II
Wynne’s part ended with the first act, but he waited at the stage door till the close of the play. Presently Eve came out and joined him.
Very small she looked wrapped in a long brown coat, with her hands tucked in the pockets. She wore a little close-fitting hat which accentuated the oval of her gravely piquant face.
“Which way?” she asked.
“Through Covent Garden, if we walk. Be jollier to walk, I think, don’t you?”
He suddenly remembered when last he had put the same question, and almost flushed at the memory. Then, as now, he had been seeking a friend. He had been a long time finding one.
“Yes, much,” said Eve. “I always walk back. I like it, and it saves the pennies.”
“I like it, and try not to remember that it saves the pennies,” he remarked whimsically. “ ’Tisn’t bad being poor when one doesn’t mean to be poor for ever. I have tremendous beliefs that this is only a passing stage, haven’t you?”
“A valley?”
“Yes, which in passing through gives us the answer to all manner of whys and wherefores.”
Eve nodded. “What a queer old street!” she said. “I haven’t been this way before.”
“There’s a coffee stall at the corner where I buy provender; that’s why I brought you. There it is.”
They stopped at the stall, with the proprietor of which Wynne seemed on excellent terms, and bought some hard-boiled eggs, “balls of chalk” as they are familiarly called.
“A friend to every one that man is,” said Wynne as they proceeded on their way. “Does all manner of good turns to the queer folk whose business keeps ’em abroad late. He lent me three suppers once, at a time when I needed them badly.”
From a glowing oven on wheels nearer his lodging they bought baked potatoes.
“Put one in each pocket. Finest things in the world to keep your hands warm.” As she followed his advice he nodded encouragingly.
“That’s the way. It’s a fire and a good dinner all in one. I’ve a very great regard for a baked potato; it’s the president of the republic of vegetables, as the hot pie is the dowager queen of confectionery.”
“What do you call a hot pie?”
“Just that! They used to be cooked in the streets in little portable ovens. Did you never meet a pieman?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Daresay not, for the last one died two years ago. A fine fellow he was. I went to his funeral.”
“I’d love to have seen a real pieman. Didn’t Simple Simon meet one going to a fair?”
“So it’s said.”
“And now they’ve all gone for ever. How sad!”
“Tell you what,” exclaimed Wynne, “there’s an old man Richmond way who sells hot turnovers. When the spring comes we might ’bus down there, have a walk in the park, and munch turnovers in the night on the way home.”
“Yes, let’s do that.”
Very ordinary affairs assume a delicate outline when approached in a romantic spirit. The idea of eating turnovers on the top of a ’bus does not sound very attractive, and yet to Wynne, as he suggested it, and to Eve as she listened, the promised expedition seemed full of the happiest possibilities. They felt the touch of a spring breeze blowing in their hair, and saw the whitey-green of the new leaves, and the blue sky turn to a lavender in which the stars appeared. Almost they could taste the good baked crust and the sour-sweet apples of the midnight feast.
“D’you know,” said Eve, “I think, of all things in the world, the most glorious are those we mean to do.”
They stopped before an old Queen Anne house, and producing a latchkey Wynne unlocked the door.
“Top floor,” he said, “and rather a climb.”
They mounted the creaky stairs, and he was puffing gustily when they reached the top landing. For a young man he seemed unduly exhausted. Striking a light on his boot, he entered and lit a shaded lamp.
“Take off your hat and I’ll get the fire going. Look! I must have paid the rent, for it is actually laid.”
Eve smiled as he went down on his knees before a tiny basket grate, then let her gaze travel round the room. Inset, in the damp-stained slanting roof, were two gable windows, broad silled and littered with books and papers. Before one of these was a writing table, dilapidated but glorious with age; this, too, was liberally sprinkled with half-written manuscripts, pens, cigarette ends, and the jumble of odds and ends with which a man surrounds himself. A small Jacobean table stood in the middle of the uncarpeted floor, a tarnished copper bowl, battered but still shapely, giving tone to its dark fissured surface. Two age-worn grandfather chairs were drawn up near the fire. In each recess in the walls was a bookcase, piled ceiling-high with books. A couple of Holbein prints, and an unframed Albrecht Dürer completed the decoration. It was a shabby, unkempt room, yet, like its owner, it possessed individuality and charm.
“I like this,” said Eve. “I’m glad I came.”
“You like it. I thought you would—hoped so, too. I’ve never shown it to any one else. It is good though, isn’t it? Try that chair. I carried it back on my head from a ragshop in Holloway Road, and having nearly deprived me of life it gave it back to me in sweet repose. Take off your coat first, won’t you? That’s right. Don’t forget the ’taters though. Thanks! I’ll put ’em on the trivet. Good. Thank God the fire means to burn. D’you know sometimes I’ve almost cried when it wouldn’t. I can’t lay a fire, and I loathe to be defeated.”
