When the uninformed chauffeur drove the car with a grand sweep under the marquise of the ostentatious pale yellow block in the Avenue Hoche where Irene Wheeler had had her flat, Mr. Ingram and a police-agent were standing on the steps, but nobody else was near. Little Mr. Ingram came forward anxiously, his eyes humid, and his face drawn with pain and distress.
"We know," said Lois. "I met Mr. Cardow at Longchamps. He knew."
Mr. Ingram's pain and distress seemed to increase.
He said, after a moment:
"Alfred will drive you home, dear, at once.Alfred, vous seriez gentil de reconduire Mademoiselle à la rue d'Athènes."He had the air of supplicating the amiable chauffeur. "Mr. Cannon, I particularly want a few words with you."
"But, father, I must come in!" said Lois. "I must——"
"You will go home immediately. Please, please do not add to my difficulties. I shall come home myself as quickly as possible. You can do nothing here. The seals have been affixed."
Lois raised her chin in silence.
Then Mr. Ingram turned to the police-agent, spoke to him in French, and pointed to the car persuasively; and the police-agent permissively nodded. The chauffeur, with an affectation of detachment worthy of the greatest days of valetry, drove off, leaving George behind. Mr. Ingram descended the steps.
"I think, perhaps, we might go to a café," said he in a tone which dispersed George's fear of a discussion as to the propriety of the unchaperoned visit to the races.
They sat down on theterrasseof a large café near the Place des Ternes, a few hundred yards away from the Avenue Hoche. The café was nearly empty, citizens being either in the Bois or on the main boulevards. Mr. Ingram sadly ordered bocks. The waiter, flapping his long apron, called out in a loud voice as he went within: "Deux blonds, deux." George supplied cigarettes.
"Mr. Cannon," began Mr. Ingram, "it is advisable for me to tell you a most marvellous and painful story. I have only just heard it. It has overwhelmed me, but I must do my duty." He paused.
"Certainly," said George self-consciously, not knowing what to say. He nearly blushed as, in an attempt to seem at ease, he gazed negligently round at the rows of chairs and marble tables, and at the sparse traffic of the somnolent Place.
Mr. Ingram proceeded.
"When I first knew Irene Wheeler she was an art student here. So was I. But I was already married, of course, and older than she. Exactly what her age was I should not careto say. I can, however, say quite truthfully that her appearance has scarcely altered in those nineteen years. She always affirmed that her relatives, in Indianapolis, were wealthy—or at least had money, but that they were very mean with her. She lived in the simplest way. As for me, I had to give up art for something less capricious, but capricious enough in all conscience. Miss Wheeler went to America and was away for some time—a year or two. When she came back to Paris she told us that she had made peace with her people, and that her uncle, whom for present purposes I will call Mr. X, a very celebrated railway magnate of Indianapolis, had adopted her. Her new manner of life amply confirmed these statements."
"Deux bocks," cried the waiter, slapping down on the table two saucers and two stout glass mugs filled with frothing golden liquid.
George, unaccustomed to the ritual of cafés, began at once to sip, but Mr. Ingram, aware that the true boulevardier always ignores his bock for several minutes, behaved accordingly.
"She was evidently extremely rich. I have had some experience, and I estimate that she had the handling of at least half a million francs a year. She seemed to be absolutely her own mistress. You have had an opportunity of judging her style of existence. However, her attitude towards ourselves was entirely unchanged. She remained intimate with my wife, who, I may say, is an excellent judge of character, and she was exceedingly kind to our girls, especially Lois—but Laurencine too—and as they grew up she treated them like sisters. Now, Mr. Cannon, I shall be perfectly frank with you. I shall not pretend that I was not rather useful to Miss Wheeler—I mean in the Press. She had social ambitions. And why not? One may condescend towards them, but do they not serve a purpose in the structure of society? Very rich as she was, it was easy for me to be useful to her. And at worst her pleasure in publicity was quite innocent—indeed, it was so innocent as to be charming. Naïve, shall we call it?"
Here Mr. Ingram smiled sadly, tasted his bock, and threw away the end of a cigarette.
"Well," he resumed, "I am coming to the point. This is the point, which I have learnt scarcely an hour ago—I was called up on the telephone immediately after you and Lois had gone. This is the point. Mr. X was not poor Irene'suncle, and he had not adopted her. But it was his money that she was spending." Mr. Ingram gazed fixedly at George.
"I see," said George calmly, rising to the rôle of man of the world. "I see." He had strange mixed sensations of pleasure, pride, and confusion. "And you've just found this out?"
"I have just found it out from Mr. X himself, whom I met for the first time to-day—in poor Irene's flat. I never assisted at such a scene. Never! It positively unnerved me. Mr. X is a man of fifty-five, fabulously wealthy, used to command, autocratic, famous in all the Stock Exchanges of the world. When I tell you that he cried like a child ... Oh! I never had such an experience. His infatuation for Irene—indescribable! Indescribable! She had made her own terms with him. He told me himself. Astounding terms, but for him it was those terms or nothing. He accepted them—had to. She was to be quite free. The most absolute discretion was to be observed. He came to Paris or London every year, and sometimes she went to America. She utterly refused to live in America."
"Why didn't she marry him?"
"He has a wife. I have no doubt in my own mind that one of his reasons for accepting her extraordinary terms was to keep in close touch with her at all costs in case his wife should die. Otherwise he might have lost her altogether. He told me many things about poor Irene's family in Indianapolis which I will not repeat. It was true that they had money, as Irene said; but as for anything else ...! The real name was not Wheeler."
"Has he been over, here long?"
"He landed at Cherbourg last night. Just arrived."
