Of Time and the River (106 page)

But whether they spoke or simply wrote the name down without a word, there was always this quality of instant recognition, this obdurate, contemptuous finality of silence, as if a door had been shut—a door that could never again be opened. Somehow Eugene disliked them more for this silence than if they had spoken evilly: there was in it something ugly, knowing, and triumphant that was far more evil than any slyly whispering confidence of slander, or any open vituperation of abuse, could be. It seemed somehow to come from all the vile and uncountable small maggotry of the earth, the cautious little hatreds of a million nameless ciphers, each puny, pallid, trivial in himself, but formidable because he added his tiny beetle’s ball of dung to the mountainous accumulation of ten million others of his breed.

It was uncanny how these clerk-like faces, grave and quiet, that never spoke a word, or gave a sign, or altered their expression by a jot, when Eugene gave them the address, could suddenly be alive with something secret, foul, and sly, could be more closed and secret than a door, and yet instantly reveal the naked, shameful, and iniquitous filth that welled up from some depthless source. He could not phrase it, give a name to it, or even see a certain sign that it was there, any more than he could put his hand upon a wisp of fading smoke, but he always knew when it was there, and somehow when he saw it his heart went hard and cold against the people who revealed it, and turned with warmth and strong affection towards the Coulson family.

There was, finally, among these grave clerk-like faces, one face that Eugene could never forget thereafter, a face that seemed to resume into its sly suave surfaces all of the nameless abomination of evil in the world, for which he had no name, for which there was no handle he could grasp, no familiar places or edges he could get his hands upon, which slid phantasmally, oilily, and smokily away whenever he tried to get his hands upon it. But it was to haunt his life for years in dreams of hatred, madness, and despair that found no frontal wall for their attack, no word for their vituperation, no door for the shoulder of his hate—an evil world of phantoms, shapes, and whispers that was yet as real as death, as ever-present as man’s treachery, but that slid away from him like smoke whenever he tried to meet, or curse, or strangle it.

This face was the face of a man in a tailor shop, a fitter there, and Eugene could have battered that foul face into a bloody pulp, distilled the filthy refuse of that ugly life out of the fat swelling neck and through the murderous grip of his fingers if he could only have found a cause, a logic, and a provocation for doing it. And yet he never saw the man but twice, and briefly, and there had been nothing in his suave, sly, careful speech to give offence.

Edith Coulson had sent Eugene to the tailor’s shop: he needed a suit and when he asked her where to go to have it made, she had sent him to this place because her brother had his suits made there and liked it. The fitter was a heavy shambling man in his late thirties: he had receding hair, which he brushed back flat in a thick pompadour; yellowish, somewhat bulging eyes; a coarse heavy face, loose-featured, red, and sensual; a sloping meaty jaw, and large discoloured buck-teeth which showed unpleasantly in a mouth that was always half open. It was, in fact, the mouth that gave his face its sensual, sly, and ugly look, for a loose and vulgar smile seemed constantly to hover about its thick coarse edges, to be deliberately, slyly restrained, but about to burst at any moment into an open, evil, foully sensual laugh. There was always about his mouth this ugly suggestion of a loose, corrupt, and evilly jubilant mirth, and yet he never laughed or smiled.

The man’s speech had this same quality. It was suave and courteous, but even in its most urbane assurances there was something non-committal, sly, and jeering, something that slid away from you, and was never to be grasped, a quality that was faithless, tricky and unwholesome. When Eugene came for the final fitting it was obvious that he had done as cheap and shoddy a job as he could do; the suit was vilely botched and skimped, sufficient cloth had not been put into it, and now it was too late to remedy the defect.

Yet the fitter gravely pulled the vest down till it met the trousers, tugged at the coat, and pulled the thing together where it stayed until Eugene took a breath or moved a muscle, when it would all come apart again, the collar bulging outward from the shoulder, the skimpy coat and vest crawling backward from the trousers, leaving a hiatus of shirt and belly that could not now be remedied by any means.

Then, gravely he would pull the thing together again, and in his suave, yet oily, sly, and non-committal phrases say:

“Um! Seems to fit you very well.”

