MARSTON & MARSTON
Duringthe weeks that immediately followed his return, Roland found that he was, on the whole, happiest when he was at the office. He had less there to worry him. His work was new and interesting. Mr Marston had decided that before Roland went on his tour alone he should acquire a general knowledge of the organisation of the business. And so Roland spent a couple of weeks in each department, acquainting himself with the routine.
"And a pretty good slack it will be," Gerald had said. "It's the governor's pet plan. He made me do it. But you won't learn anything that's going to be of the least use to you. All you've got to do in this show is to be polite and impress opulent foreigners. You don't need to know the ingredients of varnish nor how we arrange our advertising accounts. And you can bet that the fellows themselves won't be in any hurry to teach you. The less we know about things the better they're pleased. They like to run their own show. If I were you I should have as lazy a time as possible."
Under ordinary circumstances Roland would have followed this advice. He had learnt at Fernhurst to do as much work as was strictly necessary, but no more. He had prepared his lessons carefully for his house tutor and the games' master, the two persons, that is to say, who had it in their power to make his existence there either comfortable or the reverse. He had also worked hard for the few masters, such as Carus Evans, who disliked him. That was part of his armour. When Carus Evans had said to him for the third dayrunning, "Now, I think we'll have you, Whately," and he had translated the passage without a slip, he felt that he was one up on Carus Evans. But for the others, the majority with whom he was only brought into casual contact, and who were pleasantly indifferent to those who caused them no trouble, he did only as much work as was needful to keep him from the detention-room. Roland had rarely been inconvenienced by uncomfortable scruples about duty.
At any other time he would have spent the days of apprenticeship in placid idleness—discussion of cricket matches; visits to the window and subsequent speculation on the prospects of fine weather over the week-end; glances at his watch to see how soon he could slip from the cool of the counting house into the hot sunshine that was beating upon the streets; pleasant absorption in a novel. But Roland was worried by the family situation; he was finding life dull; he was prepared to abandon himself eagerly to any fresh enthusiasm. For want of anything better to do, without premeditation, with no thought of the power that this knowledge might one day bring him, he decided to understand the business of Marston & Marston.
On the first morning he was handed over to the care of Mr Stevens, the head of the trade department. Mr Stevens was a faithful servant of the firm, and, as is the way with faithful servants, considered himself to be more important than his employers.
"They may sit up in that board-room of theirs," he would say, "and they may pass their resolutions, and they may decide on this and they may decide on that, but where'ld they be without their figures, I'd like to know. And who gives them their figures?"
He would chuckle and scratch his bald head, and issue a fierce series of orders to the packers. He bore no malice against his directors; he was not jealous; he knew that there were two classes, the governing and the governed, and that it had been his fate to be born among the governed.
"There always have been two classes and therealways will be two classes. We can't all be bosses." It was a law of nature. And he considered his performances more creditable than those of his masters.
"These directors," he would say, "they were born into the business. They've stayed where they was put; they haven't gone up and they haven't gone down. But I—I started as a packer and I'm now head of the trade department; and look you here, Jones," he would suddenly bellow out, "if you hammer nails into a box at that rate you'll not only not be head of a trade department, you'll blooming soon cease to be a packer!"
It was natural that Mr Stevens should, from his previous experience of Gerald and certain other young gentlemen, regard Roland as an agreeable trifler on the fringe of important matters.
"Well, well, sir, so you've come along to see how we do things down here. I expect we shall be able to show you a thing or two. Now, if you was to go and sit over in that corner you'd be out of the way and you'd be able to see the business going on."
"I daresay, Mr Stevens, but that won't help me very far, will it?"
"I wouldn't say that, sir; nothing like seeing how the machinery works."
"But I might as well go and ask an engine-driver how a train worked and then be told to sit in a corner of the platform at a railway station and watch the trains go by. I should see how they worked but I shouldn't know much about them."
Mr Stevens chuckled and scratched the bald patch on his head appreciatively.
"You see, Mr Stevens," Roland continued, "I don't know anything about this show at all and I know that you're the only person in the place who can help me."
It was a lucky shot. Roland was not then the psychologist that he was to become in the days of his power. He worked by intuition. What he had intended for a graceful compliment was a direct appeal to Mr Stevens' vanity, at the point where it was most susceptible to such an assault. It was a grief at timesto Mr Stevens that the authorities should regard him as little more than a useful servant, who carried out efficiently the orders that they gave him. Mr Stevens was not ambitious; the firm had treated him fairly, had recognised his talents early and had promoted him. He had no quarrel with the firm, but he knew—what no one else in the building, with the possible exception of Perkins, the general manager, did know—that for a long time he had ceased to carry out to the letter the instructions that had been given him, and that Mr Marston had only a general knowledge of a department that he himself knew intimately. He had arranged numerous small improvements of which Mr Marston was ignorant, and had exploited highly profitable exchanges of material with other dealers. Mr Marston may have perhaps noticed in the general accounts a gradual fall in packing expenses, but if he had he had attributed it, without much thought, to the increased facilities for obtaining wood and cardboard. He did not know that as the result of most delicate manœuvring and an intricate system of exchange conducted by Mr Stevens his firm was being supplied with cardboard at the actual cost price.
Mr Stevens did not tell him. He enjoyed his little secret. Every year he would consult the figures, scratch his bald head and chuckle. What a lot he had saved the firm! He looked forward to the day when he should tell Mr Marston. How surprised they would all be! They had never suspected that funny old Stevens was such a good business man. In the evening hours of reverie and after lunch on Sunday he would endow the scene with that dramatic intensity that he had looked for but had not yet found in life. There were other moments, however, when he longed for appreciation. He wished that someone would realise his importance without having to have it explained to him. So that when Roland said to him, "You're the only person in the place who can help me," he was startled into the indulgence of his one weakness.
"Well, well, sir," he said, and his face flushed withpleasure, "I daresay if you put it like that"; and taking Roland by the arm he led him away into his study and began to explain his accounts, his invoices, his receipts and his method of checking them. And because he had found an appreciative audience he proceeded to reveal one by one his little secrets. "Mr Marston doesn't know I do this, and don't tell him, I'm keeping it as a surprise; but you can see that by letting the wood merchants have that extra percentage there, I can get tin-foil cheap enough to be able to pack our stuff at two per cent. less than it would cost ordinarily. Think what I must have saved the firm!"