"And she killed herself at once."
"Whether the deed was done immediately before or immediately after his arrival is not yet established. And I need hardly tell you that Mr. X has already fixed up arrangements not to appear in the case at all. But one thing is sure—she had made all the preparations for suicide, made them with the greatest care. The girls saw her yesterday, and both Lois and I spoke to her on the telephone this morning. Not a trace of anything in her voice. I assume she had given a message for Lois to the chauffeur."
"Yes," said George. "We never dreamed——"
"Of course not. Of course not."
"But why did she——"
"Another man, my dear sir! Another man! A young man named Defourcambault, in the French Embassy in London."
"Oh, him!" George burst out. "I know him," he added fiercely.
"You do? Yes, I remember Laurencine saying.... Poor Irene, I fear, was very deeply in love with him. She had written to Mr. X about Defourcambault. He showed me the letter—most touching, really most touching. His answer to it was to come to Europe at once. But poor Irene's death had nothing to do with his coming. She did not know he was coming. She shot herself as she lay in bed, and on the pillow was a letter from this man Defourcambault—well, saying good-bye to her. I saw the letter. Not a letter that I should wish to remember. Perhaps she had told him something of her life. I much fear that Defourcambault will be fetched from London, though I hope not. There would be no object.... No, thank you. I will not smoke again. I only wanted to say this to you. All Paris knows that my daughters were intimate with poor Irene. Now, if anything comes out, if anythingshouldcome out, if there's any talk—you see my fear. I wish to assure you, Mr. Cannon, that I had not the slightest suspicion, not the slightest. And yet we journalists cannot exactly be called ingenuous! But I had not the slightest suspicion, nor had my wife. You know the situation between Laurencine and your friend Lucas. You and he are very intimate, I believe. May I count on you to explain everything from my point of view to Mr. Lucas? I could not bear that the least cloud should rest upon my little Laurencine."
"You needn't trouble about Lucas," said George positively. "Lucas 'll be all right. Still, I'll talk to him."
"Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I knew I could rely on you. I've kept you a long time, but I'm sure you understand. I'm thinking only of my girls. Not for anything would I have them know the truth about the affair."
"But aren't they bound to know it?" George asked.
Mr. Ingram was wounded. "I hope not. I hope not," he said gravely. "It is not right that young girls should know such things."
"But surely, sooner or later——"
"Ah! After they are married, conceivably. That would be quite different," he admitted, with cheerfulness. "Andnow," he smiled, "I'm afraid I've got to go and write the case up for London. I can catch the mail, I think. If not, I must cable. But they hate me to cable when the mail is possible. Can I drop you anywhere?"
Simultaneously he signalled to a taxi and knocked on the window for the attendance of the waiter.
"Thanks. If you're going anywhere near the Place de l'Opéra," said George.
He was excited, rather than saddened, by the tragic event. He was indeed very excited. And also he had a deep satisfaction, because it seemed to him that he had at last been truly admitted into the great secret fellowship of adult males. The initiation flattered his pride. He left Mr. Ingram at the door of an English newspaper office in the Boulevard des Italiens, and, after vainly asking for telegrams at the hotel, walked away, aimlessly at first, along broad pavements encumbered with the chairs and tables of vast, crowded cafés, and with bright Sunday idlers and sinister street-vendors. But in a moment he had decided that he must and ought to pay a call in the Rue d'Athènes. Mr. Ingram had said nothing about his seeing Lois again, had not referred to Mrs. Ingram's invitation to repeat his visit, might even vaguely object to an immediate interview between him and Lois. Yet he could not, as a man of the world, abandon Lois so unceremoniously. He owed something to Lois and he owed something to himself. And he was a free adult. The call was natural and necessary, and if Mr. Ingram did not like it he must, in the Five Towns phrase, lump it. George set off to find the Rue d'Athènes unguided. It was pleasurable to think that there was a private abode in the city of cafés, hotels, and museums to which he had the social right of entry.
The watching concierge of the house nodded to him politely as he began to mount the stairs. The Ingrams' servant smiled upon him as upon an old and familiarly respected friend.
"Mademoiselle Lois?" he said, with directness.
The slatternly, benevolent girl widened her mouth still further in a smile still more cordial, and led him to the drawing-room. As she did so she picked up a newspaper packet that lay on a table in the tiny hall, and, without putting iton a salver, deposited it in front of Lois, who was alone in the drawing-room. George wondered what Lois would have thought of such an outrage upon established ritual had it happened to her in the home of Irene Wheeler instead of in her own; and then the imagined vision of Irene lying dead in the sumptuous home in the Avenue Hoche seemed to render all established ritual absurd.
"So you've come!" exclaimed Lois harshly. "Mother's quite knocked over, and Laurencine's looking after her. All the usual eau-de-Cologne business. And I should say father's not much better. My poor parents! What did dad want you for?"
The servant had closed the door. Lois had got up from her chair and was walking about the room, pulling aside a curtain and looking out, tapping the mantelpiece with her hand, tapping with her feet the base of the stove, George had the sensation of being locked in a cage with a mysterious, incalculable, and powerful animal. He was fascinated. He thought: "I wanted to see her alone and I am seeing her alone!"
"Well?" she insisted. "What did dad want you for?"
"Oh! He told me a few things about Miss Wheeler."
