THEY LEFT THEIR LOVE IN AVALON

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21244, 14 January 1939, Page 7

THEY LEFT THEIR LOVE IN AVALON

By

C. GORDON GLOVER

Two men were walking down the Strand in the direction of the theatres. They walked jauntily, with a certain gamin arrogance, their plimsolled 'feet padding loosely in the rhythm, their muddy, twin-handled carpet-bag swinging between them. Pancho and Herbert were streettumblers, entertainers of theatre queues, saloon-bars, raggle-taggle artists of the by-streets. Pancho, the elder, was a gaunt celery-stalk of a man with a head of dusty hair that stood up confusedly about his ears like teased string. Not so young as he was, the muscles of his white, wiry body not so strong, knees not so supple, eye not so clear. He was 50. He sang as he walked, tossing back the narrow head which perched like some thin melon on the sinewy neck thrust up from the open shirt. He was a cheerful man, very cheerful, living from day to day on the coins which clattered around his feet. He did not know where he had been born: he did not know his name. He believed his mother had been Spanish. Pancho seemed as good a name as any. He had used it for thirty years up and down the Soho streets, in tlie police courts, at the gallery doors. • He had fallen in with Herbert a couple of weeks back. They had happened to clash outside the Odeon Theatre. Both came tumbling and somersaulting down the roadway, almost meeting face to face as they spindled along on the horny palms of their hands. Herbert cleared off. Later he returned. “We might work in,” said Herbert. Pancho grinned. "Fifty-fifty splits—all right with me.” Herbert was a couple of years younger, small, kpotted and warped like a diseased tree, with iron-grey hair like the bristles on a hog’s back. He. too. had tumbled in the stree's for years, but provincials chiefly. He came to London every so often, and it was during one of these visits that he fell in with Pancho. They were hopeful that night—a big first-night at the Frivol, a spectacular revue which meant a queue three hundred strong, although the night was dank, full of raw-smelling drizzle that greased the pavements and blurred the bright hop windows. “I’m in love again . . .” chanted Pancho. “You are?" grunted Herbert. “I.” said Pancho, “am always in love.” “Married?” “Narrrr.” said Pancho. “Narrrr,” he repeated. “What’s the good for me to any woman, eh? What’s the

good? I’m not good enough for any of them. They can’t keep me and I’ve got no right to expect to keep them. Too fond of a pint,” said Pancho, and hitched up his side of the bag. The other grunted again. “Then wot you in love with—life?” he demanded, sardonically. “Narrrr,” said Pancho, “it’s all right, though. Wot you think I’d be in love with but a woman?” "Oh—a woman!” commented Herbert. “Well, wot of it? It’s natural, ain’t it?” He paused, then fell to philosophising. "But marriage—it ain’t a bit of use to our kind. Women like a bit of peace and quiet nights, sitting round the fire, mending the socks—that’s what women get married for, not for the likes of you and me.” “Arrrr,” observed Herbert, and the pair walked on. “Bin in love with her twelve years,” said Pancho musingly. “Arrrr,” grunted Herbert. “Not good enough for her, though, that’s the trouble, not good enough by half. She was all right, though,” said Pancho. He grinned reflectively and then a small cloud seemed to film either eye., “She was all right,” he added huskily. “I bin in love, too,” said Herbert, not to be outdone, “but it don’t mean nothing after the first few times. What’s women anyway?” “Women’s women,” explained Pancho. “Mothers,” said Herbert, “that’s what they’re meant for —mothers, and for having a laugh with. Most of ’em, that is,” he added thoughtfully. . “Wives,” cried Pancho, “wives for chaps as is lucky enough to be those sort of chaps. I’d a’ married her, yes I would. I would, I tell yer—but what’s the use of me to a woman?” “What’s the use of women to you? —that’s what I always say,” replied the other. “Like peanuts, that’s what they are—you want plenty of ’em. He lowered his voice until it was rough and threadbare. "I went and lost the only good ’un I ever had because I couldn’t keep away from them others. Walked out on her for a bit o’ flash that walked out on me. Didn’t know I bln married, did yer?” "I never bin,” explained Pancho. “But I would a’ bin. One’d ’ve done for me if I could ’ve suited her.” “I dessay I could say that, too,” said Herbert huskily. Pancho was singing now with gay tunelessness, “I left my love in