There could be no question of his value; but what Roland did not then appreciate—what, for that matter, Mr Stevens himself did not appreciate—was the value of this work in relation to the general business of the firm. Mr Stevens was a specialist. He understood his own department but he understood nothing else. He did not realise that on the delicate balance of that two per cent, it had been possible to undersell a dangerous rival.
The same conditions, Roland discovered, existed in several other departments. Each head worked independently of the other heads. Mr Marston, sitting at his desk, co-ordinated their work. A one-man business: that was Mr Marston's programme. One brain must control, otherwise there would be chaos. One department would find itself working against another department. He believed in departments because they stood for the delegation of routine work, but they must be subordinate departments. There were moments, however, when Roland wondered whether Mr Marston's hold on the business had not relaxed with the years. A great deal was going on of which he was ignorant. He had started the machinery and the machinery still ran smoothly, but was the guiding hand ready to deal with stoppages? Roland wondered. How much did Mr Marston really know? Had he kept up with modern ideas, or was he still living with the ideas that were current in his youth? But more than this even, Roland wondered how much Perkins knew.
He did not like Perkins. "A good man," Mr Marston had called him, "as good a general manager as you're likely to find anywhere. Not a social beauty; silent, and all that, but a good strong man. You can trust him."
Roland did not agree with this estimate. First impressions are very often right; he was inclined to trust his intuition before his reason, and his first impression of Perkins was of an embittered, jealous man. "He hates me," Roland thought, "because I'm stepping straight into this business through influence, with every prospect of becoming a director before I've finished; while he's sweated all his life, and worked from nothing to a position that for all his ability will never carry him to the board-room." He was a man to watch. The people who have been mishandled by fortune show no mercy when they get the chance of revenge.
Perkins was scrupulously polite, but Roland felt how much he resented his intrusion, and Gerald was inclined to endorse this opinion.
"Oh, yes, a sour-faced ass," he said; "father thinks a lot of him, though. It's as well to keep on the right side of him. He can make things rather awkward if you don't. He keeps an eye on most of the accounts, and he watches the travellers' expenses pretty closely. If he gets annoyed with you he might start questioning your extras."
They laughed, remembering how they had entered under the heading "special expenses" the charges for a lurid evening at a certain discreet establishment in the Rue des Colombes.
On the whole, Roland was happy at the office, but the evenings were distressing: the bus ride back; the walk up the hot stuffy street towards his home; the subsequent walk with his father; the same walk every day along the hard, flag-stoned roads, during which they met the same dispirited men hurrying home from work. London was horrible in June, with its metallic heat, its dust, and the dull leaves of the plane-trees scattering their mournful shadows. How sombre, too,were the long evenings after the wretched two-course dinner, in the small suburban drawing-room—ill lit, ill ventilated, meanly furnished. It was not surprising that he should accept eagerly the Marstons' frequent invitations to spend the week-end with them in the country; it was another world, a cleaner, fresher world, where you were met at the station, where you drove through a long, winding drive to an old Georgian house, where you dressed for dinner, where you drank crusted port as you cracked your walnuts. Yet it was not this material well-being that he so highly valued as the setting it provided for a gracious interchange of courtesy, for the leisured preliminaries of friendship, for ornament and decoration.
Was anything in his life better than that moment on a Friday evening when from the corner seat of a railway carriage he watched the smoke and chimneys of London fall behind him, when through the window he saw, instead of streets and shops and houses, green fields and hedges and small scattered villages, and knew that for forty-eight hours he could forget the fretted uneasiness of his home.
He was invited during August to spend a whole week at Hogstead. Several others would be there, and there would be cricket every day.
"We can't do without you," Mr Marston had said, "and what's more, we don't intend to."
"Of course, we don't," said Muriel; "you've got to come!"
Naturally Roland did not need much pressing.
LILITH OF OLD
Rolandmade during this week the acquaintance of several members of the family who had hitherto been only names to him. There was Gerald's uncle Arnold, a long mean-faced man, and his wife, Beatrice. Afterwards, when he looked back and considered how large a part she had played, if indirectly, in his life, and for that matter in the lives of all of them, he could not help thinking that his first sight of her had been prophetic, certainly dramatic. He had just arrived, had been met by Muriel and Mr Marston and his brother in the hall, and Muriel had insisted on taking him away at once to see her rabbits. She had come to regard him as her special friend. Gerald's other friends were too stiff and grown up; Roland was nearer to her own age and he did not patronise her.
"Come along," she said, "you've got to see my rabbits before dinner-time."
"Will they have grown up by to-morrow?" he asked.
"Well, they won't be any younger, will they? They are such dears," and she had taken his hand, pulling him after her. They ran down the curving path that sloped from the house to the cricket field. "I keep them in that little shed behind the pavilion," she said. They were certainly delightful, little brown and white balls of fur, with stupid, blinking eyes. Roland and Muriel took them out of the cage and carried them on to the terrace that ran round the field, and sat there playing with them, offering them grass and dandelions.
A grass path ran between great banks of rhododendrons from the terrace towards the garden, and at theend a pergola stretched a red riot of roses parallel to the field. Suddenly at the end of the path, at the point where it met the pergola, Roland saw, framed in an arch of roses, a tall, graceful woman walking slowly on Gerald's arm, her head bent quietly towards him. At that distance Roland could not distinguish her features, but the small oval face set in the mass of light yellow hair was delicate and the firm outlines of her body suggested that she had only recently left her girlhood behind her.
"Who's that?" asked Roland.
"That! Oh, that's Aunt Beatrice."
"But who's Aunt Beatrice?"
"Uncle Arnold's wife."
"What!"
Roland could hardly believe it: so young a woman married to that shrivelled, prosaic solicitor.
"Oh, yes," said Muriel, "they've been married nearly three years now; and they've got such a darling little girl: Rosemary; you'll see her to-morrow. She's got the loveliest hair. It crinkles when you run your fingers through it."
