This Is the End by Stella Benson (best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

Mrs. Gustus to enjoy the Spring, but also to make you quite strong before you go back to work. And, again, not only that, but also to try and trace your sister Jay."

Will you please imagine that continual intercourse with very talkative people had made Mr. Russell an adept at vocal compression. He had now almost lost the use of his vowels, and if I wrote as he spoke, the effect would be like an advertisement for a housemaid during the shortage of wood-pulp. I spare you this.

"There are three objections to the plan," said Kew. "First, that Anonyma doesn't really want to kiss the Spring; second, that I don't really want convalescent treatment; third, that Jay doesn't really want to be traced."

When Mrs. Gustus did not know the answer to an objection she left it unanswered. This is, of course, the simplest way. She snapped her notebook.

"Oh, Kew," she said, "you promised you'd be an angel." The double row of semi-detached buttons down her breast trembled with eagerness.

"Angeller and angeller," sighed Kew, "I never committed myself so far."

"I have a clue with which to trace Jay," said Mrs. Gustus. "I had a letter from her this morning."

Kew was a satisfactory person to surprise. He is never supercilious.

"You heard from Jay!" he said, in a voice as high as his eyebrows.

The letter which Mrs. Gustus showed to Kew may be quoted here:

"This place has stood since the year twelve something, and its windows look down without even the interruption of a sill at the coming and going of the tides. It has hardly any garden, and immediately to the right and the left of it the green down brims over the top of the cliff like the froth of ale over a silver goblet. To-night the tide is low, the sea is golden where the shallow waves break upon the sand, and ghostly green in the distance. When the tide is high, the sound and the sight of it seem to meet and make one thing. The waves press up the cliff then, and fall back on each other. Do you know the lines that are written on the face of a disappointed wave? To-night the clouds are like castles built on the plain of the sea. There is an aeroplane at this moment--dim as a little thought--coming between two turrets of cloud. I suppose it is that I can hear, but it sounds like the distant singing of the moon. I have come here to count up my theories, to count them and pile them up like money, in heaps, according to their value. Theories are such beautiful things, there must be some use in them. Or perhaps they are like money from a distant country, and not in currency here. Yet just as sheer metal, they must have some value.... It is wonderful that such happiness should come to me, and that it should last. I have the Sea and a Friend; there is nothing in the world I lack, and nothing that I regret...."

"What better clue could you want?" asked Mrs. Gustus. "We will take Christina round the sea-coast."

"Looking for silver cliffs and a golden sea," sighed Kew.

I don't know if I have mentioned or conveyed to you that Mrs. Gustus was a determined woman. At any rate she was, and it would therefore be waste of time to describe the gradual defeat of Kew. The final stage was the despatch of Kew to call on Nana in the Brown Borough. Jay's letter had the Brown Borough postmark, so it had apparently been sent to Nana to post. Nana might be described as the Second Clue in the pursuit of Jay. She was the Family's only link with Jay. The one drawback of Nana as a clue was that she was never to be found. Mrs. Gustus had called six times, but had been repulsed on each occasion by a totally dumb front door. But then Nana never had liked Anonyma. Nana was simple herself in an amateurish, unconscious sort of way, and I expect she disliked Anonyma's professional rivalry in the matter of simplicity. But Kew was always a favourite.

The 'bus roared up the canyons of the City, and its voice accompanied Kew in his tuneful meditations. A 'bus is not really well adapted for meditation. On my feet I can stride across unseen miles musing on love, in a taxi I can think about to-morrow's dinner, but on a 'bus my thoughts will go no further than my eyes can see. So Kew, although he thought he was thinking of Jay, was really considering the words in front of him--To Stop O'Bus strike Bell at Rear.[Footnote: He must have changed at the Bank into a Tilling 'bus.] He deduced from this that it was an Irish 'bus, and supposed that this accounted for its rather head-long behaviour. He spent some moments in imagining the MacBus, child of a sterner race, which would run gutturally without skids, and wear a different cut of bonnet.

He dismounted into a faint yellow fog diluted with a faint twilight, in the Brown Borough. The air was vague, making it not so much an impossibility to decipher the features of people approaching as a surprise to find it possible. A few rather premature bar row-flares adapted Scripture to modern conditions by hiding their light under tin substitutes for bushels, in the hope of protecting such valuables as cat's meat and bananas from aerial outrage. Kew pranced over prostrate children, and curved about the pavement to avoid artificially vivacious passers-by, who emerged from the public-houses.

