Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky Page 2

  Particularly did he feel he was betraying Ella. She so deserved his respect, but all his homage went to another. Poor Ella. He watched her as she moved about merrily (in the cap which became her so), and gave back chaff for chaff in the crowded Christmassy bar. She had only one sin: she was without beauty. But she had all the heartbreaking desires, and you could see them there, in her charming face, as she laughingly and maternally answered – a creature eternally maternal, eternally fruitless – the insincere compliments of the men.

  Ella uses her intelligence more than most, but she is ‘for ever seeking little reassurances and excuses for optimism’. As a means of overcoming her sorrowful intuitions she is determined to see the best in everyone – even her horrifying suitor, Mr. Ernest Eccles. It is her fate to have one of the most dreadful admirers in English literature. As a besieging lover with all the propaganda of youth, the fifty-two-year-old Mr. Eccles is a sinister as well as an idiotic man. He presents himself as a romantic figure but appears in Ella’s eyes merely as an old man with ‘something put by’ which could buy her comfort and stability in life.

  Money seems more likely than love to change Ella’s life, and she is pressured by her circumstances to think of men as Jenny has regarded them – ‘appendages, curiously willing providers, attendants, flatterers of an indolent mood, footers of bills and payers of “bus fares”’. She is horrified to find herself calculating that if she inherits money from the death of her stepfather – a bully who carries overtones of Bernard Hamilton – she will evade marriage to Mr. Eccles, which would be a living death. ‘I can’t stand cruelty,’ says Jenny. But everyone is destined to be cruel to someone in these novels: Jenny irresponsibly torments Bob; Bob unwittingly wounds Ella; Ella hurts Mr. Eccles, who in turn ill-treats her whenever he gets the chance.

  The fact that all this should not depress the reader is a tribute to the power of Patrick Hamilton’s storytelling and the exhilaration of his humour. In the earlier pages there are signs of immaturity – some passages of overdeliberation, moments of facetiousness, and an anxious reliance on what J. B. Priestley called Komic Kapitals. But as the book progresses, wonderfully comic scenes proliferate. Mr. Eccles, in particular, is a character of Dickensian proportions – Mr. Eccles who lives so intensely through his new hat that ‘it cost him sharp torture even to put it on his head, where he could not see it’, who when looking for his visiting card is ‘not unlike a parrot diving into its feathers’, who creates a ‘private cloakroom for his innumerable accessories whenever he sits down’, who polishes his dignity on a lurching bus ‘by peering and looking back in a critical way out of the window, rather as though London was being partially managed by him, and he had to see that the buildings were in their right places’. But though Mr. Eccles hardly ever fails to utter the most subtle drivel, he is no one-dimensional character. Touchy, crippled by shyness, desperately lonely and absurd, he too has his dreams of redemption. We feel compassion for anyone who meets him, but are also made to feel compassion for the man himself. He is used to give retrospective detachment to The Midnight Bell, for his wooing of Ella is another version of Bob’s pursuit of Jenny, and it provokes a similar reaction: ‘We all have to take these risks.’

  Patrick Hamilton treats the pub as a theatre, describing its exits and entrances, laying down its décor and stage directions (‘On your right was the bar itself, in all its bottly glitter, and on your left was a row of tables . . .’), taking us ‘behind-scenes just before the show’ and up to the attic rooms where Bob and Ella pass their ‘endless procession of solitary nights after senseless working days’. Performing against the lurid illumination of the saloon bar, his cast of ordinary habitués is magnified into a troupe of crazed misfits, and the conventions of English life reveal themselves as dramatically foolish.

  Patrick Hamilton is an expert guide to English social distinctions, with all their snobbish mimicry and fortified non-communication. He describes wonderfully well how the hyphenated upper classes, yelling at their dogs, splashing in their baths like captured seals, and writing their aloof letters in the third person (like broadcasters recounting an athletic event), remain so mysterious to the lesser breeds. Taking us out of the pub into the swarming streets of London, he gives us a social map of this malignant city as it was in the harsh commercial era of the 1920s and the early 1930s. His Marxism became a method of distinguishing between the avoidable and the unavoidable suffering of people, and, in so far as literature can change social conditions, such a vivid facsimile in fiction may have helped to do so. Since it has been out of print for thirty years, this is a good opportunity to recommend it to a new generation of readers. While the narrative drives you forward, you will absorb the authentic atmosphere of what it was like to live in England between the two world wars.