"But—oh, well, I suppose it's rather cheek, but he's years older."
"Uncle Arnold?" replied Muriel cheerfully. "Oh, yes, I think he must be nearly fifty." Then after a pause, light-heartedly as though the possession of a family skeleton was something of an honour, "I don't think they like each other much."
"How do you know?" Roland asked.
"They are always quarrelling. I never saw such a couple for it. If there's a discussion he's only got to take one side for her to take the other."
"Well, I don't see very well how she could be in love with him, he's such a...." Roland paused, realising that it would be hardly good manners to disparage Muriel's uncle. But she did not intend him to leave the sentence unfinished.
"Yes," she said, "such a.... Go on!"
"But I didn't mean that."
"Yes, you did."
"No, I didn't; really I didn't. I'm sure your uncle's awfully nice, but he's so much older, and you can't be in love with someone so much older than yourself."
"I see; you're forgiven"; then after a pause and with a mischievous smile: "Have you ever been in love, Roland?"
"Yes."
"Oh, how lovely!" and she turned quickly and sat facing him, her knees drawn up, her hands clasped in front of them. "Now tell me all about it. I've always wanted to have a talk with someone who's really been in love, and I never have."
"What about Gerald?"
She pouted. "Gerald! Oh, well, but he laughs at me, and besides——But come on and tell me all about it."
She made a pretty picture as she sat there, her face alight with the eagerness of curious girlhood, and Roland felt to the full the fascination of such a confessional. "It was a long time ago," he said, "and it's all over now."
"Never mind that," Muriel persisted. "What was her name?"
"Betty."
"And was she pretty?"
"Of course; I shouldn't have been in love with her if she hadn't been."
Muriel tossed back her head and laughed. "Oh, but how absurd, Roland! Some of the ugliest women I've ever seen have managed to get husbands."
"And some pretty hideous-looking men get pretty wives."
"But I suppose the pretty wives think their ugly husbands are all right."
"And equally I suppose the handsome husbands think their plain wives beautiful."
They laughed together, but Muriel raised a warning finger. "We are getting off the point," she said. "I want to know more about your Betty. Was she dark?"
"Darkish—yes."
"And her eyes; were they dark too?"
"I think so; they were bright."
"What, aren't you sure? I don't think much of you as a lover."
"But I can never remember the colour of people's eyes," he pleaded. "I can't remember the colour of my mother's or my aunt's, or——"
"Quick, shut your eyes; what's the colour of my eyes?"
"Blue," Roland hazarded.
"Wrong. They're green. Cat's eyes. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I shall write and tell your Betty about it."
"But that's all over long ago, I told you."
"How did it end?"
"It never began," laughed Roland: "she never cared for me a bit."
Muriel pouted. "How unromantic," she said; then added with the quick, mischievous smile, "and how silly of her!"
As he dressed for dinner that evening Roland wondered what perverse impulse had made him speak to Muriel of Betty rather than of Dolly; of either of them rather than of April; of an unsuccessful love affair that was over rather than of a successful one that was in progress. Muriel would far rather have heard of April than of Betty. How she would have pestered him with questions! Where had they met? When had he first known he was in love with her? What had he said to her? How had she answered him? It would have been great fun to confide in her. He had been foolish not to tell her. She was such a jolly girl. She had looked charming as she had sat back holding her knees, with her clear skin and slim boyish figure, and her brightly tinted lips that were always a little parted before her teeth, beautifully even teeth they were, except just at the corner of her mouth where one white tooth slightly overlapped its neighbour. She was the sort of girl that he would like to have had for a sister. He had always regretted that he had not had one, andbetween Muriel and himself there could have been genuine, open comradeship. She would have been a delightful companion. They would have had such fun going about together to parties, dances and the Oval. She would have received so charmingly his confidence.
And yet, on the whole, he did not know why, he was rather glad that he had not told her about April.
That night Roland sat next Beatrice at dinner, and was thus afforded an opportunity of confirming or rejecting his first impression of her. She was only twenty years old, but she looked younger, not so much on account of her slim figure and small, delicate, oval face as of her general pose and the girlish untidiness that made you think that she had not taken very long over her toilet. Her light yellow hair was drawn back carelessly from the smooth skin of her neck and forehead. It looked as though it had been crushed all the afternoon under a tightly fitting hat, and that when Beatrice had returned from her walk, probably a little late, she had flung the hat on the bed, and deciding that she could not be bothered to take down her hair and put it up again had been content to draw her comb through it once or twice with hurried, impatient fingers. This negligence, which might have been charming as the setting for mobile, vivacious features, was out of keeping with the tranquillity of her face, her quiet gestures and lack of action. She had not learnt how to dress and carry herself, and this was an omission you would hardly expect in a woman who had been married for three years.
And yet she was beautiful, or perhaps not so much beautiful as different. She suggested tragedy, mystery, romance. What, Roland asked himself, lay behind the wavering lustre of her eyes? And, looking at the meagre, uninspired features of her husband, he wondered how she could have ever brought herself to marry him. He was a very good fellow, no doubt, of whom one might grow fond—but love—to be held in his arms, to be kissed by those dry lips! He shuddered, revolted by this dismal mating of spring and autumn.
She did not talk very much, though occasionally, when her husband made a particularly definite statement, she would raise her head and say rather contemptuously: "Oh, Arnold!" to which he would reply with heavy worded argument: "My dear girl, what you don't understand is...." It was uncomfortable, and Roland, looking round the table, wondered whether the family was aware of it. They did not appear to be. At one end of the table Mr Marston was discussing, in his jovial, full-blooded manner, the prospects of the cricket week, and, at the other, Mrs Marston was informing a member of the Harrow XI. that their opponents of the morrow had recruited a couple of blues from a neighbouring village. Gerald and Muriel were both laughing and chatting, and the other members of the party seemed equally not to notice the close atmosphere of impending conflict. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to it.