Nana lived in a little alley which was like a fiord of peace running in from the shrill storm of the Brown Borough. Here little cottages shrank together, passive resisters of the twentieth century. Low crooked windows blinked through a mask of dirty creepers. Each little front garden contained a shrub, and was guarded by a low railing, although there would have been no room for a trespasser in addition to the shrub. Nana's house, at the end of the alley, looked along it to the far turmoil of the mother-street.

Kew insulted the gate, as usual, by stepping over it, and knocked at the door. He held his breath, so that he might more keenly hear the first whisperings of the floor upstairs, which would show that Nana was astir.

A gardenful of cats came and told him that his hopes were vain. Cats only exist, I think, for the chastening of man. They never come to me except to tell me the worst, and to crush me with quiet sarcasm should my optimism survive their warning.

But before the cats had finished speaking, there was a most un-Nana-like sound of bounding within, and Jay appeared. She threw herself out of the darkness of the door on to the twilit Kew.

The cats were ashamed to be seen watching this almost canine display, and went away.

"I didn't know you weren't in France," said Jay to Kew.

"I didn't know you weren't in Heaven," said Kew to Jay. "What's all this about golden seas and aeroplanes snarling around?"

"Oh, snarling.... That's just what they do," said Jay. "Let's pretend I said that."

It seemed as if childhood turned its face to them again after a thousand years. These roaring months of War run like a sea between us and our peaceful beginnings, so that a catchword flashed across out of our past is as beautiful and as incredible as the light in a dream.

When they were little they used to bargain for expressive words. Their childhood was full of such hair-splittings as: "If you tell how we said Wank-wank to the milkman, you must let me have the old lady who had a palpitation and puffocated running after the 'bus."

They were not spontaneous people. They were born with too great a love of words, a passion for drama at the expense of truth, and a habit of overweighting common life with romance. It was perhaps good for them to have acquired such a very simple relation by marriage as Anonyma.

"About the sea," said Jay, "I'll tell you later."

"Well, tell me first why you found home so suddenly unbearable. You've stood it for eighteen years."

"I've been a child all through those eighteen years. And to a child just the fact of grown-upness is so admirable. I wonder why. But under the fierce light that beats from the eye of a woman suddenly and violently grown old, Cousin Gustus and Anonyma don't--well, Kew, do they?"

The dusk filled the room as water fills a cup, and to look up at the light of an outside lamp on the ceiling was like looking up through water at the surface. Jay wore a dress of the same colour of the dusk, and her round face, faint as a bubble, seemed to float on its background unsupported.

"Didn't you think about adopting a baby?" suggested Kew. "That evidently put Cousin Gustus's back up."

"I didn't put Cousin Gustus's back up so high as he put mine," answered Jay. "Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us? What's the use of this war of one generation against another? Old people and young people reach a deadlock that's as bad as marriage without the possibility of divorce. Isn't all forced fidelity wrong?"

"What did you do, tell me, and what are you going to do?"

"Oh well, I felt something like frost in the air, and I couldn't define it. Really, it was work waiting to be done. Not work for the poor, but work with the poor. At home I talked about work, and Anonyma wrote about it, and Cousin Gustus shuddered at it. You were doing it all right, but where was I? Three days a week with soldiers' wives. My brow never sweated a drop. I thought there must be something better than a bird's-eye view of work. So I took a job at a bolster place.... Oh well, it doesn't matter now. I earned ten shillings a week, and paid half-a-crown for a little basement back. On Saturdays I got my Sunday clothes out of pawn, and came to tea with Nana. Do you remember the scones and the Welsh Rarebit that Nana used to make? I believe those things were worth the terror of the pawnshop. Oh, Kew, those pawnshops! Those little secret stalls that put shame into you where none was before. The pawn man--why is it that when you're already frightened is the moment that men choose to frighten you? Because weakness is the worst crime. That I have proved. My work was putting fluff into bolsters. There was a big bright grocers' calendar--the Death of Nelson--and if I could see it through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day. I had to eat my lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches--not fruit jam, you know, but raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air. The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew newspapers. Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were standing on your head? My governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he looked wet, and his hair was a horror to me. His voice was tired of dealing with fluff--though he didn't deal with it so intimately as we did--and it only allowed him to whisper. The forewoman was always cross, but always as if she would rather not be so, as