A wild shriek from the hillside opposite (distance forty yards) interrupted me.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ cried Helen; ‘but I cut a centipede in half. They are going in opposite directions.’
‘Dig another hole!’ I shouted. ‘Then go back when the halves have gone away. Yes, very distressing, but you can’t avoid everything.’
‘Murderer!’ said Helen.
This was feminine logic. I had not cut the centipede in half!
It was one of those golden October days ofwhich we have now had some half-dozen. Every night there is a little frost, so that morning both looks and smells exquisitely clean, and it is hardly possible to regret the turn of the year; though dahlias are blackened, the trees blaze with copper and gold, for in this week of windless days scarce a leaf has fallen, and the stems are as thick with foliage as they were in the summer, and to my mind doubly beautiful. And this work of bulb-planting seems to bridge over the winter, for we are already at work on spring. But in November, Helen and I mean to turn our faces townwards again, for it is possible there to be unaware of the transition to winter, which is so patently before one’s eyes in the country, and which, with the best will in the world, it is impossible not to find rather depressing. Some people, I know, label the squalls of February March as execrable, and flee the country then. But we both love them. These are the last despairing efforts of winter. His hand is already loosed from the earth; he strikes wildly, knowing that there are but few blows left in him. But in the autumn he is gaining strength every day: it is life whose hold is being loosed.And that is not exhilarating to watch. True, it is only a mimic death-bed, but personally we don’t want to sit by the bedside. In London there is no bedside. The shorter the day, the earlier the lamps are lit. Those avenues of shining eyes, which are not shocked whatever they see.... And the fogs—the mysterious fogs! I suppose we are Cockneys.
Helen gave out first in the matter of bulbs, and came and sat by me.
‘How very dirty you are!’ she said. ‘And have you been planting bulbs with your nose?’
‘Not at present. But it tickled, and so I rubbed it.’
‘Well, let’s stop now. I want to go for a walk. My back aches with bending, and though I haven’t got toothache, I feel as if I might have, and the kitchen-maid has given notice, and I don’t think anybody loves me, and if Legs marries that awful girl, I will never speak to you again. And they are coming to dinner to-night! I pray Heaven that Legs may miss his train, and not get here till late.’
‘So do I. Yes; let’s go for a real tramp on the downs. Hadn’t I better go and wash my face first?’
‘Oh no; what does it matter? But are you sure you don’t want to go on bulbing?’
‘Quite sure. I think we won’t go by the road, do you know. We can strike across the meadows and up the beacon.’
Helen gave a little purr—a querulous rumble of the throat.
‘I have the blues,’ she said, with great distinctness. ‘I was as happy as possible till ten minutes ago, and then they came on like—like a thunderstorm. Everything ached. I groaned aloud: my mind hurt me like lumbago. It hurts still. Oh, do rub something on it.’
That is one of the heavenly things about Helen. If she ‘feels bad,’ she comes and tells me about it like a child. She scolds me for all sorts of things of which I am perfectly innocent, because she knows I don’t mind one scrap (I love it, really, but I don’t tell her that), and it makes her feel better. She scolded now, even when we had passed the water-meadow and began a really steep ascent of the flanking hills.
‘I knew the kitchen-maid wouldn’t stop,’ she said, ‘because those London girls hate the country. So do I. And it was all your fault. You engaged her; I had nothing to do with it. And we neverhadsuch a kitchen-maid. She cooks better than the cook, and does everybody else’s work as well. You might have known she wouldn’t stand the country.’
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘My fault entirely. So is the toothache, isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t got one, but I might have. And that’s your fault, too. I wanted to go to the dentist as I passed through London, and you persuaded me to come down here without stopping. It did ache just then—it did.’
The hill got rather steeper.
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘How slowly you walk!’
‘Yes, but I have to do all the talking. You have no conversation. Oh dear, what a devil I am! Aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘There! I told you nobody loved me. Oh, look! we are going to have a real red sunset. All the hills are getting molten, as if they were red-hot and glowing.’
She was feeling a little better—not much, but a little. We had come up the two hundred feet of steep down-side as if we had been storming a breach. To walk very fast up a hill makes all proper people feel better, unless they have heart disease, in which case they die, and so, we hope, feel better also. But for those who have not heart disease, and want to feel better, the prescription is confidently recommended.
‘And then that awful girl!’ she went on. ‘You insisted on being neighbourly, as you call it, with the Ampses, and this is the result.’
‘There has been none at present.’
‘No; but you tell me to ask the family to dinner on the very day that Legs comes down. Oh dear, what a heavenly evening! I should so enjoy it if everything wasn’t wrong. Look at the sky! Fifty thousand little pink, fluffy angels floating about in it! Do you want to go right to the top of the hill?’
‘Yes, right to the top. Then I shall begin to answer you back.’
Helen laughed.
‘Oh no, don’t,’ she said. ‘It is no fun plaguing you if you dispute my facts. So tell me quickly:isn’t everything your fault, and not mine? Please pull me, if you intend to go that pace.’
So I pulled her, she holding the end of my stick, and we arrived at the very top of all. Sunset was below us, evening stars were above us, and on the huge expanse of down there was no one else. It was the loneliness I love.
‘The devil has gone,’ she said, after a while. ‘You are rather nice to me. And I don’t think I have toothache, and—well, you thought that Charlotte was a little Ampsy before I did. And even if nobody loves me—oh, how dirty your nose is!’
That was true, anyhow.
An extraordinary phenomenon in country towns is that, though nobody has anything to do, everyone feels extremely busy; whereas in town, though you have got an enormous deal to do, you never feel busy at all, and can, without fail, find time for anything else. I think there must be some microbe which cannot live in London, but thrives elsewhere, which produces the illusion of being rushed. Personally, I know it well: it is not an old enemy of mine, nor is it an old friend, but it is a pleasant old humbug, whichI am afraid I rather encourage. This evening, for instance, when I went to my room after tea, I encouraged it, and argued that one never had a moment to oneself. I had two hours in front of me now, as a matter of fact, in which I should be undisturbed; but the Old Humbug said that it was all very well to think about the future. All he knew was that he—that is, I—had been rushed—yes, rushed—all day and all yesterday, and ever since we came down to this dear, sleepy old town. To-day was Tuesday, and people were coming to dinner. We had gone out to lunch yesterday, and had dined out twice last week. Also, there was the garden to attend to, and a little golf (almost every day, as a matter of fact) was necessary for the health, and what with letters to write and cigarettes to smoke, and the Meistersinger overture to learn, in order to play it with Legs, I was a victim of this hurrying, bustling mode of life, which in a generation or so more would assuredly send everybody off their heads.