"I suppose he told you about Jules, and I suppose he told you I wasn't to know on any account! Poor old dad! Instead of feeling he's my father, d'you know what I feel? I feel as if I was his mother. He'ssoclever; he's frightfully clever; but he was never meant for this world. He's just a beautiful child. How in Heaven's name could he think that a girl like me could be intimate with Irene, and not know about the things that were in her mind? How could he? Why! I've talked for hours with Irene about Jules! She'd much sooner talk with me even than with mother. She's cried in front of me. But I never cried. I always told her she was making a mistake about Jules. I detested the little worm. But she couldn't see it. No, she couldn't. She'd have quarrelled with me if I'd let her quarrel. However, I wouldn't let her. Fancy quarrelling—over a man! She couldn't help being mad over Jules. I told her she couldn't—that was why I bore with her. I always told her he was only playing with her. The one thing that I didn't tell her was that she was too old for him. She really believed she never got any older. When I say too old for him, I mean for her sake, not for his. He didn't think she was too old. He couldn't—with that complexion of hers. I never envied her anything else except her complexion and her money. But hewouldn't marry an American. His people wouldn't let him. He's got to marry into a family like his own, and there're only about ten for him to choose from. I know she wrote to him on Thursday. She must have had the answer this morning. Of course she had a revolver. I've got one myself. She went to bed and did it. She used to say to me that if ever she did it that was how she would do it.... And father tells me not to add to his difficulties! Don't you think it's comic?... But she never told me everything. I knew that. I accused her of it. She admitted it. However ..."
Lois spoke in a low, regular murmur, experimentally aware that privacy in a Paris flat is relative. There were four doors in the walls of the drawing-room, and a bedroom on either side. At moments George could scarcely catch her words. He had never heard her say so much at once, for she was taciturn by habit, even awkward in conversation. She glowered at him darkly. The idea flashed through his mind: "There can't be another girl like her. She's unique." He almost trembled at the revelation. He was afraid, and yet courageous, challenging, combative. She had grandeur. It might be moral, or not; but it was grandeur. And—(that touch about the complexion!)—she could remember her freckles! She might, in her hard egotism, in the rushing impulses of her appetites—she might be an enemy, an enemy to close with whom would be terrible rapture, and the war of the sexes was a sublime war, infinitely superior in emotions to tame peace. (And had she not been certified an angel? Had he not himself seen the angel in her?) She dwarfed her father and mother. The conception, especially, of Mr. Ingram at lunch, deliciously playful and dominating, and now with the adroit wit crushed out of him and only a naïve sentimentality left, was comic—as she had ruthlessly characterized it. She alone towered formidably over the devastated ruins of Irene's earthly splendour.
He said nothing.
She rang the bell by the mantelpiece. He heard it ring. No answer. She rang again.
"Arrivez donc, jeune fille!" she exclaimed impatiently.
The servant came.
"Apportez du thé, Séraphine."
"Oui, mademoiselle."
Then Lois lounged towards the table and tore sharply the wrapper of the newspaper. George was still standing.
"He's probably got something in about her this week—about her soirée last Tuesday. We weren't invited. Of course he went."
George saw the name theSunday Journal. The paper had come by the afternoon mail, and had been delivered, according to weekly custom, by messenger from Mr. Ingram's office. Lois's tone and attitude tore fatally the whole factitious 'Parisian' tradition, as her hand had torn the wrapper.
"See here," she said quietly, after a few seconds, and gave the newspaper with her thumb indicating a paragraph.
He could hardly read the heading, because it unnerved him; nor the opening lines. But he read this: "The following six architects have been selected by the Assessors and will be immediately requested by the Corporation to submit final designs for the town hall: Mr. Whinburn, Mr.... Mr.... Mr. George E. Cannon ..."
"What did I always tell you?" she said.
And then she said:
"Your telegram must have been addressed wrong, or something."
He sat down. Once again he was afraid. He was afraid of winning in the final competition. A vista of mayors, corporations, town clerks, committees, contractors, clerks-of-works, frightened him. He was afraid of his immaturity, of his inexperience. He could not carry out the enterprise; he would reap only ignominy. His greatest desire had been granted. He had expected, in the event, to be wildly happy. But he was not happy.
"Well, I'm blowed!" he exclaimed.
Lois, who had resumed the paper, read out:
"In accordance with the conditions of the competition, each of the above named will receive a honorarium of one hundred guineas."
She looked at him.
"You'll get that town hall to do," she said positively. "You're bound to get it. You'll see."
Her incomprehensible but convincing faith passed mysteriously into him. A holy dew relieved him. He began to feel happy.
Lois glanced again at the paper, which with arms outstretched she held in front of her like a man, like the men at Pickering's. Suddenly it fell rustling to the floor, and she burst into tears.
She murmured indistinctly: "The last thing she did was for my pleasure—sending the car."
George jumped up, animated by an inexpressible tenderness for her. She had weakened. He moved towards her. He did not consider what he was doing; he had naught to say; but his instinctive arms were about to clasp her. He was unimaginably disturbed. She straightened and stiffened in a second.
"But of course you've not got it yet," she said harshly, with apparent irrelevance.
Séraphine entered bouncingly with the tea. Lois regarded the tray, and remarked the absence of the strainer.
"Et la passoire?" she demanded, with implacable sternness.
Séraphine gave a careless, apologetic gesture.
It was late in September, when most people had returned to London after the holidays. John Orgreave mounted to the upper floor of the house in Russell Square where George had his office. Underneath George's name on the door had been newly painted the word 'Inquiries,' and on another door, opposite, the word 'Private.' John Orgreave knocked with exaggerated noise at this second door and went into what was now George's private room.
"I suppose one ought to knock," he said in his hearty voice.
"Hallo, Mr. Orgreave!" George exclaimed, jumping up.
"If the mountain doesn't come to Mahomet, Mahomet must come to the mountain," said John Orgreave.
"Come in," said George.
