Mrs. Ames could not permit Elsie’s isolation to continue, and she said firmly to Harry, “Tell Miss Evans all about Cambridge,” which straightened conversation out again, and allowed Mrs. Evans to direct all her glances and little sentences to Major Ames. As was usual with men who had the privilege of talking to her, he soon felt himself a vivid conversationalist.
“Yes, gardening was always a hobby of mine,” he was saying, “and in the regiment they used to call me Adam. The grand old gardener, you know, as Tennyson says. Not that there was ever anything grand about me.”
Mrs. Evans’ mouth quivered into a little smile.
“Nor old, either, Major Ames,” she said.
Major Ames put down the glass of champagne he had just sipped, in order to give his loud, hearty laugh.
“Well, well,” he said, “I’m pretty vigorous yet, and can pull the heavy garden roller as well as a couple of gardeners could. I never have a gardener more than a couple of days a week. I do all the work myself. Capital exercise, rolling the lawn, and then I take a rest with a bit of weeding, or picking a bunch of flowers for Amy’s table. Weeding, too—
‘An hour’s weeding a dayKeeps the doctor away.’
‘An hour’s weeding a dayKeeps the doctor away.’
‘An hour’s weeding a dayKeeps the doctor away.’
I defy you to get lumbago if you do a bit of weeding every morning.”
Again a little shy smile quivered on Millie Evans’ mouth.
“I shall tell my husband,” she said. “I shall say you told me you spend an hour a day in weeding, so that you shouldn’t ever set eyes on him. And then you make poetry about it afterwards.”
Again he laughed.
“Well, now, I call that downright wicked of you,” he said, “twisting my words about in that way. General, I want your opinion about that glass of champagne. It’s a ’96 wine, and wants drinking.”
The General applied his fish-like mouth to his glass.
“Wants drinking, does it?” he said. “Well, it’ll get it from me. Delicious! Goo’ dry wine.”
Major Ames turned to Millie Evans again.
“Beg your pardon, Mrs. Evans,” he said, “but General Fortescue likes to know what’s before him. Yes, downright wicked of you! I’m sure I wish Amy had asked Dr. Evans to-night, but there—you know what Amy is. She’s got a notion that it will make a pleasanter dinner-table not to ask husband and wife always together. She says it’s done a great deal in London now. But they can’t put on to their tables in London such sweet-peas as I grow here in my bit of a garden. Look at those in front of you. Black Michaels, they are. Look at the size of them. Did you ever see such sweet-peas? I wonder what Amy is going to give us for dinner to-night. Bit of lamb next, is it? and a quail to follow. Hopeyou’ll go Nap, Mrs. Evans; I must say Amy has a famous cook. And what do you think of us all down at Riseborough, now you’ve had time to settle down and look about you? I daresay you and your husband say some sharp things about us, hey? Find us very stick-in-the-mud after London?”
She gave him one of those shy little deprecating glances that made him involuntarily feel that he was a most agreeable companion.
“Ah, you are being wicked now!” she said. “Every one is delightful. So kind, so hospitable. Now, Major Ames, do tell me more about your flowers. Black Michaels, you said those were. I must go in for gardening, and will you begin to teach me a little? Why is it that your flowers are so much more beautiful than anybody’s? At least, I needn’t ask: it must be because you understand them better than anybody.”
Major Ames felt that this was an uncommonly agreeable woman, and for half a second contrasted her pleasant eagerness to hear about his garden with his wife’s complete indifference to it. She liked flowers on the table, but she scarcely knew a hollyhock from a geranium.
“Well, well,” he said; “I don’t say that my flowers, which you are so polite as to praise, don’t owe something to my care. Rain or fine, I don’t suppose I spend less than an average of four hours a day among them, year in, year out. And that’s better, isn’t it, than sitting at the club, listening to all the gossip and tittle-tattle of the place?”
“Ah, you are like me,” she said. “I hate gossip. It is so dull. Gardening is so much more interesting.”
He laughed again.
“Well, as I tell Amy,” he said, “if our friends come here expecting to hear all the tittle-tattle of the place, they will be in for a disappointment. Amy and I like to give our friends a hearty welcome and a good dinner, and pleasant conversation about really interesting things. I know little about the gossip of the town; you would find me strangely ignorant if you wanted to talk about it. But politics now—one of those beastly Radical members of Parliament lunched with us only the week before last, and I assure you that Amy asked him some questions he found it hard to answer. In fact, he didn’t answer them: he begged the question, begged the question. There was one, I remember, which just bowled him out. She said, ‘What is to happen to the parks of the landed gentry, if you take them away from the owners?’ Well, that bowled him out, as they say in cricket. Look at Sir James’s place, for instance, your cousin’s place, Amy’s cousin’s place. Will they plant a row of villas along the garden terrace? And who is to live in them if they do? Grant that Lloyd George—she said that—grant that Lloyd George wants a villa there, that will be one villa. But the terrace there will hold a dozen villas. Who will take the rest of them? She asked him that. They take away all our property, and then expect us to build houses on other people’s! Don’t talk to me!”
The concluding sentence was not intended to put a stop on this pleasant conversation; it was only the natural ejaculation of one connected with landed proprietors. Mrs. Evans understood it in that sense.
“Do tell me all about it,” she said. “Of course, I am only a woman, and we are supposed to haveno brains, are we not? and to be able to understand nothing about politics. But will they really take my cousin James’s place away from him? I think Radicals must be wicked.”
“More fools than knaves, I always say,” said Major Ames magnanimously. “They are deluded, like the poor Suffragettes. Suffragettes now! A woman’s sphere of influence lies in her home. Women are the queens of the earth; I’ve often said that, and what do queens want with votes? Would Amy have any more influence in Riseborough if she had a vote? Not a bit of it. Well, then, why go about smacking the faces of policemen and chaining yourself to a railing? If I had my way——”
Major Ames became of lower voice and greater confidence.
“Amy doesn’t wholly agree with me,” he said; “and it’s a pleasure to thrash the matter out with somebody like yourself, who has sensible views on the subject. What use are women in politics? None at all, as you just said. It’s for women to rock the cradle, and rule the world. I say, and I have always said, that to give them a vote would be to wreck their influence, God bless them. But Amy doesn’t agree with me. I say that I will vote—she’s a Conservative, of course, and so am I—I will vote as she wishes me to. But she says it’s the principle of the thing, not the practice. But what she calls principle, I call want of principle. Home: that’s the woman’s sphere.”
Mrs. Evans gave a little sigh.
“I never heard it so beautifully expressed,” she said. “Major Ames, why don’t you go in for politics?”
Major Ames felt himself flattered; he felt also that he deserved the flattery. Hence, to him now, it ceased to be flattery, and became a tribute. He became more confidential, and vastly more vapid.
