A Day Off Page 5

  Her young man had scruples—perhaps they were fears. He did not want to find himself in trouble, or with a wife and a child. He was mortally afraid of ridicule. The accident that he had had a year’s better education than the rest (he was a clerk in the counting room) and had an uncle in London who was doing well, gave him a troublesome opinion of himself. It made a difference to him. He came of strict, Baptist parents who had taught him a great deal about sin.

  One evening towards the end of August or the beginning of September they walked slowly through the wood. He was talking—she paid scant attention to it and followed her own thoughts.

  “You know my uncle has a big house in London—Streatham it is. He’s had luck. He’s always telling me London’s the right place for a man like me, and with his connections and so on I daresay I’d do well; I’m going to learn French this winter and I’ve been reading Ruskin—you ought to read more, you know.”

  “Aren’t we going to sit down soon?” she asked. Her shoes, new and high-heeled, pinched.

  “Very well.” He left the path and they chose a ring of hawthorns and lay down in it. The day had been hot; its warmth lingered in the humid air of the wood and the breeze lifting the leaves was warm. After a few minutes during which they lay still, breathing deeply, she unfastened the front of her blouse. It was part of the ritual; this evening he varied it by saying : “I should like to touch you nearer.” It took him a little time to remove collar and tie—he wrenched at them and broke the button-hole—then they lay closer than before, drowsy with feeling.

  It came on to rain, heavy summer drops slapping the leaves. Still he did not move. “You’ll get your death,” she whispered. She raised herself up and lay across him, trying to keep him dry. He had grown very pale and she, to her surprise, began to tremble. Her lips trembled when she was trying to smile, and the little joke she made, a line from a song, sounded wretched. But she had to say something—to let off steam, she said, thinking about it afterwards. So many and strange occasions in a lifetime and so few words.

  The rain fell thicker and faster. Reluctantly they stood up, arranged their clothes and walked quickly home. He had caught a chill, of course. He went about very miserable, sorry for himself, as long as it lasted. It was a lesson, he said.

  A lesson, the woman in the Park thought sardonically. If that was what it was, I learned mine.

  But what had she learned?

  She remembered the path along the canal, the mist-thickened darkness, and the feel of earth under her hands. They lay near enough the water to see by lifting their heads the lantern on a barge moored for the night. The ditch and a bank of earth (in spring yellow flowers started there in the rank grass) hid them from the passers-by. It was uncomfortable, but there you are, the poor can’t choose—and nothing, if she lived to be a hundred, would warm her as did the hurried clumsy touches of that boy. Nothing.

  He had said his uncle would help them. He must take one of those night excursion trains to London, see his uncle, insist on a good safe job being found for him (easy enough, when you knew the ropes), then he would send for her. They would be married. Was there, he asked anxiously, any hurry about it, about their marriage? No, there was no hurry, she answered; except—it would be easier when they were married. He said little in response, weakly greedy for her.

  I might have known he wouldn’t come back, she thought. Seeing him off, the raw breath of the fog whipped her cheeks. She watched his train disappear, his face fading to a blur on the lit window. She never saw him again. After a few weeks she went at night to his parents’ house and asked for his address. But that was no use—they sent her off sharply, without a trace of surprise or pity.

  But pity is for who needs it, she thought. I don’t. I never needed it. I’m not downed by things. I found then you can put up with anything.

  She smoothed the skirt over her knees. He knew he wasn’t coming back, she thought; all those months he was meaning to shake me some day. A tremor ran through her life, so far below the surface that she scarcely felt it.

