SO it was that Doober’s changed continually and remained always the same, as manhood dawned murkily upon our Edward Albert. Doober’s, until he was wrenched out of it by circumstances beyond his control, was the foundation of his world. But outside it a number of other human encounters were streaming past him, making suggestions to him and deflecting his ideas about life. The staff he worked with at North London Leaseholds was a purely male one, and his general pose towards his colleagues was of someone “a bit superior” who condescended rather than was compelled to earn. He felt he dressed better than they did. He made a certain mystery of his place of residence; he had more pocket money; most of them still lived in and paid in to their homes. But if he offended them they controlled their resentment at his airs, and he found it more agreeable to go with them to the restaurant they frequented for lunch than to sit alone. And there they met “the girls —”
The girls were still cheaper human material than the clerical staff; they functioned in another department with envelopes and postal responses of various sorts. And they mixed very cheerfully with, the boys at the lunch-time rendezvous. There was a certain process called getting away with a nice boy, and there was a natural response in the adolescing male. A mutual possessiveness was established, which, in those days of underpaid femininity, meant taking your girl out in the evening to a café gossip or a cinema or even a music hall, and paying for her. It was only in the latter stages of the first World War that anything like economic equality dawned on young women. And the North London Leaseholds girls found a certain stand-offishness in Edward Albert provocative rather than annoying, and he responded with a certain excitement. This was far easier and simpler and less sustained than the relationships at Doober’s. He discovered “flirting”, that mutual stimulation of egotism.0
Marriage was something remote and incredible for all these youngsters, so that one “paid attention” and professed all sorts of amorous feelings with the completest immunity from any sort of fulfilment. It was a play of self-assertion, remote from any thought of that It, which distressed his dreams and secrecies.
He had a number of shadow love affairs, with Erne and Laura and Molly Brown, the only one whose surname he acquired, and several whose Christian names slipped his memory. The shadow took on a certain substance with Molly Brown. He took her one sunny Sunday to Rickmansworth for a country walk, and they got some ham and beer at an inn. Then they wandered into a patch of woodland and sat down in the shade of some bracken. They looked at one another in a mood of ignorant desire. “Let’s smoke,” she said.
“If anyone sees us,” he said.
“Nobody’s seeing us,” she said, and they smoked and regarded one another.
“Well?” she said, when the smoking was done. They heard a burst of giggling and little squeals in the adjacent bushes. “Her chap’s tickling her!” she said. Edward Albert took no further action.
She sprawled back leisurely and regarded him.
“Kiss me, Teddy!” she said, and she kissed him! She kissed rather nicely. “Like that?” she asked, and they kissed again. “Put your arm round me. No, so. . . . Let’s cuddle up close.”
He cuddled tepidly.
“My, I wish it was dark. Then we could cuddle. Couldn’t we stay till alter dark and cuddle?”
“Oo. I dunno. P’raps we’re trespassing here. Someone might come along and see us.”
“People won’t mind us just cuddling. They all do it here. Some of them do more than that.”
He mumbled a reply. He was trembling violently. Her kisses and her embrace had set him alight. He wanted to hug her violently, and also he wanted to run away. He was acutely aware of his visibility and with the stir of his senses all the secretive factors in his sensuality were aroused. She kissed him a third time and his self-control exploded. His grip tightened upon her; he held her beneath him, and hugged, hugged actively, breathing hard, until suddenly he was satisfied, and sat up as suddenly and pushed her away from him. She had been struggling against his onslaught.
“Lemme go,” she whispered fiercely “Starp it, I tell you!”
She rolled away from him and sat up also. Her hat had come off, her hair was disordered, her skirts pushed up to her knees, and her expression ruffled. Both of them were flushed and out of breath and surprised.
The tickling had ceased apparently; nobody was audible; the only sound was the breeze among the bracken.
She looked about them. “My word,” she said, in an undertone, “you do hug.”
“I— I liked it, Molly.”
“I didn’t. You were rough. Look at my hair!” She adjusted her crumpled frock and edged still further away from him, “You’ll have to help look for my hair-pins. “You seemed just to go right off your nut.”
“Well, you made me.”
“I like that.”
“You led me on.”
“I’ll take jolly good care I don’t lead you on again, my boy. You were rough. You were rough.”
“Just a bit of fun like, Molly. I didn’t mean anything.”
“Look at my ‘at!”
Another young couple in search of retirement rustled through the undergrowth twenty yards away.
“Suppose they’d come by just now,” said Molly with three pins in her mouth, remodelling her hat.
“Well they didn’t anyhow,” said Edward Albert, becoming snappy.
“If they ‘ad —”
“Why ‘arp on it?” he snarled.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in an atmosphere of mute reproach. They went home long before dusk, and she decided to leave him and go to church with her mother.
“Right O,” said he, instead of the usual tender good night.
He retired thoughtfully to Scartmore House. He reflected that the path of true love never had run smooth.
He knew he was in love with Molly because otherwise why should he have wanted her so much and given way like that?
He wanted to hug again, already, and he dreaded hugging her again. But the next time they met she seemed to have forgotten her urgency and he was disappointed. They sat on a seat by the road on Hampstead Heath, making no further allusion to hugging, and he went on with his favourite impersonation of a mysterious bastard. “I don’t know who my father was or what he was. I’ve been sort of made away with. . . . ”
The difficulty of the story was to keep it so as to avoid any suggestion of Great Expectations. For you cannot be too careful. She seemed to listen with a jaded interest, and when he suggested she should give him a kiss she gave him a peck on the cheek. “Let’s go for a ramble into these bushes,” he suggested. She shook her head.
“Just a little bit of spooning,” he pleaded.
“You don’t know where to stop. I don’t like — what you did. You know. Sunday.”
Their next meeting was more hopeful. He took her to a cinema and they sat holding hands side by side in quite their old fashion. Afterwards they got some lemon squash and a sandwich in the new little ham and beef shop, and they had a little tiff about the magic of Rudolph Valentino, which was healed when she accepted Edward Albert’s contention that there was something unEnglish about Rudolph and admitted that for her own part she couldn’t imagine how any Englishwoman could feel “that way” about any foreigner. “I’d almost as soon a Chinese. But then of course she was half-Mexican.”
That was all right. They met again. But she kept him at arm’s length, and both were much too tongue-tied to explore the difficult question of what “going too far” might mean.
The warmth of his physical interest in her cooled. . . . That was one significant incident in his sentimental education. He tried to find a stimulus in one or two of the other girls, but there wasn’t much doing with them. His feelings towards her were invaded by a streak of possessive, dislike. She had led him on. He brooded, resentfully on that idea. She had let him and then she hadn’t let him any more. For a time they went about together largely, though they did not realise it, to keep up appearances with the rest of the boys and girls. Once or twice he was.stirred to a competitive attempt at resumption by the realisation that she was going around with another fellow. She was “nice.” to him, but more and more evasive. . . .
“Well anyhow,” solilo............