He noticed, and ignored, the touch of sarcasm in John Orgreave's attitude. He had noticed a similar phenomenon in the attitude of various people within the last four days, since architectural circles and even the world in general had begun to resound with the echoing news that the competition for the northern town hall had been won by a youth not twenty-three years of age. Mr. Enwright had been almost cross, asserting that the victory was perhaps a fluke, as the design of another competitor was in reality superior to George's. Mr. Enwright had also said, in his crabbed way: "You'll soon cut me out"; and, George protesting, had gone on: "Oh! Yes, you will. I've been through this sort of thing before. I know what I'm talking about. You'reno different from the rest." Whereupon George, impatient and genuinely annoyed, had retorted upon him quite curtly, and had remembered what many persons had said about Mr. Enwright's wrong-headed jealous sensitiveness—animadversions which he, as a worshipper of Mr. Enwright, had been accustomed to rebut. Further, Lucas himself had not erred by the extravagance of his enthusiasm for George's earth-shaking success. For example, Lucas had said: "Don't go and get above yourself, old chap. They may decide not to build it after all. You never know with these corporations." A remark extremely undeserved, for George considered that the modesty and simplicity of his own demeanour under the stress of an inordinate triumph were rather notable. Still, he had his dignity to maintain against the satiric, and his position was such that he could afford to maintain it.
Anyhow, he preferred the sardonic bearing of his professional intimates to the sycophancy of certain acquaintances and of eager snobs unknown to him. Among sundry telegrams received was one composed regardless of cost and signed 'Turnbull.' He could not discover who Turnbull might be until John Orgreave had reminded him of the wigged, brown, conversational gentleman whom he had met, on one occasion only, at Adela's. In addition to telegrams he had had letters, some of which contained requests for money (demanded even as a right by the unlucky from the lucky), and an assortment of charity circulars, money-lenders' circulars, and bucket-shop lures. His mother's great sprawling letter had pleased him better than any save one. The exception was his stepfather's. Edwin Clayhanger, duly passing on to the next generation the benevolent Midland gibe which he had inherited, wrote:
"DEAR GEORGE,—It's better than a bat in the eye with a burnt stick.—Yours affectionately, NUNKS"
As a boy George had at one period called his stepfather 'Nunks,' but he had not used the appellation for years. He was touched now.
The newspapers had been hot after him, and he knew not how to defend himself. His photograph was implored. He was waylaid by journalists shabby and by journalists spruce, and the resulting interviews made him squirm. He became a man of mark at Pickering's. Photographers entreated him to sit free of charge. What irritated him in the whole vast affair was the continual insistence upon his lack of years.Nobody seemed to be interested in his design for the town hall; everybody had the air of regarding him as a youthful prodigy, a performing animal. Personally he did not consider that he was so very young. (Nevertheless he did consider that he was a youthful prodigy. He could recall no architect in history who had done what he had done at his age.) The town clerk who travelled from the North to see him treated his age in a different manner, the patronizing. He did not care for the town clerk. However, the town clerk was atoned for by the chairman of the new town hall sub-committee, a true human being named Soulter, with a terrific accent and a taste for architecture, pictures, and music. Mr. Soulter, though at least forty-five, treated George, without any appearance of effort, as a coeval. George immediately liked him, and the mere existence of Mr. Soulter had the effect of dissipating nearly all George's horrible qualms and apprehensions about his own competence to face the overwhelming job of erection. Mr. Soulter was most soothing in the matter of specifications and contractors.
"So you've got into your new room," said John Orgreave.
Never before had he mounted to see George either in the new room or in the old room. The simple fact of the presence there of one of the partners in the historic firm below compensated for much teasing sarcasm and half-veiled jealousy. It was a sign. It was a seal authenticating renown.
"Yes."
"I only wanted to give you a message from Adela. The Ingram young woman is staying with us——"
"Lois?" The name shot out of him unbidden.
"Yes. You're humbly supplicated to go to tea to-day. Four o'clock. Thank God I've not forgotten it!"
George arrived fifty-five minutes late at Bedford Park. Throughout the journey thither he kept repeating: "She said I should do it. And I've done it! I've done it! I've done it!" The triumph was still so close behind him that he was constantly realizing it afresh, and saying, wonder-struck: "I've done it." And the miraculous phantasm of the town hall, uplifted in solid stone, formed itself again and again in his enchanted mind, against a background of tremendous new ambitions rising endlessly one behind another like snowy alps.
"Is this what you call four o'clock?" twittered Adela, between cajolery and protest, somewhat older and facially more artificial, but eternally blonde; still holding her fair head on one side and sinuously waving the palm.
"Sorry! Sorry! I was kept at the last moment by a journalist johnny."
"Oh! Of course!" said Adela, pooh-poohing with her lips. "Of course we expect that story nowadays!"
"Well, it was a chap from theBuilder, or I wouldn't have seen him. Can't trifle with a trade paper, you know."
He thought:
"She's like the rest of them, as jealous as the devil."
Then Lois came into the room, hatted and gloved, in half-mourning. She was pale, and appreciably thinner; she looked nervous, weak, and weary. As he shook hands with her he felt very self-conscious, as though in winning the competition and fulfilling her prophecy he had done something dubious for which he ought to apologize. This was exceedingly strange, but it was so. She had been ill after the death of Irene Wheeler. Having left Paris for London on the day following the races, he had written to her about nothing in particular, a letter which meant everything but what it said—and had received an answer from Laurencine, who announced that her sister was in bed, and likely to be in bed; and that father and mother wished to be remembered to him. Then he wrote to Laurencine. When the result of the final competition was published he had written again to Lois. It seemed to him that he was bound to do so, for had she not willed and decided his victory? No reply; but there had scarcely been time for a reply.