  I feel hungry again, she thought. I shan’t go anywhere yet, though. I’ll wait and go to that place I went with Mr. Cohn three or four times, that time he, I thought he was getting serious. He wasn’t. The waiter might remember me coming with him and he’d serve me as though I—she broke off, not anxious to finish her thought. It didn’t do you any good to go thinking about your troubles. I ought to move, smarten myself, look for work. Her hands lay slackly folded in her lap. I’m too old, she thought, terrified. Once, but it was so long ago that she could not feel it, she had had spirit enough to leave Staveley, leave her home, leave everything. She gave out that she was going up to London to be married. Some believed her. When she reached London—in the early morning it was, the sky grey and feathery, a wind blowing grit through the streets—she had no idea where to go. She wandered round until night and then seeing a card outside some bed and breakfast hotel in the Euston Road—Wanted, it said, a strong girl—she went in, offered herself, and was taken at once. That was a bad place. After a year she left it and took a place as bedroom maid in the Dorset in Bloomsbury. She was on the fourth floor and she slept with the other girls, upstairs over the seventh, in an attic to which they climbed through a dark shaft up worn creaking stairs.

  She stayed five years, descending by stages to the first floor, where were the best bedrooms and “the suite.” She did not like the work but there were hours, in the afternoon, when she had little to do and could idle time away in the dark service room. The floor waiter was a German, almost a boy, thin and excitable.

  She went out so seldom that the hotel became like an island from which she gazed over the dun tossing sea of London. Buses rocked up and down the streets and on her evening out it was like going on the sea, not that she went far, and was relieved when the German boy offered to come with her. He changed his night in order to do it. They went to the Empire twice, and to cafés where he spoke to the waiters and they accepted him at once as one of themselves. But he had very little money to spend. From his wages he sent part to the wife in Hamburg whom he wanted never to see again (“What did you marry her for if you feel like that?” But he seemed not to know the answer.) and the rest he was hoarding—he meant to save enough to rent a café and he talked to her about it hour after hour, until she yawned in his face.

  She felt a meagre interest in the Dorset’s guests. They came in at dusk, demanded hot water, fires, the bathroom, papers, early tea, strewed the room with their clothes; in the morning, gathering their possessions, left. The room, which easily defeated all their attempts to change it, had then to be pushed and smoothed into blankness before the approach of the next visitor. A tear in the eiderdown was infinitely more interesting than the people who slept under it. They slept and went. It remained and bred endless chatter, runnings to and fro, visits from the management, locking and unlocking of doors, and only after hours of indecision was it removed and an identical quilt provided from store.

  How on earth did I stick it so long? she wondered. Sheets; hot water cans; those stairs, too (she was not allowed to use the lift). But it was safe—and she, as always, planning one thing and doing an easier. She might be there still; but for what happened in the suite—and Ernst begging her again that very day to come with him, and she felt I can’t stay here, I should be seeing them. It gave her the horrors only to pass the door afterwards.

  She was not on duty when Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel came in, and her first sight of them was in the evening of that day. They had gone out to dine, and returning sauntered along the corridor and stood side by side at the door of the suite. He had an arm round her as they stood there. In the half-lit corridor they looked somehow strange—the long shadowy walls, the dark figures, backs turned to her—she could not explain what, for a moment, as she walked towards them, she had seen. Afterwards she imagined a tremor in her flesh—a cold turn, she told Ernst.

  Mr. Schlegel turned round when she reached them and said in a friendly voice : “I say,
I can’t make this key fit.”

  If you took both hands to it, she thought. “Yes, sir.” She unlocked the door, and held it open for them to pass her. Mr. Schlegel was fumbling for the light switch—she reached out and pressed it for him. The room sprang out in the yellow light, everything in place, not even a newspaper on the red tablecloth. Tidy, she thought, a little surprised. Most people laid things about, dropped them, spoiling the room. As she turned to go she looked in their faces for the first time—the husband tall, slender, with dark hair and bright dark eyes. Young, startlingly young; smiling. His wife had unpinned her hat; she was running the pin through folds of thick shining hair to loosen it. She was not older than her husband but she had an older look, a faint shadow lying over round cheeks and dimples. Ignoring the maid, she waited for her to go. She moved as the door shut.

