A Man of Straw
I saw him in Leicester Square, standing on the edge of the pavement in front of the Empire.
There was something familiar about him, the tall, thin figure, the small moustache, and the pale, helpless blue eyes. He looked up at me, hesitating, uncertain, a little afraid to speak, expecting that I should cut him.
Then, like a flash, it came back to me; his name, his personality.
“Surely it’s Marlow, isn’t it?” I said, “and I don’t believe you’ve forgotten me either. Where have you been all these years, and what happened to you after we ran up against each other that time in France, in ’17?”
He had scarcely changed at all. He must have been thirty-six or seven, and yet there was scarcely a line to show the difference between him and the boy I knew at school. And yet there was something—vague, shadowy. It was as if, imperceptibly, he had shrunk into himself, become worn, a little humble. I could see him at school, rather arrogant, inclined to show off, and yet popular, with many friends. Then, in France, when I met him suddenly in Havre during 1917, his arrogance had shown itself again. His attitude towards me, a junior officer, had been superior, slightly ridiculous. Now, twelve years later, his manner had altered. He stooped a little, too, as if he bore some weight upon his shoulders. I felt curious to know how he had lived.
“I never thought you would remember me,” he smiled. “You know how it is, one goes abroad—one drifts, and people go out of one’s life. …” He seemed to be apologising for something.
I realised that he had the appearance of someone who is half-starved, who denies himself the meanest necessities. Yet he was not in any way shabbily or poorly dressed, his clothes were good. I took him off to dinner at my favourite little Italian restaurant, and there his general shyness melted, he gave way, he told me about himself. I leant back in my chair, smoking innumerable cigarettes, and listened to him for nearly two hours without interruption. He told me his story, fixing me the while with his pale blue eyes, and from time to time brushing his short moustache with a quick, impatient gesture.
“The fact is,” he began, “I’m done; beaten. Life has got me under, and I can’t cope. I’m thirty-seven; no money, no job—without the likelihood of anything turning up. One goes on hoping, day after day, that something will come along, and that’s about all. Meanwhile, I keep up appearances; I never allow myself to grow slack or shabby.
“These clothes, for instance. You’d never guess from my clothes that this is the first meal I’ve had for two days? No, I believe in keeping up appearances.”
He spoke without conviction. His hand trembled as he lit the cigarette I offered him. A note of weariness crept into his voice, a whining note, a ceaseless complaint.
“You see, nothing has really been my fault,” he went on. “Not consciously, anyway. I’ve never meant to hurt anyone or anything, and yet life has been against me, always, always. I don’t ask for much, only the right to live decently, to keep body and soul together.
“Something has happened to the world. People have become brutal, callous. No one is ready to lend a helping hand. If I were like the rest of them, hard, indifferent, thick-skinned—God, if I could only change my temperament. But I’m so appallingly sensitive—and it’s incurable, there’s nothing to be done. All my life it’s been the same—all my life mucked up because of it.”
He drank his coffee slowly, thoughtfully. It occurred to me that he was acting a little, that he was watching himself as it were, with me, and creating for his own benefit a shadow on a wall.
Yet he seemed unconscious of this, and I decided that he had acted a part so long that he had therefore lost all insincerity, and had become one with the character he had drawn for himself.
He leant forward, intimate, as one who bares his soul to his confessor.
“And then—no one has really understood me since my mother died.”
Weakness, self-pity—at once I held the key to his character.
Justified, perhaps, a shallow, empty life, like most of us who came through the War, but surely he could have found somewhere a place to rest? He could not have searched in himself, nor in anyone, for that matter, for that small grain of beauty that lies in all of us, even in the most weary, the most forsaken.
“No one has understood me since my mother died.”
Then he went on to talk about the War.
“Those four years had a terrible effect upon me. They shook something inside me, not youth, not ideals, but something I can’t name. Vaguely, I think, it was the want to ever do anything or to be anyone that went. There didn’t seem very much purpose in anything. I don’t know if other fellows did the same—but I became slack with myself, I didn’t bother to think at all.
“At first I waited, expectant, for something terrific to happen, so as to be able to lose myself in a rush of feeling—but it never came. I messed about, doing my job mechanically, aware of