I made myself quite comfortable in my chair, and proceeded to think about it seriously, because I had two hours in front of me. It was all quitetrue (I was encouraging the Old Humbug, you will understand), and the modern mode of life was insane. London, anyhow, was insane, and in a little while I should probably get to agree with the Old Humbug that I was rushed and driven in the country also. But, to encourage credulity, I took London first. There one certainly was busy—all the hours, that is to say, of a day that began quite early and ended next morning were full, and I reconstructed one such as I often spend, and hope to spend many times more. I do not give it, because it seems to me the least edifying, and all stern moralists (the Old Humbug is an awfully stern moralist) would—as, indeed, they have done—shake their heads over it, and say, ‘To what purpose?’ I will tell you that afterwards.
I was called, let me say, at half-past seven, and after a few incredulous groans got up. I shaved, washed a little—not much, for reasons that will appear—drank some tea, and in a quarter of an hour was wildly bicycling towards the Park. When things flourished very much, and money flowed, Helen and I rode champing steeds; but just now things were what is called fluctuating,and I rode a bicycle, and she stayed in bed. An hour and a half of frantic pedalling on a hot June morning produces excellent physical results; and at half-past nine I was in the swimming-bath at the Bath Club, where I became cool and clean. I changed into another suit of flannels there, rode sedately home, and had breakfast at precisely a quarter-past ten. By eleven I had eaten breakfast, read theDaily Mail, and smoked a cigarette, and was about to spend a quiet, studious morning until half-past one (for we were lunching out at two), when Helen came in.
‘Do come to Lord’s,’ she said; ‘it’s Gentlemen and Players, and we can sit there till lunch. We can’t go this afternoon, and you are playing golf at Woking to-morrow.’
‘I can’t. Not time.’
‘Oh, just this once.’
Just this once, then, we went. It was too heavenly, and we were late for lunch.
It was one of the rather long lunches, and it was nearly four when we left the house. Then, as we had neither of us seen the Sargents at the Academy, we went there, since the afternoon was already gone, and got home about six;and as we had been given a box at the opera for ‘Tristan,’ which began at half-past seven, it was necessary to dine at half-past six—a terrible hour, but true. At the opera Legs picked Helen up to go to a ball, and I went home to answer my morning’s post, which I had not yet read.
But, it will be objected, Gentlemen and Players, and the one necessary visit to the Academy, and ‘Tristan’ does not occur every day. Quite true; but something else always does, and the Old Humbug, who had got quite large and important during this short survey, said in those canting tones which I knew so well: ‘You are wasting your life over this insensate rush and hurry. And you do no better down here. What have you done to-day? Planted bulbs, and written two or three pages of your silly book. What will you do to-morrow? You won’t even write your silly book, because you are going to play golf with Legs in the morning, and you say you can’t work after lunch. And the days will make themselves into months, and the months into years’ (here he dropped into poetry), ‘and youwill ever be a name of scorn—at least, you would if ten minutes after you were dead anybody remembered what your name was. But you will have gone to your account.’
Well, I join issue with the Old Humbug over this. For my part, I assert that it was perfectly right for me to go to the Gentlemen and Players, and to the opera, and to plant bulbs, and to play golf with Legs to-morrow morning if fine. And as for his objection to what he calls ‘rush,’ why, I fling it in his face, since I must rush. If I set apart a certain time every day for private meditation, I should be simply bored. I should get—I suppose this must be the proposed practical effect of the plan—no great and ennobling thoughts out of my solitary meditations, and instead of feeling that I had spent the morning to some serious purpose, I should feel, and I think rightly, that I had merely wasted it. But if I have planted bulbs all morning, I haven’t wasted it. I will assert that on the Day of Judgment; for I have been busy walking along the path I feel sure I was meant to walk on. There are a thousand other pathsall leading to the central and celestial light, and they are for other people to walk on. It would, of course, be a terrible waste of time for one who by nature was a meditative recluse to go to the match between the Gentlemen and Players, or for a deaf man to go to ‘Tristan,’ or for a blind one to lie on his back and look at the filtering sunlight between the leaves of beech-trees in June. But the point for everybody is to get into touch with life as continually as he can, and at as many points as he can. This is gospel. I would I had the palate of a wine-taster to get into touch with life there; the prehensile toe and sense of balance of a tight-rope walker to get into touch there, the mathematical head of the astronomer to learn the orbit of a star that has never been seen, but only conjectured; or I wish very much indeed that I had the missionary spirit. Indeed, then I would go to the nearest cannibal islands and (probably a good thing, too) be cheerfully devoured; or, again, if I had it in a lesser degree, I would go and teach in the Sunday-school, and have a class for boys in the evening. I did try the Sunday-schoolwhen first I lived here, and for four unhallowed Sundays I passed a feverish hour surrounded by mystified infants and intolerable lithographs. You never saw such a failure as I was: I dreaded those hours so much that I thought my reason would be unhinged. And the children used to regard me, I am sure, as they would have regarded some queer, though harmless, creature of the menagerie. I couldn’t do that sort of thing.
I neither made them happy nor could I teach them anything. That latter was quite proved when, on the Sunday succeeding my fourth lesson, an Archdeacon came round and examined all the classes in turn. I think I shall never get over the nightmare horror of that scrutiny when he sat in my arm-chair at the desk, and I, the trembling instructor, stood by the side while he asked my idiot flock who Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel ware, and other really elementary things. One child said that Eve was God’s wife, and I wished the earth might open and swallow me up. Then he came to the Catechism, andit really seemed as if nobody knew his own name. And it was for that nightmare that I had spent four feverish Sunday afternoons and a parody of days between, for every moment Sunday was coming nearer.
No; I give more happiness to Legs by being soundly beaten by him at golf, or by wasting (so says the Old Humbug) a morning in taking Helen up to Lord’s to see the Gentlemen and Players. Also—I hasten to forestall criticism—I like it much better myself; and though you may, if you like, call it selfish, I hereby state that to like doing anything is a very good and Christian reason for doing it. Behold the gauntlet!
For we poor folk who really cannot teach in Sunday-schools, and are not employed in making discoveries which will alleviate painful diseases, and do not serve our constituency or our King, and sneakingly throw pamphlets about the Education Bill into the fire without reading them, because we know we don’t actually care one pin what happens, and are in every single respect quite unsatisfactory and useless and unornamental, have yet, somehow (there can be no doubt of this), to add if we can to the happiness, anyhow, of those dear folk among whom our lot has been so graciously cast. We have no great gifts of any description; we are neither wise nor witty, and there has been only one talent given us, which is the power of enjoyment. Well, that is a very little one, you may say, and a very selfish one to cultivate, but if we have nothing else at all, had we not better try to make some use of that?
