The Doll (6 page)

‘My God,’ he shouted, ‘there’ll never be another time. I’m finished with the whole damned business, finished. Do you understand?’

He left the room, and went out of the house. The door slammed behind him.

‘But that’s not what I meant,’ he thought, ‘that’s not what I meant at all.’

Frustration

A
fter he had been engaged to her for seven years he felt that it was impossible to wait for her any longer. Human endurance had been tested to the limit. For seven years he had held her hand by the stile in the field, and it was beginning to pall at last.

It seemed to him that there must be more in life than these things.

He admitted that time had been when the simple fact of looking at her from a distance had ensured him weeks of fever and excitement, when the mere process of brushing against her on a tennis court had caused a state of nervous prostration.

Such follies belonged to the distant past. He was twenty-four now instead of eighteen. In the irony of his soul he wondered what Napoleon would have done if someone had offered him a box of tin soldiers; it occurred to him that Suzanne Lenglen in her day would have protested had she been compelled to play battledore and shuttlecock.

He was earnest, he was desperate, he was very much in love.

Saying good-night to her at half-past nine in the evening was a modern equivalent to the appalling tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. At these moments his legs twisted themselves inside out, his fingers clutched at the air, and his tongue got caught up in his uvula.

A low moaning noise rose in his throat, and he wanted to creep up a wall. Marriage seemed to be the one solution . . . Scarlet in the face, his hands clenched and his jaw set, he made his declaration to her father.

‘Sir,’ he began, ‘I can’t stand this any longer; I must get married.’

The father looked him up and down.

‘I can well believe it,’ he said; ‘but it has got nothing to do with me. Personally, for a boy of your type, I put my faith in long engagements. You’ve been engaged for seven years. Why not draw up a contract for another seven?’

‘Sir – we can’t wait any longer. When we look at each other, we feel—’

The older man interrupted him brutally.

‘I’m not at all interested in what you feel. Can you support a wife?’

‘No – yes – at least. I will find a job.’

‘Is there anything you can do?’

‘I can tinker about with cars.’

‘I see. Is that enough to make her happy?’

‘I sort of . . .’

‘You expect to make a girl happy when you’ve no money, no job, no qualifications, and the only thing you know how to handle is a spanner.’

‘Sir, I—’

‘Splendid. I’ll say no more. My daughter is twenty-four; she can do as she likes. I’ll pay for your wedding; but neither of you get a penny from me afterwards. You can work. I have a feeling your marriage will be a success.’

‘Sir, may I – can I – I . . .’

‘Yes, you can clear out.’

The wedding was good, as weddings go. There were church bells, white dresses, veils, orange blossom, and the ‘Voice that Breathed o’er Eden’.

The bridegroom tripped over his feet, fumbled with the ring, forgot his lines, and looked at his bride as though she were a lump of chocolate and he were a Pekinese.

There were champagne, speeches and tears; the afternoon ended up with a cloud of confetti and somebody’s old shoe. The bride and bridegroom left with nothing but five pounds, a couple of suitcases and a borrowed Austin Seven.

Their one stick of furniture was a tent.

‘My darling,’ he told her, ‘I cannot afford to take you to a seaside hotel, not even for a weekend. We must sleep under the stars.’

His bride was more practical than he.

‘We will motor to London in a borrowed car,’ she said, ‘and there we will find rooms and a job. But I must have a honeymoon first. Let’s spend it in the tent I used as a Girl Guide.’

It seemed to him that this was the most romantic idea that had ever penetrated the human mind.

He gurgled strangely and waved his hands.

‘A pig-sty with you would be Paradise,’ he said, ‘but to think of you in a tent . . .’

‘There will be a moon,’ she sighed, ‘and trees murmuring, and a brook rippling.’

‘I will slay some animal for your breakfast,’ he cried, his voice breaking, ‘and we’ll roast it over a roaring fire. You can wear the skin to protect you from the bitter cold.’

‘Don’t forget it’s June,’ she said quickly, ‘and we shall only be on Berkhamstead Common.’