  Michael Holroyd, London 1986

  THE MIDNIGHT BELL

  BOB

  CHAPTER I

  SLEEPING, JUST BEFORE five, on a dark October’s afternoon, he had a singularly vivid and audible dream. He dreamed that he was on a ship, which was bound upon some far, lovely, and momentous voyage, but which had left the coast less than an hour ago. The coast, implicitly and strangely, was that of Spain. He was leaning over the side and peacefully savouring the phase of the journey – a phase which he knew well. It was that curiously dreamlike and uninspiring phase in which the familiarity and proximity of the coast yet steals all venturesomeness from the undertaking, and in which the climax of departure is dying down, to the level tune of winds and waves and motion, into the throbbing humdrum of voyage. That throbbing would continue for weeks and weeks. . . . A strong wind was blowing, buffeting his ears, roaring over the green waves, and rendering utterly silent and unreal the land he had just left. He was extraordinarily cold, and a trifle sick. But he did not want to move – indeed he could not move. He was lulled by the mighty swish of the water beneath him, as it went seething out into the wake, and he could not, under any circumstances, move. . . .

  He awoke, with jarring abruptness, into the obliterating darkness of his own room. The swishing was his own breath, and the disinclination to move traceable to his snuggled, though cold and stiff position, on the bed. His dream sickness was a waking sickness. The thundering of the wind in his dream was the passing of a lorry in the Euston Road outside.

  The burden of cold and ever-recurring existence weighed down his spirit. Here he was again.

  He took stock of his miserable predicament. He was in his little hovel of a room – on his bed. He was not in bed, though. Save for his coat and shoes he was fully dressed, and he was protected from the cold by his rough quilt alone. He apprehended that his clothes were wrinkled and frowsy from his heavy recumbence. . . .

  It was pitch dark – but it was not yet five o’clock. His alarm would have gone, if it had been. He need not yet stir. There were no sounds of life in the house below.

  Why had he slept? He remembered coming up here, a happy man, at half-past three. It had been bright daylight then. Now the dark was uncanny.

  He turned over with a sigh and a fresh spasm of sickness swept over him. He waited motionlessly and submissively until it passed. Then he cursed himself softly and vindictively. He faced facts. He had got drunk at lunch again.

  At last he sprang from bed and lit the gas.

  He poured out all the water from his jug into his basin, and plunged in his head, holding his breath and keeping down. He gasped into his towel and rubbed madly.

  Braced by the friction he returned to normal and all but unrepentant humanity again. Horror fled. For a moment he had been a racked soul contemplating itself in a pitch-dark and irrevocable Universe. Now he was reinstated as the waiter of ‘The Midnight Bell’ dressing in his room a quarter of an hour before opening time.

  Nevertheless, the gas-lit walls and objects around him were heavy with his own depression – the depression of one who awakes from the excess in the late afternoon. Only at dawn should a man awake from excess – at dawn agleam with red and sorrowful res
olve. The late, dark afternoon, with an evening’s toil ahead, affords no such palliation.

  In the house below – ‘The Midnight Bell’ – the silence was creepy. Creepy in a perfectly literal sense – the silence of things creeping. It was the silence of malignant things lurking in passages, and softly creeping up a little, and lurking again. . . .

  There came, however, the welcome and dispelling sound of light women’s footsteps on the bare wooden stairs: and a humming, buoyant body swept past his door, and slammed itself into the room adjoining his.

  That was Ella – his pert companion in toil – the barmaid of ‘The Midnight Bell.’