Roland listened carefully to all that Arnold Marston said, both during dinner and afterwards when the ladies had gone upstairs and the port had been passed for the second time round the table. He was hard, dogmatic and, at the same time, petulant in his talk. He quickly assumed that everyone who did not agree with him was ignorant and a fool. As he talked his fingers performed small gestures of annoyance; they plucked at the table-cloth, fingered the water-bowl, heaped the salt into small pyramids upon his plate. They were discussing the pull shot, then something of an innovation, and Roland maintained that it was absurd for school coaches not to allow boys to hit across long hops. "Why, do you know that at Fernhurst you are expected to apologise to the bowler if you make a pull shot."
"And quite right, too," said Mr Arnold.
"But, why?" Roland answered him. "The pull's perfectly safe; it's a four every time and you can't get more than a single if you play back to it with a straight bat."
"I daresay, I daresay, but cricket's cricket, and youhave got to play it with a straight bat. You've got to play according to rules."
"But there's no rule that says you mayn't hit a long hop with a crooked bat."
Mr Arnold fidgeted angrily.
"My dear boy, it's no good arguing. I've been playing cricket and watching cricket for forty years, and the good batsmen always played a straight ball with a straight bat."
"There are a good many who don't."
"That means nothing. A big man's a rule to himself. The pull's a dangerous stroke; it's all right in village cricket perhaps, but no one who doesn't play with a straight bat would get into a county side."
"But isn't it the object of the game to make runs?"
"Not altogether—even if you do get four runs from it instead of one, which I am prepared to doubt. We wear our clothes to keep our bodies warm, but you wouldn't be pleased if your tailor made your coat button up to the throat, and said: 'It covers more of you, sir; you'll be warmer that way, and the object of clothes is to keep you warm.'"
There was a general laugh at Roland's expense, and before it had subsided Mr Marston had introduced another subject. Roland was annoyed; he had a distaste for anything that savoured of cleverness. He regarded it as an unfair weapon in an argument. An argument should be a weighing of facts. Each side should produce its facts, and an impartial witness should give judgment. It was not fair to obscure the issue with an untrue, if amusing, simile. And once the laugh is against you it is no good continuing an argument. Arnold Marston had learnt this on his election platform. He had once been asked what his party proposed to do for the unemployed; it was an awkward question, that gave many opportunities for adverse heckling. But he had obscured the issue with a laugh: "When my party gets in there will be no unemployment." And the meeting had gone home with the opinion that he was a jolly fellow—not too serious—thesort of man that anyone could understand. It was a good trick on the platform, but it was very annoying at the dinner-table, at least so the discomfited found. And Roland felt even more aggrieved as they were leaving the room and the silly ass in the Harrow XI. slapped him on the back and informed him that, "The old man got in a good one on you there." He could understand Beatrice hating him.
He did not have another opportunity of speaking to her that evening, but as he sat in the big drawing-room among the members of the house party his attention drifted continually from the agreeable, superficial conversation that had been up to now so sympathetic to him. These trivial discussions of cricket, their friends, their careers, and, in a desultory manner, of life itself, had been invaded by a stern, critical silence. His eyes kept turning towards Beatrice as she sat in a deep arm-chair, her hands folded quietly in her lap; they followed her when she walked to the window and stood there, her arm raised above her head, looking into the garden. He would have liked to go across the room and speak to her; but what would he have been able to say? He could not tell what thoughts were passing beneath the unruffled surface: was she fretting impatiently at the tedious cricket shop? Was she criticising them all?—she, who had seen deeper and farther and come nearer to tragedy than any of them—or was she what she appeared—a young woman moved by the poetry of a garden stilled by moonshine? When she turned away he thought that he detected a movement of her shoulders, a gesture prompted by some wandering thought or gust of feeling, that would have been significant to one who knew her, but for him was meaningless. And that night he lay awake for nearly an hour, a long time for one who thought little and to whom sleep came easily, remembering her words and actions, the intonation of her voice, and that movement by the window. As he began to lose control over thoughts she became transfigured, the counterpart of those princesses, shut away in high-walled castles, ofwhom he had dreamed in childhood; her husband became an ogre, leering and vindictive, who laughed at him from the turrets of impregnable battlements.
Breakfast at Hogstead was a haphazard business. It began at eight and ended at ten. No one presided over it. There were cold things on the sideboard to which you helped yourself. As soon as you came down you rang the bell and a maid appeared to ask you whether you would prefer tea or coffee and whether you would take porridge. You then sat down where you liked at the long wide table.
When Roland came down the next morning at about a quarter to nine he found the big rush on; from half-past eight to half-past nine there were usually six or seven people at the table. Before that time there was only Mrs Marston and anyone who had been energetic enough to take a dip in a very cold pond that was protected from sunshine by the northern terrace of the cricket field. By a quarter to ten there was usually only a long table, covered with dirty plates, to keep company with Mr Marston, who, strangely enough, was a late riser. There were eight people in all having breakfast when Roland arrived, or, to be more exact, there were seven, for Gerald had finished his some time before, but as he had had a bathe he preferred to remain at the table and inform everyone of his courage as they came down.
"I can't think why everyone doesn't bathe in the morning," he was saying; "makes one feel splendidly fit. I'm absolutely glowing all over."
"So you've told us before," said Muriel.
"I've told you, but I haven't told Roland. Roland, why didn't you come and have a bathe this morning, you old slacker? Do you no end of good."
"Puts one's eye out," said Roland, repeating the old Fernhurst theory that cricket and swimming are incompatible.
"Rot, my dear chap; nothing like a bathe, nothing like it. I bet you I shall skittle them out this afternoon, and I don't see why I shouldn't make a few runs either."
Roland had by this time satisfied the maid's curiosity as to his beverage and had helped himself to a plate of tongue and ham. He turned round with the plate in his hand and looked to see where he should sit. There was a vacant place beside Gerald to which he would have been expected to direct himself; there was also a vacant place beside Beatrice: he chose the latter, and hardly realised till he had drawn back the chair that Gerald was at the opposite end of the table.
