Men of Marlowe's

by Mrs. Henry Dudeney

After this the Inn did not see very much of Arnold. He used to go straight from the City to the suburbs—rushing to catch a particular train and joining the general exodus at Clapham Junction. Thousands of fellows do that; it would kill me. But he really liked it. He was always hankering after the suburbs; said the air was pure; told you vaingloriously that no one could ever build on the Common—it was sacred to the people. You know the way these people talk; the people who live in smart houses all red and white—the ideas of the suburban builder never go beyond a colored peppermint stick—fellows who work and sweat in back gardens the size of a tablecloth and go to the local theater.

Arnold used to have supper with Clarissa and the widowed lady—his ideas with regard to the girl were ludicrously proper ones. After supper he and she would be alone more or less for an hour or two, with Sol spread at their feet. Arnold would talk dogs, and Clarissa would look lovely and throw in a simper now and then. At ten he left: the widow lady liked to be in bed by half-past.

It was about this time that he took to criticising Mrs. Neaves. He found himself constantly watching her, speculating on her. Once, when he went into the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon to wash out an ink pot, he noticed how white her fat neck was. She was cleaning the lid of a tin saucepan with a bit of emery paper. Her head was bent and her fist circled energetically. Her face was streaming with perspiration and her flat toper’s nose glowed like a poppy. Her bodice was open at the throat, and he saw that her neck, beneath the line of exposure, was delicately fine. It reminded him of Clarissa’s milky skin. He stood swilling out the ink pot, taking more pains than was necessary and staring at fat, frowsy Mrs. Neaves and wondering how she would look with a finely-chiseled nose in place of the comical, red, flat one, which seemed to have been roughly trodden into her face by a careless foot. She looked up at him rather curiously, rather resentfully—evidently suspecting that he was spying on her. He noticed that her blue eyes were pensive, not twinkling. It was absurd to think of Clarissa in connection with that dirty, gin-drinking woman—her face all coarse rolls of flesh, her dress gaping, and her greasy bonnet-strings streaming back from her triple chin. Yet, when he went to Clapham that night, he amused himself by trying to fit Clarissa with a flat, blossom-like nose. And he was prepared to swear that her blue eyes were twin eyes to those pensive ones which were set in the laundress’ head.

He couldn’t for the life of him help watching Mrs. Neaves—in every attitude. He watched her as she rubbed the brush across his boots, swinging her big arm easily from the shoulder; as she knelt on the rug to coax the fire, her great, spread body bunched out and her pouch-like cheeks inflated. And in the evening when he sat in the widow’s house he used to compare her with that porcelain slip of a girl Clarissa. At fifty—Mrs. Neaves couldn’t be more—would Clarissa have such haunches, such pendulous cheeks!

He idealized the laundress—quite unconsciously; he was the most matter-of-fact little chap in the world. Yet, in spite of himself, he became imaginative, degenerate. He took to engaging Mrs. Neaves in long conversations—about the lady at the cats’-meat shop in Red Lion Passage, who had just given birth to twins, and whose husband was doing three months for stamping on her (“a nice beast,” as Mrs. Neaves said righteously); about the other lady who got mad drunk regularly every Saturday night and threw all the household china out of the window—about anything, or anyone, for the mere sake of seeing her talk, of watching the changes on her coarse face, and the quick movement of her mouth, which could only boast three front teeth.

Every wrinkle, every deeply-scored line on that woman’s face, every watery light in her blue eyes, meant to Arnold the track of some youthful charm. Was Mrs. Neaves like Clarissa at eighteen? Would Clarissa be like Mrs. Neaves at fifty? I really think that he would have ended by marrying Mrs. Neaves, out of pure, involuntary fascination, if Clarissa had not been a woman and inquisitive.

She kept bothering him to take her to see his rooms. He was to leave them very soon, had sublet them to another man. He had taken a house at Clapham, a stone’s throw from the Common, and with a back garden a little bigger than usual—but only for Sol’s sake, Clarissa said. It was the first time she had shown a tinge of rebellion.

“A great dog like that will make an awful mess in a nice house with his dirty feet. Can’t you keep him chained up?”

“Chain a deerhound!” cried Arnold, in holy horror. Sol was a religion to him. “You’d spoil his legs.”

He arranged to bring Clarissa up to the Inn some Saturday afternoon. She was to have tea with him in his rooms, and go out to dine somewhere afterward. He gave Mrs. Neaves an extra shilling to stay late and get the tea. At least, he said it was to get tea; he tried to persuade himself that it was to get tea; but I’m certain that his real reason for keeping her was his odd desire to see those two together, to compare notes. He said to her with deprecating apology—she was the sort of voluble, violent woman to compel respect from a man of his character: