I Shall Not Want (59 page)

The prayers that I learnt at my fond mother's knee,
Their echoes still linger, they still comfort me.
The things that she taught me, the words that she said,
Are a cloak in the tempest, a tent o'er my head.

He looked at Mr. Tuke's face as he stood there in front of them all, singing. The expression of the priest militant had now vanished; his eyes were closed and he had folded his hands on his stomach. His whole face seemed to have slipped into a gentle, unconcerned repose not far removed from sleep.

Another verse of the hymn was just beginning:

As a child I was sinless and happy and free
Till life's snares and perils encompass
è
d me.

But John Marco had slipped out of the pew and was making quietly for the door. In a moment, while the last verse was proceeding, Mr. Tuke would be walking down from the aisle, still singing, ready to shake hands with his flock as they filed out through the porch. That was something that John Marco could not wait for; he was gone before Mr. Tuke had even moved.

And as he went on down the street, reluctant still to go back to the house where Louise's friends would be seated about in the drawing-room and everything would be so gay and bright and noisy he found himself almost
envying Mr. Tuke his crumbling Tabernacle and the silly, sleepy hymns that people still sang there.

But there were other occasions, dark sinister ones that did not bear looking back on, when these evening wanderings did not always end in so seemly, so innocent a fashion. When he had drunk too much already before he left the house, he would often drink more as soon as he was outside, pushing open one gilt-and-frosted saloon door after another. And a moment would come on these evenings when suddenly the fire in the liquor would be released inside him and he would laugh at all his stupid fears and feel the earth beneath his feet again and grow reckless. At such times he became his own victim, drifting helplessly into company that sober men would have shunned, mixing easily and on common terms with the night-time population that frequent the streets.

“It won't always be like this,” he would tell himself as he made his way back stumblingly to the magnificence of the square he lived in. “Once this year is over, once I
know
that everything is all right, I shall settle down again, Louise and I will take a holiday together, a long holiday, the kind of holiday that Mr. Lyman was talking about. Then I shall feel easier in my mind again. I shall stop drinking.”

And a week later would find him making the same resolve with the same fixed intention as he turned unsteadily up the broad sweep of Sussex Gardens and searched out the way towards his house.

He had been drinking heavily one evening, squandering the spirits upon himself, when he resolved abruptly to have no more of it. Through the first mists of alcohol that had begun mercifully to cloud across his brain, the old panic, the urgent alarm that things were getting out of his control at the shop and that he was needed there to look after them, came back to him. He pulled out his watch and sat staring at it for a moment, his mind unable to register the hour that it showed. Then shifting himself awkwardly
to his feet he quitted the saloon where he had been sitting and began to blunder through the lamp-lit streets towards the shop. The air on his face was cool; it blew soothingly. But it seemed only to increase the headiness of the drink that he had taken, and once or twice he swayed and had to raise his hand as if he were about to fall.

But the shop had no use for him at that time of night. It turned a blank face to him, black and forbidding; and he lacked the courage to ring for the night-watchman to let him in. The large building with its unlighted windows seemed some sort of tomb, a monument erected to things long dead. He would be back there soon enough—the morning could be only seven or eight hours away—by the time it had come to life again; and until then its stones would have to content themselves without him. He turned and began to walk slowly away.

He had walked for perhaps a hundred yards when his eyes suddenly caught his own name shining in the darkness in front of him. The letters, scrolled elaborate things, were etched across a brass plate on a door that caught the light of a solitary street lamp. He paused. This was something else of his, the hostel where the young ladies lived, some forty of them. He had never been inside the place; it was a chaste and separate harem ruled over by a grey-haired housekeeper of Mr. Hackbridge's appointment. And then as he stood there he remembered that it was to this doorway that he had first showed Eve Harlow home; it was from this cheap dormitory that he had sought to take her and give her everything in life that could have made her happy. Why hadn't he taken her? he asked himself. What was it that had prevented him when she at last had been so willing and so precious? But his mind was dim and indistinct to-night, and the mystery of the tragedy remained unsolved. He passed his hand across his forehead and to steady himself he rested his shoulder against the pillar of the door.