“My dear lady,” he said, “politics is a dirty business now-a-days. We can serve our cause best by living a quiet and dignified life, without ostentation, as you see, but by being gentlemen. It is the silent protest against these socialistic ideas that will tell in the long run. What should I do at Westminster? Upon my soul, if I found myself sitting opposite those Radical louts, it would take me all my time to keep my temper. No, no; let me attend to my garden, and give my friends good dinners,—bless my soul, Amy is letting us have an ice to-night—strawberry ice, I expect; that was why she asked me whether there were plenty of strawberries.Glace de fraises; she likes her menu-cards printed in French, though I am sure ‘strawberry ice’ would tell us all we wanted to know. What’s in a name after all?”
Conversation had already shifted, and Major Ames turned swiftly to a dry-skinned Mrs. Brooks who sat on his left. She was a sad high-church widow who embroidered a great deal. Her dress was outlined with her own embroideries, so, too, were many altar-cloths at the church of St. Barnabas. She and Mrs. Ames had a sort of religious rivalry over its decoration; the one arranged the copious white lilies that crowned the cloth made by the other. Their rivalry was not without silent jealousy, and it was already quite well known that Mrs. Brooks had said that lilies of the valley were quite as suitable as Madonna lilies, which shed a nasty yellow pollen on the altar-cloth. But Madonna lilies were larger; a decorationrequired fewer “blooms.” In other moods also she was slightly acid.
Mrs. Evans turned slowly to her right, where Harry was sitting. She might almost be supposed to know that she had a lovely neck, at least it was hard to think that she had lived with it for thirty-seven years in complete unconsciousness of it. If she moved her head very quickly, there was just a suspicion of loose skin about it. But she did not move her head very quickly.
“And now let us go on talking,” she said. “Have you told my little girl all about Cambridge? Tell me all about Cambridge too. What fun you must have! A lot of young men together, with no stupid women and girls to bother them. Do you play a great deal of lawn-tennis?”
Harry reconsidered for a moment his verdict concerning the wonderfulness of her. It was hardly happy to talk to a member of the Omar Club about games and the advantages of having no girls about.
“No; I don’t play games much,” he said. “The set I am in don’t care for them.”
She tilted her head a little back, as if asking pardon for her ignorance.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought perhaps you liked games—football, racquets, all that kind of thing. I am sure you could play them beautifully if you chose. Or perhaps you like gardening? I had such a nice talk to your father about flowers. What a lot he knows about them!”
Flowers were better than games, anyhow; Harry put down his spoon without finishing his ice.
“Have you ever noticed what a wonderful colourLa Franceroses turn at twilight?” he asked. “Allthe shadows between the petals become blue, quite blue.”
“Do they really? You must show me sometime. Are there some in your garden here?”
“Yes, but father doesn’t care about them so much because they are common. I think that is so strange of him. Sunsets are common, too, aren’t they? There is a sunset every day. But the fact that a thing is common doesn’t make it less beautiful.”
She gave a little sigh.
“But what a nice idea,” she said. “I am sure you thought of it. Do you talk about these things much at Cambridge?”
Mrs. Ames began to collect ladies’ eyes at this moment, and the conversation had to be suspended. Millie Evans, though she was rather taller than Harry, managed, as she passed him on the way to the door, to convey the impression of looking up at him.
“You must tell me all about it,” she said. “And show me those delicious roses turning blue at twilight.”
Dinner had been at a quarter to eight, and when the men joined the women again in the drawing-room, light still lingered in the midsummer sky. Then Harry, greatly daring, since such a procedure was utterly contrary to all established precedents, persuaded Mrs. Evans to come out into the garden, and observe for herself the chameleonic properties of the roses. Then he had ventured on another violation of rule, since all rights of flower-picking were vested in his father, and had plucked her half-a-dozen of them. But on their return with the booty, and the establishment of the blue theory, his father, so far from resenting this invasions of his privileges, had merely said—
“The rascal might have found you something choicer than that, Mrs. Evans. But we’ll see what we can find you to-morrow.”
She had again seemed to look up at Harry.
“Nothing can be lovelier than my beautiful roses,” she said. “But it is sweet of you to think of sending me some more. Cousin Amy, look at the roses Mr. Harry has given me.”
Carriages arrived as usual that night at half-past ten, at which hour, too, a gaunt, grenadier-like maid of certain age, rapped loudly on the front door, and demanded Mrs. Brooks, whom she was to protect on her way home, and as usual carriages and the grenadier waited till twenty minutes to eleven. But even at a quarter to, no conveyance, by some mischance, had come for Mrs. Evans, and despite her protests, Major Ames insisted on escorting her and Elsie back to her house. Occasionally, when such mistakes occurred, it had been Harry’s duty to see home the uncarriaged, but to-night, when it would have been his pleasure, the privilege was denied him. So, instead, after saying good-night to his mother, he went swiftly to his room, there to write a mysterious letter to a member of the Omar Club, and compose a short poem, which should, however unworthily, commemorate this amorous evening.
There is nothing in the world more rightly sacred than the first dawnings of love in a young man, but, on the other hand, there is nothing more ludicrous if his emotions are inspired, or even tinged, by self-consciousness and the sense of how fine a young spark he is. And our unfortunate Harry was charged with this absurdity; all through the evening it had been present to his mind, how dashing and Byronic a talethis would prove at the next meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club; with what fine frenzy he would throw off, in his hour of inspiration after the yellow wine, the little heart-wail which he was now about to compose, as soon as his letter to Gerald Everett was written. And lest it should seem unwarrantable to intrude in the spirit of ridicule on a young man’s rapture and despair, an extract from his letter should give solid justification.
“Of course, I can’t give names,” he said, “because you know how such things get about; but, my God, Gerald, how wonderful she is. I saw her this afternoon for the first time, and she dined with us to-night. She understands everything—whatever I said, I saw reflected in her eyes, as the sky is reflected in still water. After dinner I took her out into the garden, and showed her how the shadows of theLa Franceroses turn blue at dusk. I quoted to her two lines—
‘O, thou art fairer than the evening air,Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’
‘O, thou art fairer than the evening air,Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’
‘O, thou art fairer than the evening air,Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’
And Ithinkshe saw that I quotedather. Of course, she turned it off, and said, ‘What pretty lines!’ but I think she saw. And she carried my roses home. Lucky roses!
“Gerald, I am miserable! I haven’t told you yet. For she is married. She has a great stupid husband, years and years older than herself. She has, too, a great stupid daughter. There’s another marvel for you! Honestly and soberly she does not look more than twenty-five. I will write again, and tell you how all goes. But I think she likes me; there is clearly something in common between us. There isno doubt she enjoyed our little walk in the dusk, when the roses turned blue.... Have you had any successes lately?”