For the fact remains that it can be made some use of. Every one feels better for seeing one of these drones, who are neither soldiers, nor sailors, nor politicians, nor teachers, enjoy himself. Enjoyment in the air is like oxygen in the air: it quickens everybody, and in its way makes them happier. The poor drones can neither teach nor fight, nor make anybody good, but they can in their humdrum way make people a little more cheerful for a few minutes. For they have—this is what I mean by drones—a happy temperament, and as they are no good at all in any other direction, it is indeed time that they should be done todeath by the workers of the hive if they do not exert themselves in the mere exercise of their temperament. And just as the drone of the hive lives immersed in the honey of his flowers and in the garnered stuff that the workers have brought home, so the drone man must continue to take active and continual pleasure in all the delightful things of this world. He must pounce on enjoyment with eager zeal, and glut himself on it till he reels with the stupefaction of pleasure; he must keep himself keen and alert for the smallest humorous or engrossing detail that is within his horizons: it is shameful if he does not go to bed every night tired with his own laughter and enjoyment. And woe to him if he invests his pleasures with the serious garb of duty! The leader of the delectable life who says that he plays golf because he finds exercise so important for his health, or who sits out all afternoon to watch other people playing other games, and explains that his doctor (his doctor, forsooth!) tells him to have plenty of fresh air, or who drinks his delicious wine and says that it is good for his digestion, is a mere scampishhypocrite. He plays games because they are such fun; he watches other people play because it amuses him; he drinks wine because it tastes so nice.
And he must never falter on his primrose path; the high gods have given him but one little talent, and all that is asked of him is that he should enjoy life enormously. He has got to do that, then. The soldier and sailor may not, perhaps, enjoy life, but they are useful in other ways. The drone is only useful in this one. He must never remit his efforts, and must never want to; he must ‘rush,’ as the Old Humbug said, all the time, for if he ceases to rush he ceases to justify his existence at all. And—a heavenly destiny, one, too, beyond all desert of his—he does, if he is at all a conscientious drone, make other people a shade more cheerfully disposed than they would otherwise have been.
This breathless dissertation on drones requires at this point, as printers say, ‘paragraphing.’ In other words, I began to talk about one thing, and without pause talked about another. It was really the fault of the Old Humbug,who said that I wasted those days in which I didn’t do something for somebody. I then justified my position on those days by pleading the desire to be a drone—a life which, as I have sketched it out, seems to me to be wholly admirable. I wish to Heaven I could be in the least like those adorable people. Misbegotten industry stands in my way, and a deep-rooted, but equally misbegotten, idea that if I am very industrious I shall one day write a good story. Also, I have not the drone temperament necessary for dronage. I am not, in fact, any longer defending myself, but extolling other people.
Loafers there are in plenty in this world, but personally I have no use for them. They lead the same external lives as the lover of life leads, but how different is the spirit that animates them! The loafer may have been side by side with the life-loving drone all day, at the same parties, at the same games, at the same music, but the one goes to all these things in order to get through the hours without boredom, while the other wishes the hours infinitely multiplied so that he might go to more. The one sucks enjoyment of but a stupefied sort from them; the other catches the iridescent balls and bubbles of joy that are cast like sea-spray over the tides of time, only to throw out double of what he has received. He is like some joyful juggler: a stream of objects pours into the air from his flashing hands; he catches them and hurls them into the air again, so that the eye cannot follow the procession of flying joys. And at the end, at the close of each day, he stands still for a moment, his hands full of them, his memory stored with them, eager for the next day.
How different is the loafer! Have you ever seen the chameleon feed on flies? It is just so that the loafer, who wants only to get through the hours, feeds on the simple, silly joys of life. In expression the chameleon is like a tired old gentleman with the face-ache, though the impression of face-ache is chiefly produced by cheeks swollen in other ways, for he rolls up his tongue in a ball in his mouth when he is going to feed. Then, with an expression of bored senility, he moves verycautiously to where a fly is sitting. When he is within range, he shoots out his tongue, and the fly sticks to the adhesive tip of it. There is a slight swallowing motion, and the chameleon again rolls about his greasy eye, looking for the next victim. The loafer, in a metaphysical sense, has got just such an adhesive tongue as the chameleon. He puts it out, and pleasures stick to it like postage stamps. Then he swallows them. Observe, too, when he has to make occupations for himself, how heavily, and stupidly he passes the hours! He will read the morning paper till midday, then totter out into his garden, sadly remove one weed from the path, and totter back to the house to throw it in the fire. Then he will re-read a page of his paper, and write an unnecessary note with unnecessary care, probably wiping his pen afterwards. It will then be lunch-time. How different would the drone’s morning have been! Even if he had been compelled to spend it on the platform of Clapham Junction, he would have constructed some ‘dome in air’ out of that depressing suburb. The flashing trains would have allured him (especially the boat-trains), and his mind would have gone long journeys to the sunny South. He would have built romance round the signals, and found a fairy-tale in the advertisements.
And what is the practical side of all this? for is it not temperament which makes the magic of these wonderful persons, and temperament is a thing which is supposed to be quite outside the power of its possessor to alter or amend?
Broadly speaking, I suppose that is true, and we who do not possess the magic would bungle terribly if we attempted to rival the flashing hands of the true conjurer. I do not suppose, at any rate, that it is worth while for the meditative recluse to spend his days and nights at festive gatherings, since he will never enjoy them himself, and, what is more important, he will, in his small way, eclipse the gaiety of those parties on which he sheds the gloom of his depressing countenance. Yet, since I believe with my whole heart that joy and simple pleasure, so long as they hurt nobody, are things wholly and entirely good, it behoves every oneto look sedulously in the garden of his mind to see whether he cannot find there a few little seedlings of that species of temperament which I have tried to indicate. His garden may be the most strenuous and improving plot—a regular arboretum of high aspirations and earnest endeavours with the most beautiful gravel paths of cardinal virtues leading by the thickets and shrubberies of spiritual strivings, but, should he happen to find a few of these seedlings, and be able to raise them, they will not spoil the effect of the wholly admirable grove of moral purpose. To be quite candid, I think a little colour ‘sets off,’ as they say, the grandeur of high endeavour. It—well, it brightens it up.
‘I’remarked Helen, ‘am the rose of Sharon,andthe lily of the valley.’
She laid great stress on the ‘and,’ which gave a perfectly new significance to the verse.
‘The French for lily of the valley ismuguet,’ said Legs, with an intolerably superior air.
‘Oh, don’t show off!’ said she. ‘The great thing in walking along a rail is to keep your balance.’
‘Through the looking-glass,’ said I. ‘Upon which the White Knight fell head foremost into a hole——’
‘And kept on saying “Plenty of practice,”’ said Legs.
‘It’s easier if you wave your arms,’ said she. ‘Oh, there’s a train coming. Where’s the gum?’
Legs had the gum—a small penny bottle—and Helen hastily gummed a penny to the rail, and we all retired to the side of the line.
If you merely lay a penny on the rail, the chances are that the first wheel that goes over it causes it to jump, and it falls off, whereas if you gum it——
There was a wild maniac shriek from the engine, suddenly dropping an octave as it passed us, and the huge train, towering high above us, thundered by with rattle of wheels and the throbbing oscillation of very high speed. A dozen bits of paper came trundling and dancing after it. The rear of the van telescoped itself into a tiny square, and the signal just above us, which had been down to let the train pass, shot up a warning, right-angled arm.
