“Through there.”
Passing through a curtained aperture, Michael found a stairway, and at its top, stood, hesitating. His conscience was echoing Fleur’s comment on Anna Bergfeld’s letter: “Yes, I dare say; but what’s the good?” when the door was opened, and it seemed to him almost as if a corpse were standing there, with a face as though some one had come knocking on its grave, so eager and so white.
“Mrs. Bergfeld? My name’s Mont. You wrote to me.”
The woman trembled so, that Michael thought she was going to faint.
“Will you excuse me, sir, that I sit down?” And she dropped on to the end of the bed. The room was spotless, but, besides the bed, held only a small deal wash-stand, a pot of geranium, a tin trunk with a pair of trousers folded on it, a woman’s hat on a peg, and a chair in the window covered with her sewing.
The woman stood up again. She seemed not more than thirty, thin but prettily formed; and her oval face, without colour except in her dark eyes, suggested Rafael rather than Sapper’s Row.
“It is like seeing an angel,” she said. “Excuse me, sir.”
“Queer angel, Mrs. Bergfeld. Your husband not in?”
“No, sir. Fritz has gone to walk.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Bergfeld. If I pay your passages to Germany, will you go?”
“We cannot hope from that now, Fritz has been here twenty years, and never back; he has lost his German nationality, sir; they do not want people like us, you know.”
Michael stivered up his hair.
“Where are you from yourself?”
“From Salzburg.”
“What about going back there?”
“I would like to, but what would we do? In Austria every one is poor now, and I have no relative left. Here at least we have my sewing.”
“How much is that a week?”
“Sometimes a pound; sometimes fifteen shillings. It is bread and the rent.”
“Don’t you get the dole?”
“No, sir. We are not registered.”
Michael took out a five-pound note and laid it with his card on the wash-stand. “I’ve got to think this over, Mrs. Bergfeld. Perhaps your husband will come and see me.” He went out quickly, for the ghostly woman had flushed pink.
Repassing through the curtained aperture, he caught the hair-dresser wiping out the basin.
“Find em in, sir?”
“The lady.”
“Ah! Seen better days, I should say. The ‘usband’s a queer customer; ‘alf off his nut. Wanted to come in here with me, but I’ve got to give this job up.”
“Oh! How’s that?”
“I’ve got to have fresh air—only got one lung, and that’s not very gaudy. I’ll have to find something else.”
“That’s bad, in these days.”
The hair-dresser shrugged his bony shoulders. “Ah!” he said. “I’ve been a hair-dresser from a boy, except for the war. Funny place this, to fetch up in after where I’ve been. The war knocked me out.” He twisted his little thin moustache.
“No pension?” said Michael.
“Not a bob. What I want to keep me alive is something in the open.”
Michael took him in from head to foot. Shadowy, narrow-headed, with one lung.
“But do you know anything about country life?”
“Not a blessed thing. Still, I’ve got to find something, or peg out.”
His tragic and knowing eyes searched Michael’s face.
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Michael. “Good-bye!”
The hair-dresser made a queer jerky little movement.
Emerging from Sapper’s Row into the crowded, roaring thoroughfare, Michael thought of a speech in a play he had seen a year or two before. “The condition of the people leaves much to be desired. I shall make a point of taking up the cudgels in the House. I shall move—!” The condition of the people! What a remote thing! The sportive nightmare of a few dreaming nights, the skeleton in a well-locked cupboard, the discomforting rare howl of a hungry dog! And probably no folk in England less disturbed by it than the gallant six hundred odd who sat with him in ‘that House.’ For to improve the condition of the people was their job, and that relieved them of a sense of nightmare. Since Oliver Cromwell some sixteen thousand, perhaps, had sat there before them, to the same end. And was the trick done—not bee likely! Still THEY were really working for it, and other people were only looking on and telling them how to do it!
Thus was he thinking when a voice said:
“Not got a job about you, sir?”
Michael quickened his steps, then stood still. He saw that the man who had spoken, having cast his eyes down again, had missed this sign of weakness; and he went back to him. They were black eyes in a face round and pasty like a mince pie. Decent and shabby, quiet and forlorn, he wore an ex-Service-man’s badge.
“You spoke to me?” said Michael.
“I’m sure I don’t know why, sir; it just hopped out of me.”
“No work?”
“No; and pretty low.”
“Married?”
“Widower, sir; two children.”
“Dole?”
“Yes; and fair sick of it.”
“In the war, I see?”
“Yes, Mespot.”
“What sort of job do you want?”
“Any mortal thing.”
“Give me your name and address.”
“Henry Boddick, 94 Waltham Buildings, Gunnersbury.”
Michael took it down.
“Can’t promise anything,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Good luck, anyway. Have a cigar?”
“Thank you, and good luck to you, sir.”
Michael saluted, and resumed his progress; once out of sight of Henry Boddick, he took a taxi. A little more of this, and he would lose the sweet reasonableness without which one could not sit in ‘that House’!
‘For Sale or to Let’ recorded recurrently in Portland Place, somewhat restored his sense of balance.
That same afternoon he took Francis Wilmot with him to the House, and leaving him at the foot of the Distinguished Strangers’ stairway, made his way on to the floor.
He had never been in Ireland, so that the debate had for him little relation to reality. It seemed to illustrate, however, the obstacles in the way of agreement on any mortal subject. Almost every speech emphasized the paramount need for a settlement, but declared the impossibility of ‘going back’ on this, that, or the other factor which precluded such settlement. Still, for a debate on Ireland it seemed good-tempered; and presently they would all go out and record the votes they had determined on before it all began. He remembered the thrill with which he had listened to the first debates after his election; the impression each speech had given him that somebody must certainly be converted to something; and the reluctance with which he had discovered that nobody ever was. Some force was at work far stronger than any eloquence, however striking or sincere. The clothes were washed elsewhere; in here they were but aired before being put on. Still, until people put thoughts into words, they didn’t know what they thought, and sometimes they didn’t know afterwards. And for the hundredth time Michael was seized by a weak feeling in his legs. In a few weeks he himself must rise on them. Would the House accord him its ‘customary indulgence’; or would it say: ‘Young fellow—teaching your grandmother to suck eggs—shut up!’
He looked around him.
His fellow members were sitting in all shapes. Chosen of the people, they confirmed the doctrine that human nature did not change, or so slowly that one could not see the process—he had seen their prototypes in Roman statues, in mediaeval pictures… ‘Plain but pleasant,’ he thought, unconsciously reproducing George Forsyte’s description of himself in his palmy days. But did they take themselves seriously, as under Burke, as under Gladstone even?
The words ‘customary indulgence’ roused him from reverie; for they meant a maiden speech. Ha! yes! The member for Cornmarket. He composed himself to listen. Delivering himself with restraint and clarity, the speaker seemed suggesting that the doctrine ‘Do unto others as you would they should do unto you’ need not be entirely neglected, even in Ireland; but it was long—too long—Michael watched the House grow restive. ‘Alas! poor brother!’ he thought, as the speaker somewhat hastily sat down. A very handsome man rose in his place. He congratulated his honourable friend on his able and well-delivered effort, he only regretted that it had nothing to do with the business in hand. Exactly! Michael slipped out. Recovering his ‘distinguished stranger,’ he walked away with him to South Square.