  She always hummed when she passed his door. In some respects, he reflected, she was a very self-conscious girl. He believed also that the brusque bumpings, the lively jug-and-basin sounds, which now came through the wall, were similarly subtly challenging and alluding to himself. A rather mystifying creature, of whom he knew, really, nothing – for all their chaff and friendliness. Her afternoon had been spent in goodness. She had been over to see her sick ‘Auntie’ (as she so naïvely and characteristically called her) at Clapham.

  By and by she called out to him, through the wall, chanting his name in two distinct syllables.

  ‘Bo – ob!’

  ‘Ullo!’

  ‘What’s the time, Bob?’

  ‘Five To!’

  Ella’s retort was a mumble and a bump.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nuth – thing!’

  Silence.

  They had five more minutes. They did not speak again. The hush in the house beneath them once more asserted itself. It was the hush of behind-scenes just before the show. These two, high up here, quietly preparing and making themselves decent, were aware of the part they played, and of their shared distinction from the besieging many.

  He was now all but ready. He put on his white coat, and fixed his white apron. He then went over to his mirror, in front of which he crouched eagerly to brush his hair – a soothing and reviving operation in itself.

  His own reflection gave little dissatisfaction. The clear, clean skin; the clear, clean teeth; the firm clean-shaven features; the nous, efficiency, and yet frankness of his face; the dark, well-kept hair; the dark brown eyes, set rather far back – all these collectively were as bracing to a remorseful spirit as you could wish. He was, however, not an Englishman. His American and Irish parentage gleamed from him – most particularly his American. His father had been (and it was his proudest boast) an American ‘Cop.’ But he had never seen his father, and his mother had died in London when he was sixteen and at sea. He had spent all his early life at sea, and England was the country of his adoption. He spoke with a Cockney accent. He was now twenty-five, but looked any age between twenty and thirty. He was an acquisition to ‘The Midnight Bell,’ and a favourite everywhere.

  As he brushed his hair, Ella came out and knocked at his door. Without leaving the mirror he cried ‘Come in,’ and she entered. She was a dark, plain girl, with shingled hair and a trim figure. She was clean, practical, virtuous, and not without admirers. The slightly mocking and non-committal demeanour which she employed as her professional manner towards those who leered and laughed at her across the bar was carried into ordinary life, and was never so emphasized as when she was in the presence of Bob, whom she loved. She had loved him ever since meeting him, five months ago, when he had first come to ‘The Midnight Bell.’ He had twice taken her out to tea, and once to the pictures. She had nerved herself for a not inconceivable romance. There, however, the thing had ended. She was, she found, incapable of inspiring his tenderness. Where another might have pined and sickened at this, she, in the efficiency and resource of her healthy character, had automatically mastered and diverted her emotions, and now, without languor or jealousy, bore him nothing but good will. She was about twenty-seven. She stood looking at him, in the doorway.

  ‘Well, “Bob,”’ she said, disparagingly.

  She always put her ‘Bob’ in inverted commas, as though he were not really Bob at all, and his assumption of being so, along with all his other pretensions, were pure impostures which she had tumbled to a long while ago. This was the convention of their flirtation, and he replied in the same spirit.

  ‘Well, “Ella,”’ he said, and did not look up from the mirror.

  ‘Brushing his precious “hair,”’ said Ella. . . . His having hair was impudence, in itself.

  ‘How’s Clapham?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh. All right. What you been doing all the afternoon?’

  ‘Me? . . . Stayed in.’

  ‘Sleeping – I bet.’

  ‘Oh well. . . .’

  ‘And I should think so too,’ said Ella, ‘after all them drinks.’

  ‘What drinks?’ asked Bob.

  But Ella ignored this.

  ‘If this was my place,’ she said, ‘I’d’ve sent you out of the bar.’

  ‘I wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘Well, you weren’t far. I thought you said you was giving up drink, Bob?’

  ‘Well, I can’t help it, if they give ’em to me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ella, with profound sarcasm. ‘The Penalties of Popularity, I suppose.’

  He had left his hair and was rubbing his shoes with a rag.

  ‘If they gave me tips instead,’ he said. ‘It’d be talking. . . .’