‘Oh, well over sixty,’ said Legs, with deep appreciation, ‘and there’s the penny sitting as tight as, as—I don’t know. Lord, how hot!’
The penny had already been under half the wheels of four trains, and was so flattened that it was of knife-edge sharpness.
‘If you stropped it a little, you could shave with it,’ said Helen. ‘What babies you are!’
Legs was already busy on the up-line, arranging two pins crossways on the gummed rail, so that they should be flattened and welded together, making an entrancing object closely resembling a pair of scissors.
‘The up-train will be through in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Chuck me the penny, Helen.’
I had another object of interest—namely, a threepenny piece with a hole in it. I had tied a long string to this, the far end of which I held in my hand. The reason for this was that the coin was beginning to crack, but it would stand a wheel or two more, though it was already bigger than a sixpence; after a wheel or two I could pull it away.
‘Gum!’ said I.
We moved to the far side of the up-line, and waited. Soon from the tunnel a hundred yards below came a wreath of smoke, and the black-fronted engine raced towards us. Everything went right on that divine afternoon, and after four wheels had passed I jerked my threepenny piece away. The scissors were adorable also, and it would be scarcely necessary to strop the penny. Of course, we made acacheof these objects, burying them in a small tin boxwith the addition of a piece of paper recording our names, weights, and ages. Legs also wrote a short confession of how he murdered his two infant children, and hid the bodies in a bramble-bush ten paces from thecache. There was no such bramble-bush really, which would make it more puzzling to the inquiring mind. He represented himself as being perfectly impenitent, and ready to commit similar crimes should opportunity occur. He signed it, Benjamin Yates of 21A, Park Lane, W. Then we went home to tea.
Legs had been in for his Foreign Office examination, and had come down to spend the next two days with us, before we all moved up to town; also, to our deep-felt and secret joy, he had shown no desire to visit the Ampses, or talk any more German with Charlotte. The process of disillusionment began, I think, on the evening in October when he was here last, and the Ampses dined with us; for I saw him overhear Mrs. Amps ask Helen who ‘was the heir to all our beautiful property.’ At that moment I almost pitied Mrs. Amps. She had begun bymaking jam, but I felt that she had gone on to cook Charlotte’s goose. Legs, anyhow, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and took a couple of seconds to recover himself. I am sure I don’t wonder. You require to recuperate after that sort of remark. I felt that I knew all about Mrs. Amps when she asked that simple question. I felt as if I had known her parents and grandparents, and could prophesy about her children and grandchildren; and Legs’ eyes, which till that moment had been quite shut, began to open, just to blink.
Next day, however, he lunched with them. What happened I do not know, since he has not told me; but he was rather silent in the evening, ate little, but drank four glasses of port after dinner. I think the instinct of the drowning of care was there, and he was slightly cynical and Byronic afterwards. I love Legs.
I hasten to add, lest I may appear unfeeling, that Charlotte has for the last week or two been kind and encouraging to another young man, who is the heir to far more beautiful property. I saw him at the golf-links yesterday in a bunker. He was arranging her hands so as tograsp her niblick properly. They seemed to want a great deal of arranging. By-and-by they allowed my opponent and me to pass. Charlotte seemed not to recognize me, or else she was really so much employed in making her hat stay on that she did not see me. I mentioned, however, to Legs that I had seen her, but that she had not seen me. It seemed to interest him very little.
But this morning, as Legs and I played golf over the grey back of the huge down that rises from our happy valley, it seemed a sheer insanity that we should all go up to London the next day, so blithe was the air, so invigorating to the whole sense. The short, springy turf seemed to put its own vitality into one’s feet; they were shot forward automatically without conscious effort. And—ah, the rapture!—(it occurred more frequently to Legs than to me) of seeing a clean white ball scud for a hundred yards or so low over the ground, and then rise swallow-like against the ineffable blue! Golfers, I am told, reck nothing of their surroundings, provided only they drive far, approach dead, and hole their puts; and so I must conclude—indeed, Iconclude it for other reasons—that I am no golfer. But I am an epicure in my surroundings when I go a-golfing, and though the grey dunes and sandy hollows of the seaside course are most to my mind, I place very near those perfect joys the hugeness of scale which you get only on the uplands. To-day no whiff of vapour flecked the whole field of the shining heavens, and the country, grey and green, with fire of autumn beech-wood here and there, stretched map-like round us. But to the west the view was even more stirring to that desire of the infinite which lies so close to the heart of man. There fold after fold of downs, the knitted muscles of the huge, kind earth lay in unending interlacement. And it was all empty. There were no trees, no lines of hedgerows to break the void, and lend a scale to the eye. From the immediate green foreground slope after slope melted into grey, and from grey to the blue of distance, which fused itself into the tender azure of the sky’s horizon, so that the line between earth and air indistinguishable. It was as empty us the desert, yet one knew that from every inch of it a thousand livesrejoiced in the sun of November. Yes, even the knowledge that there would be but few more of such hours before winter hurled its armoury of squalls on to the earth added, perhaps, to their joy. None could have expected such a November as has been ours. We have snatched it from winter; it is our possession.
Yet the colour of the grass, no less than the underlying keenness of the air, savour of the sunless months. It is scarcely green; it has been bleached by the torrid months, and Nature is too wise to let it shine forth in a fresh coat of colour when so soon it will sleep, waiting for the spring. High up in the liquid blue, too, of the sky there is the sparkle of frost, for all the warm strength of the sunlight. It is not summer that floats above our heads, soon to descend earthwards, but the frost and cold. Yet they bless the Lord also.
But though I feel all this, feel it in every bone and fibre of my body, I know that I feel it more when I am doing something else—as, for instance, playing golf. I think it must be that one pleasure quickens others. The fact ofattempting to keep one’s eye on the ball as one hits it makes the whole of one’s perceptions more alert. If I was taking a solitary walk here, with no occupation except that of walking, I know quite well that I should not be conscious of the same rapturous well-being as I am now, when the object of my walk is to hit a small piece of indiarubber for three or four miles, hitting it, too, as seldom as possible. So it is not the mere hitting it that gives rapture, else the rapture would be increased by the frequency of the operation. Oh, I have been talking on the stroke! This will never do. But it was my own stroke, and Hampshire flew about in fids in consequence.
This was at the twelfth hole, and it made the match square. Legs, I need hardly remark, was playing a pitiful game for him. But on the moment—this is one of the inexplicable things about those foolish people who play games—- my whole mood changed. I cared no more at all for the empty, glorious downs. I did not mind whether the grass was blue, or grey, or green, or magenta. I saw no more flaring beech-woods, no more mapped counties. There wasone desire only in the entire contents of my soul, and that was to beat Legs. I did not feel as if I even wanted anything so much as that, and if Mephistopheles had appeared at that moment to bargain for my salvation as the price of my victory, I should have signed in my blood or any other blood that was handy. But Mephistopheles was probably otherwise engaged. At any rate, after being still all square at the seventeenth, I drove into a silly irrational bunker that ought never to have been there at the eighteenth. I took three to get out. But we had a heavenly morning. If only ... well, well. And Legs told Helen that he only just won, because he was completely off his game! The tongue is an unruly member. Mine is. Had I won, I should have certainly told Helen that Legs played a magnificent game and I had only just won. That sounds more generous than his remark, but if you think it over, you will see that it comes to exactly the same thing.