Then the idea came to him that he would see inside the place, would find out what kind of dwelling it was that
Eve Harlow had known before he had cherished her. For a second he hesitated: it was late and the young ladies would be asleep refreshing themselves for their long hours of standing to attention on the morrow. But it was
his,
all
his,
he told himself; if he wanted to go inside he had only to give the order to the caretaker. Raising his hand, he set the bell pealing and waited impatiently for the man to answer.

The caretaker was clearly surprised to see him; surprised but respectful. He touched his forelock when he saw who it was and, when he heard that John Marco wanted to come in, he stepped aside and held the door politely back. He made a strange, dishevelled figure in his flannel nightgown tucked clumsily down into the top of his trousers, and John Marco threw back his head and laughed at him. He was still laughing as he crossed the hall and began to stumble up the high staircase.

The caretaker followed wonderingly, padding up the stairs in his felt slippers. Should he call the lady housekeeper? he asked.

But John Marco shook his head.

“Tour of inspection,” he said in a low, slurred voice. “Making sure that everything's in order. No need to disturb anybody.”

There were two doors opening out from the landing in front of him. John Marco hesitated and then walked awkwardly towards the further one. It was the voice of the caretaker behind him that stopped him suddenly and made him turn.

“Not in there, sir.” The man said in horror. “That's where the young ladies sleep.”

John Marco turned his back on him.

“That's what I want to see,” he said over his shoulder. “That's what I came here to see.”

He threw the door open and peered inside. It was a long room with a narrow aisle down the centre between a double row of curtains; at the far end a lamp, turned so low that it was a glow merely, was hanging.

“So this is the kind of life she knew,” he said, speaking aloud to himself. “This is what she came back to when she left me.”

And for no reason he began to laugh again.

The caretaker came nearer and dropped his voice.

“You'll wake them, sir,” he said. “There's ten of them in here.”

“Go away,” John Marco told him. “Go back and mind the door. I shan't wake anyone.”

He tiptoed forward as he said it and stood for a moment waiting. It was strange standing there in that quiet, polished room with only the sound of breathing, the heavy, regular breathing of sleep, in the air. Then he raised his hand and slid one of the curtains back along its runners. Within, he could see the faint outline of a bed, a chair and a long cupboard.

“Like a cell,” he thought. “Like a nun's bloody cell.”

But there was a movement from the bed. The sleeper stirred and then raised herself suddenly on one elbow. At the sight of the heavy form standing there, blotting out what small glimmer the lamp provided, she screamed.

John Marco did not remember how long after the scream he stood there. He recalled only that all round him behind those curtains there were sudden frightened movements; and the atmosphere of sleep was shattered. Then there were hands, strong angry hands, that seized him and dragged him out back onto the landing again. But they were not the hands of the caretaker, because he remained over by the door. They belonged instead to the grey-haired woman whose dressing-gown was belted across her like a uniform.

“Not while I'm in charge here you don't,” she was saying. “You try and get at my girls again and I'll send for the police.”

John Marco was silent for a moment and then he laughed again.

“Do you imagine,” he said, “that I came here to do mischief? Do you think that I wanted to ravish all forty of them?”

And leaning against the top column of the balustrade he went on laughing, louder this time; laughed until the whole staircase echoed with it and doors on the other landings began to open as well.

“He's drunk,” he heard the woman saying. “We must fetch a cab. None of the girls must know that it was Mr. Marco.”

But of course the girls knew soon enough; everyone in the shop knew in fact. The incident, discreditable as it was, was enlarged upon and distorted. John Marco, the rumour went, had entered the ladies' hostel, had attempted to abduct one of their number forcibly and had finally been ejected after a terrible scene of violence. The police, rumour had it, had been called: John Marco had been arrested, and had been released again.

Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge took careful notes of the whole affair; and they compared them. In the end there was nothing that they did not know about it. They interviewed the lady-housekeeper and the door-keeper, and they sent for the girl into whose cubicle John Marco had intruded. Her part of the story was slight and unconvincing at the start; she was diffident and nervous. But under cross-examination she improved. As she went on she recalled that it was not until he was actually beside her bed that she had wakened and as she had started up she had felt his hand upon her shoulder pressing her down, his reeking breath upon her cheek. Put that way it was a pretty horrifying indictment, and Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge pored over it together.

“It can't go on,” said Mr. Hackbridge lugubriously when the girl had gone. “He's riding for a fall. He ought to be warned.”

But Mr. Lyman only shook his head.

“It suits us better that things should go on exactly as they are,” he said. “Just exactly as they are.”

And all through the autumn, almost as though unconsciously obeying Mr. Lyman, John Marco continued with his drinking. Under the influence of it he grew steadily more despotic and unapproachable; nowadays even tiny
differences of opinion, put forward hesitatingly and with due politeness, produced rages that silenced all opposition. They left him a lonely, isolated figure, surrounded by men who hated and were afraid of him. The fear had always been there; there had never been an assistant in the place who would have answered him back to his face. But it was the hatred that was something new. So long as the weekly pay envelope had not been tampered with, the assistants had quaked and been contented. But men with families who have been earning three pounds ten a week and then find themselves reduced to thirty-five shillings are not of the stuff that loyal bodyguards are made. And there was not an employee in the store who would not have walked out and gone round to the Bon Marché for an extra half-a-crown a week if only the Bon Marché had offered it.

There was, too, another effect that the drinking was having on him: he was growing careless and untidy in his dress, slovenly even. His cravats were no longer the perfectly tied things they had once been; they hung round his neck nowadays, and there were stains and spots on the front of them. During the last year or so he had come to stoop a little and his clothes, his expensively cut clothes, hung from him awkwardly. As he usually wore his coat unbuttoned, he seemed at times to be shambling along like a man older than his years.

But in his own mind, he was, in fact, a little easier: he saw the position improving itself every day in front of his own eyes. The figures that Mr. Lyman brought to him showed entries in solid, reassuring black where there had been red before. And he knew that thanks to those endless unsleeping nights spent pacing up and down his study, thanks to his cleverness and sagacity and his courage in putting a knife through everyone's salary including his own, John Marco Ltd. was now turning up on the right side again.

It was only the matter of ready money in his pocket that still troubled him. The eight hundred pounds that the
little auctioneer had given him was almost exhausted; some of it had gone to pay the interest on the mortgage on the house, and some of it, of course, had gone back into the pockets of the little auctioneer himself. But it was November already and John Marco could see daylight breaking on the road ahead of him. And simply to ensure that he could go down the road decently and in style until the dawn was really there, he decided that he must raise some more money somehow.

This time there were only money-lenders to turn to. He found them in their hidden offices in dark courtyards and dubious alley ways. He bargained with them, matching his skill at figures against theirs, and he signed his name to pieces of paper that gave him what he wanted. “It's only for three months or perhaps four,” he said to himself, “then I can tear up those documents in their faces. I can scatter the pieces over them.” And in the meantime, it was pleasant enough to feel his wallet bulging inside his coat again, to draw from his pocket a crackling, watermarked fiver with all the gold in the Bank of England behind it when he went to pay for something.

And when the Christmas trade was really upon them—it was a good shopping Christmas this year—and he saw the assistants breaking themselves in their efforts to serve the customers who were massed along the counters, he stood on his high balcony looking down on it all, and laughed to think of the despair that he had struggled through. Even when two of the young ladies who had been on their feet since nine o'clock in the morning fainted as seven o'clock came round—the shop remained open an hour later as Christmas approached—John Marco did not reproach himself when Mr. Hackbridge told him.