He finished his letter, and before beginning his poem, lit the candle on his dressing-table, and examined his small, commonplace visage in the glass. It was difficult to arrange his hair satisfactorily. If he brushed it back it revealed an excess of high, vacant-looking forehead; if he let it drop over his forehead, though his resemblance to Keats was distinctly strengthened, its resemblance to seaweed was increased also. The absence of positive eyebrow was regrettable, but was there not fire in his rather pale and far-apart eyes? He rather thought there was. His nose certainly turned up a little, but what, if not that, did tip-tilted imply? A rather long upper-lip was at present only lightly fledged with an adolescent moustache, but there was decided strength in his chin. It stuck out. And having practised a frown which he rather fancied, he went back to the table in the window again, read a few stanzas ofDolores, in order to get into tune with passion and bitterness (for this poem was not going to begin or end happily) and wooed the lyric muse.
Major Ames, meantime, had seen Mrs. Evans to her door, and retraced his steps as far as the club, where he was in half-a-mind to go in, and get a game of billiards, which he enjoyed. He played in a loud, hectoring and unskilful manner, and it was noticeable that all the luck (unless, as occasionally happened, he won) was invariably on the side of his opponent. But after an irresolute pause, he went on again, andlet himself into his own house. Amy was still sitting in the drawing-room, though usually she went to bed as soon as her guests had gone.
“Very pleasant evening, my dear,” he said; “and your plan was a great success. Uncommonly agreeable woman Mrs. Evans is. Pretty woman, too; you would never guess she was the mother of that great girl.”
“She was not considered pretty as a girl,” said his wife.
“No? Then she must have improved in looks afterwards. Lonely life rather, to be a doctor’s wife, with your husband liable to be called away at any hour of the day or night.”
“I have no doubt Millie occupies herself very well,” said Mrs. Ames. “Good-night, Lyndhurst. Are you coming up to bed?”
“Not just yet. I shall sit up a bit, and smoke another cigar.”
He sat in the window, and every now and then found himself saying, half aloud, “Uncommonly agreeable woman.” Just overhead Harry was tearing passion to shreds in the style (more or less) of Swinburne.
Dr. Evanswas looking out of the window of his dining-room as he waited the next morning for breakfast to be brought in, jingling a pleasant mixture of money and keys in his trouser pockets and whistling a tune that sounded vague and De Bussy-like until you perceived that it was really an air familiar to streets and barrel-organs, and owed its elusive quality merely to the fact that the present performer was a little uncertain as to the comparative value of tones and semitones. But this slightly discouraging detail was more than compensated for by the evident cheerfulness of the executant; his plump, high-coloured face, his merry eye, the singular content of his whole aspect betokened a personality that was on excellent terms with life.
His surroundings were as well furnished and securely comfortable as himself. The table was invitingly laid; a Sheffield-plate urn (Dr. Evans was an amateur in Georgian decoration and furniture) hissed and steamed with little upliftings of the lid under the pressure within, and a number of hot dishes suggested an English interpretation of breakfast. Fine mezzotints after the great English portrait-painters hung on the walls, and a Chippendale sideboard was spread with fruit dishes and dessert-plates. The morning was very hot, but the high, spacious room, with its thick walls, was cool and fresh, whileits potentialities for warmth and cosiness in the winter were sponsored for by the large open fireplace and the stack of hot-water pipes which stood beneath the sideboard. Outside, the windows at which Dr. Evans stood looked out on to the large and secluded lawn, which had been the scene of the garden-party the day before. Red-brick walls ran along the two sides of it at right angles to the house: opposite, a row of espaliered fruit-trees screened off the homeliness of the kitchen-garden beyond, and the railway cutting which formed the boundary of this pleasant place.
Wilfred Evans had whistled the first dozen bars of the “Merry Widow Waltz” some six or seven times through, before, with the retarded consciousness that it was Sunday, he went on to “The Church’s One Foundation,” and though, with his usual admirable appetite, he felt the allure of the hot dishes, he waited, still whistling, for some other member of his household, wife or daughter, to appear. He was one of the most gregarious and clubbable of men, and no hecatomb of stalled oxen would have given him content, if he had had to eat his beef alone. A firm attachment to his domestic circle, combined with the not very exacting calls of his practice, but truly fervent investigations in the laboratory at the end of the garden, of the habits and economy of phagocytes, comfortably filled up, to the furthest horizon, the scenery of his mental territories.
He had not to wait long for his wife to appear, and he hailed her with his wonted cordiality.
“Morning, little woman,” he said. “Slept well, I hope?”
Mrs. Evans did not practice at home all those arts of pleasing with which she was so lavish in otherpeople’s houses. Also, this morning she felt rather cross, a thing which, to do her justice, was rare with her.
“Not very,” she said. “I kept waking. It was stiflingly hot.”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said he.
Mrs. Evans busied herself with tea-making; her long, slender hands moved with extraordinary deftness and silence among clattering things, and her husband whistled the “Merry Widow Waltz” once or twice more.
“Oh, Wilfred, do stop that odious tune,” she said, without the slightest hint of impatience in her voice. “It is bad enough on your pianola, which, after all, is in tune!”
“Which is more than can be said for my penny whistle?” asked he, good-humouredly. “Right you are, I’m dumb. Tell me about your party last night.”
“My dear, haven’t you been to enough Riseborough parties to know that there is nothing to tell about any party?” she asked. “I sat between Major Ames and the son. I talked gardening on one side with the father, and something which I suppose was enlightened Cambridge conversation on the other. Harry Ames is rather a dreadful sort of youth. He took me into the garden afterwards to show me something about roses. And the carriage didn’t come. Major Ames saw me home. When did you get in?”
“Not till nearly three. Very difficult maternity case. But we’ll pull them both through.”
Millie Evans gave a little shudder, which was not quite entirely instinctive. She emphasized it for her husband’s benefit. Unfortunately, he did not notice it.
“Will you have your tea now?” she asked.
He looked at her with an air mainly conjugal but tinged with professionalism.
“Bit upset with the heat, little woman?” he asked. “You look a trifle off colour. We can’t have you sleeping badly, either. Show me the man who sleeps his seven hours every night, and I’ll show you who will live to be ninety.”
This prospect did not for the moment allure his wife.
“I think I would sooner sleep less and die earlier,” she said in her even voice, “though I’m sure Elsie will live to a hundred at that rate. You encourage her to be lazy in the morning, Wilfred. I’m sure any one can manage to be in time for breakfast at a quarter past nine.”
He shook his head.
“No, no, little woman,” he said. “Let a growing girl sleep just as much as she feels inclined. I would sooner stint a girl’s food than her sleep. Give the red corpuscles a chance, eh?”
