MURIEL had sent me some mauve primroses, slightly weather-beaten, and some honeysuckle — twine threaded with grey-green rosettes, and some timid hazel catkins. They had arrived in a forlorn little cardboard box just as I was rushing off to school.
‘Stick ’em in water!’ I said to Mrs Williams; and I left the house. But those mauve primroses had set my tone for the day: I was dreamy and reluctant; school and the sounds of the boys were unreal, unsubstantial; beyond these were the realities of my poor winter — trodden prim-roses and the pale hazel catkins that Muriel had sent me. Altogether the boys must have thought me a vacant fool; I regarded them as a punishment upon me.
I rejoiced exceedingly when night came, with the evening star, and the sky flushed dark blue, purple over the golden pomegranates of the lamps. I was as glad as if I had been hurrying home to Muriel, as if she would open the door to me, would keep me a little while in the fire-glow, with the splendid purple of the evening against the window, before she laughed and drew up her head proudly and flashed on the light over the tea-cups. But Eleanor, the girl, opened the door to me, and I poured out my tea in solitary state.
Mrs Williams had set out my winter posy for me on the table, and I thought of all the beautiful things we had done, Muriel and I, at home in the Midlands, of all the beautiful ways she had looked at me, of all the beautiful things I had said to her — or had meant to say. I went on imagining beautiful things to say to her, while she looked at me with her wonderful eyes from among the fir boughs in the wood. Meanwhile, I talked to my landlady about the neighbours.
Although I had much work to do, and although I laboured away at it, in the end there was nothing done. Then I felt very miserable, and sat still and sulked. At a quarter to eleven I said to myself:
‘This will never do,’ and I took up my pen and wrote a letter to Muriel.
‘It was not fair to send me those robins’ — we called the purple primroses ‘robins’, for no reason, unless that they bloomed in winter — ‘they have bewitched me. Their wicked, bleared little pinkish eyes follow me about, and I have to think of you and home, instead of doing what I’ve got to do. All the time while I was teaching I had a grasshopper chirruping away in my head and the arithmetic rattled like the carts on the street. Poor lads! I read their miserable pieces of composition on “Pancakes” over and over, and never saw them, thinking “the primroses flower now because it is so sheltered under the plum-trees — those old trees with gummy bark”. You like biting through a piece of hard, bright gum. If your lips did not get so sticky. . .’
I will not say at what time I finished my letter. I can recall a sensation of being dim, oblivious of everything, smiling to myself as I sealed the envelope; of putting my books and papers in their places without the least knowledge of so doing, keeping the atmosphere of Strelley Mill close round me in my London lodging. I cannot remember turning off the electric light. The next thing of which I am conscious is pushing at the kitchen door.
The kitchen is at the back of the house. Outside in the dark was a little yard and a hand’s breadth of garden hacked by the railway embankment. I had come down the passage from my room in the front of the house, and stood pushing at the kitchen door to get a glass for some water. Evidently the oilcloth had turned up a little, and the edge of the door was under it. I woke up irritably, swore a little, pushed harder, and heard the oilcloth rip. Then I bent and put my hand through the small space of the door to flatten the oilcloth.
The kitchen was in darkness save for the red embers lying low in the stove. I started, but rather from sleepy wonder than anything else. The shock was not quite enough to bring me to. Pressing himself flat into the corner between the stove and the wall was a fellow. I wondered, and was disturbed; the greater part of me was away in the Midlands still. So I stood looking and blinking.
‘Why?’ I said helplessly. I think this very mildness must have terrified him. Immediately he shrank together and began to dodge about between the table and stove, whining, snarling, with an incredibly mongrel sound:
‘Don’t yer touch me! Don’t yer come grabbin’ at me! I’ll hit you between the eyes with this poker. I ain’t done nothin’ to you. Don’t yer touch me, yer bloody coward!’
All the time he was writhing about in the space in which I had him trapped, between the table and stove. I was much too dazed to do anything but stare. Then my blood seemed to change its quality. I came awake, sick and sharp with pain. It was such a display as I had seen before in school, and I felt again the old misery of helplessness and disgust. He dared not, I knew, strike, unless by trying to get hold of him I terrified him to the momentary madness of such a slum-rat.
‘Stop your row!’ I said, standing still and leaving him his room. ‘Shut your miserable row! Do you want to waken the children?’
‘Ah, but don’t you touch me, don’t you come no nearer!’
He had stopped writhing about, and was crouching at the defensive. The little frenzy, too, had gone out of his voice.
‘Put the poker down, you fool’ — I pointed to the corner of the stove, where the poker used to stand. I supplied him with the definite idea of placing the poker in the corner, and in his crazy witless state he could not reject it. He did as I told him, but indefinitely, as if the action were secondhand. The poker, loosely dropped into the corner, slid to the ground with a clatter.
