and John Marco in his wife's dressing-room in Clarence Gardens, were alone together.

He put the photograph away in one of the drawers of his cabinet and unlocked the door again. Old Mrs. Marco was standing just outside, waiting.

“I thought I heard you, son,” she said. She turned and nodded her head mysteriously in the direction of Hesther's bedroom. “You're late,” she said. “He's asleep.”