Alice Keelingwas sitting close to the window of her mother’s room making the most of the fading light of a gray afternoon at the end of October, and busily fashioning leaves of gold thread to be the sumptuous foliage of no less sumptuous purple pomegranates, among which sat curious ecclesiastical fowls, resembling parrots. The gold thread had to be tacked into its place with stitches of gold silk, and this strip of gorgeous embroidery would form when completed part of the decoration of an altar-cloth for the church which till but a few weeks ago, had not even had an altar at all, but only a table. Many other changes had occurred in that hitherto uncompromising edifice. The tables of commandments had vanished utterly; a faint smell of incense hung permanently about the church, copiously renewed every Sunday, candles blazed, vestments flashed, and a confessional, undoubtedly Roman in origin, blocked up a considerable part of the vestry. But chief of all the changes was that of the personality of the vicar, and second to that the state of mind of the parish in general to which, taking it collectively, the word Christian could not properly be applied. But taking the parish in sections, itwould not be in the least improper to apply the word ecstatic to that section of it to which Alice Keeling belonged, and the embroidery on which she, like many other young ladies, was employed was not less a work of love than a work of piety. As the blear autumnal light faded, and her mother dozed quietly in her chair, having let her book fall from her lap for the third time, Alice, short-sightedly peering at the almost completed leaf, would have suffered her eyes to drop out of her head rather than relinquish her work. She was sewing little fibres and shreds of her heart into that pomegranate leaf, and it gave her the most exquisite satisfaction to do so.
It would have been easy, so the simple and obviously-minded person would think, for her to have turned on the electric light, and have saved her eyes. But there were subtler and more compelling reasons which stood in the way of doing that. The first was that the light would almost certainly awaken her mother, who, by beginning to talk again, as she always did when a nap had refreshed her, would put an end to Alice’s private reflections which flourished best in dusk and in silence. A second reason was that it was more than likely that Mr Silverdale would presently drop in for tea, and it was decidedly more interesting to be found sitting at work, with her profile outlined against the smouldering glow of sunset, than to be sitting under the less becoming glare ofan electric lamp. For the same reason she did not put on the spectacles which she would otherwise have worn.
The leaf was all but finished when her mother began to talk with such suddenness that Alice wondered for the moment whether she was but talking in her sleep. But the gist of her remarks was slightly too consecutive to admit of that supposition.
‘Though it looks very odd,’ she said, beginning to give utterance to her reflections in the middle of a sentence, ‘that your father and Hugh should go to Cathedral, while you and I go to St Thomas’s. But the Cathedral is very draughty, that’s what I always say, and with my autumn cold due, if not overdue, it would be flying in the face of Providence to encourage it by sitting in draughts. As for incense and confession and——’
Her voice suddenly ceased again, as if a tap been turned off by some external agency, and Alice wisely made no reply of any kind, feeling sure that in a minute or two her mother would begin to give vent to that faint snoring which betokened that she had gone to sleep again. That did not interrupt the flow of her ecstatic musings, whereas her mother’s general attitude to all the novel institutions which were so precious to her gave her a tendency to strong shudderings. Only half an hour ago Mrs Keeling had said that she was sure she saw nothing wrong in confession andwould not mind going herself if she could think of anything worth telling Mr Silverdale about.... Alice had drawn in her breath sharply when her mother said that, as if with a pang of spiritual toothache.
There came a slight sound from the drawing-room next door which would have been inaudible to any but expectant ears, and Alice bent over her work with more intense industry. Then the door opened very softly, and Mr Silverdale looked in. He was dressed in a black cassock and had a long wooden shepherd’s crook in his hand. He saw Alice seated in the window, he saw Mrs Keeling with her mouth slightly open and her eyes completely shut in a corner of the sofa, and rose to his happiest level.
‘Hush!’ he said, very gently, and tiptoed across the room to where Alice sat. He took her hand in his, pressing it, and spoke in the golden whisper which she was getting to know so well in the vestry.
‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘how good and industrious you are.’
‘I shall get it done well before Christmas,’ whispered Alice.
‘How pleased the herald angels will be!’ he answered.
Alice gave a great jerk of emotion which most unfortunately upset her embroidery-frame, which fell off the table with a crash that might haveawaked the dead, and certainly awoke the living.
‘And vestments,’ said Mrs Keeling again going on precisely at the point where sleep had overtaken her, ‘I can’t see that there’s any harm in them, though your father——’
There was a moment’s dead silence as she became drowsily aware that there was somebody else in the room. Mr Silverdale’s gay laugh, as he gave a final pressure to Alice’s hand, told her who it was.
‘Dear lady,’ he said. ‘Go on with your Protestant exhortations. I have been exhorting all afternoon, and I am so tired of my own exhortations. We will listen, and try to agree with you, won’t we, Miss Alice?’
Mrs Keeling got up in some confusion.
‘Bless me, to imagine your having come in while I was so busy thinking about what I had been reading that I never heard the door open,’ she said, hastily picking up the book which had fallen face downwards on the floor. ‘Well, I’m sure it’s time for tea. How the evenings draw in! But there are unpleasanter things than a muffin and a chat by the fire when all’s said and done.’
Alice seemed inclined to prefer her pomegranates to muffins, and had to be personally conducted from her work, and told she was naughty by Mr Silverdale, who sat on the hearthrug with woollen stockings and very muddy boots protruding frombelow his cassock, for he had had a game of football with his boys’ club before his afternoon preaching. He had only just had time to put on his cassock and snatch up his shepherd’s crook when the game was over, and ran to church, getting there in the nick of time. But he had kicked two goals at his football, and talked to twice that number of penitent souls afterwards in the vestry, so, as he delightedly exclaimed, he had had excellent sport. And he poked the fire with his shepherd’s crook.
‘And you didn’t go home and change after your football?’ asked Alice. ‘You are too bad! You promised me you would!’
He held up apologetic hands, and spoke in baby voice.
‘I vewy sowwy,’ he said. ‘I be dood to-morrow!’
‘I’m not sure I shall forgive you,’ said Alice radiantly.
‘Please! If I have another cup of tea to keep the cold out?’
‘Well, just this once,’ said Alice, pouring him out another cup.
He fixed his fine eyes on the fire, and became so like the figure of Jonah in the stained-glass window that Alice almost felt herself in Nineveh.
‘I’m getting spoiled here,’ he said, ‘all you dear ladies of Bracebridge positively spoil me with your altar-cloths and our extra cups of tea. I’m getting too comfortable. And here’s Miss Alice witha cigarette at my elbow. But I don’t know whether it’s allowed. Have one with me, Miss Alice, and then your mother will have to scold us both, and I know she’s too fond of you to scold you.’
This was slightly too daring an experiment for Alice, but she resolved to have a try in her bedroom that night.
‘Indeed, it’s allowed,’ said Mrs Keeling, ‘but as for Alice smoking, well, that is a good joke. And as for your being too comfortable I call that another joke.’
‘I call it a very bad one,’ said Alice delightedly. ‘Mr Silverdale is very naughty. You mustn’t encourage him, Mamma, to think he is funny when he is only naughty!’
She went to the window and brought back her strip of pomegranates.
‘You’re naughty too,’ he said. ‘This is play-time. And now there’s something else I want to talk about. You ladies are the queens of your homes: don’t you think you could persuade Mr Keeling not to think me the thin edge of the Pope, so to speak?’
‘Delicious!’ said Alice, beginning to be naughty with her pomegranates.
Mrs Keeling shook her head.
‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘You can have incense or Mr Keeling, but not both. And such a draughty pew as he’s got in the Cathedral!’
‘It isn’t only his attendance there that I mean,’ said Mr Silverdale. ‘But you know his Stores are in my parish, and he employs some four hundred work-people there. I went to see him at his office this morning, and asked him if I couldn’t have a daily service for them.’
‘He didn’t refuse?’ said Alice.
‘He said they might all do what they liked, out of their work hours, but he couldn’t have them encroached on. I was tempted to give him a good rap with my shepherd’s crook, but there was a lady present. So I appealed to her for her assistance in persuading him.’
‘Indeed, and who was that?’ asked Mrs Keeling.
‘He introduced me: it was his secretary. Such a handsome girl. I think she tried to snub me, but we poor parsons are unsnubbable. She told me that she quite agreed with Mr Keeling.’
‘His typewriter dared to say that!’ hissed Alice. ‘Oh——’
‘Then he began dictating to her something about linoleums. But I’ve not done with him yet. The dear man! I’ll plague his life out for him if you’ll only help me.’
A pink lustre clock of horrible aspect suddenly chimed six, and he jumped up.
‘Evensong at half-past!’ he said. ‘Blow evensong! There!’
He picked up his crook.
‘I’ve got to get hold of all you dear people, he said, grasping Alice’s long lean fingers in one hand,and Mrs Keeling’s plump ones in the other and, kissing them both. ‘What an hour of refreshment I have had. Blessings! Blessings!’
He ran lightly across the room, kissed his hand at the door, and they heard him running across the drawing room.
‘Blow evensong!’ said Alice ecstatically. ‘Wasn’t that delicious of him. And the Pope, too; the thin end of the Pope. But how could father be so rude as to begin dictating about linoleum?’
‘Your father doesn’t like working hours interfered with, my dear,’ said Mrs Keeling. ‘But we’ll do what we can. Anyhow, Mr Silverdale will have to change before he goes to church.’
‘Oh, I hope so,’ said Alice, extending her long neck over her embroidery.
‘Not that it will do any good talking to your father,’ continued Mrs Keeling placidly, ‘for I’m sure in all these thirty years I never saw him so vexed as when you and I said we should keep on going to St Thomas’s after the incense and the dressing-up began. But I had made up my mind too.’
Alice flushed a little.
‘I wish you would not call it dressings-up, Mamma,’ she said. ‘You know perfectly well that they are vestments. They all signify something: they have a spiritual meaning.’
‘Very likely, my dear,’ said Mrs Keelingamiably, ‘and I’m sure that’s a beautiful bit of figured silk which he has his coat made of.’
Alice drew in her breath sharply.
‘Cope, Mamma,’ she said.
‘Yes, dear, I said coat,’ rejoined her mother, who was not aware that she was a little deaf.
Alice did not pursue the subject, and since there was now no chance of Mr Silverdale’s coming in again, she put on her spectacles, which enabled her to see the lines of the pomegranate foliage with far greater distinctness. Never before had she had so vivid an interest in life as during these last two months; indeed the greater part of the female section of the congregation at St Thomas’s had experienced a similar quickening of their emotions, and a ‘livelier iris’ burnished up the doves of the villas in Alfred Road. The iris in question, of course, was the effect of the personality of Cuthbert Silverdale, and if he was not, as he averred, being spoiled, the blame did not lie with his parishioners. They had discovered, as he no doubt meant them to do, that a soldier-saint had come among them, a missioner, a crusader, and they vied with each other in adoring and decorative obedience, making banners and embroideries for his church (for he allowed neither slippers nor neckties for himself) and in flocking to his discourses, and working under his guidance in the parish. There had been frantic discussions and quarrels over rites and doctrines; households hadbeen divided among themselves, and, as at The Cedars, sections of families had left St Thomas’s altogether and attached themselves to places of simpler ceremonial. The Bishop had been appealed to on the subject of lights, with the effect that the halo of a martyr had encircled Mr Silverdale’s head, without any of the inconveniences that generally attach to martyrdom, since the Bishop had not felt himself called upon to take any steps in the matter. Even a protesting round-robin, rather sparsely attested, had been sent him, in counterblast to which Alice Keeling with other enthusiastic young ladies had forwarded within a couple of days a far more voluminously signed document, quoting the prayer-book of Edward VI. in support of their pastor, according to their pastor’s interpretation of it at his Wednesday lectures on the history of the English Church.
Cuthbert Silverdale was not unaware of the emotion which he had roused in so many female breasts, and it is impossible to acquit him of a sort of clerical complacency in the knowledge that so many young ladies gazed and gazed on him with a mixture of religious and personal devotion. Though a firm believer in the celibacy of the clergy, he did not feel himself debarred from sentimental relations with both married and unmarried members of his flock, indeed the very fact that nothing could conceivably come of these little mawkishnesses made them appear perfectlylicit. He held their hands, and took their arms, and sat at their knees, and called them ‘dear girls’ two or three at a time, finding safety perhaps in numbers, and not wishing to encourage false hopes. He was an incorrigible if an innocent flirt; a licensed lap-dog practising familiarities which, if indulged in by the ordinary layman, would assuredly have led to kickings. In some curious manner he quite succeeded in deceiving himself as to the propriety of those affectionate demonstrations, and considered himself a sort of brother to all those young ladies, who worked for him with the industry (and more than the excitement) of devoted sisters. To do him justice he was just as familiar with the male members of his congregation, and patted his boys on the back, and linked his arm in theirs, but it would be idle to contend that he got as much satisfaction out of those male embraces.
There was no question, however, about the devotion and strenuousness of his life. His congregation, in spite of the secession of such plain men as Mr Keeling, crammed his church to the doors and spilt into the street, and he kindled a religious fervour in the parish, which all the terrors of hell as set forth by his predecessor had been unable to fan into a blaze. In a thoroughly cheap but in a masterly and intelligible manner he preached the gospel, and in his life practised it, by incessant personal exertions, of which others aswell as himself were very conscious. It was more his surface than his essential self which was so deplorable a mass of affectation and amorousness, and the horror he inspired in minds of a certain calibre by his skippings and his shepherd’s crook and his little caresses was really too pitiless a condemnation. Indeed, the gravest of his errors was not so much in what he did, as his omission to consider what effect his affectionate dabs and touches and pawings might have on their recipients. He would, in fact, have been both amazed and shocked if he could have been an unseen witness of Alice Keeling’s proceedings when she found herself in the privacy of her own bedroom that night.