"Did you get my letter?" he smiled.
"This afternoon," she said gravely. "It followed me here. Now I have to go to Irene's flat. I should have been gone in another minute."
"Shewillgo alone," Adela put in anxiously.
"I shall be back for dinner," said Lois, and to the stupefaction of George she moved towards the door.
But just as she opened the door she turned her head and, looking at George with a frown, murmured:
"You can come with me if you like."
Adela burst out:
"He hasn't had any tea!"
"I'm not urging him to come, my dear. Good-bye."
Adela and George exchanged a glance, each signalling to the other that perhaps this sick, strange girl ought to be humoured. He abandoned the tea.... He was in the street with Lois. He was in the train with her. Her ticket was in his pocket. He had explained to her why he waslate, and she had smiled, amiably but enigmatically. He thought: "She's no right to go on like this. But what does it matter?" She said nothing about the competition—not a word of congratulation. Indeed she hardly spoke beyond telling him that she had to choose some object at the flat. He was aware of the principal terms of Irene's will, which indeed had caused the last flutter of excitement before oblivion so quickly descended upon the notoriety of the social star. Irene's renown had survived her complexion by only a few short weeks. The will was of a rather romantic nature. Nobody familiar with the intimate circumstances would have been surprised if Irene had divided her fortune between Lois and Laurencine. The bulk of it, however, went back to Indianapolis. The gross total fell far short of popular estimates. Lois and Laurencine received five thousand pounds apiece, and in addition they were requested to select each an object from Irene's belongings—Lois out of the London flat, Laurencine out of the Paris flat. Lois had come to London to choose, and she was staying with Adela, the sole chaperon available. Since the death of Irene, Mrs. Ingram had been excessively strict in the matter of chaperons.
They took a hansom at Victoria. Across the great square, whose leaves were just yellowing, George saw the huge block of flats, and in one story all the blinds were down. Lois marched first into the lift, masterfully, as though she inhabited the block. She asked no one's permission. Characteristically she had an order from the solicitors, and the keys of the flat. She opened the door without any trouble. They were inside, within the pale-sheeted interior. Scarcely a thing had yet been moved, for, with the formalities of the judicatures of France, England, and the State of Indiana to be complied with, events marched slowly under the sticky manipulation of three different legal firms. Lois and George walked cautiously across the dusty, dulled parquets into the vast drawing-room. George doffed his hat.
"I'd better draw the blinds up," he suggested.
"No, no!" she sharply commanded. "I can see quite well. I don't want any more light."
There was the piano upon which Laurencine had played! The embrasure of the window! The corner in which Irene had sat spellbound by Jules Defourcambault! The portraits of Irene, at least one of which would perpetuate her name! The glazed cases full of her collections!... The chiefpieces of furniture and all the chairs were draped in the pale, ghostly sheeting.
Suddenly Lois, rushing to the mantelpiece, cried:
"This is what I shall take."
It was a large photograph of Jules Defourcambault, bearing the words: "À Miss Irene Wheeler. Hommages respectueux deJ.D.F."
"You won't!" he exclaimed, incredulous, shocked. He thought: "She is mad!"
"Yes, I shall."
There were hundreds of beautiful objects in the place, and she chose a banal photograph of a despicable creature whom she detested.
"Why don't you take one ofherportraits? Or even a fan. What on earth do you want with a thing like that?" His voice was changing.
"I shall take it and keep it for ever. He was the cause of it all. This photograph was everything to her once."
George revolted utterly, and said with cold, harsh displeasure:
"You're simply being morbid. There's no sense in it."
She dropped down into a chair, and the impress of her body dragged the dust-sheet from its gilt arms, exposing them. She put her face in her hands and sobbed.
"You're awfully cruel!" she murmured thickly.
The sobs continued, shaking her body. She was beautifully dressed. Her shoes were adorable, and the semi-transparent hose over her fine ankles. She made a most disturbing, an unbearable, figure of compassion. She needed wisdom, protection, guidance, strength. Every bit of her seemed to appeal for these qualities. But at the same time she dismayed. He moved nearer to her. Yes, she had grandeur. All the costly and valuable objects in the drawing-room she had rejected in favour of the satisfaction of a morbid and terrible whim. Who could have foreseen it? He moved still nearer. He stood over her. He seized her yielding wrists. He lifted her veil. Tears were running down her cheeks from the yellow eyes. She looked at him through her tears.
"You're frightfully cruel," she feebly repeated.
"And what if I am?" he said solemnly. Did she really think him hard, had she always thought him hard—she, the hard one? How strange! Yet no doubt he was hard.
His paramount idea was:
"She had faith in me." It was as if her faith had createdthe man he was. She was passionately ambitious; so was he.
And when he kissed her wet mouth, and stroked with incredible delicacy those streaming cheeks, he felt himself full of foreboding. But he was proud and confident.
He took her back to Bedford Park. She carried the photograph, unwrapped; but he ventured no comment. She went straight up to her room.
"Youmust tell Mrs. Orgreave," she said on the stairs.
Adela made a strange remark:
"Oh! But we always intended you to marry Lois!"
George came into the conjugal bedroom. The hour was about three o'clock in the afternoon. Lois lay on the sofa at the foot of the twin beds. It was perhaps characteristic of her that she sincerely preferred the sofa to her bed. Sometimes in the night, when she could not sleep, she would get up and go sighing to the sofa, and, with nothing but a slippery eiderdown to cover her, sleep perfectly till George arose in the morning. Quite contentedly conventional in most matters of mere social deportment, she often resisted purely physical conventions. A bed was the recognized machine for slumber; hence she would instinctively choose another machine. Also, the sofa was nearer to the ground. She liked to be near the ground. She had welcomed with ardour the first beginnings of the new fashion which now regularly permits ladies to sit on the hearth-rug after a ceremonial dinner and prop their backs with cushions or mantelpieces. Doubtless a trait of the 'cave-woman' that as a girl she had called herself!
