THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

  Yet Nature fought on his side, as Nature does, being avid of youth and strength and manhood . . . and from her point of view as well as his, Bob Darley was doubtless right when he told young Tom one day, quite bluntly, that he was wasting his life running after a fantasy.

  It was late one night, and they had been sitting in Darley’s rooms drinking whiskey and soda—still strange to the boy’s palate, and potent, else he had never, on a sudden impulse of confidence, unburdened his soul of its long-held secret, the secret of his Dream Girl. It was partly the unaccustomed drink that unloosed his usually guarded tongue—but partly also a curious, irritated desire to show Darley, who teased him with increasing frequency about his dislike of women, that he did not avoid girls because he disliked them, but because he held, close to his heart, jealously, preciously, the image of a Girl of Girls, a girl before whom all others paled and shrank away, ashamed . . . to his credit be it said, Darley did not, despite his inner amazement, burst, at the finish of the incredible tale into either laughter or jeers. He was, indeed, somewhat thrilled—sceptical, yet not entirely, for he was a young man who read his papers carefully, and knew that ‘this occult stuff’ was not these days to be dismissed with a cackle of laughter, or a superior sniff.

  Sipping his third whisky, he regarded Tom with increased interest. Suppose he was what they’d call a Mejum—anyway it was a shame a fine-looking young chap should waste his time like that—good thing he’d made a friend who knew what was what, could give him a straight talk when it was needed! He clapped Tom on the back, assured him that he was vastly interested—which remark relieved the boy not a little, as he had been seized with a sudden panic directly his rash confession had been made, expecting shrieks of derisive laughter. He winced a trifle, however, when Darley, raising his glass on high, proposed a toast.

  ‘My boy-friend’s Dream Girl! And may she soon—what d’you call it, o’ man—materialise? Here’s her damn good health!’

  Something within Tom curled up and shivered in sharp distaste as the amiable, raucous voice rang out, but mindful of his new-found manhood, he drank obediently, and settled down to listen, as Darley hitched his chair forward and proceeded—as he subsequently put it to a group of interested colleagues at the office—to ‘talk sense into the chap’.

  From his point of view he undoubtedly talked a great deal of sense. He pointed out that whether the Girl were a dream or a reality, by thus shutting himself up in a world of visions and shadows young Tom was doing himself a deal of harm. Preventing himself from becoming a Man—a hard-bitten, experienced, knowledgeable fellar such as Darley himself . . . the lanky boy with the wistful eyes nodded diffidently, half agreeing, yet all the while a faint inner rebellion gnawed at him, murmured ‘no—no, it’s all wrong! He’s all wrong?’ Driven by that vague, undefined instinct to defend something frail, intangible, precious, to hold fast something that was slowly slipping from him, he argued stubbornly, fought for the truth of his Dream, and Darley, despite himself, was secretly amazed at the strength with which the boy stuck to his convictions. She was Real—there was no use Darley saying she wasn’t! She was a real girl, only it was so difficult to explain . . . he sat forward eagerly, his eyes alight, his curly hair ruffled, untidy, a lost faun curled in an easy chair in a shoddy back room in Camden Town, a glass of whisky held incongruously in one long hand.

  ‘You see, Bob, you don’t understand—and it’s so frightfully difficult to explain. She is real—but she’s existing on a different plane to this one! Prob’ly you’re right when you say she’s not real as we call real, I mean flesh and blood like ours, but I’m sure she’s as real as we are, looked at from another way. . . .’ He stumbled, fumbling for the right word, and Darley laughed a little scornfully.

  ‘Real—but not flesh and blood? Give me flesh and blood then, any day!’ He glanced consciously at the row of girls’ photos, splashingly signed, along the dusty mantelpiece, and slanted a knowing eye at the boy. ‘You’re a one, you are, young Tom! A girl you only see in a blob of light—never even seen her whole, you tell me, only her face . . . how d’you know she hasn’t got thick ankles?’

  Tom winced violently. Of a sudden Darley jarred upon him profoundly, terribly, and he wished desperately to be out of the room, away from the talk, the patronising laughter, the raw sting of spirit on his tongue.

  ‘It’s no use talking,’ he said a trifle sullenly. ‘You make everything cheap and nasty, Bob! I tell you, she’s my girl, the only one I want. Somehow she’s managed, because she loves me, to find a chink between our worlds through which we can meet sometimes. . . .’