Avalon . . Herbert sneered contemptuously and growled, “Put a cork in it. Sentimental, that’s what you’re getting. Save your breath, can’t yer?” He was thinking of ten-hand somersaults from end to end of their strip of sacking. “All this talk about love,” he added bitterly, Pancho stopped singing and smiled to himself. “She was all right,” he thought. He often thought about her and wondered whether she ever thought about him. But why should she? Never mind, he’d had his share of love in—Avalon. That’s what they had called the two little rooms at the top of the squeaking stairway. You should be thankful for that much, he supposed. They passed the gallery entrance of a theatre, a grimed, crumbling ruin of a place, rarely open nowadays save when some repertory company risked it for a short season. He nudged Herbert. “I met her there,” he announced. Herbert seemed disinterested. “Did yer,” he said flatly. “Arrrr,” affirmed Pancho. “That’s where it was, just by that lamp-post

see, and suddenly she comes round that corner there, see, with her hair flying, and she starts to gabble, see, with me on the flat of me ’and, ‘Come,’ she says, ‘come on,’ she says, just like that.” “Did yer go?” asked Herbert, still disinterested. Pancho winked. “What do you think?” The other made no reply. “Shall I tell yer what happened?” said Pancho. “If yer like.” “Then I won’t, see.” Pancho’s mouth shut firmly like • a trap. Tell him? Not he. Though it was a good story, one which he liked to tell —to a good audience. He had often had tears in their eyes—and his own —before he had finished. No tears would come to Herbert’s eyes he decided. In silence he padded on. But he was thinking as he often thought about that night outside the old theatre when the rain was coming down in sheets, and there were only fifteen people queueing for the gallery. He was thinking of how she had come round the corner, a shawl over her shoulders, her black hair sleek like patent leather with the rain. “Come,” she had said, “I want you—come on.” He had gone with her. “Wot is it?” “My kid’s sick—he’s dying he keeps asking for the acrobats. We went to the circus last week, then

he got ill and he asks for acrobats . . .” “I see—do a turn for the kid, that it?” “If you would. His dad’s an acrobat, but his dad . . “Dead, eh?” “No, he isn’t dead.” She laughed. “But as good as.” He had climbed behind her up the creaking stairway, paused, bag in hand, while she opened the door, followed her in, looked across the room to the big calf-brown eyes which stared from the crushed sheets. “Here’s the acrobat, Tony.” Of course all rather banal and conventional, really, just like a story. But then it was a story, a true story. "Hooo-ooop,” he had cried, tumbling, grinning, posturing about the dusty boards whose splinters drove again and again into his hands. “Hoopooop!” The calf-eyes were full of laughter; the fever-damped hands clapped stickily together. “Go on—go on.” A final contortion of arms and legs, a back-spring, a flourish, a gesture—“ How’s that, sonny?” Then the silent exhausted gratitude from huge brown eyes. And the kid got better. Well, now, you could say what you liked, but what cured him? “I did,” Pancho would conclude his story triumphantly to his audiences. “I cured that kid as sure as eggs is

eggs.” Well, he had, hadn’t he? He’d cured the kid and fallen up to the ears for the kid’s mother into the bargain. She was just—Oh, well, the old word, “different.” Quiet, serene, peaceful. “You must come again, Mr Pancho —l’m so grateful to you.” Come again? You bet your life he’d come again. And again, and again, and again. “Avalon,” they called those two little rooms at the top of the squeaking stairway. And Avalon they were. “You’ve taken it on the chin, haven’t yer?” he demanded one day. She nodded. Women did, as a rule, she said, and shrugged. Oh, well you were lucky to be alive at all she supposed. “You and me's got to marry,” Pancho had asserted. “Marry?” A curious, frightened look had crept into her eyes. “But I’m married already. You know that. The kid . . .” “Can’t we do something about it? ’Ave ’im divorced?” She shook her head. “What’d be the good even if T could ever find him? I don’t know where he is. Besides—besides I’m not marrying any more. Marrying people means loving them, giving your life to them, giving up everything to them and all for—nothing. I’ve been hurt once promising to love a man for ever,