She had gone up to bed early, feeling that nameless stir of the spirit which can only find expansion in solitude. She wanted to let herself go, to be herself, and the presence of her family forced her to wear the carapace of convention. But having pleaded fatigue at ten o’clock, though her eyes sparkled behind her spectacles, she escaped from the cramping influence of the drawing room, and locked herself into her own bedroom with her thoughts and her glowing altar-cloth.
She spread it over the side of her bed, and in front of it proceeded to her evening devotions. In the pre-Silverdale days these were the briefest and most tepid orisons, now they were invested with sincerity and heart-felt worship. First shethought over her misdoings for the day, a series of the most harmless omissions and commissions, which she set honestly before herself. She had not got up with the punctuality she had vowed: she had not kept her mind free from irritation when she went to see her grandmother: she had been guilty of gluttony with regard to jam pancakes; she had said she was tired just now when she never had felt fresher in her life. Then followed her prayers; like the rest of her vicar’s numerous Bible-class she read a chapter from the Gospels, and she finished up with the appointed meditation from the devotional book which Mr Silverdale had given her.
Up to this point there would have been nothing to surprise or amaze him; he might not even have blushed to see how, when her meditations were done, she pored over the title page where he had written her name with good wishes from her friend C. S. She kissed that page before putting the book away in a box, which contained two or three notes from him, which she read through before locking them up again. They were perfectly harmless little notes, only no man should ever have written them. One had been received only this morning, and she had not read it more than a dozen times yet. It ran—
‘Won’t I just come in this afternoon after my football and my preachment, and get someopodeldoc for my bruises and some muffins for my little Mary, and some refreshment for my silly tired brain. God bless you!‘Your friend,‘Cuthbert S.’
‘Won’t I just come in this afternoon after my football and my preachment, and get someopodeldoc for my bruises and some muffins for my little Mary, and some refreshment for my silly tired brain. God bless you!
‘Your friend,‘Cuthbert S.’
That required much study. He had never signed himself like that before. She wondered if she could ever venture to call him Mr Cuthbert, and said ‘Mr Cuthbert’ out aloud several times in order to get used to the unfamiliar syllables. ‘Preachment’ too: that was a word he often used; once when he came to see them he entered the room chanting,—
‘I admit the soft impeachmentThat I’ve been making preachment.’
‘I admit the soft impeachmentThat I’ve been making preachment.’
‘I admit the soft impeachmentThat I’ve been making preachment.’
Alice thought that quite lovely, even when she subsequently found out that the identical effusion had already been chanted on his arrival at the house of Mrs Fyson the day before. Julia Fyson, her most intimate friend and co-adorer of the vicar, had told her.
She locked up those treasures, and going to the window drew aside the curtain and looked out. The autumnal fall of the leaf from the trees in the garden had brought into view houses in the town hidden before; among these was St Thomas’s Vicarage, that stood slightly apart from the others and was easily recognisable. With the aid of an opera glass she could distinguish the windows, andsaw that a light was burning behind the blinds of his study. He had come in, then, and for a full minute she contemplated the luminous oblong. Later, she had sometimes seen that a window exactly above that was lit. She liked seeing that, for it meant that he was going to bed, and would soon be asleep, for he had mentioned that he went to sleep the moment he got into bed. Once she had watched till that light went out also.
She let the curtain fall into place again, and sat by the fire for a little feeling alive to the very tips of her fingers. To-morrow would be a busy day; she had her lesson for her Sunday-school to get ready (she and Julia Fyson were going to prepare that together); there was a hockey-match for girls in the afternoon, at which Mr Silverdale—she said ‘Mr Cuthbert’ aloud again—had promised to be referee, she was going to read the paper to her grandmother (this was now a daily task directly traceable to the vicar), and her altar-cloth would fill up any spare time.
But as the fire began to die down, the invigorating prospect of next day lost its quality, and there began to stir in her mind a vague disquiet. Hitherto it had really been enough for her that Mr Silverdale existed; to put him on a pedestal and adore in company with other reverential worshippers had satisfied her, and the inspiration had resulted in many useful activities. But to-night she began to wish that there had not beenso many other worshippers, towards whom he exhibited the same benignant and affectionate aspect. There was Julia Fyson, for instance: he would walk between them with an arm for each, and a pressure of the hand for Julia as well as herself. In moments of expansion she and Julia had confided to each other their adoration and its rewards; they had sung their hymns of praise together, and had bewailed to each other the rare moments when he seemed to be cold and distant with them, each administering comfort to the other, and being secretly rather pleased. But now Alice felt that any story of his coldness to Julia would give her more than a little pleasure. She would like him to be always cold to Julia. She wanted him herself. And at that moment the truth struck her: she was in love with him. Till then, she had not known it: till then, perhaps, there had been nothing definite and personal to know. But now, as the fire died down, she was aware of nothing else, and her heart starved and cried out. She had admired and adored before; those were self-supporting emotions. But this cried out for its due sustenance.
She got up and went to her looking-glass, turning on the electric light above it. Certainly Julia was much prettier than she, with her mutinous little pink and white face and her violet eyes. But she was such a little thing, she hardly came above Alice’s shoulder, and Alice, who knew her sowell, had often thought, in spite of her apparent earnestness nowadays, that she was flighty and undependable. With the self-consciousness that was the unfortunate fruit of her newly found habits of self-examination and confession, she told herself that Julia had not a quarter of her own grit and character. Only the other day, when he was walking between them, he had said, ‘I always think of my friends by nicknames.’ Then he had undeniably squeezed Julia’s arm and said, ‘You are “Sprite,” just “Sprite.”’Julia had liked this, and with the anticipation of a less attractive nickname for Alice, had said, ‘And what is she?’ Then had come a memorable reply, for he had answered, ‘We must call her Alice in Wonderland: she lives in a fairyland of her own.’ And he had squeezed Alice’s arm too.
It was comforting to remember that, and Alice saw wonder and wistful pensiveness steal into the reflection of her face. There was the girl who would upset all his convictions about a celibate clergy; indeed, he had said that he did not think it morally wrong for them to marry. It was a case of the thin end of the wedge again, not this time of the Pope, but of Benedick, the married man.
Alice went once more to the window, and lifted the curtain. There was an oblong of light in the window above his study. She kissed her hand toit, and once more said aloud, ‘Good-night, Mr Cuthbert.’... But it would have been juster if she had wished him a nightmare.