Several thoughts passed with incredible swiftness through his brain. Had anyone noticed what he had done? Would they think it curious? More important still, would Beatrice resent it? From this last anxiety he was soon freed, for Beatrice, without apparently having observed his presence, rose from the table and went into the garden. He was left with an empty chair on either side of him and no one for him to talk to; Gerald and Muriel were beyond the reach of anything less than a shout.
He finished his breakfast hurriedly in an enforced silence and walked out into the garden in the secret hope of finding Beatrice. In this he soon succeeded. She was playing croquet with her daughter on the lawn. Roland stood watching them for a moment and then walked slowly across the lawn. Beatrice glanced up at him and then went on with her game. She did not even smile at him. It would have been too much perhaps to have expected her to ask him to join them, but she might surely have made some sign of comradely recognition. After all, he had the night before taken her down to dinner; he had endeavoured to be as nice as he could to her, and it annoyed him and, at the same time, attracted him to feel that he had made absolutely no impression on her.
Roland was not one of those who analyse their emotions. When he was attracted by some new interest he did not put himself in the confessional, and he did not now ask himself why or how Beatrice had appealed to him.
As a matter of fact, she did not attract him physically. Her beauty added to the glamour that enriched her loneliness, but did not touch him otherwise. It was interest he felt for her, a compelling interest for someone outside the circle of his own experience, who was content to disparage what he admired and had filled her own life with other enthusiasms. She was remote, inscrutable. She lived and ate and talked and moved among them, but she had no part there. And because he was so interested in her he was desperately anxious that she should feel some interest in him. She was a mystery for him, but he was not content she should remain a mystery; he wanted to understand her, to become friends, so that in her troubles she should turn to him for sympathy and guidance. How wonderful that would be, that this aloof and beautiful woman should share with him an intimacy that she denied her husband. He would watch her as he had watched her the previous evening moving among her friends, indifferent and apart from them, and they would sit, as they had sat, hardly noticing her, talking of their own affairs, perhaps casting towards her a glance of casual speculation: "What is she really?" they would say, and then put her from their mind and return to their bridge and their billiards and their cricket shop. But he would know, and as she turned from the window he would appreciate the significance of that little movement, that hesitation almost of the shoulders, and she would turn her eyes to him, those sad, disdainful, dove-coloured eyes of hers, that invited nothing and offered nothing, but would become for him flooded with sympathy and gentle friendship; there would be no need for words—just that meeting of the eyes across a crowded drawing-room.
Immersed in reverie, he walked up and down the long grass path that ran from the cricket field to the rose garden, and when his name was shouted suddenly, shrilly and from very close, he approximated to that condition of dismay that the vernacular describes as "jumping out of one's skin." He turned, to see Murielstanding two yards behind him, her hands upon her hips, shaking with laughter.
"I have been watching you for ten minutes," she said as soon as she had recovered her breath, "and it's the funniest sight I've seen; you've been walking up and down the path with your head in the air, and your hands clenched together behind your back, and your lips were moving. I'm certain you were talking to yourself. I couldn't think what you were doing. I sat behind that bush there and watched you going up and down and up and down, your hands clenched and your head flung back and your lips moving, and then at last I guessed——"
"Well, what was it?"
"You were composing poetry. Now, don't laugh, I'm serious, and I want to know who you were composing it for."
"Well, who do you think it was?"
"That girl, of course."
"What girl?"
"Why, the girl you told me about yesterday!"
"Oh, that——"
"Yes; oh, that! But you were now, weren't you?"
"No, I wasn't. You can't see me wasting my time on poetry. Besides, I couldn't do it."
"Then, what were you doing?"
"Thinking."
"Who about?"
"You, of course."
"Oh, no," she said, shaking her head, the light hair scattering in the sunlight. "Oh, no, no, no! If you had been thinking about me, it might have occurred to you that I had no one in this large party to amuse me and that I might very likely be lonely. And if you had thought of that, and had gone on thinking that, with your head flung back——"
"Yes, I know all about that head."
"Well, if you had been thinking of me all that time, and hadn't considered it worth your while to come and see what I was doing, I should be very cross with you.But as I know you weren't I don't mind. But come along now; what was it all about?" And, sitting down on the garden seat, she curled herself into a corner and prepared herself for catechism. "Now, come on," she said, "who was it?"
"Well, if you want to know, it was your Aunt Beatrice."
Muriel pouted.
"Her! What do you want to think about her for?"
"I don't know. She's rather interesting, don't you think?"
"No, I don't," and Muriel spoke sharply in a tone that Roland had never before encountered.
"But——" he began.
"Oh, never mind," she said, "if you've been thinking about Aunt Beatrice for the last ten minutes you won't want to talk about her now. Come and have a game of tennis."
And she jumped up from her seat and walked up towards the house. Roland felt, as he prepared to follow her, that it was an abrupt way to end a conversation that she had forced on him.
And that night, as he undressed, Roland had to own to himself that altogether it had not been a satisfactory day. There had been the incident at the breakfast-table, the rebuff on the croquet lawn, the coldness that had arisen between himself and Muriel, and then, although he had done fairly well in the cricket match, he had not achieved the goal which, he had to confess, had been his great incentive to prowess—namely, the approval of Beatrice.
He had made twenty-seven in the first innings—a good twenty-seven, all things considered. He had had two yorkers in his first over. He had played a large part in the gradual wearing down of the bowling, that had paved the way for some heavy hitting by the tail. He had made several very pretty shots. There had been that late cut off the fast bowler—a beauty; he had come down on it perfectly, and it had gone pastsecond slip out of reach of the third man for three; and then there had been that four off the slow bowler who had tied up Gerald so completely; he had played him quite confidently. Mr Marston had, indeed, complimented him on the way he had placed the short-pitched balls in front of short-square for singles. It had been a pretty useful innings, but though he had kept turning his eyes in the direction of the pavilion, and especially to the shaded side of it, where the ladies reclined in deck-chairs, he had failed to discover any manifestation of excitement, pleasure or even interest on the part of Beatrice in his achievements. True, he had once seen her hands meet in a desultory clap, but that clap had rewarded what was, after all, a comparatively simple hit, a half-volley outside the off stump that he had hit past cover to the boundary, and as that solitary clap came a full thirty seconds after the rest of the pavilion had begun clapping, and ceased a good thirty seconds before anyone else clapping in the pavilion ceased, he was obliged to feel that the applause was more the acquittal of a social duty than any recognition of his own prowess, and when he was finally given leg before to a ball, that would certainly have passed a foot above the stumps, she did not smile at him with congratulations nor did she attempt to console him, though he gave her every opportunity of doing so had she wished by walking round three sides of a rectangle, and reaching the dressing-room by means of the shaded lawn on the left of the pavilion. No. His cricket had not interested her in the least, and it was exasperating to see her face kindle with enthusiasm when the wicket keeper and the slow bowler put on fifty runs for the last wicket through a series of the most outrageous flukes that have ever disgraced a cricket field.
