Incidentally Agnes

by Ralph Stock

INCIDENTALLY AGNES

By RALPH STOCK

IT was raining, the slow, relentless downpour of London in February. Wheeled traffic dispensed mud impartially amongst the just and the unjust. Umbrellas interfered, and their owners swore, apologised, or glared, according to temperament. Everyone was in a prodigious hurry to reach warmth and shelter—everyone, that is, except Strode.

Rain made little difference to his outlook on life at this juncture. Save for turning up the collar of his faded raincoat, he hardly noticed it, and continued his trance-like progress along the Strand. As a matter of fact, he was contemplating suicide, and one is apt to be preoccupied on such occasions.

This admission of weakness on his part will give a bad impression of James Strode, and a first impression at that. Anyone in passably comfortable circumstances, or in whom the twin flames of hope and illusion still burn high, will say that to harbour such a notion for one instant brands the fellow a coward or a lunatic, and that he has no desire for further acquaintance with him. It cannot be helped. Such was the vague idea that pursued him up the Strand, and he was neither a coward nor a lunatic.

He was merely the product—a by-product, if you will—of the past twenty-seven years of English middle-class life. School and war formed the sum total of his experience. He still retained some shadowy recollection of the fifth book of Euclid. He played several games with average skill, and had not been altogether a failure at killing people with a machine-gun. That is all that can be said for him, and it is more than he would have said for himself.

Yet now, in these extraordinary times of peace, when all that is required of a young man without means, influence, or training is a cut-throat struggle for existence, he found himself at a discount, at such a discount that he had come to wonder if the existence were worth the struggle. He had never doubted it while his efforts were on behalf of others as well as himself, but for himself alone he was not so sure. Who and what was he to call for all this pother about living? He had seen better men than himself flung over the parapet. Of what possible use could he be to anyone? During the past humiliating six months he had ranged all the way from carefully-worded advertisements in the "Situations Wanted" columns of the daily press to a personal application for the post of "shouter" outside a cinema palace in his efforts to find out, and without success. For the most part prospective employers had been quite nice about it, but they did not want him, and said so. That was how he came at last to count himself a unit in the vast army of the superfluous, and when a man does that he is on thinner ice than may be imagined.

In the vicinity of Aldwych he found himself absently watching a small man in oilskin cape and leggings wielding a large rubber squeegee that spurned the liquid mud in graceful festoons towards the gutter. For some reason the spectacle turned Strode's thoughts into other channels, which was as well. He could at least do that, he reflected.

"Would you mind telling me where you applied for that job?" he asked during a pause in operations.

The small man subjected him to the quick, appraising glance of the Cockney. "Metropolitan Borough Council, Roads Department, sir," he answered with a promptness and a mechanical stiffening of attitude that betrayed some past connection with one of the Services.

"You're making a mistake," said Strode. "I'm not an inspector, or anything else, for that matter. I just wanted to know."

"Wot for?"

"Because I believe I could do it."

"Oh, yer do!" The small man's demeanour underwent a lightning change. "Easy-lookin', ain't it? Nothin' to it, like. Well, let me tell yer there's more in this 'ere job than meets the heye. You couldn't get it, and if you did you couldn't do it."

"I could try."

"They don't want no triers 'ere."

"But everybody must begin. You began."

The small man leant on his mud-stained wand of office and pondered the matter. "Yus," he said, "five year ago. Worked up to it, I did."

"From what?"

"That's my business."

It was. Strode was smitten to silence. "Thanks," he said, and was turning away when the other softened sufficiently to renew the conversation.

"Take my tip, mate, this ain't no good to you. Kews a mile long for Council work, an' then it goes by prevus experience, number of kids, age, or somethink you ain't got. Grindin' a barrel-orgin with medals on yer chest's more in your line. Sob stuff. There's money in it."

Strode grinned with compressed lips, repeated his thanks, and dived into the human stream flowing towards Charing Cross.

Sob stuff! Did he look like that? He pulled his hat further over his eyes and hurried on.

Out of the murk that shrouded Trafalgar Square a drab procession emerged, an apparently endless column of down-and-out humanity shambling through the rain. The traffic was diverted for them. Mounted police herded them like bedraggled sheep. Every care was taken to keep them moving, always moving eastward to the slums that had disgorged them for a few hours' futile publicity on the plinth of Nelson's column.

"Poor devils!" muttered someone behind Strode.

"Poor nothing!" retorted someone else. "Fakes to a man! If you offered 'em work they wouldn't take it. Prefer the dole. Government's frightened of them."