Yes; it seems an insanity to leave the country just now, especially since there is no earthly reason for our doing so. Divine things, it istrue, are going on in town, for our matchless Isolde is conducting symphony concerts, and a perfect constellation of evening stars are singing together at the opera; but, after all, Legs and I play the ‘Meistersinger’ overture arranged for four hands on the piano; while, for the rich soup of Sloane Street mud and the vapour-ridden sky, we have here the turf of the downland and the ineffable blue. In fact, I am sorry to go, but should be rather disappointed if I was told that I was not going. Helen characterizes this state of mind as feeble, which it undoubtedly is, and says that she is perfectly willing either to go to-morrow or to stop on another week, if I will only make up my mind which I want to do. But there is the whole difficulty: I haven’t the slightest idea which I want to do. You might as well say to a dog which is being called from opposite quarters by two beloved voices: ‘Only make up your mind which of us you like best.’ If it knew, the question would be solved.
Well, the question was solved by tossing up, and then, of course, doing the opposite to what we had decided the arbitrament of the coinshould indicate. If it was heads, we were to stop in the country; and since it was heads, that helped us to decide that we would go to town. That, too, may seem a feeble proceeding, but I do not think it really is. To do anything as irrational as tossing causes the mind to revolt from the absurdity of abiding by the result. The consequence is that a weighty factor for doing what the coin did not indicate is supplied; for you never toss unless you are quite unable to decide.
So for the last afternoon the garden claimed me, for not only is the garden the symbol and embodiment of the country, but to me it is a sort of diary almost, since the manual acts of planting and tending have got so interwoven with that which made one’s mind busy while the hands were thus occupied that the sight of this plant or that, of a new trellis, or the stacked sticks of the summer’s sweet-peas, are, when one looks at them as now, retrospectively, on the eve of departure, retranslated back, as are the records of a phonograph, into the memories that have been pricked and stamped into them. All I see—croquet hoops, flower-beds—without ceasing to be themselves, have all become a secret cipher. By some mysterious alchemy, something of oneself has passed into them. Secret fibres of soul-stuff are woven into them. Through the touch of the hands that tended them, something from the being of that which directed those hands has entered into their life, so that next year, it may be, some regret belonging to an autumn day will flower in the daffodils of our planting. Hope, I am sure, will flower too; and with how vivid a wave of memory do I know what silent resolve went into the cutting back of that Gloire de Dijon! Thus, when in June its fragrance streams in the air, one must trust that some fragrance not its own, but of a fruit-bearing effort, will be spread about the garden.
There, for instance, are the croquet-hoops still standing, though it must be a month since we had played. A few withered leaves of the plane have drifted against the wires, and the worms have been busy on the neglected lawn, that speaks only of November. But that corner hoop has a significance beyond paint and wire. It is the record of the telegramthat came out to me one morning in late September which I showed Legs. After that we abandoned the game, and went to the house. It may have more for us yet, that corner hoop—more, I mean, than that memory of which I have spoken. Joy or sorrow may be so keen, so poignant on some day yet hid behind the veil of the future, when I shall be looking at it, that till the day of my death it will never again be seen by my mortal eye without rousing an immortal and imperishable memory. It is thus, in a manner antimaterialistic, so to speak, that men, material things, are woven into the psychical web of life, so that, almost before the eye has seen them, they have sent the message of their secret significance to the brain.
Everywhere, wherever I look, the tangle of these subtle threads is spread, even as on summer dawns the myriad spinning of gossamer makes network on the grass, so that each is crossed and intertwined with a woof of others. There is the bank where I lay all one hot July day doing nothing, thinking nothing, just lapped in the tide of living things. That has gone home. That bank and the hours I passed thereare part of me now, even as I feel that I am part of it, and I have but to look at it now to bask again in the absorbing stupor of the midsummer. There, in its blades of grass and shadowed turf, is written my doing for the day. The bank holds it in kind, safe keeping, so that when God inquires of me what I have done with that day that He gave me, the bank will be able to answer for me. Nor does it tell my secret to the croquet-hoop that holds another, nor to the clematis that on that day was a heaven full of purple stars spread over the trellis. There was nothing in all the treasure of the summer so beautiful, so triumphant as that; but what to me now is the memory of the clematis? The memory of a friendship that is over. At least, I was looking at it when I know that somebody I had loved and trusted was neither trustworthy nor lovable. It was as if a friend had pushed back the carpet from the boards of the room where he and I had so often been merry and intimate together, and showed me, with a sort of secret hideous glee, that a sewer flowed beneath the floor. Poor clematis! it is sick at heart. Its thin, barestalk shivers mournfully as this golden afternoon begins to turn a little grey with the chill wind of evening.
Ah, if only he had said he was sorry! If only he had said that he knew it was wrong, but that the flesh was weak! If only he had even contemplated the step, which to some extent undoes the wrong that has been done, I do not think the clematis would have shed a single one of its purple stars. All of us, saints or sinners, do dreadful things, the memory of which is sufficient to make us long to sink into the earth for shame. But he only smiled behind his hand, and with whispered gusto told me about it, licking the chops of memory. It isthatwhich matters.
That corner of the garden had delayed me long, and it was already getting dark when I had gathered up and fingered the gossamer threads that lay so thickly down the border that led to the gate from which descend the steps of the rose-garden. There were so many messages there. The bare stalks of phloxes and campanulas, Oriental poppies and hollyhocks, Japanese anemone and iris—all hadsomething to say. Some memories were a little vague, faint, and dim even as the odour of the phloxes; some were tall and resplendent like the hollyhocks; some were vivid as the poppies. And then I went through the gate of the rose-garden and stood there. There was nothing there but the rose-trees; there was no one there but Helen.
So the tale of the garden was told, and by the time it was finished dusk had begun to deepen, and cheerful beckoning lights were gleaming from the house. It was time to go in to take up, and with what love and alacrity, the pleasant hour of the present again; for it is not ever good to linger too long over memories, or for however short a time to indulge in regrets, unless those regrets are to be built into the fabric of the present, making it stronger and more courageous. All other regrets, all other regarding of the past, which says, ‘It is past; it is irretrievably done,’ is enervating and poisonous, and but paralyzes our energies. Indeed, it is better not to be sorry at all for the unwise, unkind, and mistaken things we havedone if our sorrow tends to unfit us for doing better in the future.
