The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(116)

Michael entered from its west end, and against his principles. Here was overcrowded England at its most dismal, and here was he, who advocated a reduction of its population, about to visit some broken-down aliens with the view of keeping them alive. He looked into three of the little shops. Not a soul! Which was worst! Such little shops frequented, or – deserted? He came to No. 12, and looking up, saw a face looking down. It was wax white, movingly listless, above a pair of hands sewing at a garment. ‘That,’ he thought, ‘is my “obedient humble” and her needle.’ He entered the shop below, a hairdresser’s, containing a dirty basin below a dusty mirror, suspicious towels, bottles, and two dingy chairs. In his shirt-sleeves, astride one of them, reading The Daily Mail, sat a shadowy fellow with pale hollow cheeks, twisted moustache, lank hair, and the eyes, at once knowing and tragic, of a philosopher.

‘Hair-cut, sir?’

Michael shook his head.

‘Do Mr and Mrs Bergfeld live here?’

‘Upstairs, top floor.’

‘How do I get up?’

‘Through there.’

Passing through a curtained aperture, Michael found a stairway, and at its top, stood, hesitating. His conscience was echoing Fleur’s comment on Anna Bergfeld’s letter: ‘Yes, I dare say; but what’s the good?’ when the door was opened, and it seemed to him almost as if a corpse were standing there, with a face as though someone had come knocking on its grave, so eager and so white.

‘Mrs Bergfeld? My name’s Mont. You wrote to me.’

The woman trembled so, that Michael thought she was going to faint.

‘Will you excuse me, sir, that I sit down?’ And she dropped on to the end of the bed. The room was spotless, but besides the bed, held only a small deal washstand, a pot of geranium, a tin trunk with a pair of trousers folded on it, a woman’s hat on a peg, and a chair in the window covered with her sewing.

The woman stood up again. She seemed not more than thirty, thin but prettily formed; and her oval face, without colour except in her dark eyes, suggested Rafael rather than Sapper’s Row.

‘It is like seeing an angel,’ she said. ‘Excuse me, sir.’

‘Queer angel, Mrs Bergfeld. Your husband not in?’

‘No, sir. Fritz has gone to walk.’

‘Tell me, Mrs Bergfeld. If I pay your passages to Germany, will you go?’

‘We cannot get a passport now; Fritz has been here twenty years, and never back; he has lost his German nationality, sir; they do not want people like us, you know.’

Michael stivered up his hair.

‘Where are you from yourself?’

‘From Salzburg.’

‘What about going back there?’

‘I would like to, but what would we do? In Austria everyone is poor now, and I have no relative left. Here at least we have my sewing.’

‘How much is that a week?’

‘Sometimes a pound; sometimes fifteen shillings. It is bread and the rent.’

‘Don’t you get the dole?’

‘No, sir. We are not registered.’

Michael took out a five-pound note and laid it with his card on the washstand. ‘I’ve got to think this over, Mrs Bergfeld. Perhaps your husband will come and see me.’ He went out quickly, for the ghostly woman had flushed pink.

Repassing through the curtained aperture, he caught the hairdresser wiping out the basin.

‘Find ’em, sir?’

‘The lady.’

‘Ah! Seen better days, I should say. The ‘usband’s a queer customer; ‘alf off his nut. Wanted to come in here with me, but I’ve got to give this job up.’

‘Oh! How’s that?’

‘I’ve got to have fresh air – only got one lung, and that’s not very gaudy. I’ll have to find something else.’

‘That’s bad, in these days.’

The hairdresser shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I’ve been a hairdresser from a boy, except for the war. Funny place this, to fetch up in after where I’ve been. The war knocked me out.’ He twisted his little thin moustache.

‘No pension?’ said Michael.

‘Not a bob. What I want to keep me alive is something in the open.’

Michael took him in from head to foot. Shadowy, narrow-headed, with one lung.

‘But do you know anything about country life?’

‘Not a blessed thing. Still, I’ve got to find something, or peg out.’

His tragic and knowing eyes searched Michael’s face.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Michael. ‘Good-bye!’

The hairdresser made a queer jerky little movement.

Emerging from Sapper’s Row into the crowded, roaring thoroughfare, Michael thought of a speech in a play he had seen a year or two before. ‘The condition of the people leaves much to be desired. I shall make a point of taking up the cudgels in the House. I shall move –!’ The condition of the people! What a remote thing! The sportive nightmare of a few dreaming nights, the skeleton in a well-locked cupboard, the discomforting rare howl of a hungry dog! And probably no folk in England less disturbed by it than the gallant six hundred odd who sat with him in ‘that House’. For to improve the condition of the people was their job, and that relieved them of a sense of nightmare. Since Oliver Cromwell some sixteen thousand, perhaps, had sat there before them, to the same end. And was the trick done – not precisely! Still they were really working for it, and other people were only looking on and telling them how to do it!