The authors of these illuminating remarks proved to be typical London citizens, well-nourished, well-clad, but to Strode they were something more. They represented an exalted and vaguely mysterious class of person who contrived to make a living. He bore them no ill-will on that account. They were cleverer than he, that was all. He had always admired in others accomplishments that he lacked himself. Moreover, whichever of them was correct in his estimate, Strode knew that he himself should have been in that procession, "frightening the Government." It was only self-consciousness that prevented him, a rooted objection to exhibiting his own futility.

He turned from the dismal scene and walked unseeingly into an umbrella which, on being raised, revealed the annoyed but otherwise comely features of Miss Norah Wilkinson.

"Hullo, Jim!" she exclaimed in precisely the same fashion that she had greeted him at a dance or tennis-party in the dim ages of the past—four years ago, to be exact, when he had a gratuity to spend. "What luck! Take me out of here, there's a dear—tea, anything."

Strode piloted her mechanically into a popular resort of heat and female music, and sat before her, wondering vaguely why he had done it. He remembered her as a rather oppressively exuberant school-girl, and saw little change in the woman that she must be now.

"How's things?" she chirped, harpooning a meringue. "And where have you been buried?"

"Nowhere—yet," said Strode. "I'm looking for work."

"How ghastly?"

"Isn't it?"

Norah manipulated the teapot with large, capable hands. "It really is the limit," she observed. "Everyone worth knowing is looking for work these days. One'd think it's a new game or something. There's no one left to do anything with, except old men who say they're as young as they feel, and then lie and gasp after a set of rabbit singles. I don't know what's happening to everybody, but they're different. You're different."

"Sorry," murmured Strode.

"So am I, but you can't help it, or I know you would," Norah conceded. "You were quite a good sort, Jim. Why are you different?"

Strode quailed under the direct scrutiny of those inquiring blue eyes. "I didn't know I was," he defended lamely, "but if I am, it may be because things are different. I don't understand 'em."

"After the War, you mean."

"Hush!" said Strode. "That word is never mentioned in polite society these days."

"Why? We won the old thing, didn't we?"

"I suppose we did. But tell me, how's Sir Henry?"

"I was going to say 'the same as ever,'" pondered Norah, "but he isn't. If you can imagine it, even father's different. Talks about aftermaths and economy, though what an aftermath is I haven't the foggiest, and why we should economise I can't make out, considering we're profiteers of the deepest dye. I said as much the other day, and I'm not popular in consequence. Anyway, my dress allowance has been cut down to such a pitch that I have to shop in the City. Can you beat it?"

Strode admitted that he could not, thereby precipitating further revelations.

"As for this 'looking for work,' I wonder there's any left."

"There isn't," said Strode, "to speak of."

"But you all seem to fall on your feet somehow."

"Do we?"

"Well, everyone I know does. You remember Leslie Waldon, the tall fair one who dances rather well, but nearly falls backwards when he serves."

Strode nodded, though he had no recollection of the gentleman.

"Well, he's bailiff, or whatever it's called when you look after an estate. He only gets over once a week to our covered court, but it seems quite a decent billet otherwise. He had an aunt who knew a cousin by marriage to Lord Drayton."

"Really?" said Strode.

"Yes. Why don't you get something like that?"

"What, an aunt who knows a cousin by marriage——"

"Don't be an ass. If you're going to laugh at every suggestion I make, I shan't believe you want work at all, though I must say you looked tragic enough when we met just now. What were you dreaming about?"

"Suicide," said Strode.

"But how thrilling! Gas is the latest, isn't it?"

"I believe so."

"Personally, I could never bear the stuff since having a tooth out with it," said Norah, "so I'm free from temptation, And as people who talk about it never do it, I feel fairly safe about you, old thing." She pondered the matter, her china-blue eyes resting on the remaining meringue. "No, I shouldn't think it's a bit exciting, and if it is, one can't look back on it, so what's the good? I should think anyone who really comes to it must have lost his sense of humour, and don't say you've done that, Jim."

"Perhaps not quite," admitted Strode, but refrained from adding that he found it increasingly difficult to laugh on an empty stomach.

"I know just what you mean, though," Norah sympathised. "I've felt that way loads of times, especially the other day, when I just couldn't get my forehand drive and a retrieving rabbit of a woman nearly wiped me off the court. But stay with it, Jim! I was one set down and two five in the second, and brought it off in the end."

After further heartening confidences, Norah collected a gold-mesh purse and a few other trifles that would have supported a starving family for a year, and prepared to depart.

