Merry Go Round by W. Somerset Maugham

  'Oh, I have enjoyed myself,' she cried. 'I like going out with you much more than with Tom; he's always trying to save money.'

  They took a cab to the Golden Crown, where Jenny shared a room with the other barmaid.

  'Will you come out with me again?' asked Basil.

  'Oh, I should love to. You're so different from the other men who come to the bar. You're a gentleman, and you treat me – as if I was a lady. That's why I first liked you, because you didn't go on as if I was a lump of dirt: you always called me Miss Bush ...'

  'I'd much rather call you Jenny.'

  'Well, you may,' she answered, smiling and blushing. 'All those fellows who hang about the bar think they can do anything with me. You never tried to kiss me like they do.'

  'It's not because I didn't want to, Jenny,' answered Basil, laughing.

  She made no reply, but looked at him with smiling mouth and tender eyes; he would have been a fool not to recognize the invitation. He slipped his arm round her waist and touched her lips, but he was astonished at the frank surrender with which she received his embrace, and the fugitive pressure turned into a kiss so passionate that Basil's limbs tingled. The cab stopped at the Golden Crown, and he helped her out.

  'Good night.'

  Next day, when he went to the public-house, Jenny blushed deeply, but she greeted him with a quiet intimacy which in his utter loneliness was very gratifying. It caused him singular content that someone at last took an interest in him. Freedom is all very well, but there are moments when a man yearns for someone to whom his comings and goings, his health or illness, are not matters of complete indifference.

  'Don't go yet,' said Jenny; 'I want to tell you something.'

  He waited till the bar was clear.

  'I've broken off my engagement with Tom,' she said then. 'He waited on the other side of the street last night and saw us go out together. And this morning he came in and rounded on me. I told him if he didn't like it he could lump it. And then he got nasty, and I told him I wouldn't have anything more to do with him.'

  Basil looked at her for a moment silently.

  'But aren't you fond of him, Jenny?'

  'No; I can't bear the sight of him. I used to like him well enough, but it's different now. I'm glad to be rid of him.'

  Basil could not help knowing it was on his account that she had broken off the engagement. He felt a curious thrill of power, and his heart beat with elation and pride, but at the same time he feared he was doing her some great injury.

  'I'm very sorry,' he murmured. 'I'm afraid I've done you harm.'

  'You won't stop coming here because of this?' she asked, anxiously watching his doubtful face.

  His first thought was that a sudden rupture might be best for both of them, but he could not bear that on his account pain should darken those beautiful eyes, and when he saw the gathering tears he put it aside hastily.

  'No, of course not. If you like to see me I'm only too glad to come.'

  'Promise that you'll come every day.'

  'I'll come as often as I can.'

  'No, that won't do. You must come every day.'

  'Well, I will.'

  He was touched by her eagerness, for he must have been a dolt not to see that Jenny cared a good deal for him, but introspective though he was, never asked himself what were his own feelings. He wished to have a good influence on her, and vowed she would never through him come to any harm. She was very unlike his notion of the ordinary barmaid, and he thought it would be simple to lead her to some idea of personal dignity; he would have liked to take her away from that rather degrading occupation, placing her where she could learn more easily: her character, notwithstanding three years at the Golden Crown, was very ingenuous, but in those surroundings she could not for ever remain unspoilt, and it would have seemed a justification of his friendship if he could put her in the way to lead a more beautiful life. The most obvious result of these deliberations was that Basil presently made it a practice to take Jenny on her free evenings to dinner and to the play.

  As for her, she had never known anyone like the young barrister who impressed her by the courtesy of his manner and the novelty of his conversation: though often she did not understand the things he said, she was flattered nevertheless, and, womanlike, simulated a comprehension which made Basil think her less uneducated than she really was. At first she was intimidated by the grave stateliness of his treatment, for she was accustomed to less respect, and he could not have used a duchess with more polite decorum; but insensibly admiration and awe passed into love, and at last into blind adoration of which Basil not for a moment dreamed. She wondered why since that first night he had never kissed her, but at parting merely gave his hand; in three months she had advanced only so far as to use his Christian name.

