The Philosopher got up and saw the world around him with slow delight and his nostrils caught the delicate scent of briar. He remembered how, on coming back to it after his first long absence from home, he had thought it like the sun-bleached and newly-laundered scent of a countrywoman’s linen. Or like the fresh pinafores of little girls at school when he was a boy. That clean freshness and living purity.
One high rose, wide open, was almost apart from the body of the bush below, as a girl’s face in rapt wonder remains memorable in itself. It was a vivid scarlet.
Scarlet …
There was no scarlet about that first woman of the streets. There was darkness and there was night; the stillness of quiet dark streets and his own rushing feet.
‘Of the streets.’ How profoundly apt!
They had been round, two other young mechanics and himself, at Sammy Dose’s place. Sammy, in his late thirties, had a big bed-sitting-room all to himself. Some said that Dose was a contraction of his surname Douglas, and others lightheartedly suggested that Sammy had got ‘a dose’. He had a powerful singing voice and sometimes, quite suddenly, would let it out in an opera song that lent itself to shattering the roof and putting this gimcrack world on its back for a fair distance round. The skin under his jaw would inflate and quiver like a taut dewlap as his mouth opened to its utmost capacity. As unexpectedly as he began, he stopped. Then he would thump his chest, ‘Ha, that’s better!’ and proceed to tell the lads what he thought would do the world and them a power of good. He was ribald at times to an extreme degree, but for the most part with a rough core of sense, and nearly always with an elbowing earnestness that could not be bothered with ideal and nonsensical argument. He thought the constitution of society so amazing a piece of hypocrisy, that, so help his god, it was worth enduring as a sheer piece of wonder, a fantastic circus-spectacle.
To-night his parting oracle had been, ‘Free love, free beer, keep your mind and your bowels open, and no socialism.’ As the three lads, after leaving his place, stood at the corner of the street before parting, it was perhaps symptomatic of the state of their mind at this time that what struck them as particularly rich and ironic in the oracle, what they repeated as they laughed, were the words, ‘and no socialism’.
As young Tom was going homeward alone, his fresh country mind was so amused by the experience of the evening – for it had the wonder of being entirely outside of him – that he quite forgot where he was, and when a woman spoke to him, he stopped, as he would have done on the Glen road at home, and said, ‘What’s that?’ instantly anxious to help.
She was dressed in dark clothes, the long skirt of the period reaching to the pavement, and took a slow step towards him, with two words of greeting in a quiet, low, but incredibly clear voice.
He could not answer and for a moment could not move. Then he gave a sort of stiff smile, looked away, and walked on.
Presently, glancing over his shoulder, he saw that she was following him. When a fellow did not want to be seen walking with a whore, this was the way to set about it. He had given her the tip.
From the increased beating of his heart, a tremulous weakening went up into his throat. His desire for escape made his feet feel so light that they might have had beating wings. But somehow he dare not run yet. He dare not. He could not run.
He quickened his speed by lengthening his pace lightly and stealthily, but when he half-glanced over his shoulder she was still coming on. They were off the main thoroughfare and it was fairly dark, with no-one about. She was still coming, dark, upright, without any visible motion of legs, without any sound.
Terror touched him out of that advancing figure and the lateness of the night, terror, thickened by the tremulousness in his throat, by a formless pulsing emotion that had knowledge of the body in it, and of its needs. But first he had to escape – to think.
He turned, right, up a side street, quickening his pace at once. He gained on her, and when he came to the next opening, he entered and ran swiftly along it on his toes. It was a short lane and soon he was in a somewhat narrow street but with lamp-posts here and there. Suddenly he stopped running, caught by a swift fear on seeing a figure almost beside him, upright and black, close by the lamp-post in the central shadow of the pool of light. The face turned, a man’s face, pale, watchful, and, as it seemed to Tom, coldly inimical.
But it was not a policeman, and the man neither moved nor spoke.
Tom went on walking so quickly that his legs broke into a run of their own accord, and as he ran his mind told him with a fantastic humour, a wild careless humour, an urgent beating humour, that he had a shilling in his pocket, and that it was enough.
It was as though he had escaped from the woman and also somehow from the sinister man, and now in the half-won freedom already what he had missed was rearing its serpent’s head.
He told it to himself and to the street up which he fled, a dark street of tall silent houses, a gloomy cavern with sickly lamp moons receding under a long slice of night-sky that it is doubtful if he saw at the time, but that he could swear ever afterwards he saw, and saw more clearly as the years went by.
For that particular impression of a city at night he never forgot. It remained as an impression secret to himself, holding in a heedless yet menacing way, in its stone walls and stark roof-ridges, in its blind face that yet could see, a terrifying immanence and power.
