Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?
'Fielding,' said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her what book she wanted.
She bought Tom Jones.
At ten o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones- that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones-a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked-much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She had nothing to wear.
They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece. Some people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women never-except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herself airs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought. Not going to music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other's clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked Tom Jones.
There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones.
'I do like Tom Jones,' said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early in
April when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite.
Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid nature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square) eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature-or words to that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fanny laid down Tom Jones.
She stitched or knitted.
'What's that?' asked Jacob.
'For the dance at the Slade.'
And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red tassels. What should she wear?
'I shall be in Paris,' said Jacob.
And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet the same people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits on his knee. She flirts outrageously-with Nick Bramham just now.
'In Paris?' said Fanny.
'On my way to Greece,' he replied.
For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.
He would forget her.
A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw-a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies are flaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree.
Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book in his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fire-flies, and brought back glow-worms in pill- boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds. It all came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her.
She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathed Jacob in a turban? There was his face. She lit the lamp. But as the daylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And though he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he said, and come to the Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor (and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in the glass), still-there lay Tom Jones.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
'Archer,' said Mrs. Flanders with that tenderness which mothers so often display towards their eldest sons, 'will be at Gibraltar to-morrow.'
The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while the random church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock striking four straight through the circling notes; the glass purpling under a storm-cloud; and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of shadow), the post, with all its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands, in slanting hands, stamped now with English stamps, again with Colonial stamps, or sometimes hastily dabbed with a yellow bar, the post was about to scatter a myriad messages over the world. Whether we gain or not by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say. But that letter-writing is practised mendaciously nowadays, particularly by young men travelling in foreign parts, seems likely enough.
For example, take this scene.
Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey in Paris. (Old Miss Birkbeck, his mother's cousin, had died last June and left him a hundred pounds.)
'You needn't repeat the whole damned thing over again, Cruttendon,' said Mallinson, the little bald painter who was sitting at a marble table, splashed with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, and undoubtedly more than a little drunk.
'Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady?' said Cruttendon, as Jacob came and took his seat beside them, holding in his hand an envelope addressed to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England.
'Do you uphold Velasquez?' said Cruttendon.
'By God, he does,' said Mallinson.
'He always gets like this,' said Cruttendon irritably.
Jacob looked at Mallinson with excessive composure.
'I'll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the whole of literature,' Cruttendon burst out. ''Hang there like fruit my soul.'' he began...
'Don't listen to a man who don't like Velasquez,' said Mallinson.
'Adolphe, don't give Mr. Mallinson any more wine,' said Cruttendon.
'Fair play, fair play,' said Jacob judicially. 'Let a man get drunk if he likes. That's Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I'm with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. 'Hang there like fruit my soul,'' he began quoting, in a musical rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-glass. 'The devil damn you black, you cream-faced loon!' he exclaimed as the wine washed over the rim.
''Hang there like fruit my soul,'' Cruttendon and Jacob both began again at the same moment, and both burst out laughing.
'Curse these flies,' said Mallinson, flicking at his bald head. 'What do they take me for?'
'Something sweet-smelling,' said Cruttendon.
'Shut up, Cruttendon,' said Jacob. 'The fellow has no manners,' he explained to Mallinson very politely. 'Wants to cut people off their drink. Look here. I want grilled bone. What's the French for grilled bone? Grilled bone, Adolphe. Now you juggins, don't you understand?'
'And I'll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in the whole of literature,' said Cruttendon, bringing his feet down on to the floor, and leaning right across the table, so that his face almost touched Jacob's face.
''Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,'' Mallinson interrupted, strumming his fingers on the table. 'The most ex-qui-sitely beautiful thing in the whole of literature... Cruttendon is a very good fellow,' he remarked confidentially. 'But he's a bit of a fool.' And he jerked his head forward.
Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs. Flanders; nor what happened when they paid the bill and left the restaurant, and walked along the Boulevard Raspaille.
Then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in the morning; the scene a studio; and the