I looked from it to him, feeling him like a burden upon me, and in some way I was afraid of him, for my heart began to beat heavily. His own indefinite clumsiness, and the jangle of the poker on the hearth, and then my sudden spiritual collapse, unnerved him still more. He crouched there abjectly.
I took a box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the gas at the pendant that hung in the middle of the bare little room. Then I saw that he was a youth of nineteen or so, narrow at the temples, with thin, pinched-looking brows. He was not ugly, nor did he look ill-fed. But he evidently came of a low breed. His hair had been cut close to his skull, leaving a tussocky fringe over his forehead to provide him with a ‘topping’, and to show that it was no prison crop which had bared him.
‘I wasn’t doin’ no harm,’ he whined resentfully, with still an attempt at a threat in his tones. ‘I ’aven’t done nuffin’ to you; you leave me alone. What harm have I done?’
‘Be quiet,’ I said. ‘You’ll wake the children and the people.’
I went to the door and listened. No one was disturbed. Then I closed the door and pulled down the wide-opened window, which was, letting in the cold night air. As I did so I shivered, noting how ugly and shapeless the mangle looked in the yard, with the moonlight on its frosty cover.
The fellow was standing abjectly in the same place. He had evidently been rickety as a child. I sat down in the rocking-chair.
‘What did you come in here for?’ I asked, almost pleading.
‘Well,’ he retorted insolently. ‘An’ wouldn’t you go somewhere if you ’edn’t a place to go to of a night like this?’
‘Look here,’ I said coldly, a flash of hate in my blood; ‘None of your chelp.’
‘Well, I only come in for a warm,’ he said, afraid not to appear defiant.
‘No you didn’t,’ I replied. ‘You came to take something. What did you want from here?’ I looked round the kitchen unhappily. He looked back at me uneasily, then at his dirty hands, then at me again. He had brown eyes, in which low cunning floated like oil on the top of much misery.
‘I might ’a took some boots’ he said, with a little vaunt.
My heart sank. I hoped he would say ‘food’. And I was responsible for him. I hated him.
‘You want your neck breaking,’ I said. ‘We can hardly afford boots as it is.’
‘I ain’t never done it before! This is the first time —’
‘You miserable swine!’ I said. He looked at me with a flash of rat-fury.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
‘Exeter Road.’
‘And you don’t do any work?’
‘I couldn’t never get a job — except — I used to deliver laundry —’
‘And they turned you off for thieving?’
He shifted and stirred uneasily in his chair. As he was so manifestly uncomfortable, I did not press him.
‘Who do you live with?’
‘I live at ’ome.’
‘What does your father do?’
But he sat stubborn and would not answer. I thought of the gangs of youths who stood at the corner of the mean streets near the school, there all day long, month after month, fooling with the laundry girls and insulting passers-by.
‘But,’ I said, ‘what are you going to do?’
He hung his head again and fidgeted in his chair. Evidently what little thought he gave to the subject made him uncomfortable. He could not answer.
‘Get a laundry girl to marry you and live on her?’ I asked sarcastically.
He smiled sicklily, evidently even a little bit flattered. What was the good of talking to him?
‘And loaf at the street corners till you go rotten?’ I said.
He looked up at me sullenly.
‘Well, I can’t get a job,’ he replied with insolence. He was not hopeless, but like a man born without expectations, apathetic, looking to be provided for, sullenly allowing everything.
‘No,’ I said, ‘if a man is worthy of his hire, the hire is worthy of a man — and I’m damned if you are a man!’
He grinned at me with sly insolence.
‘And would any woman have you?’ I asked.
Then he grinned slyly to himself, ducking his head to hide the joke. And I thought of the coloured primroses and of Muriel’s beautiful, pensive face. Then of him with his dirty clothes and his nasty skin! Then that, given a woman, he would be a father.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s a knock-out.’
He gave me a narrow, sleering look.
‘You don’t know everyfing,’ he said in contempt.
I sat and wondered. And I knew I could not understand him, that I had no fellow feeling with him. He was something beyond me.
‘Well,’ I said helplessly, ‘you’d better go.’
I rose, feeling he had beaten me. He could affect and alter me: I could not affect nor alter him. He shambled off down the path. I watched him skulk under the lamp-posts, afraid of the police. Then I shut the door.
In the silence of the sleeping house I stood quite still for some minutes, up against the impassable fact of this man, beyond which I could not get. I could not accept him. I simply hated him. Then I climbed the stairs. It was like a nightmare. I thought he was a blot, like a blot fallen on my mind, something black and heavy out of which I could not extricate myself.
As I hung up my coat I felt Muriel’s fat letter in my pocket. It made me a trifle sick. ‘No!’ I said, with a flush of rage against her perfect, serene purity, ‘I don’t want to think of her.’ And I wound my watch up sullenly, feeling alone and wretched.