Not a single ball was hit along the ground and only rarely did it follow the direction in which the bat was swung. Length balls on the off stump flew over the head of mid-on, of point, and second slip, to fall time after time providentially out of reach. The fieldingside grew exasperated; slow bowlers tried to bowl fast and fast bowlers had a shot with lobs; full pitches even were attempted, and these, too, were smitten violently over the heads of the instanding fieldsmen and out of reach of the deeps. It was a spectacle that would at ordinary times have flung Roland into convulsions of delight, but on this occasion it annoyed him beyond measure. He felt as must a music-hall artist whose high-class performance has been received with only mild approval when he watches the same audience lose itself in caterwauls of hilarious appreciation at the debauched antics of a vulgar comedian with a false nose and trousers turned the wrong way round who sings a song about his "ma-in-law and the boarding-house." For there was Beatrice, who had hardly taken the trouble to watch his innings, laughing and clapping the preposterous exhibition of this last wicket pair. It was a real relief to him when the slow bowler, in a desperate effort to hook an off ball to the square by boundary, trod on his middle stump and nearly collapsed amid the debris of the wicket.
Altogether it had been an unsatisfactory day and it was typical of the whole week. He had looked forward to it eagerly, he had meant to enjoy himself so much—the quiet mornings in the garden, the inspection of the wicket, the change into flannels, the varying fortune of cricket, the long enchantment of a warm, heavy afternoon, and afterwards the good dinner, the comradeship, the kindly interplay of talk, till finally sleep came to a mind at harmony with itself and full of agreeable echoes. How good these things had seemed to him in imagination. But, actually, there was something missing. The weather was fine, the cricket good, the company agreeable, but the harmony was broken. He was disquieted. He did not wake in the morning with that deep untroubled sense of enjoyment; he had, instead, a belief that something was going to happen; he was always looking to the next thing instead of abiding contentedly in the moment.
And this mental turmoil could only be attributedto the presence of Beatrice. She disturbed him and excited him. His eyes followed her about the room. Whenever he was away from her he wondered what she was doing and wished she would come back; but in her presence he was unhappy and self-conscious. He hardly joined in the general conversation of the table for shyness of what she would think of him. On the few occasions when he sat next to her he could think of nothing to say to her, nothing, that is to say, that was individual, that might not have been, and as a matter of fact probably had been, said to her by every other young man in the room.
He would hazard some remark about the weather—it was rather hot: did she think there was any danger of a thunderstorm?
"I hope not," she would answer; "it would spoil everything, wouldn't it?" She assumed the voice of a mother that is endeavouring to reassure a small child. Cricket was like a plaything in the nursery. "That is what she takes me for," he said to himself—"an overgrown schoolboy"; and he prayed for an opportunity of saying something brilliant and evocative that would startle her into an interest for him. If only he could lead the conversation away from heavy trivialities to shadowy conjectures, wistful regrets; if only they could talk of life and its disenchantments, its exquisite gestures; of sorrow, happiness and resignation. But how were they to talk of it? If she thought about him at all, which was doubtful, or in any way differentiated him from the other young men of the party, she would probably consider that he was flattered by her gracious inquiries about his batting average. How was she to know what he was feeling; and how was he to introduce so portentous a subject? He recognised with a smile what a sensation he would cause were he to lean across to her and say: "What do you, Mrs Arnold, consider to be the ultimate significance of life?" His question would be sure to coincide with one of those sudden silences that occur unexpectedly in the middle of a meal, and his words would fall into that pool of quiveringsilence, scattering ripples of horror and dismay. Mr Marston would stare at him, Muriel would giggle and say she had known all the time he was a poet, and the other members of the party would gaze at him in astonished pity. "Poor fellow!" their glances would say; "quite balmy!" And Beatrice? she would dismiss the situation with an agreeable pleasantry that would put everyone save Roland at his ease. He did not in the least see how he was to win her confidence.
His looks had not impressed her, as, indeed, why should they? His features were neither strikingly handsome nor strikingly ugly; they were ordinary. He was not clever, at least his cleverness did not transpire in conversational brilliance and repartee; and she was not interested in cricket. He envied the ease with which Gerald talked to her, the way they laughed and ragged each other. They were such good friends. It had been in Gerald's company that he had first seen her. Was Gerald in love with her, he wondered. Gerald had never confided to him any recent love affair, and perhaps this was the reason. It was not unlikely. She was young, she was lonely, she was beautiful. He asked Muriel whether she thought there was any cause for his anxiety.
"What!" she said. "Gerald and Aunt Beatrice in love with each other!"
"Yes; why not. She's not in love with her husband, and I don't see why at all——" He stopped, for Muriel was fixing him with a fierce and penetrative glare.
"No," she said, "there's not the least danger of Gerald falling in love with Aunt Beatrice, but if you aren't very careful, someone else will be very soon!"
He laughed uncomfortably.
"Oh, don't be silly!"
"So you know who I mean, don't you?"
"You mean me, I suppose."
"Of course."
He tried to dismiss the subject with a laugh.
"And that would never do, would it?"
It was not successful. Muriel looked more annoyed than he had ever seen her before. It was absurd of her. She must know that he was only ragging. They had always been so open with one another, so charmingly indiscreet.
"No, it wouldn't," she said.
He waited, thinking she was going to add some qualification to this plain denial. Her lips indeed began to frame a syllable, when in response to some swift resolution she shook her head. "Oh, well," she said, "it doesn't matter."