Eugene was choking with exasperation, and knew that he had been done, because he had foolishly paid them half the bill already, and now knew no way out of it except to lose what he had paid and get nothing for it or take the thing and pay the balance. He was caught in a trap, but even as he jerked at the coat and vest speechlessly, seized his shirt and thrust the gaping collar in the fitter’s face, the man said smoothly:

“Um! Yes! The collar. Should think all that will be all right. Still needs a little alteration.” He made some chalk-marks on Eugene. “Should think you’ll find it fits you very well when the tailor makes the alterations.”

“When will the suit be ready?”

“Um. Should think you ought to have it by next Tuesday. Yes. I think you’ll find it ready by Tuesday.”

The sly words slid away from the boy like oil: there was nothing to pin him to or grasp him by, the yellowed eyes looked casually away and would not look at Eugene, the sensual face was suavely grave, the discoloured buck-teeth shone obscenely through the coarse loose mouth, and the suggestion of the foul loose smile was so pronounced now that it seemed that at any moment the man would have to turn away with heavy trembling shoulders and stifle the evil jeering laugh that was welling up in him. But he remained suavely grave and non-committal to the end, and when Eugene asked him if he should come again to try it on, he said, in the same oily tone, never looking at him:

“Um. Shouldn’t think that would be necessary. Could have it delivered to you when it’s ready. What is your address?”

“The Far End Farm—it’s on the Ventnor Road.”

“Oh! Coulson’s!” He never altered his expression, but the suggestion of the obscene smile was so pronounced that now it seemed he would have to come out with it. Instead, he only said:

“Um. Yes. Should think it could be delivered to you there on Tuesday. If you’ll just wait a moment I’ll ask the tailor.”

Gravely, suavely, he took the coat from Eugene and walked back towards the tailor’s room with the coat across his arm. In a moment, the boy heard sly voices whispering, laughing slyly, then the tailor saying:

“Where does he live?”

“Coulson’s!” said the fitter chokingly, and now the foul awaited laugh did come—high, wet, slimy, it came out of that loose mouth, and choked and whispered wordlessly, and choked again, and mingled then with the tailor’s voice in sly, choking, whispering intimacy, and then gasped faintly and was silent. When the man came out again his coarse face was red and swollen with foul secret merriment, his heavy shoulders trembled slightly, he took out his handkerchief and wiped it once across his loose half-opened mouth, and with that gesture wiped the slime of laughter from his lips. Then he came toward Eugene, suave, grave, and courteous, evilly composed, as he said smoothly:

“Should think we’ll have that for you by next Tuesday, sir.”

“Can the tailor fix it so it’s going to fit?”

“Um. Should think you’ll find that everything’s all right. You ought to have it Tuesday afternoon.”

He was not looking at Eugene: the yellowish bulging eyes were staring casually, indefinitely, away, and his words again had slid away from the boy like oil. He could not be touched, approached, or handled: there was nothing to hold him by, he had the impregnability of smoke or a ball of mercury.

As Eugene went out of the door the tailor began to speak to someone in the shop, Eugene heard low words and whispered voices, then, gasping, the word “Coulson’s!” and the slimy, choking, smothered laughter as the street-door closed behind him. He never saw the man again. He never forget his face.

That was a fine house: the people in it were exiled, lost, and ruined people, and Eugene liked them all. Later, he never knew why he felt so close to them or remembered them with such warmth and strong affection.

He did not see the Coulsons often and rarely talked to them. Yet he felt as familiar and friendly with them all as if he had known them all his life. The house was wonderful as no other house he had ever known, because they all seemed to be living in it together with this strange speechless knowledge, warmth, and familiarity, and yet each was as private, secret, and secure in his own room as if he occupied the house alone.

Coulson himself Eugene saw least of all: they sometimes passed each other going in or out the door, or in the hall; Coulson would grunt “Morning,” or “Good Day,” in a curt blunt manner, and go on, and yet he always left Eugene with a curious sense of warmth and friendliness. He was a stocky well-set man with iron-grey hair, bushy eyebrows, and a red weathered face which wore the open colour of the country on it, but also had the hard dull flush of the steady heavy drinker.