Had Alice been in a condition to observe any windows and the lights in them, except those of the dark study and the illuminated bedroom at the Vicarage, she would have seen that, late as it was, there was a patch of gravel on the garden-wall outside her father’s library window which smouldered amid the darkness of the night and showed there was another wakeful inhabitant in the house. He had gone to his room very shortly after Alice’s disappearance from the drawing room, leaving his wife talking about table linen to Hugh. He, like Alice, wanted, though more dimly than she, the expansion of solitude. But when he got into that retreat, he found he was not quite alone in it. He had intended to look through the Leonardo publication which had just arrived, and for which he thought he thirsted. But it still lay unturned on the table. He had but unpacked and identified it, and in ten minutes had forgotten about it altogether. Another presence haunted the room and disquieted him.
It was nearly a month since the Sunday afternoon when he had held conference with the two Properts here. He had gone back to his office on the following Monday morning, feeling that he had shown a human side to Norah. She had done the same to him: she had talked to ‘MrKeeling’; not to ‘sir’; there was some kind of communication between them other than orders from an employer to an employed, and obedience, swift and deft from the employed to the employer. When he arrived at the office, punctual to nine o’clock, with a large post awaiting his perusal, he had found she had not yet come, and had prepared a little friendly speech to her on the lines of Mr Keeling. She arrived not five minutes afterwards, and he had consciously enjoyed the sound of her steps running along the passage, from the lift. But when she entered she had no trace of the previous afternoon.
‘I am late, sir,’ she said. ‘I am exceedingly sorry.’
At that, despite himself, the Sunday afternoon mood dried up also. She was in the office again, was she? Well, so was he. If she had only looked at him, had called him Mr Keeling, he would have been Mr Keeling. As it was, he became ‘sir’ with a vengeance.
‘I hope it won’t happen again,’ he said. ‘I cannot allow unpunctuality. Open the rest of the letters, and give me them.’
She had frozen into the perfect secretary. With incredible speed she had the sheaf of letters before him, and with her writing pad in her hand awaited his dictation. Twice during the next hour she, with downcast eyes, corrected some error of his, once producing an impeccable file to show himthat a week before he had demanded a reduction on certain wholesale terms, once to set him right in a date regarding previous correspondence. She had been five minutes late that morning, but she had saved him fifty in future correspondence. She seemed to know her files by heart: it was idle to challenge her for proof when she made a correction.
Then she had gone back with her shorthand notes to her room, and all morning the noise of her nimble fingers disturbed him through the felt-lined door. He was in two minds about that: sometimes he thought he would send her into Hugh’s room, where another typewriter worked. Hugh was accustomed to the clack of the machine, and two would be no worse than one. Then again he thought that the muffling of the noise alone disturbed him, that if she sat at the table in the window, and did her work there, he would not notice it. It was the concealed clacking of the keys that worried him. Perhaps it would even help him to attend to his own business to see how zealously she attended to hers. Those deft long fingers! They were the incarnation of the efficiency which to him was the salt of life.
Five days had passed thus, and on the next Saturday he had asked her brother and her, this time giving the invitation to her, to visit his library again. She had refused with thanks and a ‘sir,’ but Charles had come. Keeling haddetermined not to allude to his sister’s refusal, but had suddenly found himself doing so, and Charles, with respect, believed that she was having a friend to tea. And again, despite himself, he had said on Charles’s departure, ‘I hope I shall see you both again some Sunday soon.’
Well, he was not going to ask twice after one refusal of his favours, but, as the next week went by, he found the ‘sir’ and the dropped eyes altogether intolerable. These absolutely impersonal relationships were mysteriously worrying. She had shown herself a compatriot of the secret garden, and now she had retreated into the shell of the secretary again. This week the weather turned suddenly cold, and since there was no fireplace in her room, he invited her to sit at the table by the window in his, which was close to the central-heating hot-water pipes. A certain employer-sense of pride had come to his aid, and now he hardly ever glanced at her. But one day the whole card-house of this pride fell softly on the table, just as he took his hat and stick after the day’s work.
‘I wonder if you would do a book-plate for me, Miss Propert,’ he said. ‘I should like to have a book-plate for my library.’
She paused in her work but did not look at him.
‘Yes, sir, I will gladly do you one,’ she said. ‘Shall I draw a design and see if you approve of it?’
‘No, I know nothing of these things. But Ishould like a book-plate. Similar to the sort of thing you did for Lord Inverbroom.’
He hesitated a moment.
‘As regards size,’ he said, ‘perhaps you will come up and have a look at my books again, and get a guide from them.’
She smiled, or he thought she smiled, and that together with her reply enraged him.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ she said. ‘Book-plates will suit any volume except duodecimos. I don’t think you have any. If so, I could cut the margin down, sir. But I should like to submit my design to you before I cut the block.’
‘That also will not be necessary,’ he said. ‘Something in the style of Lord Inverbroom’s. Good-afternoon, Miss Propert.’
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said she.
It was extraordinary to him how this girl got on his mind. He thought he disliked her, but in some obscure way he could not help being interested in her. There was somebody there, somebody from whom there came a call to him. He wanted to know how she regarded him, what effect he had on her. And there were no data: she sat behind her impenetrable mask, and did her work in a manner more perfect than any secretary who had ever served him. She declined to come to his house with her brother, she had retreated again inside that beautiful shell. He noticed infinitesimal things about her: sometimesshe wore a hat, sometimes she left it in her room. One day she had a bandage round a finger of her left hand, and he wondered if she had cut herself. But her reserve and reticence permitted him no further approach to her: only he waited with something like impatience for the day when she would bring the block of his book-plate or an impression of it. There would surely be an opportunity for the personal relation to come in there.
He had begun to know that moment which few men of fifty, and those the luckiest of all, are unaware of. He wanted a companion, somebody who satisfied his human, not his corporal needs. While we are young, the youthful vital force feeds itself by its own excursions, satisfies itself with the fact of its travel and explorations. It is enough to go on, to lead the gipsy life and make the supper hot under the hedge-side, and sleep sound in the knowledge that next day there will be more travel and fresh horizons, and a dawn that shines on new valleys and hillsides. But when the plateau of life is reached, those are the fortunate ones who have their home already made. For thirty years he had had his own fireside and his wife, and his growing children. But never had he found his home: some spirit of the secret garden had inspired him, and now he felt mateless and all his money was dust and ashes in his mouth. Two things he wanted, one to bedifferent in breed from that which he was, the other to find a companion. The shadow of a companion lurked in his room, where were the piles of his books. Somewhere in that direction lay the lodestone.
Another week passed, and still he waited for some word from his secretary about the book-plate. He was not going to be eager about it, for he would not confess to himself the anxiety with which he awaited an opportunity that his twenty-five shillings a week secretary had denied him. But day by day he scrutinized her face, and wondered if she was going to say that the book-plate was finished.