  ‘Then if she loves you as much as all that, she ought to be able to come through altogether to your world, as you call it!’ said Darley a trifle sardonically. He was getting a little tired of the pertinacity with which the boy stuck to his point. ‘Come, there’s a bargain—ask her to do it. ’S all very well, you know, her expecting you to spend the rest of your life, a good-looking lad like you, sitting moping night after night staring at a damn great witchball like you do!’

  The boy’s eyes widened, amazed, and leaning forward, Darley proceeded to elaborate his impulsive suggestion. He was rather pleased with it. If, he considered, he could pin Tom down to trying some tangible experiment, and it failed, as of course, it must fail, that would obviously do more than anything towards clearing his mind of the illusion that had clouded it for so long.

  ‘You see, it’s a proof, eh? Test her, my boy—tell her you can’t live like this any longer—and, I tell you straight, you won’t be able to! It isn’t natural to go around alone as you do, never take a girl out, or go on the loose a bit—why, you’ve never even kissed a girl yet! Tell her if she don’t do it you’ll go off after another girl who isn’t so darned stand-offish?.’

  It was late when Tom got home, and his entrance to his shabby bedroom not so steady as usual. He kept his eyes sullenly averted from the great silver witchball, which the landlady, greatly admiring, kept poised on a yellow ware saucer, upon the centre table—but the habit of years is not easily broken. He could not keep his gaze away for long, and the first glance he stole he saw that she was there, gazing at him in silence from the bright patch of light reflected from the gas-fire, her grey-green eyes filled with mournful tears, her sweet mouth drooping. . . . She regarded him in silence, as abjectly he rushed into blundering defences, knowing that she knew, trying to justify himself, yet conscious all the while of a miserable sense of guilt.

  Darley’s advice, Darley’s stories of life, women, the Time one might have, clung to him like a bunch of dirty, clinging leeches that would not be shaken off . . . he was vaguely conscious of the row of girls’ photographs above Darley’s mantelpiece, smiling, alluring, challenging, vaguely aware of a blind instinct that made him at once shamed and hotly curious, defiant and shy. He tried blunderingly to explain, but she stopped him half-way with a little wistful cry, utterly piteous—the tears brimmed and ran down her cheeks, and he felt that, unseen, she stretched tiny appealing hands to him for pity.

  ‘Oh, Boy, Boy—so it has come! I have been so afraid! I have tried so hard to make you happy without—that. But now. . . .’

  The imperious male awaking within him answered, more harshly than he knew.

  ‘It’s too late, Girl! I’ve grown up—I’m a man. And Darley says it’s quite right. I can’t go on living my life like this, living on a dream, a shadow—it’s terrible. All the way here I’ve been thinking and thinking. . . .’

  ‘I know. I was with you. I watched your thoughts.’ There was a tiny flavour of contempt, of bitterness in her voice. ‘Thoughts set going by that man—vulgar, coarse—you should never have told him, Boy.’

  ‘Well, I did, so it’s no use regretting it.’ Guilt made him brusquely defiant. ‘And even though in some ways I don’t like him, Darley’s a darn sensible fellow. He’s right about this—it’s true I can’t go on with it, Girl—unless?’ He paused a minute and plunged. ‘Unless you do what, of course, he doesn’
t believe you can do. Come through—to me!’

  Though her gaze was steady on his in the mirror of the witchball, it seemed oddly as if she flinched and retreated—stood away a little. He hurried on, ashamed yet urgent—dimly he felt the shame, yet the urge was the more imperious impulse.

  ‘You see, Girl—oh, perhaps on your side it’s difficult to understand, when a man grows up, how lonely he is without a woman! Oh, it sounds beastly, but it’s true—after all, we are flesh and blood, and we want flesh and blood, to love, and kiss, and . . . all that. Don’t you see? I adore you, Girl, I shall never love anyone else, but I’m grown up now. I’m a man with a man’s instincts, a man’s needs. . . .’

  She shivered faintly, as he caught the great ball close to him, and it seemed, as she slowly answered, that her very voice was faint and desperate with sadness—with a sadness that went far deeper than the little sorrows of the world in which he dwelt.

