Thunder on the Left (1925)/Chapter 4
GEORGE was in a fidget, in the little sitting room that opened off the hall. It was just under the stairs and when any one went up or down he could hear the feet and couldn't help pausing to identify them by the sound. It was astonishing how many footsteps passed along those stairs: and if they ceased for a while it was no better, for he found himself subconsciously waiting for the next and wondering whose they would be. He had laid out his maps and papers and the portable typewriter, all ready to begin work: the draft of his booklet on Summer Tranquillity (for the Eastern Railroad) would soon be due.
His mind was too agitated to compose, but he began clattering a little on the machine, at random, just to give the impression that he was working. Why should any one invent a 'noiseless' typewriter, he wondered? The charm of a typewriter was that it did make a noise, a noise that shut out the racket other people were making. What a senseless idea, to imagine that he could really get some work done here, buried in the country. He could not concentrate because there was nothing to concentrate from. There was only the huge vacancy of golden summer, droning pine trees, yawning beaches, the barren pagan earth under a crypt of air. The world shimmered like a pale jewel with a flame of uneasiness at its core. The place to write about Summer Tranquillity would have been that hot secret little office of his in town, where the one window opened like a furnace door into a white blaze of sunshine, where perspiration dripped from his nose on the typewriter keys, but where he had the supreme sensation of intangible solitude.
What on earth were they walking about for, upstairs? Was she showing the man the whole house? He looked distractedly across the garden. The listless beaming of the summer noon lay drowsy upon the lawn, filling him with an appalling sense of his absurd futility. As Phyllis had so often said, he was neither business man nor artist. What the devil was he working for, what goal was there, what fine flamboyant achievement was possible? He had a feeling of being alone against the world, a poor human clown wrestling with grotesque obsessions; and no longer really young.
He leaned toward the glass-paned bookcase, tilting his head anxiously to see the reflection of the top . . . certainly it was receding in a V above each temple—but that made the forehead seem higher. He had always believed that, among advertising men, he looked rather more intellectual . . . he turned again to the window, a little ashamed of his agitations. Beyond the glass veranda he caught the stolid gaze of the cook at the pantry window. He averted his head quickly: ridiculous that you can't do anything without catching someone's eye. All this was just insanity. He took up the page he was working on and rolled it into the typewriter. Page 38 . . . like himself, thirty-eight, and forty only two pages away. I suppose that at forty a man feels just as young as ever, but . . . it's absurd to feel as young as I do, at thirty-eight. . . . Well, I must keep my mind clear (he thought, rather pathetically)—it's the only capital we have.
Phyllis's footsteps were coming downstairs. He was always worried when he heard them like that: slow and light, pausing every few treads. That meant she was thinking about something, and in a minute there would be a new problem for him to consider. When he heard them like that he usually rushed into the hall, demanding hotly, "Well, what is it now?"
"What is what?"
"You know I can't work when you come downstairs like that.'
"Like what?"
"As though you were worrying."
"Well, why didn't you take a house where I could slide down the banisters?"
This time the feet came down so slowly he felt sure she wanted him to rush out. The rushing out always put him in the wrong. Well, he just wouldn't. He would stay where he was, that would show her he was indignant. He took out page 38, put in a blank sheet and rattled the keys vigorously. But he felt cheated of a sensation. He always enjoyed bursting out, through the door at the foot of the stairs, and catching her transfixed on the landing, with the big windows behind her—half frightened, half angry. He would not have told her so, but it was partly because she was so pretty there: the outline of her comely defiant head against the light, her smooth arm emerging from the dainty sleeve that caught and held a pearly brightness. How lovely she is, he thought; it's gruesome for her to be so pretty and talk such nonsense . . . she needs someone to pump her full of indigestible compliments, that would silence her
She was at the telephone. He could hear her talking to the grocer. "I'm sorry, Mr. Cotswold, is it too late to catch the driver? I've got some unexpected guests . . ."
He hastened into the hall. "Don't forget the sardines," he shouted.
She looked at him calmly with the instrument at her mouth. She seemed surprisingly tranquil.
"Never mind, then, thank you," she said to Mr. Cotswold, in the particularly cordial and gracious voice which (George felt) was meant to emphasize the coolness with which she would now speak to him.
"If you want sardines you'll have to go down and get them yourself. The driver's left."
She went into the sitting room and automatically pulled the blind halfway down. He followed her and raised it to the top of the window again. She sat on the couch, and he was surprised to see a dangerous merriment in her face.
"I suppose you think you can shut yourself in here and just let the house run itself," she said. "Like a sardine."
"I have to do my work, don't I?"
She looked at the sheet in the typewriter, on which was written wildly Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of this absurd family. But she did not comment on it, and George felt that this was one of her moments of genius. He wondered, in alarm, what she was going to do with him next. He felt helpless as only a husband can.
"Well, anyhow, they pack sardines in oil, not in vinegar," he said angrily. This sounded so silly it made him angrier still. He closed the door and cried in a fierce undertone, "What's the idea, this man Martin? Who is he? Is he staying for lunch?"
"He's an artist. I thought you liked artists."
"Yes, but we don't have to fill the house with 'em."
"I've put him in the spare room."
"In the spare room! What about Miss Clyde?"
"I haven't the faintest idea. He seemed to expect it, somehow. He's a very irresistible person."
"I guess I can resist him. If we've got to have him in the house we can put him in here, on the couch."