The event occurred at the most inopportune moment. He had concluded a bargain, a day or two before, for the purchase of the entire vintage of a French vine-grower in the Bordeaux district, and had just opened a letter to say that owing to the absence of a certain payment in advance, the stock had been disposed of to another purchaser, and he had lost one of the best bargains he had ever made. But he felt sure that he had drawn the cheque in question: he remembered drawing it in his private cheque-book, just before leaving one afternoon, when the cashier had already gone home. He opened the drawer where he kept his cheque-book and examined it. There it was: it was true he had drawn the cheque, but he had forgotten to tear it out and despatch it, meaning no doubt to do so in the morning.
Never in all his years of successful business had he made so stupid an omission, an omission for which he would at once have dismissed any of his staff, telling him that a man who was capable of doing that was of no use to Keeling. And it was himself who had deserved dismissal. He could remember it all now: he had locked the cheque up again as it was necessary to send a certain order form with it, and that was inaccessible now that his secretary had gone. He would do it in the morning, but when morning came he had thought of nothing but the request he was going to make that Norah should do him a book-plate. That, that trivial trumpery affair, utterly drove out of his head this important business transaction. He was furious with himself for his carelessness: it was not only that he had lost a considerable sum of money, it was the loss of self-respect that worried him. He could hardly believe that he had shown himself so rotten a business man: he might as well have sold stale fish, according to the amiable hint of his mother-in-law as have done this. And at that unfortunate moment when he was savage with himself and all the world Norah Propert appeared. Instantly he looked at his watch to see if she was again late. But it had not yet struck nine, it was he himself who was before his time.
She carried a small parcel with her, of which she untied the string.
‘I have brought the block of your book-plate, sir,’ she said, ‘with a couple of impressions of it.’
He held out his hand for it without a word. She had produced a charming design, punning on his name. A ship lay on its side with its keel showing: in the foreground was a faun squatting on the sand reading: behind was a black sky with stars and a large moon. He knew it to be a charming piece of work, but his annoyance at himself clouded everything.
‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘What do you charge for it?’
‘Ten pounds,’ she said. ‘That will include a thousand copies.’
He looked at the block in silence for a moment. There did not seem to be much work on it: he could get a woodcut that size for half of the price. It was but three inches by two.
‘Ten pounds!’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t dream of giving more than seven for it. Even that would be a fancy price.’
He put the block down, laid the two impressions on the top of it, and turned over the leaves of his cheque-book in order to pay for the thing at once. But she picked up her work, and without a word began wrapping it up in the paper she had just taken off it. Already he knew he had made a blunder, and the blunder was the act of a cad. It had been his business to ask the price beforehand, if he wanted to know it, not toquarrel with it afterwards. But the cad in him had full possession just then.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, and glancing up he found that for once she was looking at him with contemptuous anger, held perfectly in control.
‘I am going to take my work away again, sir, as you do not care to pay the price I ask for it,’ she said.
‘Nonsense. Seven pounds is a very good price. I know the cost of woodcuts.’
He had written the cheque and passed it over to her. She took no notice whatever of it, tied the string round her parcel and put it on the table in the window. Then, still without a word, she took up her pencil and her writing-pad, and sat down to receive his dictation.
In his heart he knew he was beaten. She had given him even a sharper lesson than he had given himself in the matter of the cheque he had forgotten to post. And that was but business; the error was expensive, but it was merely a matter of money as far as its effects went. He very much doubted whether money would settle this. He still thought that ten pounds was an excessive charge, but that did not detract from the fact that he had behaved meanly. His pride still choked him, but he knew that sooner or later he would be obliged to capitulate. He would have to apologize, and hope that his apology would be accepted.
The morning’s work went on precisely as usual, and not by the tremor of an eyelash did she betray whatever she might be feeling. Just that one look had she given him of sovereign disdain, and the remembrance of it stiffened him against her, and he battled against the surrender that he knew must come. If she was going to be proud, he could match her in that, and again he told himself that seven pounds was a very good price. He was not going to be imposed on....
All the morning the see-saw went on within him, and when she rose to go for her hour’s interval he noticed that she took the parcel containing the wood-block with her. And very ill-inspired he made an attempt at surrender.
‘Come, Miss Propert,’ he said. ‘Let’s have an end of this. I should have asked the price before I commissioned you to do the work. Let me give you a cheque for ten pounds.’
She smiled: there was no doubt about that.
‘I’m afraid that’s quite impossible, sir,’ she said, ‘now that you have told me that you don’t consider my work worth that. Good-morning, sir.’
Up flamed his temper again at this. What on earth did the girl want more? He had offered her the price she asked; he had said he was wrong in not inquiring about it before. She might go hang, she and her niceties and her contempt.
She had come back in the afternoon without her parcel, and his imagination pictured hertelling her brother all that had happened. He felt he must have cut a sorry figure. ‘That’s the end of his books and his book-plates for me,’ would be the sort of way Norah would sum it all up. Probably they did not discuss it much: there really was very little need for comment on what he had done. The simple facts were sufficient: perhaps she had smiled again as she smiled when she rejected his first overtures.
All afternoon they worked within a few yards of each other, all afternoon his accusing conscience battered at his pride; and as she rose to go when the day’s work was over, he capitulated. He stood up also, grim and stern to the view, but beset with a shy pathetic anxiety that she would accept his regrets.
‘I want to ask your pardon, Miss Propert,’ he said, ‘for my conduct to you this morning. I am sure you did not charge me more than your work was worth. I like your design very much. I shall be truly grateful to you if you will let me have that plate. I am sorry. That’s all.... I am sorry.’
It cost him a good deal to say that, but at every word his burden lightened, though his anxiety to know how she would deal with him increased.
She raised her eyes to his, quite in the secret garden manner, and she smiled not as she had smiled when she left him this morning.
‘Thank you so much, Mr Keeling,’ she said.‘I shall be delighted to let you have the block if you feel like that about it. I will bring it back with me to-morrow, shall I?’
To-night as he thought over this, when the hour was quiet, and upstairs Alice kept vigil, Norah’s presence seemed to haunt the room. She had only been here once, but he could remember with such distinctness the trivial details of that afternoon, that his imagination gave him her again, now standing by the book-shelves, now seated in one of the chairs he had brought in that day, and kept here since. They would be needed again, he hoped, next Sunday, for with the arrival of the Leonardo book he had an adequate excuse for asking her again, and, he hoped, an adequate cause for her acceptance. There it lay on the table still unopened, and in the clinking of the ashes in the grate, and the night-wind that stirred in the bushes outside, he heard with the inward ear the sound of her voice, just a word or two spoken through the wind.