‘How wonderful you are, darling!’

‘Am I?’

The Austin Seven bumped along the country roads.

In the evening they came to a wild stretch of heath that could be no other than their destination.

‘We must not pitch our tent too close to the road,’ he said. ‘I want to feel that I’m alone with you, miles from civilisation, with nothing around us but the tangled gorse.’

‘How shall we ever get the car over the rough ground?’ she asked.

‘We will leave it near the road, and we’ll strike inland towards those trees. I’ll carry the tent on my back.’

‘You look like a prehistoric man, passionate and savage,’ she told him.

‘I feel it, my darling.’

It was dark before they had found a suitable camping-ground, and the tent was hoisted with difficulty. It had a queer list to starboard, and looked like the relic of a past age.

‘We are like nomads,’ she said vaguely, her mouth full of potted meat. It was cold, and she wished she had a warmer coat.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ he said, trying to break the neck of a ginger-beer bottle. He had forgotten the opener.

After supper they sat outside the flapping tent, waiting for the moon that never came. Large clouds scurried across the sky.

‘Darling,’ he whispered, ‘to think we have waited seven years for this. At last we are alone together, really alone. I couldn’t have waited any longer.’

‘No, nor could I. Isn’t this the most romantic thing that’s ever happened?’

They sat for a few minutes more.

‘I think I’ll go in the tent,’ she said.

She disappeared, and he stood outside, smoking a cigarette.

His legs shook and his hands trembled. ‘This is the most beautiful moment in my life,’ he thought.

A sudden gust of wind blew at his hair. There was a patter in the trees, and a large cloud, hovering overhead, seemed to burst swiftly and silently.

‘Darling,’ she called softly.

He tiptoed inside. Another gust of wind blew across the heath, followed by the sheeting rain.

Two minutes later the tent fell in.

The grey dawn crept into the sky. The battered remains of white canvas fluttered hideously in the wind, like the torn rags of some long-dead explorer. A young man hammered at the pegs with the undaunted perseverance of the very great.

His clothes were sodden, his shoes were pulp. His bride, crouched in the fork of a tree, watched him with dull eyes. At last he admitted defeat, and kneeling in the comparative shelter of a gorse bush, he kept up a monologue that sounded like a chapter from James Joyce.

And the rain fell and the wind blew. Once a still small voice spoke from the fork of a tree.

‘Darling,’ it said, ‘I believe we’d have been happier at Bournemouth, after all.’

Two figures stood side by side on the edge of the London road.

‘I tell you it was here we left the car,’ he repeated for the twelfth time. ‘I remember this patch of stones.’

‘I’m sure it was further back,’ she said; ‘there was a broken tree stump.’

‘Well – wherever it was, it’s not there now. It’s been stolen; that’s all.’

There was a sharp note of irritation in his voice. It is not every man who spends his wedding night in a gorse bush. And now the car was gone, and in it their two suitcases – nothing remained to them but the clothes they wore.

‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘this is a calamity that has been sent to test us.’

He said so-and-so, and so-and-so.

She looked about her vaguely.

‘I don’t see how they would help us,’ she told him. ‘Besides, I don’t see any. No, darling, the only thing to do is to smile and be brave. After all, we have each other.’

‘Darling, forgive me,’ he said.

Hand in hand, they wandered along the road.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast . . .

They walked for hours, but in the wrong direction. They found themselves in Tring. They had lunch and walked again; they found themselves in Watford.

They caught buses, they caught trains; they found themselves in London.

It was nine in the evening once more. The day had passed slowly, horribly, yet with a subtle swiftness.

As children lost in a wood, they wandered up and down the Euston Road. Shabby, rain-bespattered and unwashed, they looked like the remnant of a hunger strike march.

Suddenly her shoe button burst. Stifling a groan, she bent her weary back to fix the strap.

As she did so, her wedding ring slipped off her finger and rolled into a drain . . .

They stood on the doorstep of a lodging-house.