Millie got up from the table, and went to the sideboard to get some fruit. Then suddenly it struck her all this was hardly worth while. It seemed a stupid business to come down every morning and eat breakfast, to manage the household, to go for a walk, perhaps, or sit in the garden, and after completing the round of these daily futilities, to go to bed again and sleep, just for the recuperation that sleep gave, to enable her to do it all over again. But the strawberries looked cool and moist, and standing by the sideboard she ate a few of them. Just above it hung the oblong Sheraton mirror, which her husband had bought so cheaply at a local sale and had brought home so triumphantly. That, too, seemed to tell her a stale story, and the reflection of her young face,crowned with the shimmer of yellow hair, against the dark oak background of the panelling seemed without purpose or significance. She was doing nothing with her beauty that stayed so long with her. But it would not stay many years longer: this morning even there seemed to be a shadow over it, making it dim.... Soon nobody would care if she had ever been pretty or not; indeed, even now Elsie seemed by her height and the maturity of her manner to be reminding everybody of the fact that she herself must be approaching the bar which every woman has to cross when she is forty or thereabouts.... And, strange enough it may appear, these doubts and questionings which looked at Millie darkly from the Sheraton glass above the sideboard, selfish and elementary as they were, resembled “thought” far more closely than did the generality of those surface impressions that as a rule mirrored her mind. They were, too, rather actively disagreeable, and generally speaking, nothing disagreeable occurred to her. The experiences of every day might be mildly exhilarating, or mildly tedious. But, whatever they were, she was not accustomed to think closely about them. Now, for the moment, it seemed to her that some shadow, some vague presence confronted her, and menacingly demanded her attention.
Riseborough is notable for the number of its churches, and before long the air was mellow with bells. As a rule, Millie Evans went to church on Sunday morning with the same regularity as she ate hot roast beef for lunch when it was over, but this morning she easily let herself be persuaded to refrain from any act of public worship. It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that she might feelfaint during the psalms and, on her husband’s advice, she settled to stop at home, leaving him and Elsie, who was quite unaware what faintness felt like, to attend. But it was not the fear of faintness that prompted her absence: she wanted, almost for the first time in her life, to be alone and to think. Even on the occasion of her marriage, she had not found it necessary to employ herself with original thought: her mother had done the thinking for her, and had advised her, as she felt quite sure, sensibly and well. Nor had she needed to think when she was expecting her only child, for on that occasion she had been perfectly content to do exactly as her husband told her. But now, at the age of thirty-seven, the sight of her own face in the glass had suggested to her certain possibilities, certain limitations.
Ill-health had, on infrequent Sundays, prevented her attendance at church, and now, following merely the dictates of habit, she took out with her to a basket chair below the big mulberry-tree in the garden, a Bible and prayer-book, out of which she supposed that she would read the psalms and lessons for the day. But the Bible remained long untouched, and when she opened it eventually at random, she read but one verse. It was at the end of Ecclesiastes that the leaves parted, and she read, “When desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home.”
That was enough, for it was that, here succinctly expressed, which had been troubling her this morning, though so vaguely, that until she saw her symptoms written down shortly and legibly, she had scarcely known what they were. But certainly this line and a half described them. No doubt it was all very elementary; by degrees one ceased to care, and thenone died. But her case was rather different from that, for she felt that with her desire had not failed, simply because she never had had desire. She had waked and slept, she had eaten and walked, she had had a child; but all these things had been of about the same value. Once she had had a tooth out, without gas; that was a slightly more vivid experience. But it was very soon over: she had not really cared.
But though she had not cared for any of those things, she had not been bored with the repetition of them. It had seemed natural that one thing should follow another, that the days should become weeks, and the weeks should become months, insensibly. When the months added themselves into years, she took notice of that fact by having a birthday, and Wilfred, as he gave her some little present in a morocco case, told her that she looked as young as when they first met, which was very nearly true. She had a quantity of these morocco cases now: he never omitted the punctual presentation of each. And the mental vision of all these morocco cases, some round, some square, some oblong, and the thought of their contents—a little pearl brooch, a sapphire brooch, a pair of emerald ear-rings, a jewelled hat-pin—suddenly came upon her with their cumulative effect. A lot of time had gone by; it chiefly lived in her now through the memory of the morocco cases.
By virtue of her unemotional temperament and serene bodily health she looked very young still, and certainly did not feel old. But as the bells for church ceased to jangle and clash in the hot still air, leaving only for the ear the hum of multitudinous bees in the long flower-bed, it dawned on her that whatevershe felt, and however she looked, she would soon be on the other side of that barrier which for women marks the end of their essential and characteristic life. There were a few years left her yet out of the years of which she made so little use, and with a spasm, the keenest perhaps she had ever known, even including the extraction of the tooth without gas, the horror of middle-age fell upon her, making her shiver. All her life she had felt nothing: soon she would be incapable of feeling, except in so far as regret, that pale echo of what might once have been emotion, can be considered an affair of the heart. To feel, she readily perceived, implied the existence of something or somebody to feel about. But she did not know where to look for her participant. Long ago her husband had become as much part of that dead level of life as had her breakfast or her dressing for dinner. Never had he stirred her from her placid passivity, she had never yearned for him, in the sense in which a thirsty man desires water. She had no love of nature: “the primrose by the river’s brim” might have been a violet for anything that she cared; charity, in its technical sense, was distasteful to her, because the curious smell in the houses of the poor made her only long to get away. It was hard to know where to turn to find an outlet for that drowsily awakening recognition of life that to-day, so late and as yet so feebly, stirred within her. Yet, though it stirred but feebly, there was movement there: it wanted to be alive for a little, before it was indubitably dead.
Her thoughts went back to the topic concerning which she had told her husband that there was nothing to be told—namely, the dinner-party at theAmes’ last night. Certainly there was nothing remarkable about it: she had conducted herself as usual, with the usual result. She was accustomed to deal out her little smiles and deferential glances and flattering speeches to those who sat next her at dinner, because in herself a mild amiability prompted her to make herself pleasant, and because, with so little trouble to herself, she could make a man behave as agreeably as he was capable of behaving. She attracted men very easily, cursorily one might say, without attaching any importance to the interest she aroused, and without looking further than the dinner-table for the fruits of the attraction she exercised. But this morning, this tardy and drowsy recognition of life, beside which, so to speak, lay the shadow of middle-age, gave her pause. Was there some fruition and development of herself, before the withered and barren years came to her, to be found there? It would be quite beyond the mark to say that, sitting here, she definitely proposed to herself to try to make herself emotionally interested in somebody else, in case that might add a zest to life, but she considered the effect which she so easily produced in others, and wondered what it meant to feel like that. Certainly Major Ames had enjoyed escorting her home; certainly Harry had felt a touch ofgaucheromance when he showed her the effect of twilight on the complexion of some rose or other. He had given her a whole bunch of roses, with an attempt at a pretty speech. Yes, that was it—the shadows in them looked pale-blue, and he had said that they were just the colour of her eyes. But the roses were pretty: she hoped that somebody had put them in water.
She was already more than a little interested in her reflections: there was something original and excitingto her in them, and it was annoying to have them broken in upon by the parlour-maid who came towards her from the house. Personally, she thought it absurd not to keep men-servants, but Wilfred always maintained that a couple of good parlour-maids produced greater comfort with less disturbance, and yielding to him, as she always yielded to anybody who expressed a definite opinion, she had acquiesced in female service. But she always called the head parlour-maid Watkins, whereas her husband called her Mary.
“Major Ames wants to know if you will see him, ma’am,” said Watkins.
The interest returned.
“Yes, ask him to come out,” she said.