Onenight early in December Norah Propert was busily engaged in the sitting-room of her brother’s house just off the market-place at Bracebridge. She had left him over a book and a cigarette in the dining-room, and as soon as she had finished her supper had gone across the passage to her work again. The room was very simply decorated: to Mrs Keeling’s plush-and-mirror eye it would have seemed to be hardly decorated at all. There were a few framed photographs or cheap reproductions of famous pictures on the walls, a book-case held some three hundred volumes, the floor had a fawn-coloured drugget on it, and there was not a square inch of plush anywhere.
The table at which she worked was covered with small cardboard slips, bearing in her neat minute handwriting the titles and the authors of the books in Mr Keeling’s library. Each appeared twice, once under its author, once under its title, and these she was sorting out into an alphabetical file from which she would compile her catalogue. She had been at work on it for about a fortnight, and the faint hopes she had originally entertained of getting it finished by the end of the year had now completely vanished. He had beenbuying books in very large numbers; already wing-bookcases had begun to invade the floor space of his room, and he intended in the spring to build out farther into the garden. But Norah was not at all sure that she regretted the vanishing of those hopes: the work interested her, and she had the true book-lover’s pride in making all the equipment connected with books as perfect as it could be. Three times a week she went with her brother after supper for a couple of hours’ work in Mr Keeling’s library: the other evenings she brought into order at home the collection of slips she had made there.
Those evenings spent at Mr Keeling’s house had a great attraction for her. She enjoyed the work itself, and as she made her slips she had refreshing glances at the books. It was a leisurely performance, not like her swift work in the office. Charles helped her in it, making author-slips or illustration-slips as she made title-slips. There was a fire on the hearth, a tray of sandwiches for them before they left, and more often than not Mr Keeling came and sat with them for half an hour, unpacking fresh volumes if any had come in, and looking through the book-catalogues that were sent him. And Norah was honest enough with herself to confess that it was not the work alone that interested her. Friendship, no less than friendship sudden and to her quite unexpected, had been the flower of the original enmity betweenher and the man, who was never ‘sir’ to her even in the office now. It dated from the moment when he had made his unreserved apology to her over the matter of the book-plates. She knew what it must cost to a man of his type to say what he had said to his typewriter, and she had to revise all her previous estimates of him, and add him up honestly again. She found the total a very different one from that which she had supposed was correct. True, a woman does not like or dislike a man directly because of his qualities, but his qualities are the soil from which her like or dislike springs. They are part at any rate of his personality, in which she finds charm or repulsiveness. The upshot was, to take it at its smallest measure, that instead of disliking her work for him, she had grown to like it, because it was for him that she did it.
She was deep in her work now when her brother joined her. Charles was suffering from a cold of paralysing severity, and she looked up with a certain anxiety as a fit of coughing took him, for he was liable to bad bronchitis.
‘Charles, you ought to go to bed,’ she said, ‘and stop there to-morrow.’
‘I dare say, but I shan’t,’ said Charles hoarsely.
‘Why? It is very unwise of you. I’ll tell Mr Keeling as soon as I get there in the morning. I’m sure he’ll think you were right.’
‘Oh, I shall be better,’ said he. ‘Consideringthat he saw me through an illness last year, the least I can do is to hold on as long as I can.’
‘So that he may have the pleasure of seeing you through another one this year,’ remarked Norah.
‘Don’t be so optimistic. I may die instead.’
‘You can if you like,’ she said, ‘but it would worry me very much.’
Charles subsided into his book again for a little, but presently put it down.
‘What about your work at Keeling’s to-morrow night?’ he said, ‘if I’m not fit to come out? You can’t very well go up there alone, can you?’
Norah paused before she answered.
‘Why on earth not?’ she said. ‘I sit with him alone all day in his office. Besides, I know he has a dinner-party to-morrow. I shan’t see him.’
‘And how do you know that?’ he asked.
‘Because a note came to the office from his wife, which I opened, not knowing her writing, which had something to do with it. He began dictating a reply for me to type-write, but I suggested he had better write a note himself.’
‘What awful impertinence!’
‘He didn’t think so. He’s rather touching. He said, “Then you don’t despair of making a gentleman of me in time..”’
‘I remember you told me once he was a cad. I shall go to bed, I think.’
‘You had much better. And do let me tell him you have stopped there to-morrow morning she said.
‘I doubt it. Good-night. I dare say I shall be all right to-morrow.’
Charles was no better next day, but merely obstinate, and went up to his work, as usual, with his sister. Keeling appeared shortly after, and, as usual, began the dictation. Now and then he gave sharp glances at Norah, and before long stopped in the middle of a letter.
‘What’s the matter, Miss Propert?’ he said. ‘Better tell me and not waste time, unless it’s private.’
He had no difficulty in making her look at him now. She looked up with a half smile.
‘How did you guess there was anything the matter?’ she asked.
‘How do I guess it is warm or cold? I feel it. Tell me.’
‘I’m rather anxious about Charles,’ she said. ‘He has got an appalling cough.’
‘Have you sent for the doctor?’
‘No. He insisted on coming up to his work.’
Keeling got up.
‘I’ll soon settle that,’ he said, going out.
He came back in a very short space of time.
‘You’ll find him in bed when you get home,’ he said.
‘Oh, thank you so much. I am so grateful.’
‘You needn’t be. I told him he wanted tomake me pay a big doctor’s bill for him instead of his paying a little one. He deserved that for being so idiotic as to come out. Read the letter, please, which we stopped in the middle of.’
All day the work went forward as usual: there was a heavy budget to answer, and it was not till nearly six that Norah had her letters ready for his signature. He made no payment to her for such over-time work, for the balance was more often on the other side, and she got away before her time. As he passed her back the last of the batch, he said,—
‘You are coming to the library this evening, are you not?’
‘I had meant to, if it is convenient to you.’
‘Perfectly. Perhaps you would leave a line on the table to say how your brother is. I don’t suppose I shall see you to-night.’
Mrs Keeling’s party that night, which sat down very punctually at half-past seven, and would disperse at half-past ten, was of the only-a-few-friends nature. Julia Fyson, Alice’s bosom friend, whom she had begun to dislike very cordially, was there, with her father and mother, the former, small and depressed, the latter, large and full-blooded and of a thoroughly poisonous nature. The four Keelings were there, and the extremely ladylike young woman whom Hugh had lately led to the altar. She was a shade too lady-like,if anything, and never forgot to separate her little finger from the others when she was holding a cup or glass. They were ten in all, Mr Silverdale and Dr Inglis completing the number. As was usual at the table of that generous housekeeper Mrs Keeling, there were vast quantities of nitrogenous food provided in many courses, and it was not till nine that the dining-room door was opened, on the run, by Mr Silverdale to let the ladies leave the room. He made a suitable remark to each as she passed him, and Julia Fyson and Alice, with waists and arms interlaced, stopped to talk to him as they went out. Precisely at that moment, while they were all in the Gothic hall together, the boy covered with buttons opened the front door and admitted Norah Propert. The door into the dining-room was still being held wide by Silverdale, as the interlaced young ladies answered his humorous laments over the setting of the sun now that the ladies were leaving, and through it Keeling standing at the head of the table saw Norah there. She had had but one moment for thought as the front-door was opened to her, but the light from the hall streamed full on to the step and she judged it better to come in than, having been already seen, retreat again. Without looking up she walked across to the library door while still Mrs Fyson stared, and let herself in. She heard the dining-room door opposite close again while she fumbled for the switch ofthe electric light; she heard indistinguishable murmurs from the hall. Only one caught her ear intelligibly when Mrs Keeling said, ‘Oh, Mr Keeling’s typewriter. She is cataloguing his books.’