"Sorry for being so dull." Strode apologised.

"My dear man, don't mention it," beamed Norah. "My heart bleeds for you, or words to that effect. Let me know when you've found something."

Strode promised. "And if I don't?" he added, as he paid the bill and they drifted towards the door.

"If you don't," said Norah, her boyish face framed in a taxi window, "come down and develop that back hand of yours. As far as I remember, it needed it, and——"

But at that juncture the taxi moved off, after the inconsiderate fashion of such vehicles.

Strode watched it go, then turned in the direction of Victoria, wondering what its occupant would have said had she known that their tea cost precisely half his remaining wealth. Probably sympathised and paid the bill with alacrity, he reflected, and he couldn't have stood that, no. One had to join the procession to be taken seriously, and he couldn't stand that, either. What was he that every recognised avenue of escape seemed closed to him? How was it that he found himself physically incapable of "using" people, of accepting hospitality, charity, influence, any one of those things that others seemed able to look upon as their right? He did not know . He only knew that it was ineradicably so.

There are deeps below deeps of human habitation in London, and in a Pimlico lodging house Strode fancied he had reached bedrock. He mounted slowly to the topmost floor, entered a room eight feet by ten, and sat on a sagging bed, staring at a patch of mildew on the opposite wall.

In the circumstances it may sound an unenterprising thing to do, but it was mechanical. He had done it rather often of late. Moreover, a patch of mildew has its points. For one thing, it is probably more tasteful in design and colour than anything else in a Pimlico lodging house, and, for another, it possesses much the same attributes as an open fire in conjuring pictures before the mind's eye. Whatever Strode saw in it on this occasion held his undivided attention for upwards of three minutes, then he shook himself into consciousness of things practical, and dragged a tin trunk from under the bed.

He was kneeling before it, with one hand buried in the clothes it contained and resting on a battered leather holster at the bottom, when he became aware that he had left his bedroom door open, and that someone was watching him from the landing.

He glimpsed the white of a cap and apron. It was only Agnes, the housemaid, yet Strode snatched his hand from the trunk and knelt there, waiting for her to declare herself or go. In the end she went, a slop pail making a faint metallic clatter as she descended the stairs.

He had hardly noticed her up to the present, and now that he came to think of her, all he could recall was a cap and apron, a small, not unpleasing face framed in dark hair, an unobtrusive presence that "did" his room and was universally known as Agnes. He was rather surprised at her spying on him—if she had been spying. It might, of course, be a matter of conscience on his part, which reminded him—he must be getting on with it.

This took the form of walking briskly in the direction of Ratcliff Common, the right pocket of his raincoat sagging perceptibly. It was some time since he had felt as buoyant as he did that evening. He had reached a decision. Suspense was at an end. There was something to be done that he could do.

Ratcliff Common, a murk-shrouded waste of muddy turf and rain-filled depressions, brought back memories. Night was closing down, and Strode wandered into it, feeling curiously at home. It only needed a few star shells, a tangle of barbed wire, the eternal din, and—and hardly the figure of a woman approaching across No Man's Land.

It was Agnes. She came towards him as though the encounter were the most natural thing in the world, smiled and said rather breathlessly: "Good evening, Mr. Strode."

Strode fought with anger and embarrassment in turn. If the meeting were accidental, why didn't she pass on? If intentional—but he spurned the thought. What could anyone want with him? In any case, how long was one supposed to stand like an idiot, being smirked at by housemaids on Ratcliff Common?

Then he became aware that she had spoken, that she was still speaking—telling him something about it being her custom to take a short cut across the Common to the picture palace on the other side. And what was he supposed to reply? "How interesting!" or something like that? What banality! Yet she was moving on now, and he had said nothing, cut her dead. There was no need to be rude, even if one were going to be nothing shortly afterwards. He found himself beside her, apologising. And Agnes seemed to understand. There was something distinctly comforting in her apparent ability to take things for granted and not talk about them.

Out of the murk there presently emerged a yellow glow that resolved itself into the light of Rotherham Road, and these were dwarfed to insignificance by the Paragon Picture Palace, a blaze of illuminated posters representing a picturesque-looking person, with a long upper lip, in the act of strangling someone over a waterfall.

"That's Fred Armitage," said Agnes, pausing under the portico.

"Fred Armitage in his latest super-production of passion and peril!" obligingly boomed the "shouter" in a voice of brass.

"I once tried for that job," said Strode.

Agnes regarded him incredulously.