There was no use denying it: it had not been the week he had expected.
THE TWO CURRENTS
Rolandreturned home dissatisfied with himself and anxious to vent the dissatisfaction on someone else. He was in a mood when the least thing would be likely to set him into a flaring temper, and at dinner his father provided the necessary excitant. They were considering the advisability of having the dining-room repapered and Mr Whately was doubting whether such an expensive improvement would be possible for their restricted means.
"I don't know whether we can manage that just now," he said. "We have had one or two little extras this last year or so; there was that new stair carpet and then the curtains on the second landing. I really think that we ought to be a little careful just now. Of course later on, when Roland and April are married——" And he paused to beam graciously upon his son before completing the sentence. "As I was saying, when Roland and April——" But he never completed the sentence. It remained for ever an anacoluthon. It was that beam that did it. It exasperated Roland beyond words. Its graciousness became idiocy.
"I wish you wouldn't talk like that, father," he said. "We've heard that joke too often."
There was an uncomfortable silence. Mr Whately was for a moment too surprised to speak. He had made that little pleasantry so often that it had become part of his conversational repertory. He could not understand Roland's outburst; at first he was hurt; then he felt that he had been insulted, and, like all weak men, he was prone to stand upon his dignity.
"That's not the way to talk to your father, Roland."
"I'm sorry, father, but oh, I don't know, I...." Roland hesitated, and the matter should then have been allowed to drop. Mrs Whately had indeed prepared to interfere with an irrelevant comment on a friend's theory of house decoration, but Mr Whately, having once started on an assault, was loath to abandon it. "No, Roland, that's not at all the way to speak to me, and I don't know what you've got to be impatient with me about. You know quite well that you're going to marry April in time."
"I know nothing of the sort."
"Don't be absurd; of course you do; it was arranged a long time ago."
"No, it wasn't; nothing's been arranged. We're not engaged, and I won't have all this talk about 'when Roland and April are married.' Do you hear? I will not have it!"
It was a surprising outburst. Roland was usually so even-tempered, and the moment afterwards he was bitterly ashamed of himself.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know what I was saying."
For a moment his father did not answer him. Then: "It's all right, Roland," he said; "we understand."
But Roland saw quite clearly he was not forgiven, that his behaviour had increased the estrangement that had existed between his father and himself ever since, without asking parental advice, he had abandoned the idea of the bank. They did not talk much after dinner, and Mr Whately went to bed early, leaving Roland and his mother alone. It was easier now that he had gone.
"I feel such a beast," Roland said. "I don't know what made me do it. I was worried and tired. I didn't enjoy myself as much as I had hoped to down at Hogstead."
"I know, dear, I know. We all feel like that sometimes, but I don't see why that particular thing should have upset you. After all, it's a very old joke of father's; you've heard it so often before."
"I know, mother, I know. I don't know what it was."
He could not make clear to her, if she was unable to appreciate through her intuition, his distaste for this harping on his marriage, this inevitable event to which he had to come, the fate that he could in no way avoid.
"Really, dear," his mother went on, "I couldn't understand it. You haven't had any row with April, have you?"
"Oh, no; nothing like that, nothing."
"Then really, dear——"
"I know, mother, I know."
It was no good trying to explain to her. Could anyone ever communicate their grief, or their happiness for that matter, to another? Was it not the fate of every human soul to be shut away from sympathy behind the wall he, himself, throws up for his defence?
"And, dear, while we're on the question," his mother was saying, "both father and I have been thinking that—well, dear, you've been spending rather a lot of money lately, and we thought that, though you have such a certain post, you really ought to take the opportunity of putting by a little money for setting up your house later on. Don't you think so, dear?"
"I suppose so, mother."
"You see you've got practically no expenses now. I know you pay us something every week, and it's very good of you to, but you could quite easily save fifty pounds a year."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"And don't you think you ought to?"
"I'll try, mother, I'll try."
She rose from her chair, walked across to him, and, bending down, kissed his forehead.
"We do feel for you, dear," she said, "really we do."
"I know you do, mother."
For a long while after she had left him Roland remained in the drawing-room; he was burdened by a confused reaction against the influences that wereshaping his future for him. He supposed he was in love with April, that one day he would marry her; but was there any need for this insistence upon domesticity? Could he not be free a little longer? His eyes travelled miserably round the small, insignificant drawing-room. The window curtains had long since yielded their fresh colour to the sunshine and hung dingily in the gaslight. The wall-paper was shabby and tawdry, with its festooned roses. The carpet near the door was threadbare; the coverings to the stiff-backed chairs were dull and crinkly. This was what marriage meant to men and women in his position. He contrasted the narrow room with the comfort and repose of Hogstead. What chance did people stand whose lives were circumscribed by endless financial difficulties, who could not afford to surround themselves with deep arm-chairs and heavy carpets and warm-coloured wall-papers? It was cruel that now, at the very moment when he had begun to escape from the drab environment of his childhood, these fetters should be attached to him. It was cruel. And rising from his chair he walked backwards and forwards, up and down the room. The days of his freedom were already numbered. They would be soon ended, the days of irresponsible, unreflecting action. It was maddening, this semblance of liberty where there was no liberty. He recalled a simile in a novel he had once read, though the name of the book and of the author had escaped his memory, in which human beings were described as fishes swimming in clear water, with the net of the fisherman about them. He was like that. He was swimming in clear water, but at any moment the fisherman might lift the net and he would be gasping and quivering on the bank.
Next day, in pitiful reaction, he presented to Mr Marston a request to be allowed to commence his foreign tour immediately instead of, as had been previously arranged, in the beginning of the autumn.
"But, my dear fellow," Mr Marston expostulated, "you surely don't want to go in the very middle of the cricket season, when you're in such splendid form?Think what games you'll be missing. There's the Whittington match in August. We simply can't do without you. And then there's that game against Hogstead in September, in which you did so splendidly last year. It's no good, my dear fellow, we simply can't spare you."
But Roland was stubborn.