Through it he fled, with the turmoil in his breast and the hot shilling in his pocket. Would he stop or would he not? Would he – would he take a chance? As he rounded the corner within a few doors of his lodging, he paused and listened, but could not hear light footsteps because of the beating blood in his ears. Then he thought he heard them, the soft footfalls of a woman’s shoes, small shoes and a woman’s feet. He retreated to the dark entry leading to his tenement stair. There he took his stand, shielded by the pitch darkness behind. If she came – that would settle it. Would it? Or – would it?
Again he could not hear very well because of the surgings the blood made in his virgin body. Keeping his mouth open in order to hear better made it very dry, and his throat dry. When membranes met they stuck like damp gum.
Would it be safe, would he be safe, was it safe here?
Could he not talk to her anyway? But then – but then – if he did no more than talk, would she denounce him, denounce him in a loud voice to the street, say she had been assaulted? Had he not heard of it, over and over, as a well-known trick that she resorted to at the defeated moment? Dannie and Bob in company could bait a whore, using the most vile language to her, but then that was a game of the pack, the time and the place being chosen.
But now – here … his body held itself so taut, listening, that it began to tremble in its own fever. Would the footsteps never come? Were they coming? All at once in a moment of acute listening, so acute that his hearing penetrated to a distance in which everything was supremely still, in which his hearing became a second sight, he realised that the footsteps were not coming, that somewhere they had turned off, that they had ceased and were now lost beyond finding in streets receding into the night.
He stepped out on the pavement, and stood staring towards the corner in a fascination he could not break. His body emptied in a dark, defeated, spiteful way. He was restless and did not know what to do. He was dead tired, yet not tired. Then quite distinctly there were footsteps coming round the corner and at once his body stepped back into the entry. As the footsteps advanced his mouth opened and he thought of nothing. Quietly came the footsteps, but in paces too deliberate and slow, too long, for the small feet of a woman. He flattened himself against the black wall. The figure walked past and instantly, from a murderous evil in the air, he was certain beyond all doubt that it was the sinister figure he had seen under the lamp-post. In ways unknown to the instincts of beasts of prey, that man was on the prowl.
His body went slack and he turned for the stone stairs. A pervasive, unaired, sour smell, that he had got used to and hardly noticed, now came upon him with the pungency of his first visit. He groped for the wall. It was damp with cold sweat. He coughed, clearing his throat, giving the invisible a chance to declare itself. He pushed up against impalpable presence, body or bodies, and came to the first landing, groped around it, found the inner wall and mounted again. On the third landing, he stopped, breathing heavily, and waited until his sight, which could see nothing, cleared. When he found the door unlocked, relief ran over his body in a soft ease. Noiselessly he closed the door and slid the lock home; listened to make sure the old woman had not heard. Her bed creaked and she gave her rheumy cough. Blast it! he said silently, in a taut silent laugh, his mouth open, hearkening. She had warned them more than once against stealing out and unlocking the door secretly for a late comer. He faced right and his fingers ran over wood until they found the knob. He held to the knob until he had closed the door behind him, then listened for his two companions. Heavy regular breathing proclaimed deep sleep. Lifting his right foot to step carefully, he set it down in the middle of an earthenware vessel which, tilting, plunged him forward heavily in a wild stagger that fetched up with a crashing sound across the rail of his bed. The single loose brass knob fell with a tinkling clatter on the floor. The deep sleep of his companions turned into convulsions of choked mirth.
He hissed curses at them, as he gathered himself off the bed and listened. He had always been sensitive to the poor old woman’s feelings, so miserable she looked, with her thin face and bent shoulders and mittened hands that cut another slice off the loaf only when she could no longer ignore their waiting eyes. Bob could look at the loaf until she squirmed, coughed, drew the back of a mitten across her watery nose, and cut. He prided himself upon this power. Now his thick laughter told of the bolster against his mouth.
The first thing Tom saw when he struck the match was the parcel of laundry from home. His father’s handwriting was on the brown paper, but inside, as always with the washing, would be a scrap of a note from his mother. This was her opportunity also for sending a small gift, invariably in money, if only a sixpence and two or three coppers, ostensibly to pay for the posting home of his next parcel of underclothes, but actually something secretly saved, a token from her to him, outside the father’s knowledge.
As the candle flared up, he began opening the parcel, his back to the two scoffing figures in the double bed now asking after his night’s adventure with goodhumoured exaggerated ribaldry.
Pinned on the breast of his shirt, as usual. He withdrew the pin and unrolled the paper. A single shilling slid onto his palm. He looked at it for a moment, then gripped it, hiding it from his own eyes and theirs.
‘Ma Gode!’ came Dannie’s appalled voice from behind. ‘The han’le’s broken aff the pot!’
Tom stared at the floor with their staring faces. The crescent handle lay apart from the upended vessel. After a moment, Bob turned over on his face the more readily to stifle an ungovernable mirth. The bed shook.
Tom turned back to the letter. ‘Take care of yerself now and see you and be eating all ye can …’ But the writing began to waver, his body grew hot, and, throwing himself on the single bed – for this was his week of it – he gave way to a mirth that bit on the bed-clothes and hid him.