Watkins went back to the house and returned with Major Ames in tow, who carried a huge bouquet of sweet-peas. There then followed the difficulty of meeting and greeting gracefully and naturally which is usual when the visitor is visible a long way off. The Major put on a smile far too soon, and had to take it off again, since Mrs. Evans had not yet decided that it was time to see him. Then she began to smile, while he (without his smile) was looking abstractedly at the top of the mulberry-tree, as if he expected to find her there. He looked there a moment too long, for one of the lower branches suddenly knocked his straw hat off his head, and he said, “God bless my soul,” and dropped the sweet-peas. However, this was not an unmixed misfortune, for the recognition came quite naturally after that. She hoped he was not hurt, was hesurethat silly branch had not hit his face? It must be taken off!Whatlovely flowers! And were they for her? They were.
Major Ames replaced his hat rather hastily, after a swift manœuvre with regard to his hair which Mrs.Evans did not accurately follow. The fact was (though he believed the fact not to be generally known) that the top of Major Ames’ head was entirely destitute of hair, and that the smooth crop which covered it was the produce of the side of his head—just above the ear—grown long, and brushed across the cranium so as to adorn it with seemingly local wealth and sleekness. The rough and unexpected removal of his hat by the bough of the mulberry-tree had caused a considerable portion of it to fall back nearly to the shoulder of the side on which it actually grew, and his hasty manœuvre with his gathered tresses was designed to replace them. Necessarily he put back his hat again quickly, in the manner of a boy capturing a butterfly.
His mind, and the condition of it, on this Sunday morning, would repay a brief analysis. Briefly, then, a sort ofaurora borealisof youth had visited him: his heaven was streaked with inexplicable lights. He had told himself that a man of forty-seven was young still, and that when a most attractive woman had manifested an obvious interest in him, it was only reasonable to follow it up. He was not a coxcomb, he was not a loose liver; he was only a very ordinary man, well and healthy, married to a woman considerably older than himself, and living in a town which, in spite of his adored garden, presented but moderate excitements. But indeed, this morning call, paid with this solid tribute of sweet-peas, was something of an adventure, and had not been mentioned by him to his wife. He had seen her start for St. Barnabas, and then had hastily gathered his bouquet and set out, leaving Harry wandering dreamily about the cinder-paths in the kitchen garden, in the full glory of the discovery that the colour of the scarlet runners waslike a clarion. Major Ames had plucked almost his rarest varieties, for to pluck the rarest, since he wished to save their first bloom for seed, would have been on the further side of quixotism and have verged on imbecility, but he had brought the best of his second-best. Last night, too, he had hinted at his own remissness in the matter of church attendance on Sunday morning, and on his way up here had permitted himself to wonder whether Millie would prove (in consequence, perhaps, of that) to have abstained from worship also, expecting, or at least considering possible, a morning call from him. As a matter of fact she had not indulged in any such hopes, since it had been a matter of pure indifference to her whether he went to church on Sunday or not. But when he found on inquiry at the door that she was at home, it was scarcely unreasonable, on the part of a rather vain and gallantly minded man, to connect the fact with the information he had given.
So he hastily readjusted his hat.
“My own stupidity entirely,” he said; “do not blame the tree. Yes, I have brought you just a few flowers, and though they are not worthy of your acceptance, they are not the worst bunch of sweet-peas I have ever seen, not the worst. These, Catherine the Great, for instance, are not—well—they do not grow quite in every garden.”
Mrs. Evans opened her blue eyes a little wider.
“And are they really for me, Major Ames?” she asked again. “It is good of you. My precious flowers! They must be put in water at once. Watkins, bring me one of the big flower-bowls out here. I will arrange them myself.”
“Lucky flowers, lucky flowers,” chuckled Major Ames.
“It’s I who am lucky,” said she, acknowledging this subtle compliment with a little smile. “I stop away from church rather lazily, and am rewarded by a pleasant visit and a beautiful nosegay. And what a charming party we had last night! I could hardly believe it when I came back here and found it was nearly half-past eleven. Such hours!”
Major Ames gave his great loud laugh.
“You are making fun of us, Mrs. Evans,” he said; “’pon my word you are making fun of us and our quiet ways down at Riseborough. I’ll be bound that when you were in London, half-past eleven was more the sort of time when you began to go out to your dances.”
“I used to go out a good deal when I was quite young,” she said. “Wilfred used quite to urge me to go out, and certainly people were very kind in asking me. I remember one night in the season, I was asked to two dinner-parties and a ball and an evening party. After all, it is natural to take pleasure in innocent gaiety when one is young.”
Major Ames felt very hot after his walk, and, forgetting the adventure of his hair, nearly removed his straw hat. But providentially he remembered it again just in time.
“Upon my word, Mrs. Evans,” he said jovially, “you make me feel a hundred years old when you talk like that, as if your days of youth and success were over. Why, some one at your garden-party yesterday afternoon told me for a fact that Miss Elsie was the daughter of your husband’s first wife. Wouldn’t believe me when I said she was your daughter. Poor Sanders—it was Mr. Sanders who said it—had to pay ten shillings to me for his positiveness. He betted, you know, he insisted on betting. But really, any one whodidn’t happen to know would be right to make such a bet ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
She gave him a little smile with lowered eyelids.
“Dear Elsie!” she said. “She is such a comfort to me. She quite manages the house for me, and spares me all the trouble. She always knows how much asparagus ought to cost, and what happens to strawberry ice after a party. I never was a good housekeeper. Wilfred always used to say to me, ‘Go out and enjoy yourself, my dear, and I’ll pay the bills.’ Of course, it was all his kindness, I know, but sometimes I wonder if it would not have been truer kindness to have made me think and contrive more. Elsie does it all now, but when my little girl marries it will be my turn again. Tell me, Major Ames, is it you or cousin Amy who makes everything go so beautifully at your house? I think—shall I say it—I think it must be you. When a man manages a house there is always more precision somehow: you feel sure that everything has been foreseen and provided for. Printed menu-cards, for instance—sochic, so perfectlycomme-il-faut.”
Watkins had brought out a large dish, rather like a sponging-tin, for the sweet-peas, and Mrs. Evans had begun the really Herculean labour of putting them in water. A grille of wire network fitted over the rim of it: each pea was stuck in separately. She looked up from her task at him.
“Am I right?” she asked.
Major Ames was not really an untruthful man, but many men who are not really untruthful get through a wonderful lot of misrepresentation.
“Oh, you mustn’t give me credit for that,” he said (truthfully so far); “it’s a dodge we always used to have at mess, so why not at one’s own house also?It’s better than written cards, which take a lot of time to copy out again and again, and then, you see, my dear Amy is not very strong at French, and doesn’t want always to be bothering me to tell her whether there’s an accent in one word, or two ‘s’s’ in another. Saves time and trouble.”
Mrs. Evans applauded softly with pink finger-tips.
“Ah, I knew it was you!” she said.