  At length the spring came. Along Fleet Street and the Strand flower-women offered for sale gay vernal blossoms, and their baskets gave a dash of colour to the City's hurrying grey. There were days when the very breath of the country, bland and generous, seemed to blow down the crowded thoroughfare, uplifting weary hearts despondent with long monotonous toil: the sky was blue, and it was the same sky that overhung green meadows and trees bursting into leaf. Sometimes towards the west bevies of cloud, dazzling in the sunshine, were piled upon one another, and at sundown, all rosy and golden, would fill the street with their effulgence, so that the smoky vapours took a gorgeous opalescence, and the heart beat with sheer delight of this goodly London town.

  One balmy night in May, when the air was suave and fragrant, so that the heavy step was lightened and the tired mind eased by a strange sad gaiety, Jenny dined with Basil at the little restaurant in Soho where now they were well known. Afterwards they went to a music-hall, but the noise and the glare on that sweet night were unendurable; the pleasant darkness of the streets called to them, and Basil soon proposed that they should go from that place of tedium. Jenny agreed with relief, for the singers left her listless, and an unquiet emotion, which she had never known, made her heart throb with indescribable yearning. As they passed into the night she looked at Basil for a moment with wide-open eyes, in which, strangely mingled, were terror and the primitive savagery of some wild thing.

  'Let's go on the Embankment,' she whispered. 'It's quiet there.'

  They looked at the silent flowing river and at the warehouses of the Surrey side, uneven against the starlit sky. From one of these gleamed like a malevolent eye one solitary light, and it gave mystery to that square mass of dingy brick, suggesting some grim story of lawless passion and crime. It was low-tide, and below the stone wall was a long strip of shining mud; but Waterloo Bridge, with its easy arches, was oddly dapper, and its lights, yellow and white, threw gay reflections on the water. Near at hand, outlined vaguely by their red lamps, were moored three barges; and there was a weird magic about them, for, notwithstanding their present abandonment, they spoke of strenuous life and passion and toil: for all their squalid brutality there was romance in the hard, strong men who dwelt there on the widening river, travelling on an eternal pilgrimage to the salt sea and the open.

  They wandered slowly towards Westminster Bridge, and the lights of the Embankment in their sinuous line were strangely reflected, so that a forest was seen on the river of fiery piles on which might have been built a mystic, invisible city. But the short walk wearied them, though the night was sweet with the savour of springtime, and their limbs were heavy as lead.

  'I can't walk back,' said Jenny; 'I'm too tired.'

  'Let us take a cab.'

  Basil hailed a passing hansom, and they got in. He gave the address in Fleet Street of the Golden Crown, They did not speak, but the silence told them things more significant than ever words had done. At last, in a voice not her own, as though speech were dragged from her, Jenny broke the oppressive stillness.

  'Why have you never kissed me since that first night, Basil?'

  She did not look at him, and he made no sign that he heard, but she felt the trembling of
his limbs. Her throat grew hot and dry, and a horrible anxiety seized her.

  'Basil!' she said hoarsely, insisting on an answer.

  'Because I didn't dare.'

  She could count now the throbbing of that torturer in her breast, and the cabman seemed to drive as for a wager. They sped along the Embankment, and it was very dark.

  'But I wanted you to,' she said fiercely.

  'Jenny, don't let us make fools of ourselves.'

  But as though his words were from the mouth only, and a stronger power mastered him, even as he spoke he sought her lips; and because he had resisted so long their sweetness was doubly sweet. With a stifled gasp like a wild beast, she flung her arms about him, and the soft fragrance of her body drove away all thoughts but one: mindless of the passers-by, he pressed her eagerly to his heart. He was mad with her fair, yielding beauty and the passion of her surrender, mad with that never-ending kiss, than which in his whole life he had never known a greater rapture. And his heart trembled like a leaf trembling before the wind.