  There was a pause. She looked at him ironically, and around the room.

  ‘You and your old John O’ London’s Weekly,’ she said. . . .

  This was referring to a bundle of eleven or twelve numbers of this periodical, which lay on the little wicker table by his bed.

  ‘What’s wrong with my John O’ London’s Weekly?’

  ‘Nothing, Bob. Glad to know you’ve got such littery tastes.’

  He said nothing. The secret, jealously guarded inner craving, which was responsible for those papers lying there, was not a thing he could elucidate to Ella.

  She, on the other hand, was intrigued by, and a little glad of, his reticence in this connection – giving him full credit for experience in realms she secretly revered. She became more serious.

  ‘You’re a great Reader, ain’t you, Bob?’ she said, and picked up a little green volume that also lay on the table.

  ‘My word!’ she said. ‘The History of the Decline an’ Fall of the Roman Empire – by Edward Gibbon. Do you wade all through this, Bob?’

  Bob became a little nervous.

  ‘That’s only Volume One. They’re seven in all. I’m getting ’em one by one.’

  ‘My word!’ said Ella, scanning the pages. ‘What did he want to write all that for, Bob?’

  This was a stupid query, and almost impossible to answer at random. His reply, however, revealed his innate courtesy.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, Ella,’ he said, and rubbed his shoes.

  ‘Well, I’ll Decline and Fall downstairs,’ said Ella, with sudden decision. ‘So long, Bob.’

  ‘So long, Ella.’

  She went out, and he heard her footsteps receding down the hollow wooden stairs. He looked at himself once more in the glass, turned off the gas, and followed her.

  CHAPTER II

  THOSE ENTERING THE Saloon Bar of ‘The Midnight Bell’ from the street came through a large door with a fancifully frosted glass pane, a handle like a dumb-bell, a brass inscription ‘Saloon Bar and Lounge,’ and a brass adjuration to Push. Anyone temperamentally so wilful, careless, or incredulous as to ignore this friendly admonition was instantly snubbed, for this door actually would only succumb to Pushing. Nevertheless hundreds of temperamental people nightly argued with this door and got the worst of it.

  Given proper treatment, however, it swung back in the most accomplished way, and announced you to the Saloon Bar with a welcoming creak. The Saloon Bar was narrow and about thirty feet in length. On your right was the bar itself, in all its bottly glitter, and on your left was a row of tables set against a comfortable and continuous leather seat which went the wh
ole length of the bar. At the far end the Saloon Bar opened out into the Saloon Lounge. This was a large, square room, filled with a dozen or so small, round, copper-covered tables. Around each table were three or four white wicker armchairs, and on each table there lay a large stone ash-tray supplied by a Whisky firm. The walls were lined with a series of prints depicting moustached cavalrymen in a variety of brilliant uniforms; there was a fireplace with a well-provided fire; the floor was of chessboard oil-cloth, broken by an occasional mat, and the whole atmosphere was spotless, tidy, bright, and a little chilly. This was no scene for the brawler, but rather for the principled and restrained drinker, with his wife. In here and in the Saloon Bar ‘The Midnight Bell’ did most of its business – the two other bars (the Public and the Private) being dreary, seatless, bareboarded structures wherein drunkenness was dispensed in coarser tumblers and at a cheaper rate to a mostly collarless and frankly downtrodden stratum of society. The Public Bar could nevertheless be glimpsed by a customer in the Saloon Bar, and as the evening wore on it provided the latter with an acoustic background of deep mumbling and excited talk without which its whole atmosphere would have been lost – without which, indeed, the nightly drama of the Saloon Bar would have been rather like a cinematograph drama without music. . . .

  When Bob came down to this, Ella was already at her post, in casual conversation with Freda, her companion barmaid, who had only arrived at ‘The Midnight Bell’ a few weeks ago, who did not sleep in, and with whom Bob had but the lightest acquaintanceship. The Governor, too, was in evidence; and so was the Governor’s Wife. And the Governor’s Wife’s Sister was somewhere about.