Now, clearly (though almost without intention) Major Ames had gone too far to retreat: also retreat implied a flat contradiction of what Mrs. Evans said she knew, which would have been a rudeness from which his habitual gallantry naturally revolted. Consequently, being unable to retreat, he had to make himself as safe as possible, to entrench himself.
“Perhaps it’s a little extravagance,” he said. “Indeed, Amy thinks it is, and I never mention the subject of menu-cards to her. She’s apt to turn the subject a bit abruptly on the word menu-card. Dear Amy! After all, it would be a very dull affair, our pleasant life down here, if we all completely agreed with each other.”
She gave a little sigh, shaking her head, and smiling at her sweet-peas.
“Ah, how often I think that too,” she said. “At least, now you say it, I feel I have often thought it. It is so true. Dear Wilfred is such an angel to me, you see! Whatever I do, he is sure to think right. But sometimes you wonder whether the people who know you best, really understand you. It is like—it is like learning things by heart. If you learn a thing by heart, you so often cease to think what it means.”
Mrs. Evans, it must be confessed, did not mean anything very precisely by this: her life, that is to say,was not at all circumstanced in the manner that her speech implied it to be, except in so far that she often wished that more amusing things happened to her, and that she would not so soon be forty years old. But she certainly intended Major Ames to attach to her words their natural implication: she wanted to seem vaguely unappreciated. At the same time, she desired him to see that she in no way blamed her dear unconscious Wilfred. If Major Ames thought that, it would spoil a most essential feature of the picture she wished to present of herself. Why she wished to present it was also quite easy of comprehension. She wanted to be interesting, and was by nature silly. The fact that she was close on thirty-eight largely conduced to her speech.
Major Ames made a perfectly satisfactory interpretation of it. He saw all the things he was meant to see, and nothing else. And it was deliciously delivered, so affectionately as regarded Wilfred, so shyly as regarded herself. He instantly made the astounding mental discovery that she was somehow not very happy, owing to a failure in domestic affinities. He felt also that it was intuitive of him to have guessed that, since she had not actually said it. And he was tremendously conscious of the seduction of her presence, as she sat there, cool and white on this hot morning, putting in the last of the sweet-peas he had brought her. She looked enchantingly young and fresh, and evidently found something in him which disposed her to confidences. In justice to him, it may be said that he did not inquire in his own mind as to what that was, but it was easy to see she trusted him.
“I think we all must feel that at times, my dear lady,” he said, anxious to haul the circumstance ofhis own home into the discussion. “I suppose that all of us who are not quite old yet, not quite quite old yet, let us say, in order to include me, feel at times that life is not giving us all that it might give; that people do not really understand us. No doubt many people, and I daresay those, as you said, who know one best, do not understand one. And then we mustn’t mind that, but march straight on, march straight on, according to orders.”
He sat up very straight in his chair as if about to march, as he made thrillingly noble remarks, and hit himself a couple of sounding blows with his clenched fist on his broad chest. Then a sudden suspicion seized him that he had displayed an almost too Spartan unflinchingness, as if soldiers had no hearts.
“And then perhaps we shall meet some one who does understand us,” he added.
The critical observer, the cynic, and that rarest of all products, the entirely sincere and straightforward person, would have found in this conversation nothing that would move anything beyond his raillery or disgust. Here sitting under the mulberry-tree in this pleasant garden, on a Sunday morning, were two people, the man nearly fifty, the woman nearly forty, both trying, with God knows how many little insincerities by the way, to draw near to each other. Both had reached ages that were dangerous to such as had lived (even as they had) extremely respectable and well-conducted lives, without any paramount reason for their morality. About Major Ames’ mode of life before he married, which, after all, was at the early age of twenty-five, nothing need be said, because there is really very little to say, and in any case the conduct of a young man not yet in his twenty-fifth year has almost nothing to do with the character of the same man when heis forty-seven. In that very long interval he had conducted himself always as a married man should, and those years, married as he was to a woman much his senior, had not been at all discreditably passed. This chronicle does not in the least intend to impute to him any high principled character, for he had nothing of Galahad in his composition. But he was not a satyr. Consequently, for this is part of the ironical composition of a man—just in the years with which we are dealing, at a time of life when a man might have been condoned for having sown wild oats and seen the huskiness of them, he was in that far more precarious position of not having sown them (except, so to speak, in the smallest of flower-pots), nor of having experienced the jejune quality of such a crop. But it is not implied that he now regretted the respectability of those twenty-two years. He did not do so: he had had a happy and contented life, but he would soon be old. Nor did he now at all contemplate adventure. Merely an Odysseus who had never voyaged wondered what voyaging was like. He was not in love with this seductive long-lashed face that bent over the sweet-peas had brought her. But if he had the picking of those sweet-peas over again, he would probably have picked the very best, regardless of the fact that he wanted the seeds for next year’s sowing. So as regards him the cynic’s sneers would have been out of place; he contemplated nothing that the cynic would have called “a conquest.” The sincere, straight-forward gentleman would have been equally excessive in his disgust. There was nothing, except the slight absurdity of Major Ames’ nature, to justify either laughter or tears. He was a moderate man of middle-age, about as well intentioned as most of us.
Mrs. Evans, perhaps, was less laudable, and moredeserved laughter and tears. She had consciously tried to produce a false impression without saying false things—a lamentable posture. She had wanted, as was her nature, to attract without being correspondingly attracted. She was prepared for him to go a little further, which is characteristic of the flirt. She succeeded, as the flirt usually does.
His last sentence was received in silence, and he thought well to repeat it with slight variation. The theme was clear.
“We may meet some one who understands us,” he said. “Who looks into us, not at us, eh? Who sees not what we wish only, but what we want.”
She put the last sweet-pea into the wire-netting.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she said; “how beautiful that distinction is.”
He was not aware of its being particularly beautiful, until she mentioned it, but then it struck him that it was rather fine. Also the respectability of all his long years tugged at him, as with a chain. He was quite conscious that he was encouraged, and so he was slightly terrified. He had not much power of imagination, but he could picture to himself a very uncomfortable home....
Providence came to his aid—probably Providence. Church time was spent, and two black Aberdeen terriers, followed by Elsie, followed by Dr. Evans, came out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn. They were all in the genial exhilaration that accompanies the sense of duty done. The dogs had been let out from the house, where they were penned on Sunday morning to prevent their unexpected appearance in church; the other two had been let out from church.
Wilfred Evans had most clearly left church behind him: he had also left in the house not only his tophat but his coat, as befitted the heat of the morning, and appeared, stout, and strong, and brisk. Elsie was less vigorous: she sat down on the grass as soon as she reached the shade of the tree. She had the good sense to shake hands with Major Ames first: otherwise her mother would have made remarks to him about her manners. But she was markedly less elderly now than she had been at the formal dinner-party of the night before.
Dr. Evans arrived last at the mulberry-tree.
“Jove! what jolly flowers,” he said. “That’s you, Major Ames, isn’t it? How de’do? Well, little woman, how goes it? You did well not to come to church. Awfully hot it was.”