"It's too late. He's in the spare room now, washing his hands.—You needn't have been so rude when I brought him in."
"I didn't like his looks," George mumbled.
This wasn't true. George had liked his looks, but he had resented (as must every man burdened with many perplexities) that gay and careless air. He looks as if he didn't have a thing on earth to worry about, George thought. And he comes floating in here, with casual ease, among the thousand interlocking tensions of George's difficulties, to gaze with untroubled eye on his host's restless alertness. Or was this some sort of joke that Phyllis was putting over on him?
"I'm going to put the two older children on the sleeping porch, so Ben and Ruth can have their room. Miss Clyde will have to go on this couch."
"How about me?"
"Well, we can sleep together I suppose. It won't kill us, for a few nights."
Not if I know it, George thought. That old walnut bedstead, with the deep valley in the middle, so that we both keep rolling against one another. Unless you clutch the post and lie on a slope all night. Besides, Phyl is so changeable in temperature. When she goes to bed she's chilly and wants to kindle her feet against you. Then by and by she gets warmed up and it's like sleeping with a hot bottle five feet long. On a night in July, too. Whenever I get comfortable, she wants to turn over on the other side; that brings us face to face. Impossible! How unexpected life is. If any one had told me, twelve years ago, that it would be so irritating to sleep in the same bed with a pretty woman, I wouldn't have believed it. Phyl doesn't like it either, yet she was annoyed by that booklet I wrote for the Edwards Furniture Company on The Joys of the Separate Bed. I'll sleep on the window seat in the upstairs hall. No: that won't do, if Miss Clyde is in the den she'll have to be coming upstairs to the bathroom and Phyl won't like me spread out there in public. It's funny: sleeping is the most harmless thing people ever do, why are they so furtive about it?
But George rather liked the idea of Miss Clyde on his couch. It seemed, somehow, to add piquancy to a dull situation. To conceal this private notion, he argued against it.
"Miss Clyde will be a long way from the bathroom," he said.
"There's no other place to put her. You're always talking about artists, their fine easy ways, I guess she won't mind if someone sees her in a wrapper."
She'd look charming in a wrapper, George thought. The queer little boyish thing! I can just imagine her. It would be blue, a kind of filmy blue crêpe. Coming up the stairs the morning sunlight would catch her, through those big windows: her small curves delicately outlined in a haze of soft colour, her hair tousled, a flash of white ankle as she reached the top step. He would sit up on the window seat, as though just drowsily awakened. Oh . . . good-morning! Good-morning. What a picture you would make. Silhouette Before Breakfast. Life is full of so many heavenly pictures. . . . The bay window above the garden would be calm and airy in the before-breakfast freshness of July; the house just beginning that dreamy stir that precedes the affairs of day. She would come across to him . . . he had hardly dared admit, even to himself, how far they had gone in imagination. . . .
"I'm damned if I want strange women careering all over the house in their wrappers," he said with well-simulated peevishness.
"Bosh!" exclaimed Phyllis. "There's nothing you'd like better. Unless without their wrappers."
"What's the use of being vulgar?" he said. He thought: How gorgeous Phyllis is. You can't fool her.
Poor old George, thought Phyllis. I believe he imagines that he's attractive to women. But I won't say that to him, he's in such a stew already.
"Miss Clyde is one of the most truly refined people I ever met."
This didn't quite succeed. Phyllis was always annoyed when George attempted to bunco her. He was so transparent.
"I believe you imagine you're attractive to women," she said.
"Hell," he said, "I don't even take time to think about it."
"If that were true, you'd be much more so."
If I'd finished this cursed booklet, he thought, I'd take a little time off and be attractive to women, just to surprise her. Why, damnation, I could even make Phyl fall in love with me if it was worth taking the trouble. The way to please women is to show them that you know they're not happy. And that their special kind of unhappiness is a particularly subtle and lonely one, but curable by sympathy. But it's better not to think about these things at all. It's queer to think of all the people in the world, and how troubled they are when they look each other straight in the eyes. If I knew why that is, I'd know everything. The devil of it is, women have begun to think. That's why everything is so uneasy. Why even Phyllis has begun to think. I mustn't let her, because she's too fond of being comfortable. It'll only upset her. She must be kept amused. That's the beauty of money, it's a substitute for thinking. It can surround you with delightful distractions. It's like women, too: it comes to the fellows who know how to entertain it. I must learn how to be attractive to money.
"Certainly, Phyl, no one can say that you're attractive to women. You're too pretty." He leaned over and kissed the end of her nose. There, perhaps that would calm her, he might still be able to do half an hour's writing before the children came back from the beach. That was the only solution. Simplify, simplify life by burying yourself in some work of imagination—such as the Eastern Railway booklet. He smiled bitterly. Those were the only happy people, the artists—immersed in dreams like frogs in a pond, only their eyes bulging just above the surface. But how are you going to attain that blissful absorption? Dominate the ragings of biology by writing railroad folders? The whole universe turns contrary, he thought, to the one who wants to create. Time is against him, carnal distraction, the natural indolence of man. Yes, even God is against him: God, Who invented everything and is jealous of other creators. If Phyllis hadn't been there, he would have fallen on his knees by the couch and told God what he thought of Him.
They heard someone coming downstairs. Phyllis rose.
"Come in, Mr. Martin! See the nice little den where George does his work."