  'Will you come back to my rooms, Jenny?' he whispered.

  She did not answer, but drew herself more closely to him. He lifted the trap in the roof of the hansom and told the cabman to drive to the Temple.

  For a week, for a month even, feeling stronger and braver because this woman had given him her love, Basil enjoyed a very ecstasy of pride; he faced the world with greater assurance, and life possessed a spirit and a vigour which were quite new to him. But presently the romantic adventure gained the look of a somewhat vulgar intrigue, and when he recalled his ideal of an existence, spotless and pure, given over to noble pursuits, he was ashamed. This love of his was nothing more than a passing whim of which the knell sounded with its gratification, and he saw with dismay that Jenny had given herself to him body and soul: on her side it was a deathless passion compared with which his attachment was very cold. Each day fanned the flames in her heart, so that he became a necessity of her existence, and if by chance he was too busy to see her an anxious letter came, pitiful in its faulty spelling and clumsy expression, imploring him to visit her. Jenny was exacting, and he resigned himself to going every day to the Golden Crown, though that bar grew ever more distasteful. The girl was quite uneducated, and the evenings they spent together – for now, instead of going to a theatre, Jenny passed her leisure in Basil's rooms – went rather heavily; he found it sometimes hard work to make conversation. He realized that he was manacled hand and foot with fetters that were only more intolerable because they consisted of nothing more substantial than the dread of causing pain. He was a man who bore uneasily an irregular attachment of this sort, and he asked himself what could be the end; a dozen times he made up his mind to break with Jenny, but coming to the point, when he saw how dependent she was upon his love, had not the courage. For six months, degraded to a habit, the connection went on.

  But it was only by reminding himself constantly that he was not free that Basil abated his nascent love for Mrs Murray, and he imagined that his feeling towards her was different from any he had known before. His desire now was overwhelming to break from the past that sullied him, and thenceforward to lead a fresher, more wholesome life: cost what it might, he must finish with Jenny. He knew that Mrs Murray meant to winter abroad, and there was no reason why he, too, should not go to Italy; there he might see her occasionally, and at the end of six months, with a free conscience, ask her to be his wife.

  Thinking he saw the way more clearly before him, Basil ceased his lonely promenade and walked slowly into Piccadilly. After the stir and restless movement of the day, the silence there, unnatural and almost ghostly, seemed barely credible; and the great street, solemn and empty and broad, descended in a majestic sweep with the tranquillity and ease of some placid river. The air was pure and limpid, but resonant, so that a solitary cab on a sudden sent the whole place ringing, and the emphatic trot of the horse clattered with long reverberations. The line of electric lights, impressive by their regularity, self-asserting and staid, flung their glare upon the houses with an indifferent violence, and lower down threw into distinctness the straight park railing and the nearer trees, outlining more sombrely the leafy darkness beyond. And between, outshone, like an uneven string of discoloured gems twinkled the yellow flicker of the gas-jets. Everywhere was silence, but the houses, white except for the gaping windows, had a different silence from the rest; for in their sleep, closed and bolted, they lined the pavement helplessly, disordered and undignified, as though without the busy hum of human voices and the hurrying of persons in and out they had lost all significance.

  7

  ON the following Sunday Basil Kent and Hurrell lunched with Miss Ley, and there met Mr and Mrs Castillyon, who came early in the afternoon. The husband of this lively lady was a weighty man, impressive by the obesity of his person and the commonplace of his conversation; his head was bald, his fleshy face clean-shaven, and his manner had the double pomposity of a landed proprietor and a member of Parliament. It seemed that Nature had taken a freakish revenge on his dullness when she mated him with such a sprightly person as his wife, who, notwithstanding his open adoration, treated him with impatient contempt. Mr Castillyon might have been suffering had he been as silent as he was tedious; but he had an interminable flow of conversation, and now, finding the company somewhat overwhelmed by his appearance, seized the opportunity to air opinions which should more properly have found utterance in that last refuge of dullards and bores, the House of Commons.