“And a very long sermon, Daddy,” said Elsie.
“Twenty-two minutes: I timed it. Very interesting, though. You’ll stop to lunch, Major Ames, won’t you? We lunch at one always on Sunday.”
Now Major Ames knew quite well that there was going to be at his house the lunch that followed parties, the resurrection lunch of what was dead last night. There would be little bits of salmon slightly greyer than on the evening before, peeping out from the fresh salad that covered them. There would be some sort ofchaud-froid; there would be a pink and viscous fluid which was the debilitated descendant of the strawberry ice which Amy had given them. There would also be several people, including Mrs. Altham, who had not been bidden to the feast last night, but who, since they came according to the authorized Riseborough version of festivities, to the lunch next day, would certainly be bidden to dinner on the next occasion. Also, he knew well, he would have to say to Mrs. Altham, “Amy has given us cold luncheon to-day. Well, I don’t mind a cold luncheon on as hot a day asit is.Chaud-froidof chicken, Mrs. Altham. I think you’ll find that Amy’s cook understandschaud-froid.”
And all the time he knew thatchaud-froidmeant a dinner-party on the night before. So did the viscous fluid in the jelly glasses, so did everything else. And of course Mrs. Altham knew: everybody knew all about the lunch that followed a dinner-party. Even if the dinner-party last night had been as secret as George the Fourth’s marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert, the lunch to-day would have made it as public as any function at St. Peter’s, Eaton Square.
He thought over the unimaginable dislocation in all this routine that his absence would entail.
“I wonder if I ought to,” he said. “I fancy Amy told me she had a few friends to lunch.”
Millie Evans looked up at him. Infinitesimal as was the point as to whether he should lunch here or at home, she knew that she definitely entered herself against his wife at this moment.
“Ah, do stop,” she said. “If Cousin Amy has a few friends why shouldn’t we have one?”
He got up: he nearly took off his hat again, but again remembered.
“I take it as a command,” he said. “Am I ordered to stop?”
“Certainly. Telephone to Mrs. Ames, Wilfred, and say that Major Ames is lunching with us.”
“À les ordres de votre Majesté,” said he brightly, forgetting for the moment that his wife came to him for help with the elusive language of our neighbours. But the Frenchness of his bearing and sentiment, perhaps, diverted attention from the curious character of his grammar.
Itwas, of course, as inevitable as the return of day that Mrs. Altham should start half-an-hour earlier than was necessary to go to church that morning, in order to return to Mrs. Brooks, who had been dining last night at the Ames’, a couple of books that had been lent her a month or two ago, and that Mrs. Brooks should recount to her the unusual incident of Harry’s taking Mrs. Evans into the garden after dinner, and giving her a gradually growing bouquet of roses torn from his father’s trees. Indeed, it was difficult to settle satisfactorily which part of Harry’s conduct was the most astounding, with such completeness had he revolted against both beneficiaries of the fifth commandment.
“They can’t have been out in the garden for less than twenty minutes,” said Mrs. Brooks; “and I shouldn’t wonder if it was more. For we had scarcely settled ourselves after the gentlemen came in from the dining-room, when they went out, and I’m sure we had hardly got talking again after they came back, before my maid was announced. To be sure the gentlemen sat a long time after dinner before joining us, which I notice is always the case when General Fortescue is at a party, but it can’t have been less than half-an-hour that they were in the garden now one comes to add it up.”
Mrs. Brooks surveyed for a moment in silence her piece of embroidery. Not for a moment must it besupposed that she would have done embroidery for her own dress on Sunday morning; this was a frontal for the lectern at St. Barnabas, which would make it impossible for Mrs. Ames to decorate the lectern any more with her flowers. There was a cross, and a crown, and some initials, and some rays of light, and a heart, and some passion flowers, and a dove worked on it, with a profusion of gold thread that was positively American in its opulence. Hitherto, the lectern had always been the field of one of Mrs. Ames’ most telling embellishments. When this embroidery was finished (which it soon would be) she would be driven from the lectern in disorder and discomfiture.
“A very rich effect,” said Mrs. Altham sympathetically. “Half-an-hour! Dear me! And then I think you said she came back with a dozen roses.”
Mrs. Brooks closed her eyes, and made a short calculation.
“More than a dozen,” she said. “I daresay there were twenty roses. It was very marked, very marked indeed. And if you ask me what I think of Mrs. Ames’ plan of asking husband without wife and wife without husband, I must say I do not like it at all. Depend upon it, if Dr. Evans had come too, there would have been no walking about in the garden with our Master Harry. But far be it from me to say there was any harm in it, far! I hope I am not one who condemns other people’s actions because I would not commit them myself. All I know is that the first time my late dear husband asked me to walk about the garden after dinner with him, he proposed to me; and the second time he asked me to walk in the garden with him he proposed again, and I accepted him. But then I was not engaged to anybody else at thetime, far less married, like Mrs. Evans. But it is none of my business, I am glad to say.”
“Indeed, no, it does not concern us,” said Mrs. Altham, with avidity; “and as you say, there may be no harm in it at all. But young men are very impressionable, even if most unattractive, and I call it distinct encouragement to a young man to walk about after dinner in the garden with him, and receive a present of roses. And I’m sure Mrs. Evans is old enough to be his mother.”
Mrs. Brooks tacked down a length of gold thread which was to form part of the longest ray of all, and made another little calculation. It was not completely satisfactory.
“Anyhow, she is old enough to know better,” she said; “but I have noticed that being old enough to know better often makes people behave worse. Mind, I do not blame her: there is nothing I detest so much as this censorious attitude; and I only say that if I gave so much encouragement to any young man I should blame myself.”
“And the dinner?” asked Mrs. Altham. “At least, I need not ask that, since I am going to lunch there, so I shall soon know as well as you what there was.”
Mrs. Brooks smiled in a rather superior manner.
“I never know what I am eating,” she said. And she looked as if it disagreed with her, too, whatever it was.
This was not particularly thrilling, for though it was generally known that Harry had an emotional temperament and wrote amorous poems, he appeared to Mrs. Altham an improbable Lothario. In any case, the slight interest that this aroused in her wasnothing compared to that which awaited her and her husband when they arrived for lunch at Mrs. Ames’.
There had been a long-standing feud between Mrs. Altham and her hostess on the subject of punctuality. About two years ago Mrs. Ames had arrived at Mrs. Altham’s at least ten minutes late for dinner, and Mrs. Altham had very properly retorted by arriving a quarter of an hour late when next she was bidden to dinner with Mrs. Ames, though that involved sitting in a dark cab for ten minutes at the corner of the next turning. So, next time that Mrs. Altham “hoped to have the pleasure of seeing you and Major Ames at dinner on Thursday at a quarter to eight,” she asked the rest of her guests at eight. With the effect that Mrs. Ames and her husband arrived a few minutes before anybody else, and Riseborough generally considered that Mrs. Altham had scored. Since then there had been but a sort of desultory pea-shooting kept up, such as would harm nobody, and to-day Mrs. Altham and her husband arrived certainly within ten minutes of the hour named. Mr. Pettit, who generally lunched with Mrs. Ames or Mrs. Brooks on Sunday, was already there with his sister. Harry was morosely fidgeting in a corner, and Mrs. Ames was the only other person present in the small sitting-room where she received her guests, instead of troubling them to go up to the drawing-room and instantly to go down again. She gave Mrs. Altham her fat little hand, and then made this remarkable statement.
