Tono Bungay

The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable.

My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.

I won’t pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct.  I was a young and fairly vigorous male; all my appetite for love had been roused and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and my marriage.  I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of all else, and it had failed me.  It had faded when I had hoped it would grow brighter.  I despaired of life and was embittered.  And things happened as I am telling.  I don’t draw any moral at all in the matter, and as for social remedies, I leave them to the social reformer.  I’ve got to a time of life when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about realities.

To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a room in which the typists worked.  They were the correspondence typists; our books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we had had the luck to secure on either side of us.  I was, I must confess, always in a faintly cloudily-emotional way aware of that collection of for the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of the girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon my attention.  I appreciated her at first as a straight little back, a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with a smiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair very neatly done—­and as a side-long glance; presently as a quickly turned face that looked for me.

My eye would seek her as I went through on business things—­I dictated some letters to her and so discovered she had pretty, soft-looking hands with pink nails.  Once or twice, meeting casually, we looked one another for the flash of a second in the eyes.

That was all.  But it was enough in the mysterious free-masonry of sex to say essential things.  We had a secret between us.

One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was alone, sitting at her desk.  She glanced up as I entered, and then became very still, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table.  I walked right by her to the door of the inner office, stopped, came back and stood over her.

We neither of us spoke for quite a perceptible time.  I was trembling violently.

“Is that one of the new typewriters?” I asked at last for the sake of speaking.

She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her eyes alight, and I bent down and kissed her lips.  She leant back to put an arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me again and again.  I lifted her and held her in my arms.  She gave a little smothered cry to feel herself so held.

Never before had I known the quality of passionate kisses.

Somebody became audible in the shop outside.

We started back from one another with flushed faces and bright and burning eyes.

“We can’t talk here,” I whispered with a confident intimacy.  “Where do you go at five?”

“Along the Embankment to Charing Cross,” she answered as intimately.  “None of the others go that way…”

“About half-past five?”

“Yes, half-past five…”

The door from the shop opened, and she sat down very quickly.

“I’m glad,” I said in a commonplace voice, “that these new typewriters are all right.”

I went into the inner office and routed out the paysheet in order to find her name—­Effie Rink.  And did no work at all that afternoon.  I fretted about that dingy little den like a beast in a cage.

When presently I went out, Effie was working with an extraordinary appearance of calm—­and there was no look for me at all….

We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when there was none to overhear; we came to an understanding.  It was strangely unlike any dream of romance I had ever entertained.