But just as I crossed the lawn, going towards the house, another memory started up out of the dusk so clearly that I almost thought that I heard my name called from the garden, and almost expected, when I got indoors, to hear again the sound of shuffling, unshod feet on the stairs. The memory of that mysterious midnight hour, though I have not spoken of it again, is seldom out of my thoughts. It does not sit, so to speak, in the front row, but in the dimness that lies at the back of one’s mind, out of which come those vague vapours which are, if they have body enough, eventually condensed into thought, just as out of thought is coined speech and action. There in that dark kitchen of the mind I know that the thought of that night has ever been simmering on the fire. Something within me is not content with the fact that even at the moment that the voice cried from the garden, at the moment when Legs saw the white face smiling at him, that dear soul passed to the other side. There is more to come yet. Else—here is the vapour taking the shape ofthought at last—else why did Legs, who scarcely knew her, receive that warning? No echo of any memory of that night, strangely also, has ever come back to him. He knows no more about it now than he did the next morning, when he asked me if I had been sitting up late talking.
I have told Helen all about it; I have told her too—for there is nothing so wild and fantastical that I would not tell it her—that there is some uneasy guest sitting at my hearth who stays in the shadow, so that I cannot see his face. And she answered with a serenity that was almost reassuring, saying that, if something more was coming, there was still, whatever it was, nothing to fear; if otherwise, the uneasy guest was moonshine of the imagination. That seems to cover the whole ground. But the fact is that I am afraid of my fear—a thing for which it is idle to try to find excuses.
We are leaving quite early to-morrow morning, so, when I entered the house that evening after the tour of the garden, I had definitely finished with the country for someweeks to come. So, too, had Helen and Legs, for tea had already gone into the drawing-room. And even as I locked the garden-door behind me, I heard a sudden gust of wind come and shake the panes, as if this calm, golden day had been sent just for us, and that the moment we had finished with it the winds, overdue, but kindly waiting for us, began to drive their cloud-flocks out of the south-west. Nor was the coming of the rain long delayed. Even while we sat at tea, a sheet of it was flung with a sudden wild tattoo against the panes, and there hissed on to the logs of the open hearth a few stray drops. Legs paused, with his mouth full of crumpet.
‘It makes me feel twice as comfortable as I was before,’ he said. ‘It must be so beastly out of doors.’
Legs had just uttered this thoroughly Lucretian sentiment, when—
The door opened, and Mr. Holmes was announced. I have refrained from mentioning Mr. Holmes before because I expected he would come in about now, big with purpose. He is a kind little gentleman, about forty-five yearsold, who lives with his sister, and does not do anything whatever. He is generally known as the Bun-hander, because no tea-party has ever been known to take place for miles round at which Mr. Holmes was not handing refreshments to the ladies. That is his strength, his forte. His weakness is just as amiable—though, perhaps, hardly so useful—for his weakness is Rank.
He constantly comes to see Helen—about once a fortnight, that is to say (for in the autumn he is very busy going to tea-parties)—for the reason, so Legs and I believe, that she is the daughter of the younger son of a peer. Helen will have none of this, and maintains that he comes to see her for Herself. Personally, I can behave beautifully when Mr. Holmes finds Helen and me alone, but I am rather nervous if Legs happens to be in the room, for he is quite unable to take his eyes off Mr. Holmes, but stares at him in a sort of stupor of wonderment. Once (that is a year ago now) he left the room very suddenly. Choking and muffled sounds were heard from the hall and the stamping of feet. Helen and I talked very loud to overscorethis, and I trust Mr. Holmes did not hear. But when Legs is there, I am afraid (it is a sort of nightmare) that I shall be overtaken, too, with helpless giggling. If I begin, Helen will go off, and I can imagine no way of satisfactorily terminating the interview. Because if once I began laughing at Mr. Holmes, I do not see how I could ever stop. His appearance, his voice, his conversation, are all quite inimitable.
He is small and inclined to stoutness, and has a fierce little moustache, so much on end that it looks as if it had just seen a ghost. Not long ago he had no teeth to speak of; now they are as dazzling and continuous, as Mr. Wordsworth said, as the stars that shine. He has rather thin brown hair, which I will swear used to be streaked with grey, but is so no longer, and he wears three rings with stones in them. One is an emerald, so magnificent that it is almost impossible to believe in it. He is dressed in the very height and zenith of provincial fashion, and would no more be seen in shabby clothes than he would be seen without stays. Yes; I maintain it, and even Helen, who was a perfect St. Thomas about it for long, has admitted thatoccasional creaks proceed from Mr. Holmes’s person for which it is difficult to offer any other explanation. It was a creak, in fact, more than usually loud that made Legs leave the room on the occasion I have referred to. Down his trousers he has the most beautiful creases, and all his clothes nearly fit perfectly. He wears brown boots with cloth tops, above which when he sits down you can see socks with clocks on them stranglingly suspended. In the winter he wears a hat with a furrow in it, and in the summer a panama. He wears a knitted tie (just now it is rather the fashion here for young men to have ties knitted for them by their friends), which Helen says is certainly machine-made, with a pin in it. His shirt always has some stripe or colour in it, and his links are invariably the same colour as the stripe. To-day the links were turquoise and the stripe light blue. And from top to toe it is all a little wrong, though since I do not know how clothes are made, I cannot tell you what is wrong. The effect, however, is that, though so carefully arrayed, Mr. Holmes looks like a rather elderly shop-assistant going out on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Holmes goes out much oftener than that, for he may be seen in the window of the club every morning from about half-past eleven till one. I have often seen him sitting in the window there looking at illustrated papers, and smoking a cork-tipped cigarette, ladies’ size. Then he goes home to lunch, and after lunch either drives with his sister in a hired fly, or else, if it is very fine, goes round the ladies’ golf-links, which are a good deal shorter than the men’s. He has tea at the club and sits there till dinner. Then, after a blameless day, he goes home to dine and sleep. I suppose no one in the world has ever done less of any description.
I have alluded to his weakness—rank; he has another, which is gossip. He knows who was dining at the Ampses last Wednesday, and who lunched with the Archdeacon on Sunday, and how the Bishop’s wife is. It is he for whom also the fashionable intelligence is written in the daily papers, and, though he never goes there, he knows who is in town, and who lunched at Prince’s last Sunday, or walked in the Park, and how the Marquis of God-knows-what is after his operation. (He always refers to a Marquisasa Marquis, to an Earlasan Earl.) But, best of all, perhaps, he loves infinitesimal intrigue, especially if it concerns Rank.
And here my portentous secret must burst from me. For the fact is that for the last three days the town has been convulsed, and I have been holding it all back, assuming an unnatural calm, so that it might all come in a deluge. For three days ago a Duchess came here to open a window, or shut a door in the town-hall, which had been put up in memory of something, and was entertained to luncheon afterwards by the Corporation. And on this eye-opening occasion Helen was sent in before the wife of the younger son of a Baronet. And in consequence the wife of the younger son of the Baronet cut her afterwards, as with a knife; yet knife was no word for it: the averted eye was more like a scimitar. Before the assembled company, when Helen went to shake hands with her after lunch, she cut her, and she turned from her, revolving on her own axis like the eternal stars. Upon which, very properly, after two days’ heated discussion, and a great demand forDebrett, public opinion sided with the wife of the younger son of the Baronet, on the ground that Helen took her husband’s rank, which in this case happened to be none at all. What made it worse was that the Duchess, who should have known better, being an old friend of Helen’s, came to tea with her afterwards in a motor-car covered with coronets for all the world to see.
