Henry Green - Loving, Living, Party Going

She stood out as though so much health, such abundance and happiness should have never clothes to hide it. Indeed she looked as though she were alone in the world she was so good, and so good that she looked mild, which she was not.

She put out her tongue and carefully examined this. Then she smiled herself good-bye again and began to powder all over her.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you listened to a word I said.’

‘Is Max out there, d’you suppose?’

‘I don’t know. Shall I go and find him?’

‘No, of course not. Let him find me.’

‘As you are? In or out of your bath?’

‘No such luck for him,’ she said, and laughed. She began whistling.

Max said he would ask Alex what he thought this man had been, it seemed to him a natural excuse to see what they were doing. Going in he found Alex wearily leaning his shoulder against the shut door of that bathroom.

‘Hullo, old boy!’

‘Amabel,’ said Max.

‘Why, hullo, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m having a bath.’

‘Good,’ he said.

Angela came in. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘didn’t you say that man was the hotel detective?’

‘What man?’

‘The man you gave a drink to.’

‘I thought he might be, but I shouldn’t think so.’

He could not have been, for now that he was trying to get out of this hotel, and it was like trying to get out of one world into another, no one in authority seemed to know him. If they let people out they said then they would have to allow them in, they had experienced that before when everything had been broken up, no, he could not go outside. Then he asked them what right they had to keep him in, and they told him it was to protect their own property. He had said he must go out, and then each of those officials had left him.

In the lounge where he was now it was even fuller than it had been. Every seat was occupied and people sat about on their bags as they had done outside when there had been room to sit down. One wall had windows high up along it which looked out over the station, and on their outside ledges were perched young men, mostly amusing themselves at the guests inside. These youths were putting out their yellow tongues at one old lady seated by him, and while he thought how he could get out he watched her shake her paper at them. As he always interfered he told her not to bother, and in this he was right, as she encouraged them by showing temper. But she would not listen. ‘Go away,’ she said, and once she had said that began mouthing soundlessly, go away, articulating with her lips at those youths behind glass. They caught on to this and mouthed back through the shut window, only what they brought soundless out were obscenities. He could read their lips, but she never knew. He said to her, ‘Now don’t you go and throw something at them, ma’am, it would not be proper in someone in your position and you might never know what you got back.’ ‘Go away,’ she said out loud again.

Although all those windows had been shut there was a continual dull roar came through them from outside, and this noise sat upon those within like clouds upon a mountain so they were obscured and levelled and, as though they had been airmen, in danger of running fatally into earth. Clouds also, if they are banked up, will so occupy the sky as to dwarf what is beneath and this low roar, which was only conversation in that multitude without, lay over them in such a pall, like night coming on and there is no light when one must see, that these people here were obscured by it and were dimmed into anxious Roman numerals.

Not putting this into words he did feel relieved when he got into a passage where it was emptier, though three people lay at full length against one wall. Seeing another stranger come out of one door to go into another, ‘Hi, Charlie,’ he shouted, not knowing his name, and stopped him. These three sleepers moaned in their darkness. ‘Charlie,’ he went on, coming up to him, ‘any way out of ‘ere?’ ‘No, lad, it’s all shut up.’ ‘But say you or me wanted to get out?’ ‘He’d slip out of a window,’ this other stranger said and went off.

‘Have you looked outside?’ Julia said to Evelyn upstairs.

‘How d’you mean, outside?’

‘Why at all those millions down below,’ she said, and led them past where Angela was sitting by the curtains. ‘Look at that, darlings,’ she said almost tearfully, for what had exhilarated her not so long ago was forbidding now. She frowned.

Max came back to be with them, unseeing. Now that he had heard Amabel and that he knew she was in her bath undressed, it seemed to him that when they had been together she had warmed him every side. When he opened his eyes close beside her in the flat she had blotted out the light, only where her eye would be he could see dazzle, all the rest of her mountain face had been that dark acreage against him. He had lain in the shadow of it under softly beaten wings of her breathing, and his thoughts, hatching up out of sleep, had bundled back into the other darkness of her plumes. So being entirely delivered over he had lain still, he remembered, because he had been told by that dazzle her eyelids were not down so that she lay still awake.

He wanted her.

So this stranger on his mission went into rooms at a venture, tried windows and found them locked, and then went out again until he came to one room where two maids leant out of an open casement towards their knight standing on his friend’s shoulder from the station floor ten foot beneath. His bowler hat lay next his friend’s feet and in a cross neatly on the crown of it lay his pair of gloves.

Through this open window noise of all those outside smote him in one vast confused hum like numbers of aeroplanes flying by and against which these two maids’ shrill female voices, screeching to make themselves appreciated by their white-collared boy, were like urgent wheels that had not been oiled. Interfering again he came forward and he said, ‘Save us, young fellow. Don’t you go and fall down or you might be hurt.’

‘It’s her eyes enfold me and uphold me,’ was his gallant answer.

‘Did you hear that?’ she screeched, and her friend leaned further out and said:

‘Which one, which eyes?’

‘Now don’t make me choose,’ he said, reaching up with one arm, his other hand sucking to the wall. ‘Hold me,’ he said, ‘hold me.’ One of them stretched her dainty dirty fingers down and he caught her wrist. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘where would you be if I jumped off his shoulder?’ These two screamed now like rats smelling food when they have been starved in empty milk-churns. ‘Listen,’ this stranger interrupted, ‘that’s murder,’ leaning out himself. ‘What’s murder?’ was his answer, and the other said he could not stand Ed’s weight much longer. They redoubled their shrieks, they were famished and had not been so charmed for ages.

‘She’d fall slap on her ‘ead and break ‘er neck,’ he said pondering, when the one who was being held broke off her shrieks to say, well it was her neck, wasn’t it?

‘I’ll jump off and then I’ll knock his block off for him,’ he murmured and scrambled out, hung at arm’s length, while Ed said, mind my gloves and hat, dropped lightly for his age, and began ploughing his way through. He had forgotten them at once.

To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown thick together or thousands of tailors’ dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor.

‘What targets,’ one by him remarked, ‘what targets for a bomb.’

Max leaned his forehead against a shut window tormented by his dreams of Amabel, daydreams brought on by her voice, by her being so near, by her choosing to be undressed behind that door and because she used another voice when she wore no clothes, she mocked.