When his father’s solicitor recommended a certain Islington boarding-house as an establishment where a man of means could be housed and fed for as little as thirty shillings a week, and a certain firm in Fenchurch Street as another establishment where a man of gifts could earn as much as forty shillings a week, George found out where Islington and Fenchurch Street were, and fell mechanically into the routine suggested for him. That he might have been happier alone, looking after himself, cooking his own meals or sampling alone the cheaper restaurants, hardly occurred to him. Life was become suddenly a horrible dream, and the boarding-house was just a part of it.
However, three years of Islington was enough for him. He pulled himself together ... and moved to Muswell Hill.
There, we have him back at Muswell Hill now, and I have not been long, have I? He has been two years with Mrs. Morrison. I should like to say that he is happy with Mrs. Morrison, but he is not. The terrible thing is that he cannot get hardened to it. He hates Muswell Hill; he hates Traill and the Fossetts and Ransom; he hates Miss Gertie Morrison. The whole vulgar, familiar, shabby, sociable atmosphere of the place he hates. Some day, perhaps, he will pull himself together and move again. There is a boarding-house at Finsbury Park he has heard of....
II
If you had three weeks’ holiday in the year, three whole weeks in which to amuse yourself as you liked, how would you spend it? Algy Traill went to Brighton in August; you should have seen him on the pier. The Fossett Brothers adorned Weymouth, the Naples of England. They did good, if slightly obvious, work on the esplanade in fairly white flannels. This during the day; eight-thirty in the evening found them in the Alexandra Gardens—dressed. It is doubtful if the Weymouth boarding-house would have stood it at dinner, so they went up directly afterwards and changed. Mr. Ransom spent August at Folkestone, where he was understood to have a doubtful wife. She was really his widowed mother. You would never have suspected him of a mother, but there she was in Folkestone, thinking of him always, and only living for the next August. It was she who knitted him the M.C.C. tie; he had noticed the colours in a Piccadilly window.
Miss Gertie went to Cliftonville—not Margate.
And where did George go? The conversation at dinner that evening would have given us a clue; or perhaps it wouldn’t.
“So you’re off to-morrow,” Mrs. Morrison had said. “Well, I’m sure I hope you’ll have a nice time. A little sea air will do you good.”
“Where are you going, Crosby?” asked Ransom, with the air of a man who means to know.
George looked uncomfortable.
“I’m not quite sure,” he said awkwardly. “I’m going a sort of walking-tour, you know; stopping at inns and things. I expect it—er—will depend a bit, you know.”
“Well, if you should happen to stop at Sandringham,” said Algy, “give them all my love, old man, won’t you?”
“Then you won’t have your letters sent on?” asked Mrs. Morrison.
“Oh no, thanks. I don’t suppose I shall have any, anyhow.”
“If you going on a walking-tour,” said Owen-Jones, “why don’t you try the Welsh mountains?”
“I always wonder you don’t run across to Paris,” said the dome-shaped gentleman suddenly. “It only takes——” He knew all the facts, and was prepared to give them, but Algy interrupted him with a knowing whistle.
“Paris, George, aha! Place me among the demoiselles, what ho! I don’t think. Naughty boy!”
Crosby’s first impulse (he had had it before) was to throw his glass of beer at Algy’s face. The impulse died down, and his resolve hardened to write about the Finsbury Park boarding-house at once. He had made that resolution before, too. Then his heart jumped as he remembered that he was going away on the morrow. He forgot Traill and Finsbury Park, and went off into his dreams. The other boarders discussed walking-tours and holiday resorts with animation.
Gertie Morrison was silent. She was often silent when Crosby was there, and always when Crosby’s affairs were being discussed. She knew he hated her, and she hated him for it. I don’t think she knew why he hated her. It was because she lowered his opinion of women.
He had known very few women in his life, and he dreamed dreams about them. They were wonderful creatures, a little higher than the angels, and beauty and mystery and holiness hung over them. Some day he would meet the long-desired one, and (miracle) she would love him, and they would live happy ever afterwards at—— He wondered sometimes whether an angel would live happy ever afterwards at Bedford Park. Bedford Park seemed to strip the mystery and the holiness and the wonder from his dream. And yet he had seen just the silly little house at Bedford Park that would suit them; and even angels, if they come to earth, must live somewhere. She would walk to the gate every morning, and wave him good-bye from under the flowering laburnum—for I need not say that it was always spring in his dream. That was why he had his holiday in April, for it must be spring when he found her, and he would only find her in the country.... Another reason was that in August Miss Morrison went to Cliftonville (not Margate), and so he had a fortnight in Muswell Hill without Miss Morrison.
For it was difficult to believe in the dreams when Gertie Morrison was daily before his eyes. There was a sort of hard prettiness there, which might have been beauty, but where were the mystery and the wonder and the holiness? None of that about the Gertie who was treated so familiarly by the Fossetts and the Traills and their kind, and answered them back so smartly. “You can’t get any change out of Gertie,” Traill often said on these occasions. Almost Crosby wished you could. He would have had her awkward, bewildered, indignant, overcome with shame; it distressed him that she was so lamentably well-equipped for the battle. At first he pitied her, then he hated her. She was betraying her sex. What he really meant was that she was trying to topple over the beautiful image he had built.
I know what you are going to say. What about the girl at the A B C shop who spilt his coffee over his poached egg every day at one thirty-five precisely? Hadn’t she given his image a little push too? I think not. He hardly saw her as a woman at all. She was a worker, like himself; sexless. In the evenings perhaps she became a woman ... wonderful, mysterious, holy ... I don’t know; at any rate he didn’t see her then. But Miss Morrison he saw at home; she was pretty and graceful and feminine; she might have been, not the woman—that would have been presumption on his part—but a woman ... and then she went and called Algy Traill “a silly boy,” and smacked him playfully with a teaspoon! Traill, the cad-about-town, the ogler of women! No wonder the image rocked.
“Let’s sit down,” he said. “I thought you always went to Mar—to Cliftonville for your holiday?” (page 27).
Well, he would be away from the Traills and the Morrisons and the Fossetts for three weeks. It was April, the best month of the year. He was right in saying that he was not quite sure where he was going, but he could have told Mrs. Morrison the direction. He would start down the line with his knapsack and his well-filled kit-bag. By-and-by he would get out—the name of the station might attract him, or the primroses on the banks—leave his bag, and, knapsack on shoulder, follow the road. Sooner or later he would come to a village; he would find an inn that could put him up; on the morrow the landlord could drive in for his bag.... And then three weeks in which to