You may imagine that the fat was in the fire after that. Helen had no idea why the wife of the Baronet’s younger son had cut her, and perhaps might never have known had not Mr. Holmes dropped in only yesterday and told her, adding that he was sure he could clear it up. I was not at home when this interview took place, but when he entered the room this afternoon, after having called only yesterday, it was certain that he must have come on this subject. He had a book in his pocket, which made an unusual bulge.
Legs was steeped in wide-eyed contemplation as Mr. Holmes had his tea. From time to time I glanced at him, and saw that the corners of his mouth were faintly twitching. His eyetravelled from Mr. Holmes’s face to his jewelled hands; it lingered about his clothes, but came back, loverlike, to his face. In a few minutes we had learned about everybody—how the Lord-Lieutenant of the county had driven through in his motor—not the Daimler, but a new Panhard—yesterday afternoon, stopping only at the fishmonger’s, and taking the London road afterwards; how there had been a party at the barracks last night, at which there was music; but not very good music, Mr. Holmes was afraid; how the Bishop had not influenza at all, but only a bad cold; how The Pines had been taken by the Hon. Alice Accrington, who had a cork foot—so sad. A rhinoceros had trodden on the original one.
I had ceased to be able to look at Legs, but here I heard him give a little whimper, as a dog does when it wants a door to be opened for it. Helen all the time had been of impeccable behaviour. She had asked just the right questions, and appeared so genuinely interested that I felt I had never known before of what depth of hypocrisy she was capable. Then Mr. Holmes’s wealth of information began to growthin, even as the stars burn thin at daybreak, and I knew that he was going to dawn, and that the true reason for which he came was going to break forth. He put down his cup on the tea-table, took a cigarette, and suddenly creaked.
If you can imagine a sneeze, a cough, a spit, the strangled wheeze caused by a fish-bone in the throat, and the noise an empty siphon of soda-water makes when you press the handle, all combined, you will faintly grasp what Legs did. His effort to swallow the whole of this mixed convulsion was most praiseworthy, though I should think dangerous, and it came to my ears only as if someone had done it half a mile away. Mr. Holmes, I am sure, heard nothing this time, and Legs left the room with his handkerchief to his mouth in the manner of mourners in the second coach at a funeral. There was no sound outside, but soon after a muffled tread overhead, where is his bedroom. Then for a moment I caught Helen’s eye. She looked so inexpressibly grave that I nearly asked her who was dead. Then dawn came. Mr. Holmes has a high cackling voice, and thebulgy volume in his pocket was ‘Whitaker’s Almanack.’
‘I should have come before,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to come to you last, and really the afternoon has flown. About Tuesday now. Dear lady, you only took your right place. There is no question about it. I have been to the Mayor, I have been to the Archdeacon. Look.’
He found a page in Whitaker, and gave Helen the volume. It was a table of precedence. I saw ‘Eldest sons of younger sons of peers’ underlined.
‘Look at the next column,’ he said. ‘The sister takes the rank of her husbandorher elder brother. Now see where younger sons of Baronets and their wives come!’
Far away below eldest sons of younger sons of peers, in an outer darkness below even members of the fifth class of the Victorian Order, I saw that obscure relationship. My emotions of various kinds almost suffocated me. Helen was justified before all the world. It washerturn to cut the wife of the younger son of the Baronet if she chose.
So we talked very pleasantly for a quarterof an hour about the movements of the aristocracy, and then Mr. Holmes ‘rose to go.’ His cab was waiting, and I helped him on with a very magnificent fur coat in the hall, which in the somewhat indistinct light seemed to be made of the purest rabbit skin. In the dimness of the landing above I thought I could see an obscure shadow leaning over the banisters which resembled Legs.
‘I hope, after this, your wife will take her proper place,’ said Mr. Holmes. ‘Of course, everyone knows the Duchess came here to tea.’
He lit a cigarette, and I heard the banister tremble slightly, as if from an infinitesimal earthquake.
‘It is so kind of you to have taken so much trouble,’ said I firmly.
‘It was nothing. I am sure you need have no further anxiety.’
I went back to the drawing-room. Helen’s face was buried in a sofa-cushion, and Legs came downstairs in three jumps.
So we laughed till it was time to dress for dinner. Occasionally we seemed to be recovering, but then somebody said ‘Creak,’ or ‘Baronet,’ and a fresh relapse took place.
I pity all poor souls who do not know Mr. Holmes. It is so sad for them—sadder than the lady with the cork foot. Oh, think of it! This triumphant vindication of Helen (which is all wrong, by the way) will last him a long, long time. It has been a campaign, triumphantly concluded, and I should not in the least wonder if he has half a bottle of champagne to-night. And after a time the excitement will die away, fading like a golden sunset, and he will settle down to his ordinary life again, and read the paper in the morning, and go for a little drive in the afternoon, and have tea and toast at the club afterwards. And in the spring the Panama hat will come out, and the rich fur coat be put away, and he will hand strawberries instead of buns, and iced coffee instead of tea, and perhaps play a little croquet. But this week has been a great week for him—it really has. If you want to understand the gloriousness of Mr. Holmes, you must take my word for it that nothing so engrossing has happened to him for months.
THIS once-happy family has suddenly returned to the pit whence it was digged, and it is impossible to imagine any more depressing spectacle than we present. Dawn in faint flickers is beginning to shine on the wreck, and occasionally for a moment or two, though we may be over-sanguine, Helen and I can dimly imagine being happy again. Legs cannot do that yet; it is still midnight gloom with him.
The intelligent reader will scarcely need to be told that it is the influenza that has blackened the world like this. Helen began, and Legs and I followed within twenty-four hours. That, somehow, is a relief to her, since she feels she did not give it us. As if it mattered where it came from! Besides, personally I would rather catch it from herthan anyone else. Legs has had the worst visitation, because, after it was quite certain he had got it, he persisted in attending the last night of the autumn opera season, did not enjoy it at all, of course, by reason of a splitting headache, and was really ill for a day or two. I was infinitely wiser. As soon as the nymph touched me with her fairy hand I went firmly to bed, turned my face to the wall like Hezekiah, and stopped there till the fever was over. After five days I tottered downstairs to find an old, old woman sitting by the fire. It was Helen.