"Not Armitage's—the shouter's," he explained.

"Go on!" said Agnes.

"Yes, why not?"

Agnes did not say. She continued to contemplate her hero's upper lip, and what was expected of him suddenly dawned on Strode. He had escorted Agnes to the movies. It was incumbent on him to take her in. And why not? A whimsical mood took possession of him. He had precisely three shillings left. Two of them went in tickets, and the remainder in a carton of chocolates with a pink ribbon. Agnes should be his sole beneficiary.

She sat very close to him in the stuffy darkness, no doubt expecting him to hold hands or put his arm round her waist. It seemed the recognised thing to do. And again, why not, if it gave her pleasure? Which it apparently did.

For some time they sat in silence, watching Fred Armitage manipulate his upper lip with considerable effect. It gave him a wistful expression when saying good-bye to his aged mother, an intensity in love episodes, and a ferocity in righteous anger that held his audience spellbound.

"Was that right what you told me about trying to be a shouter?" Agnes asked, with startling irrelevance.

"Yes," said Strode.

"You're too much class for that."

"Why?"

"Can't kid me," said Agnes. "We see too much."

"I suppose you do see a bit," Strode admitted.

"I should smile!"

There was a pause while Fred Armitage said something striking by means of a caption, then Agnes's voice came again, low, persuasive.

"How long have you been out?"

"Out?"

"Out of a job."

Strode moved uneasily in his seat.

"Don't tell me if you don't want to," Agnes warned him, "only it seems to me——"

"Nearly a year," said Strode. "What does it seem to you?"

"Too darned bad."

"How do you know it isn't my own fault?"

"I don't," said Agnes, "but it's too darned bad, all the same."

"You see, I can't do anything," Strode tried to explain, "anything that's paid for."

"'Course you can't," said Agnes with heat. "And whose fault's that?"

"My own, I suppose."

"Oh, go on!" snapped Agnes. "You make me sick."

"Sorry," muttered Strode.

"Yes, that's your trouble; you're sorry for being alive, you are. Why don't you up and tell 'em you was too busy keeping them alive a while ago to learn any other job, and now they ought to keep you on velvet until you do?"

Strode found no suitable reply.

"I would," stormed Agnes, "double quick! Oh, I know your sort——" The sentence remained unfinished. She turned to him, though at the moment the screen presented a "close-up" of Fred Armitage's upper lip quivering with emotion. "Why don't you clear out? I'm going to when I've saved enough."

"I tried to," said Strode, "but missed the 'bus. Canada's the cheapest at twenty pounds, but somehow when I had it I didn't go, and now—well, I'm finding there's a bit of a difference between twenty pounds and—and nothing."

"I know," murmured Agnes.

And she did know. In some indefinable way Strode felt that she knew and understood everything. She was the all-wise mother of a universe wherein he was an ineffectual infant. To have met such a fellow-creature, though as yet he had no notion of her name, was sufficiently unique in his experience to render him unconscious of the fact that he had revealed to her what he would have withheld on the rack from anyone else. He talked. She listened. The ghastly loneliness that had encompassed him so long was slipping—slipping …

Then he laughed—if it could be called that. The absurd sound was caused by nothing more than Agnes conveying a chocolate to her mouth. Of course! He mustn't be a fool. He mustn't lose grip of himself. He was at the movies with a housemaid. And why was she showing such interest in him and his affairs? Because she was earning an evening's entertainment and a box of chocolates in the only way she knew how. To-morrow she would be showering equal solicitude on the postman, policeman, or anyone else who "had the price." That was the way of her kind, wasn't it? She called it "having a good time." And small blame to her if she could get it.

It was an ugly thought, a poisoned dart out of the jungle of Strode's mind, biting deep. He could not extract it. Agnes was still regarding him with her curiously penetrating gaze, and slowly consuming chocolates.

"You think too much," she said judicially. "It don't do. You get stale for ever thinking round the same thing. It comes in time so that you don't see nothing else, and you miss things."

Strode neither admitted nor denied the charge.

"F'rinstance, if I was to tell you that you don't know what being up against it is, and that you've got enough at this moment to get to Canada or anywhere else you've a mind, you wouldn't believe me, would you?" Agnes seemed to find a response to this surprising statement before one could be made. "No, I thought not. Well, you 'ave. Crikey," she burst forth, "what you want is a good shakin'!"

"If you can shake me into believing that," said Strode, "fire ahead."

"Didn't I tell you we see a bit?" continued Agnes mysteriously. "Well, did I or did I not see you only this evening with your arms up to the elbows in clothes?"