It had begun to snow thickly outside, and she stood for a minute or two before the fire, shaking from her cloak the frozen petals, which fizzed on the coals. Certainly she had felt a disconcertment at the moment of her entry and passage through the hall, had found fault with the ill luck that had caused her to meet the gorged galaxy from the dining-room on the one and only night when her brother had not been with her. But the encounter did not long trouble her, and like warmth coming over frozen limbs, the fact of being here alone gave her a thrill of pleasure that surprised her. She was in his secret garden all by herself, without Charles to intrude his presence, without even Keeling himself. She did not want him here now; she was surrounded with him, and presently she plunged like some ecstatic diver into the work she had come to do for him. Soon the buzz of men’s conversation drifted past the door, prominent among which was Silverdale’s expressive and high-pitched voice, and without intention she found herself listening for Keeling’s. Then the murmur was cut off by the sound of a shutting door, and she went on with her work on the catalogue cards. Faint tinkles of a piano were heard as Alice performed several little pieces, faintscreams as Julia Fyson sang. Keeling was there, no doubt, and still she did not want him in his bodily presence. He was more completely with her in this room empty but for herself.
She had settled in her own mind to get away before the party broke up, but she grew absorbed in her work, and it came with something of a surprise and shock to her when again she heard the gabble of mixed voices outside, saying what a pleasant evening they had had, and realized that she must wait till those compliments were finished. She had not yet written the note which Keeling had asked her to leave on the table, regarding her brother’s health, and this she did now as she waited, giving a promising account of him. Soon the front-door closed for the last time, leaving silence in the hall, and she heard a well-known foot cross it in the direction of the drawing-room, pause and then come back. Keeling entered.
‘Good-evening, Miss Propert,’ he said. ‘I want you, if you will, to leave your work now, and come into the drawing-room to talk to my wife and daughter for a few minutes, while I ring for a cab for you. It is snowing hard.’
‘Oh, I would rather not do that,’ said Norah. ‘I have got great big overshoes: there they are filling up the corner of the room; I shan’t mind the snow. And, Mr Keeling, go back to the drawing-room, and say I’ve gone.’
It was clear to each of them that the samesituation, that of Norah having been seen entering the house alone after dinner, and going to his private room, was in the mind of each of them. Norah, for her part, had a secret blush for the fact that she considered the incident at all, but her reply had revealed that she did, for she remembered that her brother had alluded to the question of her coming up here alone. But Keeling saw no absurdity in, so to speak, regularizing the situation, and his solution commended itself to him more than hers.
‘I should prefer that you came and were introduced to Mrs Keeling,’ he said. ‘I think that is better.’
Norah got up, smiling at him. Her internal blush had filtered through to her face.
‘If you think it best, I will,’ she said. ‘Whatever we do, don’t let us waste time here.’
‘Come then,’ he said.
He showed her the way to the drawing-room, where his wife and Alice were standing by the fire.
‘I have brought in Miss Propert,’ he said, ‘while I am getting a cab for her to take her home. It is snowing heavily. And this is my daughter, Miss Propert.’
Mrs Keeling made a great effort with herself to behave as befitted a mayoress and the daughter of a P. and O. captain. She thought it outrageous of her husband to have brought the girl inhere without consulting her, not being clever enough to see the obvious wisdom, both from his standpoint and that of the girl, of his doing so. But she had the fairness to admit in her own mind that it was not the girl’s fault: Mr Keeling had told her to come into the drawing-room, and naturally she came. Therefore she behaved to her as befitted the Mayoress talking to a typewriter, and was very grand and condescending.
‘I am sure you are very useful to Mr Keeling,’ she said, ‘in helping to arrange his books, and it must be a great treat to you to have access to so large a library, if you are fond of reading.’
The pretentious solemnity of this was not lost on Norah’s sense of humour. She was rather annoyed at the whole affair, but it was absurd not to see the lighter side of it, and answer accordingly.
‘Yes, I am very lucky,’ she said. ‘I was lucky in London too, where I had access to the library at the British Museum.’
This seemed a very proper speech to Mrs Keeling. It was delivered in clear, pleasant tones, with the appearance of respect, and she could not make out why Alice gave one of her queer, crooked smiles, or why she said,—
‘I suppose that is bigger than my father’s, Miss Propert.’
Norah looked up at her, laughing.
‘At a guess I should say it was,’ she said.
Decidedly there was something here that Mrs Keeling did not wholly comprehend, and when she did not comprehend she called it being kept in the dark. She comprehended, however, that Norah was exceedingly good-looking, and that there was a certain air about her, which she supposed came from reading books. Simultaneously she remembered Mrs Fyson asking her who it was who had come in and passed into Mr Keeling’s library; and on being informed that lady had said, ‘How very odd,’ and at once changed the subject. Instantly she began to consider if it was very odd. But for the present she determined that nothing should mar the perfect behaviour of the Mayoress.
‘Pray sit down, Miss Propert,’ she said. ‘I fancy your brother is one of Mr Keeling’s clerks too.’
‘Yes; he usually comes with me in the evening,’ said Norah, ‘but he is in bed with a very bad cold.’
‘Indeed. Oh, indeed!’ said Mrs Keeling.
Conversation came to a dead halt here, and again Mrs Keeling, with growing resentment, took in Norah from head to foot. The seconds were beaten out sonorously by the pink clock on the chimney-piece, and at last Norah, now growing thoroughly uncomfortable in this hostile atmosphere, rose.
‘I think Mr Keeling had much better not bother about a cab for me,’ she said. ‘I can perfectly well walk home.’
Mrs Keeling became a shade statelier, without abatement of her extremely proper behavior.
‘Mr Keeling will do as he thinks wisest about that,’ she said.
It seemed, however, not to be in Mr Keeling’s power to do what he thought wisest, for after a minute or two of ringing silence, he appeared with the news that there were no cabs to be got. It was snowing heavily and they were all out.
Norah held out her hand to Mrs Keeling. ‘I won’t keep you up any longer,’ she said. ‘I shall walk home at once.’