“We are not waiting for anybody else, I think.”
Upon which they went into lunch, and Harry sat at the head of the table, instead of his father.
Mrs. Ames was in her most conversational mood, and it was not until thechaud-froid, consisting mainlyof the legs of chickens pasted over with a yellow sauce that concealed the long blue hair-roots with which Nature has adorned their lower extremities, was being handed round, that Mrs. Altham had opportunity to ask the question that had been effervescing like an antiseptic lozenge on the tip of her tongue ever since she remarked the Major’s absence.
“And where is Major Ames?” she asked. “I hope he is not ill? I thought he looked far from well at Mrs. Evans’ garden-party yesterday.”
Mrs. Ames set her mind at rest with regard to the second point, and inflamed it on the first.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Did you think he looked ill? How good of you to ask after him. But Lyndhurst is quite well. Mr. Pettit, a little more chicken? After your sermon.”
Mr. Pettit had a shrewd, ugly, delightful face, very lean, very capable. Humanly speaking, he probably abhorred Mrs. Ames. Humanely speaking, he knew there was a great deal of good in her, and a quantity of debateable stuff. He smiled, showing thick white teeth.
“Before and after my sermon,” he said. “Also before a children’s service and a Bible class. I cannot help thinking that God forgot his poor clergymen when he defined the seventh day as one of rest.”
Mrs. Ames hid a small portion of her little face with her little hand. She always said that Mr. Pettit was not like a clergyman at all.
“How naughty of you,” she said. “But I must correct you. The seventh day has become the first day now.”
Harry gave vent to a designedly audible sigh. TheOmar Club were chiefly atheists, and he felt bound to uphold their principles.
“That is the sort of thing that confuses me,” he said. “Mr. Pettit says Sunday was called a day of rest, and my mother says that God meant what we call Monday, or Saturday. I have been behaving as if it was Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Mr. Pettit gave him a kindly glance.
“Quite right, my dear boy,” he said. “Spend your Tuesday or Wednesday properly and God won’t mind whether it is Thursday or Friday.”
Harry pushed back his lank hair, and became Omar-ish.
“Do you fast on Friday, may I ask?” he said.
Mrs. Ames looked pained, and tried to think of something to say. She failed. But Mrs. Altham thought without difficulty.
“I suppose Major Ames is away, Mr. Harry?” she said.
Even then, though her intentions might easily be supposed to be amiable, she was not allowed the privilege of being replied to, for Mr. Pettit cheerfully answered Harry’s question, without a shadow of embarrassment, just as if he did not mind what the Omar Khayyam Club thought.
“Of course I do, my dear fellow,” he said, “because our Lord and dearest friend died that day. He allows us to watch and pray with Him an hour or two.”
Harry appeared indulgent.
“Curious,” he said.
Mr. Pettit looked at him for just the space of time any one looks at the speaker, with cheerful cordiality of face, and then turned to his mother again.
“I want you at church next Sunday,” he said, “with a fat purse, to be made thin. I am going to have an offertory to finance a children’s treat. I want to send every child in the parish to the sea-side for a day.”
Harry interrupted in the critical manner.
“Why the sea-side?” he asked.
Mr. Pettit turned to him with unabated cordiality.
“How right to ask!” he said. “Because the sea is His, and He made it! Also, they will build sand-castles, and pick up shells. You must come too, my dear Harry, and help us to give them a nice day.”
Harry felt that this was a Philistine here, who needed to be put in his place. He was not really a very rude youth, but one who felt it incumbent on to oppose Christianity, which he regarded as superstition. A bright idea came into his head.
“But His hands prepared the dry land,” he said, “on the same supposition.”
“Certainly; and as the dear mites have always seen the dry land,” said Mr. Pettit, with the utmost good-humour, “we want to show them that God thought of something they never thought of. And then there are the sand-castles.”
Harry was tired, and did not proceed to crush Mr. Pettit with the atheistical arguments that were but commonplace to the Omar Khayyam Club. He was not worth argument: you could only really argue with the enlightened people who fundamentally agreed with you, and he was sure that Mr. Pettit did not fulfil that requirement. So, indulgently, he turned to Mrs. Altham.
“I saw you at Mrs. Evans’ garden-party yesterday,” he said. “I think she is the most wonderful person I ever met. She was dining here last night, and I took her into the garden——”
“And showed her the roses,” said Mrs. Altham, unable to restrain herself.
Harry became a parody of himself, though that might seem to be a feat of insuperable difficulty.
“I supposed it would get about,” he said. “That is the worst of a little place like this. Whatever you do is instantly known.”
The slightly viscous remains of the strawberry ice were being handed, and Mr. Pettit was talking to Mrs. Ames and his sister from a pitiably Christian standpoint.
“What did you hear?” asked Harry, in a low voice.
“Merely that she and you went out into the garden after dinner, and that you picked roses for her——”
Harry pushed back his lank hair with his bony hand.
“You have heard all,” he said. “There was nothing more than that. I did not see her home. Her carriage did not come: there was some mistake about it, I suppose. But it was my father who saw her home, not I.”
He laid down the spoon with which he had been consuming the viscous fluid.
“If you hear that I saw her home, Mrs. Altham,” he said, “tell them it is not true. From what you have already told me, I gather there is talk going on. There is no reason for such talk.”
He paused a moment, and then a line or two of the intensely Swinburnian effusion which he had written last night fermented in his head, making him infinitely more preposterous.
“I assure you that at present there is no reason for such talk,” he said earnestly.
Now Mrs. Altham, with her wide interest in all that concerned anybody else, might be expected to feel the intensest curiosity on such a topic, but somehow she felt very little, since she knew that behind the talk there was really very little topic, and the gallant misgivings of poor, ugly Harry seemed to her destitute of any real thrill. On the other hand, she wanted very much to know where Major Ames was, and being endowed with the persistence of the household cat, which you may turn out of a particular arm-chair a hundred times, without producing the slightest discouragement in its mind, she reverted to her own subject again.
“I am sure there is no reason for such talk, Mr. Harry,” she said, with strangely unwelcome conviction, “and I will be sure to contradict it if ever I hear it. I am so glad to hear Major Ames is not ill. I was afraid that his absence from lunch to-day might mean that he was.”
Now Harry, as a matter of fact, had no idea where his father was, since the telephone message had been received by Mrs. Ames.
“Father is quite well,” he said. “He was picking sweet-peas half the morning. He picked a great bunch.”