He began wandering round the room and producing plates and knives from unexpected quarters. Presently he stopped and puzzled.
“Can you think of a likely place to find the bread?” he asked.
“Where did you see it last?”
“I don’t know. I have meals at all sorts of odd times and places, so one loses track. Wait a minute, though.”
He disappeared into the bedroom and emerged with a loaf and a saucer with butter on it.
“Breakfasted while I was dressing,” he explained, “or else I had supper in there over night. I don’t know which—but let’s make a start.”
They feasted very royally off bread and hard-boiled eggs and hot potatoes and raspberry jam, followed by a pot of tea. The tea they drank from little Chinese Saki cups without handles.
“I only use these on the especialist occasions,” he announced, adding with a smile, “In fact I have never used them before.”
“Haven’t you many friends?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
“I thought you hadn’t.”
“Why?”
“People with lots of friends don’t like me—but then I don’t like them—so that’s that—isn’t it. Let’s draw near the fire. The poor little thing means well, but it can’t reach us at such a distance.”
So they drew up their chairs and talked. They talked of books, of dead men, and of great ambitions. Under the influence of her society Wynne seemed to lose much of his arrogance and cynicism. He spoke of the things he loved naturally and with reverence. Ever and again he would dart to the shelves for a volume and read some passage to the point of the subject they had been discussing. Then he would throw it aside and paraphrase with a clear and almost inspired insight.
“One should always paraphrase,” he said. “One should paraphrase one’s own thoughts and every one else’s. It’s the sure way of getting down to basic facts. If I were to produce a play of Shakespeare’s I should make every actor translate his lines into colloquial schoolboy English. Then we should know he had his meanings right. Some glimmer of that necessity occurred to me the first time I went to a theatre, but now I see how absolutely essential it is.”
The talk always led back to himself. His own ego was the all-important factor.
“Extraordinary wrong most people are in their ideas!”
“When will you start to put them right?”
He looked at her keenly—on guard lest she should be laughing at him. But the question was sincere enough.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t believe in beginnings—gradual ascent, ladder of fame, and all that. Life to me is divided into two halves—the period of finding out and the period of handing out. I don’t intend to be a person who is beginning to be spoken of. When I am spoken of it will be by every one—simultaneously. In the meantime it is better to be obscure—and absorbent.”
“You want success.”
“I shall have it too.”
“For the world’s sake.”
“Ye-es—and for mine.”
Quarter after quarter boomed out from the neighbouring clocks. It was after two when Eve rose and took her coat from the nail on the door.
“You going?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I walk with you?”
“No, it isn’t far.”
“Very well—I want to work too. But you’ll come again, won’t you?”
“If I may.”
“ ’Course you may. You must. You’re an easy person—easier than I’d have thought possible—you sort of—don’t bother me. Take a Walter Pater with you. Better for you than Meredith. Treat it gently, though; I starved a whole week to buy that book.”
She took the white-vellum bound volume, nodded, and tucked it under her arm.
“Good-night.”
“ ’Night. You are rather an admirable person.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. A girl is generally frightened to be in a man’s rooms in the middle of the night.”
“It wouldn’t occur to me to be frightened of you,” said Eve.
“Why not?”
“A man who starved for a week to buy this.” She touched the book under her arm.
For some reason her gently spoken words piqued him, and he replied:
“Yet I am a man just the same.”
“A man but not the same,” she said, and, smiling, passed out on to the landing.
She had descended the first flight before he moved and followed her to the front door.
“I will walk back with you.” It was what any man would have said.
“No, please not. I had rather think of you as the student working for the day.”
He hesitated—then, “Very well. Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
He retraced his steps slowly. The memory of her attitude and her words puzzled him.
“More like a boy,” he concluded, which if you think it out was a very fine form of conceit.
His thoughts wandered from his work, and he bit his pen for a long, long while. His eyes rested unseeingly on the black patch which was the window.
“More like a boy—much more.”
He nodded to convince himself. After all, the friendship of a boy who is really a girl is very pleasant.
Never once did it cross his mind how entirely negligible was the physical side of his nature. A man whose brain works with febrile intensity night and day, and whose earnings are scarcely sufficient to buy the meanest fare, knows little or nothing of passionate callings. Unlike your idle, over-fed fellow whose intellect performs no greater task than finding excuses for bodily indulgence, the student’s sensuality lies in words and colour. His worst vice is the prostitution of an artistic standard.