‘It’s impossible,’ said he, ‘there’s nearly a foot of snow now.’
‘All the more reason for getting home before there are two,’ said she.
‘I’ll see you home then,’ he said. ‘You can’t go alone.’
‘Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort,’ said she. ‘It is quite unnecessary. I absolutely forbid it.’
For a moment it was a mere tussle of will between them, and Norah’s reasons were the stronger. She looked at him a moment, and knew she had won, and without more words went back to the library and put on her over-boots, and gathered up the book-slips she had made that evening. He followed her as far as the hall, and waited for her.
‘Don’t look at my feet,’ she said gaily. ‘Theyare officially invisible like the legs of the Queen of Spain.’
The grim mouth smiled, and the stern eyes grew kindly. She knew that transformation so well now.
‘You are very obstinate,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you let me walk home with you?’
‘I am right,’ she said. ‘And I think your plan was wrong.’
‘They weren’t rude to you?’ he asked, growing grim again.
‘Ah, you shouldn’t have asked that,’ she said. ‘They were exceedingly polite.’
He let her out into the snow, and felt that fire went with her; then returned to the drawing-room where he found unquestionable ice. Little sour wreaths of mist were already afloat in Mrs Keeling’s mind, which, though not yet condensed into actual thought, were chilling down to it in that narrow receptacle. Alice took her embroidery, and went upstairs, but his wife sat rather upright by the fire, looking at the evening paper which she held upside down. She meant to behave with perfect propriety again, but wished him to begin, so as to launch her propriety on a fair and even keel.
For his part he had known so many of those evenings, when the dinner-party went away precisely at half-past ten, and he was left to hear long comments by his wife on the soup and thebeef and the grouse and the pudding and the savoury, and what Dr Inglis said, and what Mrs Fyson thought. He hoped, when he first came back, after seeing Norah fade into the snow-storm, that he was to be regaled with such reminiscences, but hoped rather against hope. No reminiscences came to his aid, and he began to be aware, from the ice-bound conditions, that he must expect something far less jovial and trivial. But he had no accusing conscience, and if she chose to read her evening paper upside down in silence, he could at least read the morning paper the right way up. Then, as he would not give her a lead, make some remark, that is to say, to which she could take exception, she had to begin.
‘I must say I am surprised at your not seeing Miss Propert home,’ she said. ‘After bringing her into my drawing-room and forcing me to be civil to her, you might have had the civility yourself to see her to her house.’
He was aware that she was intending to exercise the dead-weight somewhere. It was not many weeks ago that she had brought it into play regarding Mr Silverdale and his Romish practices, when she had refused to leave his church for the simpler rites of the Cathedral. He had yielded there, because he did not really care whether she and Alice chose to attend a milliner-church or not. They might if they liked: it did not seriously matter. But the dead-weight, if she wasintending to exercise it over the question of Norah, mattered very much.
‘Would it have pleased you better if I had seen her home?’ he asked.
‘I can’t say whether I should have been pleased or not,’ she said. ‘It didn’t happen. But I’m sure I don’t know why you sent your typewriter in here to talk to me. I don’t know what you think I should find to say to her. With Alice here too.’
She had said too much, and knew it the moment she had said it. But the mists had congealed, and she felt obliged, as she would have expressed it, say, to Mrs Fyson, to speak her mind. She did not really speak her mind; she spoke what some perfectly groundless jealousy dictated to her.
He dropped the paper, and stood up by the fireplace.
‘You said, “With Alice here too,.”’he said. ‘Oblige me by telling me what you mean.’
She saw that in a reasonable frame of mind she would not have meant anything. But she was cross and surfeited, and the cold in the head which had spared her so long was seriously threatening. She wanted, out of sheer perverseness, to defend an indefensible position.
‘Well, I’m sure Alice must have thought it very odd your bringing your typewriter into my drawing-room,’ she said.
‘No, you didn’t mean that!’ said Keeling.
Mrs Keeling got up.
‘If you only want to contradict me,’ she said, ‘you can do it by yourself, Thomas. I’m not going to answer you. That rude girl came in here——’
‘Rude? You said, “rude.” How was she rude?’
He knew he was being unwise in bandying stupid words with his wife. But she continued to make accusations, and his want of breeding, to use a general term, did not allow him to pass them over in the silence that he knew they deserved.
‘How was she rude?’ he repeated.
‘She said something about the British Museum Library that I did not understand,’ she said.
‘And because you couldn’t understand, you think she was rude? Was that it?’
‘Well, if you had heard her say it——’ she began.
‘You know I did not. But I am quite certain that Miss Propert was not rude. And now about Alice’s being here, when I brought her in. What of that? I wish you to tell me if you meant anything. If you did not, I wish you to say so.’
He knew quite well that he was adopting a bullying tone. But he had no inclination to be bullied himself. One or other of them had to be vanquished over this, and he was quite determined that he would not hold the white flag. There was something to be fought for, something which he could not give up.
‘You must allow it was very odd that your secretary should appear in the middle of my dinner-party,’ she said, ‘and simply stroll across to your room. I had been talking of your room half dinner-time with Mr Fyson, saying that none of us was allowed there. And then, in came this girl——’
He cut her short.
‘What has that to do with Alice?’ he repeated.
‘I was going to say that, only you always interrupt me,’ she said. ‘Then when our guests are gone, you bring her in here, just as if she was Julia Fyson, into my drawing-room. And Alice—well, Alice would think it very odd too, just as Mrs Fyson did. Of course it was not that which Mrs Fyson thought odd: I know you will try to catch me up, and ask me how Mrs Fyson knew, but that is always your way, Thomas. I know quite well that Mrs Fyson had gone away before you brought her in here.’
‘I don’t want to catch you up,’ he said. ‘I only want to know why Alice should not be here when I bring Miss Propert in to wait for a cab. You can’t give me any reason because there is no reason. Let’s get that clear, and then I want to talk about something else.’
Suddenly the whole of the vague internal movements of her mind flashed into his vision, as intelligible as some perfectly simple businessproposition. She had a certain justification too: it was awkward that Norah had run into the exit of the ladies, that his wife had been saying that none of them ever entered the library. He knew the mind of Bracebridge pretty well, the slightly malicious construction that women like Mrs Fyson would find themselves compelled to put on it all. He knew also the mind of his wife, and the effect which it clearly had had on her. Her sense of propriety, of dignity had been assaulted: it was a queer thing to have happened. Then there was Norah’s presence in her drawing-room. He had insisted on that, for, at the moment, it seemed the most straightforward thing to do. But he was beginning to think it had been a mistake. Something about the girl, her beauty (and never had that struck him so forcibly as when he saw her standing by Alice), her air of breeding, of education, of simplicity in front of those draped easels and painted looking-glasses had stirred some long latent potentiality for jealousy in his wife. It was that suggestion which suddenly enraged him.