  ‘Oh, love, my love! I feared this—I have feared it so long, warded it off so long—fought with all my strength to content you with the things of the soul and spirit, so that the sex-need of woman might not wake within you. But now . . .?’

  She ceased, voiceless—he caught her up urgently, passionate.

  ‘Oh, Girl, is it so impossible? Darley said it was—he said you could never do it—that if you could it would be a proof. . . .’

  ‘And because a vulgar worldly fool says that, you are prepared to forgo this wonderful companionship that has meant so much to us?’ Her tone was bitter, and, hurt in his turn, he responded brusquely, sullenly:

  ‘That doesn’t matter—he doesn’t matter. But his does—I want you, Girl, I want you on my side somehow! I can’t do it without you—I can’t. Is it—for my sake—so utterly impossible?’

  She hesitated, her wide sorrowful eyes searching his—then slowly shook her lovely dark head.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Not utterly impossible, my beloved! Yet intolerably difficult. . . . Oh, my own, can you not forget this madness, and go back to where we were before, just Boy and Girl together, in our little world?’

  ‘No,’ he said harshly. ‘Because I am a man now, Girl, and I want you as a man wants a woman. If you love me—will you, at all costs, try?’

  There was a long and dreadful pause, then, with big tears pouring down her face, she nodded—and he knew suddenly that he had forced something that seemed bitter as death upon the creature dearest to him in life. In a voice shaken with fear, with love and sorrow, she bade him good night—yet to his dying day he never forgot her last words, faint and laden with foreboding in his ears.

  ‘Because I love you—I will try. But I don’t know—I can’t tell you, if I shall succeed. . . . I may succeed, but, ah, my dear, not quite, perhaps, in the way you want! The gods give, truly, but they give in their own grim way. . . .’

  * * * * *

  The chill autumn passed on, the year gave place to winter, and the sun might strike a dazzling light from the great silver witchball, standing in the window, the moon, the firelight might dance upon it, but no small pointed face dawned within the brightness, no steady grey-green eyes looked out with laughter, love, understanding in their depths . . . for the first time in his life Tom Harrison knew loneliness bitter and profound, and many an hour he spent poring frantically in to the depths of the great ball, trying to call her back from the strange distant world into which she had vanished since that tragic night, that night for which he cursed himself now so wholeheartedly. For days afterwards he had avoided Darley, hurrying away from the office a few minutes earlier than usual in order to get back to his humble ‘digs’ and try again, and yet again, to bring her back to him—but a week passed, ten days, a month, three months, and still she gave no sign, and his utter misery gave place to a defiant recklessness. Since she did not care, it seemed, neither would he—and when Darley, at last, running him to earth at his desk, tendered an invitation to dine at the Waldorf and ‘meet a coupla nice girls’, Tom accepted it with alacrity, with a grim determination to show his friend that he had at last emerged from the chrysalis of boyhood.

  Maudie and Doris, the two chorus girls, voted him a ‘scream’, especially when wine and cocktails had completed their fell work, and when Darley, with a wink at Maudie, the more enterprising of the two, ushered Tom into a taxi with her at the finish, and whisked the demure Doris off in another, the young lady was not slow to take the initiative in a flirtation with ‘quite the nicest-looking boy she had seen in a month of Sundays’. Finding a curly dark head on his shoulder and a pair of rouged but pretty lips pursed beneath his own, for a fleeting moment Tom paused, seeing, despite the fumes of drink that were clouding his brain, a sorrowful pair of grey-green eyes beneath a cloud of dusky hair—but he winced away from the memory, and with a sudden savage movement, pressed his lips down on the mouth so close to his. It was Her fault. She had not come. She had left him lonely until he was half mad with misery . . . all right, she could take the consequences! Was he not a man as other men?

  It was dawn—indeed, the sun was peeping above the house-tops—before he left the fair Maudie’s flat, and then it was with heavy eyes and an unaccountable sick, shamed feeling gnawing at him. So must Esau have felt when he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage . . . yet Darley, to whom he confided his mood, slapped him on the back and assured him he was being too squeamish by far. Got to take the plunge some time, eh? It’ll come easier next time—why, what did young Tom think girls were for, eh? And so on and so forth. . . . Yet the memory of the moment when feeling sick, uncleanly, ashamed, he lifted his face to the coolness of the dawn, standing there in the small mean street outside the house where she lodged, sickened the boy for the moment of women, and for some time he avoided the sex, and Miss Maudie Simpson in particular. Refusing further invitations, he set himself diligently to his work and tried to forget—to forget both his lost Dream girl and his more sadly lost innocence.