  But in a little while, at the butler's heels, Reggie, with the stealthiness of a sleek cat, slouched into the room. He was pale after Saturday's amusement, but very handsome. Miss Ley, rising to welcome him, intercepted a glance at Mrs Castillyon, and, seeing in that lady's eye a malicious twinkle, was convinced that the pair had arranged this meeting. But though it amused the acute woman that an assignation should be made in her house, she would not have given Mrs Castillyon further occasion to exercise her wiles if the member of Parliament had not bored her into a bad temper. And really Emily Bassett exaggerated the care she took of her son; it irritated Miss Ley that anyone should be so virtuous as Reggie was thought to be.

  'Paul,' said Mrs Castillyon, 'Mr Bassett has heard that you're going to speak in the House tomorrow, and he would so much like to hear you.... My husband – Mr Barlow-Bassett.'

  'Really! How did you hear that?' asked Mr Castillyon, delighted.

  It was part of Reggie's ingenuity that he never lied in haste to repent at leisure. For one moment he meditated, then fixed his eyes firmly on Frank to prevent a contradiction.

  'Dr Hurrell told me.'

  'Of course I shall be delighted if you'll come,' pursued the orator. 'I shall speak just before dinner. Won't you dine afterwards? I'm afraid the dinner they give you is very bad.'

  'He won't mind that after he's heard you speak, Paul,' said Mrs Castillyon.

  A faint smile flickered on her lips at the success of this manoeuvre. Mr Castillyon turned blandly to Miss Ley, with the little shake of his whole body which announced a display of eloquence. Frank and Basil immediately jumped up and bade Miss Ley farewell; they walked together towards the Embankment, and for a while neither spoke.

  'I wanted to talk to you, Frank,' said Basil at last. 'I'm thinking of going abroad for the winter.'

  'Are you? What about the Bar?'

  'I don't mind about that. After all, I have enough to live on, and I mean to have a shot if I can do any real good as a writer. Besides, I want to break with Jenny, and I can think of no kinder way to do it.'

  'I think you're very wise.'

  'Oh, I wish I hadn't got into this mess, Frank. I don't know what to do. I'm afraid she's grown a good deal fonder of me than I ever thought she would, and I don't want to cause her pain. I can't bear it when I think of the wretchedness she'll suffer – and yet we can't go on as we are.'

  Frank remained silent, with compressed lips and a stern look on his face. Basil divined the unspoken censure, and burst out passi
onately.

  'Oh, I know I oughtn't to have given way. D'you think I've not bitterly regretted? I never thought she'd take it any more seriously than I did. And, after all, I'm a man like any other. I have passions as other men have. I suppose most men in my place would have done as I did.'

  'I didn't venture to reproach you, Basil,' said Frank dryly.

  'I meant to do only good to the girl. But I lost my head. After all, if we were all as cool at night as we are in the morning....'

  'Life would be a Sunday-school,' interrupted Frank.

  At that moment they were near Westminster Bridge, and a carriage passed them. They saw that in it sat Mrs Murray, and she bowed gravely; Basil reddened and looked back.

  'I wonder if she's on the way to Miss Ley.'

  'Would you like to go back and see?' asked Frank coldly.

  He looked sharply at Basil, who flushed again, and then threw off his momentary hesitation.

  'No,' he answered firmly; 'let us go on.'

  'Is it on account of Mrs Murray that you wish to throw over Jenny?'

  'Oh, Frank, don't think too hardly of me. I hate the ugly sordid vulgarity of an intrigue. I wanted to lead a cleaner life than most men because of my – because of Lady Vizard; and when I've been with Jenny I'm disgusted with myself. If I'd never seen Mrs Murray, I should still do all I could to finish.'

  'Are you in love with Mrs Murray?'