‘My wife and I want a room for the night,’ he said. ‘We camped out yesterday, and then our car was stolen, and so was our luggage.’

The woman glanced at the girl’s left hand.

‘My wife lost her ring, too,’ he added.

The woman sniffed and shrugged her shoulders.

‘You seem to have lost a good many things.’

‘We are telling the truth,’ he said coldly.

‘I don’t believe a word of your story,’ answered the woman, ‘but I won’t turn you out this time of night.’

Meekly they followed her upstairs.

‘The lady can have this room, and the gentleman the one at the end of the passage. This is a respectable house, and I’m a respectable woman.’

She frowned down at them, her arms akimbo.

‘And I’m a very light sleeper.’

There seemed no more to be said.

She turned and left them in the passage.

‘Good heavens! Have I got to creep like a thief to my own wife?’ he whispered fiercely.

‘Hush! she may hear,’ she whispered back.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you go to your room and wait for me. I’ll pretend to go to mine, and then I’ll come along to yours.’

‘Supposing the boards creak?’

‘I’ll risk it. Darling, I love you.’

‘So do I.’

He began to undress in his own room. The lodgings might be uncomfortable, but they were better than a gorse bush.

What an appalling day it had been! But she had behaved marvellously. Any other girl would have gone home to her family.

To think he had waited for her seven years . . .

He opened the window, and as he did so the door of his own room slammed.

There was a noise of something falling on to the floor. He turned, and saw that the handle of the door had slipped off into the passage outside, while the useless knob lay at his feet . . .

The next morning he bought her a wedding ring at Woolworth’s.

They moved to lodgings where the landlady was deaf, and where the door of the room bolted and double-locked.

It seemed to them that the world was theirs. The only trouble was that they had no money.

He left her alone while he looked for a job, and as soon as his back was turned she crept away to an agency. They must both work if they wished to live in comfort together.

How wonderful their life would be – the quiet suppers, the long evenings . . .

And, later, children playing about the floor.

They met at half-past six, he with his jaw set, a feverish glint in his eye.

‘Darling, I’ve got a job,’ he said.

‘How splendid!’

‘It’s all I could get, but it’s better than nothing. Anyway, we’ll have to-morrow in the day-time, all to-morrow.’

‘Oh! no,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got a job, too. I’m a daily companion to a lady in Golders Green. My hours are from nine until seven.’

He stared at her as one who has heard sentence of death.

‘You don’t mean what you’re saying!’

‘Why! Whatever’s the matter?’

‘My hours are just the reverse. From seven until nine.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Darling, I’m a night porter at a bank in Acton.’

Piccadilly

S
he sat on the edge of a chair swinging her legs. Her frock of black satin was too tight for her, and too short; as she tilted on her chair the dress rose above her knees, and I could see the beginning of a ladder in her stocking, hastily mended, the thread jumbled in a knot. Her hair was unnaturally light and over-waved; the vivid red of her lipstick, smudged and thick, toned badly against the pallor of her face dusted with a mauve powder. Her patent shoes were thin for walking, and cheap. The toes were too stumpy and the heels too high. She had thrown off her black coat, the collar and the cuffs of which boasted an imitation fur, and her hat, a minute piece of velvet worn at the back of her head, now lay at her feet. Around her throat was a necklace of scarlet beads that clashed with her mouth. Her face was thin, the skin drawn tightly across her cheekbones, and her eyes – silly doll’s eyes, like blue china – stared sullenly in front of her.