She was now stretched on the sofa in a luxurious and expensive ribboned muslin negligée, untidy, pale, haggard, heavy, shapeless, the expectant mother intensely conscious of her own body and determined to maintain all the privileges of the exacting rôle which nature had for the third time assigned to her. Little Laurencine, aged eight, and little Lois, aged five, in their summer white, were fondling her, tumbling about her, burying themselves in her; she reclined careless, benignant, and acquiescent under their tiny assaults; it was at moments as though the three were one being. Whentheir father appeared in the doorway, she warned them in an apparently awed tone that father was there, and that nursey was waiting for them and that they must run off quietly. And she kissed them with the enormous kiss of a giantess suddenly rendered passionate by a vast uprush of elemental feeling. And they ran off, smiling confidently at their father, giggling, chattering about important affairs in their intolerable, shrieking voices. George could never understand why Lois should attempt, as she constantly did, to instil into them awe of their father; his attitude to the children made it impossible that she should succeed. But she kept on trying. The cave-woman again! George would say to himself: "All women are cave-women."
"Have you come to pack?" she asked, with fatigued fretfulness, showing no sign of surprise at his arrival.
"Oh no!" he answered, and implied that in his over-charged existence packing would have to be done when it could, if at all. "I only came in for one second to see if I could root out that straw hat I wore last year."
"Do open the window," she implored grievously.
"It is open."
"Both sides?"
"Yes."
"Well, open it more."
"It's wide open."
"Both sides?"
"Yes."
"It's so stuffy in this room," she complained, expelling much breath.
It was stuffy in the room. The room was too full of the multitudinous belongings and furniture of wife and husband. It was too small for its uses. The pair, unduly thrown together, needed two rooms. But the house could not yield them two rooms, though from the outside it had an air of spaciousness. The space was employed in complying with custom, in imitating the disposition of larger houses, and in persuading the tenant that he was as good as his betters. There was a basement, because the house belonged to the basement era, and because it is simpler to burrow than to erect. On the ground floor were the hall—narrow, and the dining-room—narrow. To have placed the dining-room elsewhere would have been to double the number of stairs between it and the kitchen; moreover, the situation of the dining-room in all such correct houses is immutably fixed by the codeThus the handiest room in the house was occupied during four hours of the twenty-four, and wasted during the remaining twenty. Behind the dining-room was a very small room appointed by the code to be George's 'den.' It would never have been used at all had not George considered it his duty to use it occasionally, and had not Lois at intervals taken a fancy to it because it was not hers.
The whole of the first floor was occupied by the landing, the well of the staircase, and the drawing-room, which last was inevitably shaped in the resemblance of an L. The small back portion of it over George's den was never utilized save by the grand piano and rare pianists. Still, the code demanded that the drawing-room should have this strange appendage, and that a grand piano should reside in it modestly, apologetically, like a shame that cannot be entirely concealed. Nearly every house in Elm Park Road, and every house in scores of miles of other correct streets in the West End, had a drawing-room shaped in the semblance of an L, and a grand piano in the hinterland thereof. The drawing-room, like the dining-room, was occupied during about four hours of the twenty-four, and wasted during the remaining twenty.
The two main floors of the house being in such manner accounted for, the family and its dependents principally lived aloft on the second and third floors. Eight souls slept up there nightly. A miracle of compression!
George had had the house for ten years; he entered it as a bridegroom. He had stayed in it for seven years because the landlord would only confide it to him on lease, and at the end of the seven years he lacked the initiative to leave it. An ugly house, utterly without architectural merit! A strange house for an architect to inhabit! George, however, had never liked it. Before his marriage he had discovered a magnificent house in Fitzroy Square, a domestic masterpiece of the Adams period, exquisitely designed without and within, huge rooms and many rooms, lovely ceilings, a forged-iron stair-rail out of Paradise; a house appreciably nearer to the centre than the one in Elm Park Road, and with a lower rental. George would have taken the house, had not Lois pointed out to him its fatal disadvantage, which had escaped him, namely, that people simply did not live in Fitzroy Square. Instantly Lois entered Fitzroy Square, George knew himself for a blind fool. Of course the house was impossible. He was positively ashamed to show her the house. She admitted that it was beautiful. So ElmPark Road was finally selected, Elm Park Road being a street where people could, and in fact did, live. It was astounding how Lois, with her small and fragmentary knowledge of London, yet knew, precisely and infallibly, by instinct, by the sound of the names of the thoroughfares, by magic diabolical or celestial, what streets were inhabitable and what were not. And something in George agreed with her.
He now rummaged among hat-boxes beneath the beds, pulled one out, and discovered a straw hat in it.
"Will it do?" he questioned doubtfully.
"Let me look at it."
He approached her and gave her the hat, which she carefully examined, frowning.
"Put it on," she said.
He put it on, and she gazed at him for what seemed to him an unnecessarily long time. His thought was that she liked to hold him under her gaze.
"Well?" he exclaimed impatiently.
"It's quite all right," she said. "What's the matter with it? It makes you look about fourteen." He felt envy in her voice. Then she added: "But surely you won't be able to wear that thing to-morrow?"
"Of course not. I only want it for this afternoon.... This sun."