and I’m not going to be hurt again. I got the kid; he comes first. Anything else comes second from now on. . .” It did not last very long as these things go—about six months of Avalon before he left his love in it for the last time. Well, he was that sort of chap, that was all. He knew he drank a bit, he knew he was no great shakes for a decent woman. he knew he was as weak as the lovable world. “You’re drunk again, Pancho.” “Blind’s a bat, but I love- you. Oh, come on, Peg. Forget about it.” And those great brown eyes of the kid’s Watching him in a puzzled, disappointed way. He liked the kid and the kid liked him. But the kid didn’t matter when the kid’s mother was around. “Pancho, Pancho, can’t you pull yourself together? Are you all the same —you men?” Pull himself together? Of course he couldn’t. Just not that kind of chap. Not the kind of chap who was any good to anyone—just a cheerful, inconsequent devil, a moody, addlepated sort of devil. Sometimes it was heaven for Pancho; when it wasn’t heaven it was hell. Some women weren’t meant for heaven and hell—just for peaceful, comfortable things of the world. Peg wasn’t made for heaven, it scared her too much; she knew it wouldn’t last. Avalon was mostly heaven and hell for them. So one day, crying, she had said: “Pancho, Pancho, I can’t stand it any more. You see. it’s happening all over again, like it happened with him—but in a different way. Pancho, go away, will you—go away?” And off he had gone, stumbling down the squeaking stairway for the last time singing. “Oh, I left my love in Avalon.” The love of his life. Not good enough for her, just—not that sort of chap. How he had sung, and strutted, and soaked that night away! And they had run him in. Drunk and disorderly. Well, there was an excuse, wasn't there? “You don’t leave your love in Avalon every day of the week do you. Your Honour?” Contempt of court. He paid the fine, grinned—and went on grinning, and being alive, and in love. But he never went back to Avalon. No use going into all that for someone like Herbert. "Well, here we are,” said Herbert and down went the bag in the mud outside the Athene Theatre. Slowly they took off their coats, rolled their sleeves, spat on their hands and took stock of the audience. “Ready?” queried Pancho. "Arrrr,” said Herbert and struck his posterior into the air to take Pancho's spring. He clapped his hands, cried “Hoooo-oop,” padded forward, hop-skip-jump, leaped to his objective—the side-show commenced. Once Pancho slipped, fell inelegantly in the mud. “He’s in love,” said Herbert. The

crowd roared. Pancho grinned. “I’ll say so.” he affirmed. Slowly the crowd filed towards the door, the coppers tingled on the pavement. Pancho and Herbert dived among the taxi-wheels to collect their spoil. And at length they were alone in the street “Time for the Drama—then back here for the comeout,” said Pancho briefly. Again they were outside the Frivol, again hurdling themselves leggily at one another, again stumping on blistered palms about the roadway, grotesque, absurd human travesties posturing with the inadequacy of performing animals. The coins showered again—sob-stuff coins. When the stage door gave forth Antonia Marques (the find of .the year, Europe’s most finished trapeze artist) and his mother, Pancho and Herbert were flat upon their backs, tossing the spangled ball from foot to foot. Pancho looking up, saw the heavy coat with the Astrakhan collar —and then calf-brown eyes, lazily indulgent. And looking beyond them he saw Peg, Peg! In a fur coat. And the kid .... The two, mother and son, passed quickly across the pavement to where sleek and shining, their car was standing. There was a faint smell of furs and of carnations. Pancho, shambling to his feet, saw white hands fumbling in an evening bag, then heard the tinkle of coins. He looked down. Two half-crowns. He looked up. Peg! That was Peg and the kid, and they’d not seen him —thank Gawd. Just a couple of street tumblers. Suddenly, as he stood, eyes damp, staring after the retreating car, he was aware of Herbert at his side, clutching his arm, peering into bis face. And he saw Herbert’s eyes, calf-brown and big. And Herbert was stammering. “There, see them, see them two? Told you I bin married, di’n’t I? Well, that’s her, and that’s him. That’s my kid, that’s my kid and his ma. All your talk about love—why you, you never had the chance to lose one like ’er, did yer?” He went on stammering, “That’s my kid—l . Pancho looked into those brown eyes and laughed. “I might’ve known it,” he said. “Known what?” “I'll tell yer. Well, I done something for her, too. I gave her back the kid’s fife once. Yus that’s what I done. And you’re what she used to call ’im.” “What you talking about?” demanded Herbert. Pancho stooped and Retrieved the half-crowns. He held them in the palm of his hand and slowly shook them together. “Just ‘his,” he said. “We ain’t either of us much good, you and me, but we each done something for her, see. Come on and I’ll teli yer about it—and well drink to their ’ealths. Gawd bless them both." And staring into Pancho’s eyes, he stopped and lifted the other handle of the carpet bag.