Eugene never saw him drunk, and yet he was never sober: he was one of those men who have drunk themselves past any hope of drunkenness, who are soaked through to the bone with alcohol, saturated, tanned, weathered in it so completely that it could never be distilled out of their blood again. Yet, even in this terrible excess one felt a kind of grim control—the control of a man who is enslaved by the very thing that he controls, the control of the opium-eater who cannot leave his drug but measures out his dose with a cold calculation, and finds the limit of his capacity, and stops there, day by day.

But somehow this very sense of control, this blunt ruddy style of the country gentleman which distinguished his speech, his manner, and his dress, made the ruin of his life, the desperate intemperance of drink that smouldered in him like a slow fire, steadily, nakedly apparent. It was as if, having lost everything, he still held grimly to the outer forms of a lost standard, a ruined state, when the inner substance was destroyed.

And it was this way with all of them—with Mrs. Coulson and the girl as well: their crisp, clipped friendly speech never deviated into intimacy, and never hinted at any melting into confidence and admission. Upon the woman’s weathered face there hovered, when she talked, the same faint set grin that Captain Nicholl had, and her eyes were bright and hard, a little mad, impenetrable, as were his. And the girl, although young and very lovely, sometimes had this same look when she greeted anyone or paused to talk. In that look there was nothing truculent, bitter, or defiant: it was just the look of three people who had gone down together, and who felt for one another neither bitterness nor hate, but that strange companionship of a common disgrace, from which love has vanished, but which is more secret, silent, and impassively resigned to its fatal unity than love itself could be.

And that hard bright look also said this plainly to the world: “We ask for nothing from you now, we want nothing that you offer us. What is ours is ours, what we are we are, you’ll not intrude nor come closer than we let you see!”

Coulson might have been a man who had been dishonoured and destroyed by his women, and who took it stolidly, saying nothing, and drank steadily from morning until night, and had nothing for it now but drink and silence and acceptance. Yet Eugene never knew for certain that this was so; it just seemed inescapable, and was somehow legible not only in the slow smouldering fire that burned out through his rugged weathered face, but also in the hard bright armour of the women’s eyes, the fixed set grin around their lips when they were talking—a grin that was like armour, too. And Morison, who had referred to Coulson, chuckling, as a real “bottle- a-day-man,” had added quietly, casually, in his brief, indefinite but blurted-out suggestiveness of speech:

“I think the old girl’s been a bit of a bitch in her day. . . . Don’t know, of course, but has the look, hasn’t she?” In a moment he said quietly, “Have you talked to the daughter yet?”

“Once or twice. Not for long.”

“Ran into a chap at Magdalen the other day who knows her,” he said casually. “He used to come out here to see her.” He glanced swiftly, slyly at Eugene, his face reddening a little with laughter. “Pretty hot, I gather,” he said quietly, smiling, and looked away. It was night: the fire burned cheerfully in the grate, the hot coals spurting in small gaseous flares from time to time. The house was very quiet all around them. Outside they could hear the stormy wind in the trees along the road. Morison flicked his cigarette into the fire, poured out a drink of whisky into a glass, saying as he did so: “I say, old chap, you don’t mind if I take a spot of this before I go to bed, do you?” Then he shot some seltzer in the glass and drank. And Eugene sat there, without a word, staring sullenly into the fire, dumbly conscious of the flood of sick pain and horror which the casual foulness of the man’s suggestion had aroused, stubbornly trying to deny now that he was thinking of the girl all the time.

LXXIII

One night, as Eugene was corning home along the dark road that went up past the playing field to the house, and that was bordered on each side by grand trees whose branches seemed to hold at night all the mysterious and demented cadences of storm, he came upon her suddenly standing in the shadow of a tree. It was one of the grand wild nights that seemed to come so often in the autumn of that year: the air was full of a fine stinging moisture, not quite rain, and above the stormy branches of the trees he could see the sky, wild, broken, full of scudding clouds through which at times the moon drove in and out with a kind of haggard loneliness. By that faint, wild, and broken light, he could see the small white oval of the girl’s face—somehow even more lovely now just because he could not see it plainly. And he could see as well the rough gleaming bark of the tree against which she leaned.