"Oh!" she cried. "I do think it's a shame I can't go to the Opening! It's just my luck."
He considered that she arraigned her luck much too often; he considered that on the whole her luck was decidedly good. But he knew that she had to be humoured. It was her right to be humoured.
"Yes," he said judicially and rather shortly. "I'm sorry too! But what are you going to do about it? If you can't go, you can't. And you know it's absolutely out of the question." As a fact he was glad that her condition made such an excursion impossible for her. She would certainly have been rather a ticklish handful for him at the Opening.
"But I should so haveenjoyedit!" she insisted, with emphasis.
There it was, the thirst for enjoyment, pleasure! The supreme, unslakable thirst! She had always had it, and he had always hardened himself against it—while often, nevertheless, accepting with secret pleasure the satisfactions of her thirst. Thus, for example, in the matter of dancing. Shehad shared to the full in the extraordinary craze for dancing which had held the West End for several years. Owing to her initiative they had belonged to two dancing clubs whose members met weekly in the saloons of the great hotels. The majority of the members were acutely tedious to George, but Lois was quite uncritical, save on the main point; she divided the members into good dancers and bad dancers. George was a pretty good dancer. He liked dancing. Membership of these clubs involved expense, it interfered with his sleep, it made his early mornings more like defeats than triumphs, it prevented him from duly reading and sketching. But he liked dancing. While resenting the compulsion to outrage his conscience, he enjoyed the sin. What exasperated him was Lois's argument that that kind of thing "did him good" professionally, and was indeed essential to the career of a rising or risen young architect, and that also it was good for his health and his mind. He wished that she would not so unconvincingly pretend that self-indulgence was not what it was. These pretences, however, seemed to be a necessity of her nature. She reasoned similarly about the dinners and theatre-parties which they gave and attended. Next to dancing she adored dinners and theatre-parties. She would sooner eat a bad dinner in company anywhere than a good dinner quietly at home; she would far sooner go to a bad play than to none at all; she was in fact never bored in the theatre or in the music-hall. Never!
Once, by misfortune—as George privately deemed—he had got a small job (erection of a dwelling-house at Hampstead) through a dinner. Lois had never forgotten it, and she would adduce the trifle again and again as evidence of the sanity of her ideas about social life. George really did not care for designing houses; they were not worth the trouble; he habitually thought in public edifices and the palaces of kings, nobles, and plutocrats of taste. Moreover, his commission on the house would not have kept his own household in being for a month—and yet the owner, while obviously proud to be the patron of the celebrated prodigy George Cannon, had the air of doing George Cannon a favour!
And so her ambition, rather than his, had driven them both ruthlessly on. Both were overpressed, but George considerably more than Lois. Lois was never, in ordinary times, really tired. Dinners, teas, even lunches, restaurants, theatres, music-halls, other people's houses, clubs, dancing, changing clothes, getting into autos and taxis and gettingout of autos and taxis, looking at watches, writing down engagements, going to bed with a sigh at the lateness of the hour, waking up fatigued to the complexities of the new day—she coped admirably with it all. She regarded it as natural; she regarded it as inevitable and proper. She enjoyed it. She wanted it, and that which she wanted she must have. Yet her attitude to George was almost invariably one of deep solicitude for him. She would look at him with eyes troubled and anxious for his welfare. When they were driving to a dance which he had no desire to attend, she would put her arm in his and squeeze his arm and murmur: "Coco, I don'tlikeyou working so hard." (Coco was her pet name for him, a souvenir of Paris.)
He acknowledged that, having chosen her rôle, she played it well. She made him comfortable. She was a good housekeeper, and a fair organizer generally. She knew how to be well served. He thought that her manner to servants was often inexcusable, but she "kept" her servants, and they would "do anything" for her. Further, except that she could not shine in conversation, she was a good hostess. She never made mistakes, never became muddled, never forgot. Of course she had friends to whom he was indifferent or perhaps slightly hostile, but she was entitled to her friends, as he to his. And she was a good mother. Stranger still, though she understood none of the arts and had no logical taste, she possessed a gift of guessing or of divination which, in all affairs relating to the home, was the practical equivalent of genuine taste. George had first noticed this faculty in her when she put a thousand pounds of her money to a thousand pounds of his stepfather's and they began to buy furniture. The house was beautifully furnished, and she had done her share. And in the alterations, additions, and replacements which for several years she had the habit of springing upon him, she rarely offended him. Still, he knew indubitably that she had not taste,—anyhow in his sense of the term,—and would never, never acquire it. An astonishing creature! He had not finished being astonished at her. In some respects he had not even come to a decision about her. For instance, he suspected that she had "no notion of money," but he could not be sure. She did what she liked with her own income, which was about two hundred a year; that is to say, she clothed herself out of it. Her household accounts were unknown to him; he had once essayed to comprehend them, but had drawn back affrighted.
"Well," she said plaintively. "Now you're here, I think you might sit a bit with me. It's most awfully lonely for me."
"I can't possibly," he said, with calm. "I have to rush off to the club to see Davids about that business."
She ignored his inescapable duties! It was nothing to her that he had a hundred affairs to arrange before his night-journey to the north. She wanted him to sit with her. Therefore she thought that he ought to sit with her, and she would be conscious of a grievance if he did not. 'Lonely!' Because the children were going out for an hour or so! Besides, even if it was lonely, facts were facts, and destiny was destiny and had to be borne.
"What business?"
"You know."
"Oh! That!... Well, can't you go after tea?"
Incurable!
"Here, lass!" he said, with a laugh. "If I stop arguing here I shall miss him."