  A little time later their bell rang. She found Mr. Schlegel with a foot on the fender peering down at the grate.

  “Will this fire light?” he said.

  The things they asked! hadn’t he a match? “Certainly, sir. I’ll light it for you at once.” The night was warm, no need, she thought, vexed, for them to have a fire.

  Kneeling, to see better the wood and paper, she watched Mr. Schlegel cross the room to the bedroom. He pulled the door behind him but the catch, she knew its tricks but visitors did not, slipped, leaving the door ajar. There was a silence. Then the wife’s voice :

  “Must I?” Too ordinary a phrase for the way it sounded. Affected, thought the kneeling woman. They’re all alike. She felt a resentment against rich leisured women that centred itself in the muscles of her knees. They ached and she rubbed them angrily through her dress.

  Mr. Schlegel let down the blind in the other room. “Did you put this up, dear?” he said.

  “Henry!”

  “You remember what we agreed, darling.”

  There was silence again, then a weak sound as though he had touched her.

  Her voice had changed. “Oh very well.”

  Light quick steps crossed the bedroom and the sitting-room. They stopped so close to the girl bent over the fire that she heard silk rustle itself into silence. Unexpectedly Mrs. Schlegel knelt beside her. “Has the wood caught?”

  “It’s young wood, I think, madam.”

  Flowers of smoke rose through the coals. Mrs. Schlegel poked with her fingers at the flattened paper. “Don’t soil yourself, madam.”

  “Oh, I shan’t do that,” Mrs. Schlegel said, laughing. She jumped up—no twinges in her knees—and walked to the window. Parting the dark curtains she looked into the farther darkness.

  “What’s through here?”

  “What, madam?”

  “Where am I looking?”

  “Over the gardens, madam.”

  “Do they belong to the hotel?” Mrs. Schlegel asked, trying to see, her hand on the curtain.

  “No, madam. You come into them from the street at the side. They say a great many Jews walk there.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” Mrs. Schlegel said lightly. She drew back. “I can’t see anything but the reflection of the room. Isn’t it a pity!”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Are there trees?”

  “Yes. And grass. Trees and grass. I don’t think you would care for it, madam.” She wouldn’t go there herself, because of being spied on from the hotel.

  “Well.” Mrs. Schlegel sighed : she let the curtain fall across the window. It swung and settled. “The fire’s going nicely now.”

  “I think it will be all right, madam.” She stooped to it again. Now if I put more coal on, she thought. The charred sticks glowed in the centre.

  When she straightened herself Mrs. Schlegel was standing so near that their shoulders touched. Vexed, because she was being hindered, she gathered up brush, shovel, and duster, and moved to go.

  “Ah, wait,” Mrs. Schlegel said.

  She waited, indifferently. Mrs. Schlegel felt in her pocket and brought out two half-crowns. “This is all I have, I’m afraid.” She pressed them in the other woman’s free hand with an eager quickness.

  “Thank you, madam.” Surprised, she took the coins and was trying to open the door with them in her hand when Mrs. Schlegel came past her and opened it.

  “Goodnight,” she said, smiling.

  She hurried along the corridor, feeling the money in her hand. It was late now and the lights had been turned out on the staircase. She banged into the service room : the German boy was waiting for her; he took her shovel and the other things from her and took her in his arms. She returned his kisses with real warmth—a thought brushed her mind that brought Mrs. Schlegel into it. She forgot the resentment she had been feeling. There was not much to choose between kisses, whether Ernst did it to her or Mr. Schlegel kissed his young wife. She felt suddenly friendly towards the other woman.

  “I think always how I can be to you,” Ernst said tragically. He meant that he wanted her to live with him. She smiled into his arm.

  At one o’clock the following day the door of the suite had to be opened. No answer to loud repeated knocks had come from those inside. The door, which had been bolted, gaped from burst hinges. Ernst went in first and looked in the sitting-room. It was empty. The manager had gone into the bedroom. He came out in a moment and spoke to the three women. “Clear off, all of you.” Then he said angrily to Ernst. “You. Come in here and help me.”