Every now and then she puffed at a cigarette, pursing up her lips as a child would do, vainly attempting smoke rings, playing at bravado. She had sprinkled herself freely with scent, but even so it could not altogether hide the smell peculiar to one whose skin is rarely washed, whose clothes are seldom cleaned, whose body is under-nourished. She looked at me under her lashes, and then shrugged her shoulders, throwing aside her cigarette, forcing a smile that went ill with her appearance, that belonged to someone who must have been dead a long while. Then she began to talk at last, her voice hard and metallic, real-ising that I was not a man but a dummy thing without feeling, a note-book in my hand. ‘Newspaper boy, that’s it, is it?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to earn your living the same as I have. It’s a dirty job, isn’t it? When some fellow has left his wife for a new girl your boss sends you round to nose out where it was done and who with. Or else a kid is run over by a tram, and you call on the mother to hear how much blood he spilt. I guess you’re popular all right in homes where things have gone wrong. I guess it gives you a sort of pleasure, doesn’t it, to poke your fingers into people’s lives? You’d think there was trouble enough without a boy like you trampling with heavy feet on something that ought to be kept dark and secret.

‘What’s it all for, can you tell me? So that Mr Smith can get a thrill to himself thinking, “I might have been that chap – unfaithful,” so that Mrs Smith can wonder, “Might have happened to my kid?” No – I’m not clever, I’m not wise. But I kind of get time for thinking things now and again. Well, what do you want me to tell you? I’ve no secrets, not these days. I don’t know anyone that’s been murdered, nor run over, nor left sudden, nor waiting for a baby. I haven’t any friends to speak of. I rub along better on my own. You know – I find the talk of other people silly. Seems as though whatever they say it wouldn’t make a pennyworth of change if they’d left it all unsaid. The weather now – ah! that’s different if you like. Weather means a lot to me. You understand that, don’t you? I hate the rain – I can’t afford to have it rain. And I hate the fog – I hate the winter – they’re bad times for me. But for Lady Stuck-up in her fur coat and her car, it doesn’t hurt her. She’s all right. And Miss Prim selling stockings behind a counter, she’s all right. Half the world don’t worry when it rains.

‘But me, looking out of this window and seeing the sky like a dripping bucket, and saying to myself, “Will it stop before night?” and “Will my shoes let in the wet again?” Yes, and the chap who sells sunshades –
we
worry. Come on, tell me it takes all sorts to make a world. They told me that in school. I don’t know why you want to ask me questions. Is it that you’re doing a piece in your paper called “Confessions of the Great”? I’ve seen that sort of stuff before. “How I became an Actress”, by Florrie Flapdoodle, or “My First Step Towards the Church”, by the Archbishop of Bunk. You want to pry into the lives of humble people like myself. “As a Kid I loved handling Corpses,” said the Undertaker. Is that it? So you want me to give it you, hot and strong, straight from the shoulder.

‘Listen, you funny little fellow with your notebook and your inky fingers. I’ll tell you a story. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. You can make what you like out of it and print it in big letters in the “Sunday Muck”: “What Led to My Entering the Profession”, by Mazie.’

You see, in a kind of way, everything happened because of superstition. I’ve always been mad for superstition. Walking under ladders, crossing my salt, bowing to the moon, hunting up passages in the Bible. Even now it’s the same. Every morning I open my Bible to see if it’s going to be my lucky day. Laughing at me? I tell you I’m serious. A girl I knew found ‘God shall send a pestilence unto ye,’ and in a fortnight she had it. She didn’t laugh. All she knew was that it didn’t come from God . . . We’re like that, every one of us. Believing in legends, believing in symbols, believing in signs – the only things we don’t believe in are fairies.

Listen – if I wasn’t superstitious I’d be a housemaid now in Park Lane. It’s a fact. I’d be wearing a cap and an apron. I’d be emptying the slops of some overfed old countess. I’d be meeting my boy Thursday night under a lamp-post and going to a picture house for one-and-three-penny-worth of cuddle. And, look at me – I’m free, I don’t owe anything to no one, I belong to myself. Haven’t I got a room of my own? Once I was a kid that didn’t know a thing. I went into service straight from the Soldiers’ Orphan Home. A kitchenmaid in Kensington, that was me. No, I hadn’t got any relations. Never knew my parents. The fellow who met my mother on a foggy night must have worn a uniform, else I wouldn’t have been sent to the Soldiers’ Orphan Home. I was happy because I was ignorant. I used to scrub myself every day with soap and wear flannel next the skin. I didn’t know any better. I thought if I rose from under-housemaid to upper maybe I’d save enough at fifty to live quiet in the country.