Strode flushed.

"Oh, I know," said Agnes, "but how can I help it if you leave your door open, and there's a crack an inch wide in the hinge? I'm tellin' you what I saw—which was clothes, good clothes, and plenty of 'em. It wouldn't surprise me if you got twenty pound for that lot."

Strode leant forward in the semi-darkness. "Do you mean to say they're worth twenty pence?" he demanded. "Old clothes—very old, some of them."

"And boots, and I don't know what all," murmured Agnes absently.

Strode's hand went out. "Don't fool me," he said sharply. "You don't know what you're doing."

"Don't I?" Agnes turned her attention to the screen. "I wouldn't be too sure about that, neither. You go to old Mother Jenkins, five doors up from us, and see if I'm foolin' you; then you can talk."

"Somehow it never occurred to me," muttered Strode.

"That's what I'm tellin' you," chirped Agnes. "You want a keeper."

"But if what you say is right, look what it means!" Strode was looking himself, to the exclusion of all else. He had been groping so long in the dark that this sudden ray of light was too much for him. It conjured visions. "I could get out," he babbled, "out and away—to where there's room to move, and breathe, and——"

"Live," supplied Agnes.

"Yes, that's it, live. I——" Of a sudden he realised what his unconscious rescuer had said. Was she so unconscious, after all? How much could a woman read in a man's face? His hand went mechanically to his bulgent pocket. Swift suspicions crossed his mind, and were gone. Agnes was watching Fred Armitage and munching chocolates.

His arm had long since ceased to encircle her waist. He was otherwise engaged. It was as though some window within him had been suddenly flung wide, admitting light and air. Out and away! Foot-loose after an eternity of wading through swamps! What a fool he had been! What a fool! But there should be an end of that. The girl beside him knew what she was talking about. Who better? He evidently had something they would pay for, after all. Fancy a trunkful of comic old clothes making all that difference! But then it was a comic old world when you came to think of it.

Fred Armitage and his upper lip faded from the screen. The three-piece orchestra scrambled through a few bars of the National Anthem, and Strode found himself tramping across Ratcliff Common with his thoughts—and incidentally Agnes.

They said "Good night" a few yards from their door. Somehow Strode found it an awkward process. After sitting with one's arm round a housemaid for the best part of an evening, what was the proper method of leave-taking?

"Thanks for the evening," she said primly. "The choc'lates was fine."

"Better than the show, eh?"

"No, that was fine, too."

"Shall I tell you what was finer than either?" said Strode, rising to the occasion.

"Yes, if you like."

"You."

"Me?"

"Yes, I can't tell you what you've done for me to-night, but I shan't forget it. Do you mind?"

Apparently Agnes did not.

"Now you go on in, or they'll talk," she said, thrusting him gently from her.

When he had gone, she stood there a little while quite still, then smiled to herself in the darkness, and passed on.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

He was up and out before her customary eight o'clock knock on his door the next morning, and by noon he was back, flinging things into a papier mâché suit-case and treading on them.

As a running accompaniment to packing activities he gave her to understand that old clo' dealers were not as bad as they were painted, provided you knew how to handle them. He had been polite, but firm. He had shown that he was not one to be fooled. Once during the interview he had had the supreme cunning to bundle up his wares and threaten to take them elsewhere. That had brought her round. Twenty-two pounds ten shillings and sixpence! What did Agnes think of that for a deal?

Then straight to the shipping people, where he found that a "special" left Euston for Liverpool at three, and a boat for St. John that very night, so there wasn't much time to lose, was there? And incidentally, weren't these cheap locks the deuce? If she would stand on the middle, he could get them down one at a time. Ah, thanks!

"I'd like to hear how you get on," Agnes contrived to interpolate.

Why, of course. She would hear from him the moment he landed. Would he be likely to forget that it was she who had shown him a way out? Good-bye, and thanks for all she had done.

Within two minutes of the snapping of the suit-case locks he had gone. The sound of a taxi approached and receded. And Agnes still stood on the threshold of his room, a tip in her hand and a twisted smile on her lips. Yes, she might have heard from him—if he had not forgotten to ask her name.

Instead, he had chanced to remember his promise to let Norah Wilkinson know when he had "found something." So that by the time Strode had suffered a shower of periodicals, an over-elaborate jack-knife, and a vociferous send-off at Euston, Agnes had applied herself to the task of saving once more the amount she had given Mother Jenkins to pay for a trunkful of "comic old clothes."