  Ernst obeyed him. They bent over the Schlegels, who were dead, and covered them with the sheet, after composing Mrs. SchlegePs dress.

  Ernst had brought a letter in from the sitting-room. In Mr. Schlegel’s neat writing it gave the address of a brother with instructions for reaching him, and another address—Mrs. Schlegel’s solicitor. Nothing but that, except a quite perfunctory regret for giving trouble.

  When Ernst told her about Mrs. Schlegel’s mouth, and her clenched hand, she began to cry. She cried into her apron behind the service room door and went with reddened eyes when she was summoned. The housekeeper came upstairs and spoke to her sharply. On no account must other guests be upset.

  She could not say why she was crying. Not for Mrs. Schlegel, who had been forced to leave with her the last words anyone would ever hear her speak. No knowing what she had said when there was only her husband to hear her. No—it was something else that made her cry. It had to do with herself and made her frightened and giddy. She clutched the handles of doors and once, when she was laying the fire in another room, she thought she was going to faint. Her youth—was it?—had been given a severe shock. She would never feel safe now.

  So she thought. At night Ernst told her to shut herself and the other maid in the service room while the Schlegels were taken away, down the service stairs, to the police van. The brother had never come.

  She went out afterwards and waited for Ernst to come back. They stood together on the back stairs, flattened against the wall. She roused herself to ask : “Was her hair fair or dark?”

  “Whose?”

  “Mrs. Schlegel’s, of course, stupid.”

  “I do not know,” Ernst said wearily.

  “I can’t just remember,” she said with a feeling of anger and dissatisfaction. “It’s vexing. I ought to—seeing I saw her touch it.”

  Afterwards Ernst asked her again, for the hundredth time, to come with him. He had now taken his café—it was in Greek Street. If she came with him it would be ein Stück von Himmel: in any case he was leaving the hotel. He repeated this over and over, until the foolish foreign phrase began to ring in her ears like a churchyard bell. She would be alone with the Schlegels. “A café’ll be downright hard work,” she grumbled. There were ways, made holy by use, of evading it in the hotel, but foreigners are cruel to work. She felt in her bones that there would be no evading Ernst.

  “Here you have also hard work,” Ernst said eagerly.

  Her mind was made up, but she would keep him waiting a little. Not to seem anxious.

  “What’s it like, your café? I mean—where would
we sleep? “

  “Behind the kitchen is two rooms_____—”

  “Dark, I daresay.”

  One of them had no window, Ernst said humbly. Light entered it through a skylight, but—his voice grew husky—there was nothing to be ashamed of in the other room. It could be their bedroom.

  She squeezed his arm. “Right ho,” she said kindly.

  Ernst went crimson. “Right ho, my dearest,” he said.

  After all—she sighed—he had been kind. He worked her to death, of course (but she had expected it), getting her out of bed at cockcrow and on her feet until close on midnight. He worked himself harder. They bought second-hand furniture in Wardour Street, ugly strong chairs and tables, and a bedstead with green hangings. A good easy bed and she would have spent a great deal more time in it if Ernst—but the night when he stayed five hours with her was a miracle. She hated the very smell of coffee first thing; and to please her he made tea and fetched it to her in bed. His mind was already on the day’s work. “What time is it? ”(but she knew—summer or winter, he had her up at six). Once when she was furious at being wakened he simply turned and left her. She heard him talking German to the other man and her fury passed off in a fit of sobbing. She felt cruelly abandoned.

  Of course she wore a ring and called herself Mrs. Groener. Every month the same sum of money went to the real Mrs. Groener in Hamburg. After one outburst—why, she shouted, must she slave to earn money for the other woman?—she had to give in, as she gave in to the incessant work and the long hours. There was an extraordinary passion in Ernst—she felt it ready to spring on her when she crossed him. She had to give way.