I wanted to marry, too. I thought if you kissed a boy he took you straight away to church. Then I met Jim. Jim didn’t take me to church nor did he kiss me much, but he taught me a whole lot of things housemaids don’t need to know. I felt for Jim what girls in books feel for the fellow on the cover. You know, he has big eyes and curly hair. Jim’s hair was straight and he had a cast in one eye, but I didn’t worry. I don’t know if there’s a name for it – what Jim and I had. In the pictures they call it Love. In the newspapers they call it an Offence. I didn’t call it nothing, but it seemed all right to me. I had a pain in my heart when he wasn’t there. I’d wait around in the rain; I wouldn’t work proper. I thought maybe he’d leave me if I didn’t look nice. So I gave up washing and bought some scent and powder, and he said I was fine. He used to say to me, ‘Look here, Mazie, service isn’t any good to you. You’re too smart.’ ‘Why,’ I’d tell him, ‘I can’t do anything else.’ ‘Of course you can,’ he’d say, ‘there’s heaps of things you could do. Service is drab. It doesn’t lead you nowhere.’ When I told him maybe one day I’d get to upper housemaid he laughed.

‘Are you going to waste your days planning what’ll come to you when you’re fifty?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d got more sense.’

I told him he was mean, but I thought about it all the same. I thought maybe he’d look down on me if I stayed in service. ‘If I leave my place you’ll have to find me a job,’ I said. He looked queer then, he didn’t say much, but next time we went together he petted me so I felt I’d do anything he wanted as long as I didn’t have to lose him. ‘I treat you all right, don’t I?’ he said. ‘How do you think I earn money to take you out and give you good times?’

‘I don’t know. You work, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I work, Mazie, but not the way you mean.’

‘Well, tell me,’ I said.

Then he laughed, slyly, winking at me. ‘Look at this,’ he said, and he took a necklace out of his pocket and jingled it up and down before my eyes.

‘Where’d you find that?’ I asked him.

‘Took it off an old lady,’ he said.

Then I understood. Jim was a thief. I was scared. I cried, I said I wouldn’t have any more to do with him. I was honest, I said. ‘All right,’ he laughed, and went off, not coming near me for three weeks.

That taught me. I saw I couldn’t do without him. I wrote him he could steal the Crown Jewels if he liked, as long as he took me back. I thought p’raps I could reform him and one day I’d save enough money to keep him and buy a little house in the country. I gave in my notice to the lady in Kensington. I saw an advertisement in a paper for an under-housemaid in a place in Park Lane.

I showed it to Jim. ‘That’s me,’ I said. He laughed. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘You come and get rich my way.’

I put the advertisement in my bag.

‘I’m going to answer it today,’ I told him.

‘We’ll see,’ he said.

He said he’d come with me. We went to the Underground and booked to Down Street. I was fussed and worried, I wondered if I was doing the right thing – answering that advertisement.

‘Look here,’ said Jim, ‘let’s make a bargain. Either you go to Park Lane or you come and live with me, work with me. You can’t do both; quick now, decide.’ He said this as we got into the train. I shut my eyes tight. I thought, ‘If only there could be a sign to tell me what to do.’ Then I opened my eyes, I glanced at the platform as the train carried us away. Suddenly I saw the words flash up at me in lights on a board: ‘Passing Down Street.’

Then I said aloud to Jim, ‘All right. I’ll come to you.’

Yes, you can call it superstition. Each thing has happened to me in that way. In the Underground, too. Funny, isn’t it? Never up in the air, never up in the world. Always below, beneath the ground. I was with Jim for about six months. He trained me so I could steal women’s handbags without their noticing. It was quite easy. I was expert after a time.