I think that was the most dreadful day I ever remember. She told me again and again how ill I looked until I was goaded into a sort of depressed frenzy, and said I couldn’t possibly look as ill as she. We both had beef-tea in the middle of the morning, and to my horror, when it was brought, it was brought not by Raikes, my man who is as indispensable to this house as is the carburetter to a motor-car (for it won’t run without), but by an Awful Thing that I never sawbefore. In answer to an inquiry, I was told that Raikes felt very ill, and had asked the Awful Thing to bring us our beef-tea instead of him. So I sent her back to Raikes with a thermometer that he was to be so good as to put under his tongue for one minute, and then return. It came back recording 102 degrees. I gave the Awful Thing the thermometer to wash, and she instantly dropped it on the floor. It was, of course, broken into twenty million fragments, but I remembered that, though I was a worm, I was a Christian worm, and said: ‘Never mind. Please tell Raikes that he is to go to bed instantly.’ I then picked up the twenty million fragments, and cut myself severely. I said ‘Damn!’ quite softly.
Helen winced, which was merely intended to annoy me, and it succeeded admirably.
So there we sat exactly like that awful picture called ‘Les Frileux,’ in which an old man and an old woman sit apart under a leafless tree. The ground is covered with the dead leaves. Soon they will die, too.
It is impossible to depict the dreariness of that morning. Outside a sort of jaundiced dayshowed the soupy mud that flooded Sloane Street, through which motor-buses, which once I thought so fine, splashed their way. A few sordid people under umbrellas bobbed by the windows, and as the darkness increased a man with a long stick began to turn up the lamps. Then it instantly got rather lighter, and another man (not the same one) with another long stick came and turned them down again. Upon which Egyptian darkness settled down over the town, and I must suppose that the first man had caught the influenza, for he never turned them up any more.
Helen was not reading; she was sitting by the fire looking mournfully at the coals. This would not do at all, and in the intervals of a paroxysm of coughing I asked:
‘How is Legs this morning?’
‘Worse,’ said Helen.
I took up theDaily Telegraph, and read the list of the people who were dead. I knew one of them slightly. Then my cut finger began to bleed again, which reminded me of the Awful Thing.
‘Servants are so ridiculous and tiresome,’ I said. ‘I should think your maid might have found time to bring up our beef-tea, instead of that dreadful girl. I don’t know where you get your servants from.’
‘Barton went to bed yesterday with influenza,’ said Helen wheezily. ‘She is very feverish—worse than Legs.’
I can’t say why, but this news made me feel rather better, so I lit a cigarette. It tasted exactly as if it had been made of the green weed which grows on stagnant horse-ponds. I felt much worse again at once, and was quite sure my temperature was going up. But I could not have the mournful satisfaction of knowing that this was true, because the thermometer was broken. And my finger continued to bleed. The blood was very bright red—probably arterial. Yet, whatever was happening, it seemed impossible that things were as desperate as I thought them, and I made the excellent determination to do something.
‘Will it disturb you if I play the piano?’ I asked Helen.
‘Not the least.’
I attempted to play the ‘Etudes Symphoniques,’ beginning with the last variation, by reason of the sky-scraping spirits of it. I don’t think I played any correct notes at all, and Helen (again to annoy me) made the noise which tiresome people make to show that a wrong note gets on their highly sensitive nerves. It consists of a whistling intake of the breath. Though I had only played a dozen bars, the white notes in the treble were spotted with blood, as if I was a Jew and the piano was the lintel of the door on Passover night. It was absurd to go on playing on a blood-boltered piano, even if I could play the right notes, which I could not. So again, with the laudable idea of doing something, I staggered upstairs, brought down a moistened towel, and proceeded to clean the keys. I struck notes from time to time, and Helen kept on wincing.
‘Is that necessary?’ she asked at length.
‘Yes, because I have bled over the piano. Besides, I’m cleaning it with the soft pedal down.’
The door was flung open, and the Awful Thing appeared.
‘Dinner,’ she said, and left the door open.
We went downstairs. ‘Dinner’ in Raikes’ indisposition was huddled on to the table. There were pieces of moist fish under one cover. There was a ginger pudding under another. There were large potatoes under a third; and under the fourth a rich and red beef-steak. Then despair descended on me.
‘Is the cook ill, too?’ I asked of the Awful Thing.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Who cooked this? Or, rather, didn’t?’
‘Please, sir, I did.’
Then quite suddenly, both for Helen and me, dawn began to break for a little. Here was three-quarters of the establishment incapacitated, and the Awful Thing was calmly doing everybody’s work as well as her own, which was that of a housemaid. Helen cheered up at once.
‘Please give me some fish,’ she said to me. ‘It looks quite excellent.’
I helped her largely and sumptuously. Weboth understood each other at this moment, and I put a thumping helping on to my own plate.
Helen, greatly daring, took a greedy mouthful, and spoke to the Awful Thing, who was beginning to beam largely on us.
‘Delicious,’ she said to her. ‘I had no idea you could cook so beautifully. You needn’t wait; we will ring. And you must have help in at once. Will you telephone to Mrs. Watkins’ agency, asking for a—(she paused, and I know she was going to say ‘cook’)—a housemaid?’
The Awful Thing smiled from ear to ear, and a moment afterwards we heard the insane ringing of the telephone.
‘Oh, Icouldn’tsend for a cook just this moment,’ said Helen, when the girl had left the room. ‘She was bursting with pride at having cooked this. But if I eat it I shall be sick. What are we to do?’
The girl in her enthusiasm had built the fire three-quarters of the way up the chimney, though the day was muggy and warm beyondall telling. Into the heart of the blaze we stuffed large pieces of fish, which burned with a blue and oily flame.
‘Now ring,’ said Helen.
The girl returned after a long pause.
‘Please ‘m, Mrs. Watkins hasn’t a housemaid to send, by reason of so much illness. But she can send a cook,’ she said, and her face fell.
‘It’s such a pity, when you can cook so well,’ said Helen; ‘but we must have somebody. You can’t do all the work.’
‘A char and I could manage, ‘m,’ she said, changing the plates with an awful clatter.
‘Oh, not with Mr. Legs ill,’ said Helen. ‘We shall have you knocked up next, and where should we be then?’
The radiant smile returned to the girl’s face.
‘Give me some steak, Jack,’ said Helen, ‘and a potato. How delicious it smells!’
The Awful Thing again left the room, leaving, as it were, the fragrance of her smile behind her.
We made no attempt to eat any of the second course, but put two large slices of steak, twopotatoes, and a big spoonful of perspiring cauliflower into the fire. Pieces of ginger-pudding followed it to the burning ghaut, and soon the door again opened, and coffee was brought in. This was an after-thought, I fancy, though ill-inspired and gritty. But there was a coal-scuttle.
I am afraid we both relapsed again after lunch, though for a time the shining example of the housemaid who had done the work of everybody else inspired us to attempt to play piquet, bezique, and the piano. But these were all hopeless: it did not seem worth while dealing, and, in point of fact, the attempt at a duet came to a conclusion at the end of the first page, for Helen only groaned and said:
‘I can’t turn over.’