  Yet to eat of the Tree of Knowledge is to hunger again—and women are not easily put off. Also the uneasy memory, shamed yet fascinated, of that one night nagged at the boy’s just-awakened manhood shrewdly, and it inevitably came to pass that at last they met again—and this time Miss Simpson, having gleaned in the meantime a good deal of knowledge about the young man from Darley, adopted different tactics, realising that her first attack-direct had rather alarmed her quarry. She was quite frank about her intentions—that is, to her chum Doris, and to herself. She meant to marry him. Certainly he was not, as the cynical Doris put it, much of a catch, but marriage of any kind was better than none—and this diffident charming boy, several years her junior, obviously utterly and abysmally ignorant of women, was easy prey, once she had corrected her first false step. This she speedily did by adopting an air of wistful shyness, as if she dared not meet his eyes after their mutual folly—the ‘madness of youth’ as she later called it, culling the phrase from the title of a recently seen moving-picture. Put this way, the episode of that first night somehow sounded less degrading—deftly she drew the picture of a girl suddenly swept off her feet by an audaciously attractive lover, and this picture of himself was so new and flattering to Tom that he swallowed it whole—and the thing was done; thereafter he spent his evenings, his week-ends, his every spare moment, sitting, metaphorically or actually, at Miss Simpson’s feet.

  To his amazed delight, conscious as he was of the limited entertainment possible on his slender income, Tom Harrison found Miss Maudie surprisingly easy to please. Being excessively humble, it did not occur to him that he might be worth cultivating, and he rejoiced quite frankly in the discovery of a companion who, apparently, shared his simple tastes, preferred an afternoon on the Heath to sitting in a crowded cinema, and agreed that it was waste of money to buy silk stockings when one could wear cotton and spend the balance on a book of poetry.

  It must be admitted that there was considerable acting art, to say nothing of patience, shown by the young lady, when night after night, her feet itching to take her to the
nearest cheap night-club, she sat concealing her yawns upon a seat in the Temple Gardens while her infatuated escort read Keats to her! In obediently putting on her hat and ‘going for a blow’ on the top of a jolting omnibus, while her entire soul was secretly longing for a copy of Home Chat and a box of chocolates on the sofa in her dinky flat—in refusing cocktails and cigarettes, discovering that Tom’s ideal girl (humorously described to her by Darley) neither drank nor smoked—in listening and sweetly assenting to views and ideals that, as she vigorously expressed it to her chum Doris, ‘fairly turned me up! Sappy ass—wait till I’ve snitched him!’

  And so Tom Harrison’s evil fate came upon him—and the New Year saw them irrevocably wed.

  * * * * *

  Gracechurch Street found Tom Harrison curiously changed after a month of marriage. Puzzled, his colleagues tried by ragging, inquiry, bluff, to awaken his old shy gaiety, to banish the odd, stunned look in his eyes, but after a while, losing interest, they desisted, and life resumed its normal course. Only the blank, bewildered look in the boy’s eyes remained, and glancing at him from time to time, seated at the desk near his own to which he had recently been promoted, Bob Darley frowned, faintly disturbed. Dimly he sensed something wrong, a certain quality, appealing, youthful, vanished from the grave young face . . . the faun was still there, gleaming from the great eyes under the tumbled thatch of curly hair, but it was a faun no longer merely shyly, amusedly interested in a strange world, ready to laugh and be friends. Something peeped out that had learnt what it was to be afraid . . . it was the ‘hurt’ look, like something happy, trusting, smitten brutally between the eyes, that worried Bob Darley. Shrewdly, despite his hardened shell of cynicism—but Briton-like, he pooh-poohed it, and shrugging his large shoulders, told himself not to be a fool, and asked Tom out to lunch. Yet not even lunch, a good lunch, with beer and steak-pie, which last Tom loved, cured that hurt, puzzled look, loosened that oddly silent tongue, so after a while Darley, a little huffed, relinquished his well-meant efforts, and Tom was left indeed alone.