We worked the Underground. I got to know every station, every lift – all the network of passages. Sometimes it was exciting, and dangerous, making me want to laugh, but more often it was hell. Sometimes I’d tremble so I’d come over faint. ‘Pull yourself together,’ Jim would whisper, ‘do you want to give us away?’

Sometimes he’d make me go alone. Then I’d be scared. It seemed as though everyone must be looking, and that I was there, all alone, no one near, nowhere to hide if things went wrong.

‘You’re not bold enough,’ Jim told me, ‘how d’you think we’re ever going to get rich if you act timid the way you do? Handbags don’t bring us in much unless you get a lucky haul. You’ve got to learn an’ be more snappy. Most women nowadays wear bracelets. Why can’t you have a try at them?’ He’d always be worrying at me.

‘Can’t you lift a bracelet?’ he’d say. He’d complain all the time. He was lazy now, he made me do the work.

One evening when I’d only lifted one bag the whole day he turned nasty. ‘I’m coming out with you tonight,’ he said, ‘and we’re going to get a bracelet.’ I began to cry. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel sure of my fingers.’

‘You’ll do as I tell you or I’m finished with you,’ he said.

We started to work the Central London line shortly after eleven. We counted on getting the after-theatre crowd. It was at Oxford Circus he saw the old lady in the fur coat walk to the booking office. She booked to Lancaster Gate. Jim nudged me, pointed to her hands.

She wore a large ring on her little finger. It looked valuable, too. We also booked to Lancaster Gate. I was trembling all over, and my hands were slippery with sweat. ‘I can’t do it,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t do it.’ He held my arm so tight I nearly screamed. We didn’t sit next to her in the carriage. We were in another part of the train.

When we got out at Lancaster Gate she was walking up the platform. There were few people about, I saw it was going to be difficult. There wouldn’t be the excuse of jostling in a crowd.

She was in evening dress. It was long at the back. She couldn’t manage it proper. I thought that perhaps if she tripped in some way . . . I brushed against her – she dropped her bag. We both groped for it on the floor. The bag opened and her powder-box and purse and odds and ends fell out in a mess. I talked loudly, fussing her, pretending to help, bumping her against the wall – but I had the ring. Then I left her, and ran on to catch the lift, Jim just behind me. ‘Something is going to happen,’ I thought, ‘something is going to happen . . .’ I felt I could see prison in front of me, and I couldn’t escape. If the old lady missed her ring in the lift I was done for. I wondered if I had better turn back and get through to the other platform. I knew if I went up in that lift I was finished. And as though to prove it – as though there really was something true in superstition – I saw the notice: ‘Stand clear of the Gates.’

I turned to Jim. ‘I’m going back,’ I said. He was rough, he shook my arm. ‘Get in quick – you little fool,’ he said. But he was scared, too. I could see the whites of his eyes. He pushed me inside the lift. I saw the old lady running along the passage waving her hand. ‘I’ve been robbed,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve been robbed. Stop that girl.’

People turned to look at me. I tried to get to the other side of the lift, but it was barred. Then they began to crowd round me and to question me.

You don’t want me to tell you about gaol, do you? You can squeeze that out of somebody else. There’s plenty of ex-convicts who like to get into the newspapers. I’ve got nothing to say . . . Oh! Yes – they treated me kind. That’s right, isn’t it?

And a lady visited me once a week and asked me if I’d been a bad girl, and wouldn’t I be happier with Jesus? I told her ‘No,’ I didn’t care how dirty he’d been to me I’d go with Jim and no one else. That was true, too. Maybe he’d turned me down, but I was his girl. I only wanted to get clear of gaol to be with him again. He told me it was the same for him. He came and saw me once. You stand in a kind of place with bars around, and they let you talk to your friends. ‘Why, Mazie,’ he said. ‘You know I didn’t mean to get you in here, don’t you?’

‘That’s all right – I haven’t split,’ I said.

‘You aren’t sore at me, Mazie, are you?’ he said, ‘it just happened that way, and it couldn’t be helped. I tried to save my skin. You won’t let on to them here we were working together, will you?’ he said.