"I'm very sorry, sir," he said, "but I do feel that I ought to be going out there soon, and July and August will be slack months—just the time to see people and form alliances. In the autumn they would be too busy to worry about me."
Mr Marston shrugged his shoulders. It was annoying, but still the business came first, he supposed.
"All right, my dear fellow. I daresay you are right. And I am glad to see you are so keen on your work. I only wish Gerald was."
"Oh, but I think he is really, sir," said Roland, who, for one horrible moment, had a feeling that he was playing a mean trick on Gerald. At school he had resented the way that little Mark-Grubber Shrimpton had gone up to Crusoe at the end of the hour to ask his questions. He had found a nasty name for such behaviour then, and was there so much difference between Shrimpton's thirst for knowledge and his own desire to travel when he might have been playing cricket? But Mr Marston speedily reassured him.
"Oh, yes; Gerald—he's keen enough of course, and, after all, he's rather different. He's known all along there was no necessity for him to over-exert himself, and I daresay he's heard so much shop talked that he's got pretty sick of the whole thing. You have come fresh to it."
"Then I may go, sir?"
"Yes, yes, if you want to. I'll ask Mr Perkins to make an arrangement. I expect we'll be able to get rid of you next week."
And so it was arranged.
Two days before his departure, as he was bounding downstairs on his way to lunch, Roland was suddenlyconfronted at the turn of the staircase below the second landing by a tall, graceful figure, in a wide-brimmed hat and light crinkly hair. He gave a surprised gasp. "I am so sorry," he began; then saw that it was Beatrice. "Oh, how do you do, Mrs Arnold?" It was rather dark and for a moment she did not recognise him.
"Oh, but of course—why, it's Mr Whately! And how fortunate! I was wondering how I should ever get to the top of these enormous stairs. I can't think why you don't have a lift. I've come to see Gerald. Do you think you could run and tell him I'm here? I suppose I should have gone and asked one of your clerks, but they do so embarrass me. Oh, thank you so much. It is kind."
Within a minute Roland had returned with the news that Gerald had already gone out to lunch, that his secretary did not know where he had gone, but that he had left a message stating that he was not to be expected back before three.
A look of disappointment crossed her face.
"Oh, but how annoying!" she said. "And I had wanted him to take me out to lunch. We haven't seen each other for such a long time. I suppose it's my own fault. I ought to have let him know. All the same, thank you so much, Mr Whately."
She had half turned to go, when Roland, with one of those sudden inspirations, of which a moment's thought would have rendered him incapable, suggested that she should come out and lunch with him instead. "It would be so delightful for me if you would."
As she turned towards him, her features expressing an obvious surprise, he wondered how on earth he had had the courage to ask her. He had never seen her look more beautiful than she did, standing there in the half light of the staircase, her pale blue dress silhouetted against the dull brown of the woodwork, and one arm flung out along the banister. For a moment he thought that she was going to refuse, then the look of surprise passed into a gracious smile.
"But how kind of you, Mr Whately: I should love to."
He took her to a smart but quiet restaurant that was mostly used by city men wishing to lunch unobtrusively with their secretaries, and they were lucky enough to find a corner table. At first he found conversation a little difficult; the waiter was so slow bringing the dishes. There were uncomfortable pauses in their talk. But by the time they had finished their fish, and drunk a little wine, Roland's nervousness had passed. It was a delight to look at her, a delight to listen to the soft intonations of her voice; and here in the quiet intimacy of the restaurant he was able to appreciate even more acutely than at Hogstead the mystery and romance that surrounded her. The pathos of her life was actual to him; they were discussing a new novel that had been much praised, but of which she had complained a falsity to life.
"But then you are so different from the rest of us," he had said.
"Ah, don't say that," she replied quickly. "I'm so anxious to be the same as all of you, to live your life and share your interests. It's so lonely being different."
She made him talk of himself, of his hopes and his ambitions. And he told her that in two days' time he would be going abroad.
"In the middle of August! Before the cricket season's over! What horrid luck!"
"Oh, no, I wanted to go," said Roland. "I was getting tired of things. I wanted a change."
She looked at him with curiosity, a new interest for him in her deep dove-coloured eyes.
"You, too!" she said.
"I don't know what it is," Roland continued. "I feel restless; I feel I must break loose. It's all the same, one day after another, and what does it lead to?"
She leant forward, her elbows on the table, her face resting upon the backs of her hands.
"Ah, don't I know that feeling," she said; "one waits, one says, 'Something is sure to happen soon.' But it doesn't, and one goes on waiting. And one triesto run away, but one can't escape from oneself." Their eyes met and there seemed to be no further need for words between them. Roland's thoughts travelled into spaces of vague and wistful speculation. A profound melancholy consumed him, a melancholy that was at the same time pleasant—a sugared sadness.
"What are you thinking of, Roland?" The use of his Christian name caused no surprise to him; it was natural that she should address him so. He answered her, his eyes looking into hers.
"I was thinking of how we spend our whole lives looking forward to things and looking back to things and that in itself the thing is nothing."
She smiled at him. "So you've found that out too?" she said. Then she laughed quickly. "But you mustn't get mournful when you are with me. You've all your life before you and you're going to be frightfully successful and frightfully happy. I shall so enjoy watching you. And now I must really be rushing off. You've given me a most delightful time"; and she began to gather up her gloves and the silk purse that hung by a gold chain from her wrist.
Roland could do little work that afternoon; his thoughts wandered from the ledger at his side and from the files of the financial news. And that evening he was more acutely aware than usual of the uncoloured dreariness of his home. For him Beatrice was the composite vision of that other world from which the course of his life was endeavouring to lead him. She represented, for him, romance, adventure, the flower and ecstasy of life.
But two days later he felt once again, as he leant against the taffrail to watch the English coast fade into a dim haze, that he was letting drop from his shoulders the accumulated responsibilities of the past six months. Did it matter then so much what happened to him over there behind that low-lying bank of cloud if he could at any moment step out of his captivity, relinquish his anxieties and enter a worldthat knew nothing of April or of his parents, that accepted him on his own valuation as a young man with agreeable manners and a comfortable independence? Who that held the keys of his dungeon could be called a prisoner?