He bent down, and prepared his lips to kiss her. He smiled superiorly, indulgently. He was the stronger. She defeated him sometimes; she gravely defeated him in the general arrangement and colour of their joint existence; but he was the stronger. She had known it for over ten years. They had had two tremendous, critical, highly dangerous battles. He had won them both. Lois had wanted to be married in Paris. He had been ready to agree until suddenly it occurred to him that French legal formalities might necessitate an undue disclosure as to his parentage and the bigamy of which his mother had been a victim. He refused absolutely to be married in Paris. He said: "You're English and I'm English, and the proper place for us to be married is England." There were good counter-arguments, but he would not have them. Curiously, at this very period, news came from his stepfather of his father's death in America. He kept it to himself. Again, on the night itself of their marriage, he had said to her: "Now give me that revolver you've got." At her protesting refusal he had said: "My wife is not going about with any revolver. Not if I know it!" He was playful but determined. He startled her, for the altercation lasted two hours. On the other hand he had never said a word about the photograph of Jules Defourcambault, and had never seen it. Somewhere, in some mysterious fastness, the mysterious woman kept it.
His lips were close to hers, and his eyes to her eyes. Mostpersons called her eyes golden, but to him they were just yellow. They had an infinitesimal cast, to which nobody ever referred. They were voluptuous eyes. He examined her face. She was still young; but the fine impressive imprint of existence was upon her features, and the insipid freshness had departed. She blinked, acquiescent. Her eyes changed, melting. He could almost see into her brain, and watch there the impulse of repentance for an unreasonable caprice, and the intense resolve to think in the future only of her husband's welfare. She was like that.... She could be an angel.... He knew that he was hard. He guessed that he might be inordinately hard He would bear people down. Why had he not been touched by her helpless condition? She was indeed touching as she lay. She wanted to keep him near her and she could not. She wanted acutely to go to the north, and she was imprisoned. She would have to pass the night alone, and the next night alone. Danger and great suffering lay in front of her. And she was she; she was herself, with all her terrific instincts. She could not alter herself. Did she not merit compassion? Still,he must go to his club.
He kissed her tenderly. She half lifted her head, and kissed him exactly as she kissed his children, like a giantess, and as though she was the ark of wisdom from everlasting, and he a callow boy whose safety depended upon her sagacious, loving direction.
From the top of the flight of stairs leading from the ground floor, George, waiting till it was over, witnessed the departure of his family for the afternoon promenade. A prodigious affair! The parlourmaid (a delightful creature who was, unfortunately, soon to make an excellent match above her station) amiably helped the nursemaid to get the perambulator down the steps. The parlourmaid wore her immutable uniform, and the nursemaid wore her immutable uniform. Various things had to be packed into the perambulator, and then little Lois had to be packed into it—not because she could not walk, but because it was not desirable for her to arrive at the playground tired. Nursey's sunshade was undiscoverable, and little Laurencine's little sunshade had to be retrieved from underneath little Lois in the depths of the perambulator. Nursey's book had fallen on the steps. Then the tiny but elaborate perambulator of Laurencine's doll had to go down the steps, and the doll had to be therein ensconced under Laurencine's own direction, and Laurencine's sunshade had to be opened, and Laurencine had to prove to the maidsthat she could hold the sunshade in one hand and push the doll's perambulator with the other. Finally, the procession of human beings and vehicles moved, munitioned, provisioned, like a caravan setting forth into the desert, the parlourmaid amiably waving adieux.
George thought: "I support all that. It all depends on me. I have brought it all into existence." And his reflections embraced Lois upstairs, and the two colleagues of the parlourmaid in the kitchen, and the endless apparatus of the house, and the people at his office and the apparatus there, and the experiences that awaited him on the morrow, and all his responsibilities, and all his apprehensions for the future. And he was amazed and dismayed by the burden which almost unwittingly he bore night and day. But he felt too that it was rather fine. He felt that he was in the midst of life.
As he was cranking his car, which he had left unattended at the kerb, Mrs. Buckingham Smith's magnificent car driven by her magnificent chauffeur, swept in silence up to the door and sweetly stopped. George's car was a very little one, and he was his own chauffeur, and had to walk home from the garage when he had done with it. The contemplation of Buck Smith's career showed George that there are degrees of success. Buck Smith received a thousand pounds for a portrait (in the French manner of painting)—and refused commissions at that. Buck Smith had a kind of palace in Melbury Road. By the side of Buck Smith. George was a struggling semi-failure. Mrs. Buck Smith, the lady whom George had first glimpsed in the foyer of a theatre, was a superb Jewess whom Buck had enticed from the stage. George did not like her because she was apt, in ecstasy, to froth at the mouth, and for other reasons; but she was one of his wife's most intimate friends. Lois, usually taciturn, would chatter with Adah for hours.
"I thought I'd come and see Lois," said Mrs. Buck, effulgently smiling, as George handed her out of the car. "How is the dear thing? You just flying off?"
"You'll do her all the good in the world," George replied. "I can't stop. I have to leave town to-night, and I'm full up."
"Oh yes! The Opening! How perfectly splendid!" Tiny bubbles showed between her glorious lips. "What a shame it is poor Lois isn't able to go!"
"Yes," said George. "But look here! Don't you go and tell her so. That's quite the wrong tack."
"I see! I see!" said Mrs. Buck, gazing at him as one who was capable of subtle comprehensions. "By the way," she added, as she turned to mount the steps, "I ran across Everard Lucas at the Berkeley to-day. Lunching there. I said I was coming here. He told me to tell you, if I saw you, that old Mr. Haim or Home or some such name was dead. He said you'd be interested."
"By Jove!" George ejaculated. "Is he? Haven't seen him for years and years."