Roland Whately: A Novel

CHAPTER XII

MARSTON AND MARSTON “She’s going! what shall I do?” he asked. For answer Marston took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote on it: “Meet me at the Café des Colombes to-night at eight-thirty.” “Now, walk up to the counter and pretend to choose a cake; if she wants to see any more of you she will drop her handkerchief, or purse, or at any rate give you an opportunity of speaking to her; if she does, slip this note into her hand. If she doesn’t, you can buy me an éclair, and thank your lucky stars that you’ve been preserved from making a most abandoned fool of yourself.” Roland was in such a hurry to get to the counter that he tripped against a table and only saved himself from falling by gripping violently the shoulder of an elderly bourgeois. By the time he had completed his apologies his charmer had very nearly reached the door. “It’s all up,” he told himself; “she thinks me a clumsy fool, that it’s not worth her while to worry about. I ought to have gone straight up to her at once”; and he followed with dejected eyes her progress towards the door. She was carrying in one hand an umbrella and in the other a little velvet bag. As she raised her hand to open the door, the bag slipped from her fingers and fell upon the floor. There were three persons nearer to the bag than Roland, but before even a hand had been stretched out to it he had precipitated himself forward, had picked it up and was handing it to the lady. She smiled at him with gracious gratitude. So far all had gone splendidly. Then he began to fumble. The note was in the other hand, and in the flurry of the moment he did not know how to maneuver the bag and the note into the same hand. First of all, he tried to change the bag from the right hand to the left. But his forefinger and thumb were so closely engaged with the note that the remaining three fingers failed to grasp the handle of the bag. He made a furious dive and caught the bag in his right hand just before it reached the floor. Panic seized him. He lost all sense of the proprieties. He handed the bag straight to her, and then realizing, before she had had time to take it from him, that somehow or other the note also had to come into her possession, he offered it to her between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand with less secrecy than he would have displayed in giving a tip to a waiter. The sudden change of the lady’s expression from inviting kindliness to a surprised affronted indignation threw him into so acute a fever of embarrassment that once again he endeavored to move the bag from the right hand to the left. Again he fumbled, but with a different result. He piloted the bag successfully into the lady’s hands, but allowed the note to slip from between his fingers. It fell face upwards on the floor. Several ways of escape were open to him. He might have affected unconcern, and either picked up the piece of paper or left it where it lay. He might have kicked the note away and walked forward to open the door. He might have placed his foot on the note till the attention of the room was once again directed to its separate interests. None of these things, however, did he do. He did what was natural for him in such an unexpected situation. He did nothing. He stood quite still and gazed at the note as it lay there startlingly white against the black tiles of the floor. The eyes of everyone in the room appeared to be directed towards it. The features of the startled lady assumed an expression of horrified amazement. Two waitresses leaned over the counter in undisguised excitement; another stopped dead with a tray in her hand to survey the incriminating document. The fat gentleman against whom Roland had collided began to make some unpleasantly loud remarks to his companion. An old woman leaned forward and asked the room in general what was happening. From a far corner came the horrible suppression of a giggle. The lady herself, who was, as a matter of fact, perfectly respectable, though she liked to be thought otherwise, and had dropped her bag accidentally, was the first to recover her composure. She fixed on Roland a glance of which as a combination of hatred and contempt he had never seen the equal, turned quickly and walked out of the restaurant. The sudden bang of the door behind her broke the tension. The various spectators of this entertaining interlude returned to their ices and their chocolate, the waitresses resumed their duties, the patron of the establishment fussed up the center of the room, and Gerald, who had watched the scene with intense if slightly nervous amusement, left his table, picked up the note, and taking Roland by the arm, led him out of the public notice, and listened to his friend’s solemn vow that never again, under any circumstances, would he be induced to open negotiations with any woman, be she never so lovely, who did not by her dress, her manner and the places she frequented proclaim unquestionably her profession. It was hardly surprising that as a result of these adventures a more developed, more independent Roland returned at the end of his six months’ tour, a Roland, moreover, with a different attitude to himself, his future, his surroundings, who was prepared to despise the chrysalis from which he had emerged. His school-days appeared trivial. “What a deal of fuss we made about things that didn’t really matter at all,” he said to Gerald as they leaned over the taffrail and watched the dim line that was England grow distinct, its gray slowly whitening as they drew near. “What a fuss about one’s place in form, one’s position in the house; whether one ragged or whether one didn’t rag. I can see all those masters, with their solemn faces, thinking I had perjured my immortal soul because I had walked out with a girl. They really thought it mattered.” How puny it became in comparison with this magnificent gamble of finance! What were marks in an exam, to set against a turnover of several thousands? Duty, privilege, responsibility: what had they been but the brightly colored bricks with which children play in the nursery; and as for the fret and fever concerning their arrangement, where could be found an equivalent for the serious absorption of a child? In the same way he thought of his home and the environment of his boyhood. What a gray world it had been! How monotonous, how arid! He remembered sitting as a child at the bars of his nursery window watching the stream of business men hurrying to their offices in the morning, their newspapers tucked under their arms. They had seemed to him like marionettes. The front door had opened. Husband and wife had exchanged a brusque embrace; the male marionette had trotted down the steps, had paused at the gate to wave his hand, and as he had turned into the street the front door had closed behind him. Always the same thing every day. And then in the evening the same stream of tired listless men hurrying home, their bulky morning paper exchanged for the slim evening newssheet. They would trot up the white stone steps, the front door would swing open, again in the porch the marionettes would kiss. It had amused him as a child, this dumb show, but as a boy he had come to hate it—and to fear it also. For he knew that this was the life that awaited him if he failed to turn to account his superior opportunities. The fear of degenerating into a suburban business man had been always the strongest goad to his ambition. But now he could look that fear confidently in the face. He had won through out of that world of routine and friction and small economies into one of enterprise and daring and romance. And April: he had not thought very much about her during his six months’ absence; she belonged to the world he had outgrown, a landmark on his road of adventure. And it was disconcerting to find on his return that she did not regard their relationship in this light. Roland had grown accustomed to the fleeting relationships of school that at the start of a new term could be resumed or dropped at will. He had not realized that it would be different now; that six months in Belgium were not the equivalent of a seven weeks’ summer holiday; that he would be returning to an unaltered society in which he would be expected to fulfill the obligations incurred by him before his departure. It was the reversal of the Rip Van Winkle legend. Roland had altered and was returning to a world that was precisely as he had left it. Nothing had changed. On the first evening he went round to visit April, and there was Mrs. Curtis as she had always been, sitting before the fire, her hands crossed over her bony bosom. She welcomed him as though he had been spending a week-end in Kent. “I’m so glad to see you, Roland, and have you had a nice time? It must be pleasant for you to think of how soon the cricket season will be starting. I was saying to our little April only yesterday: ‘How Roland will be looking forward to it.’ What club are you thinking of joining?” “The Marstons said something to me about my joining their local club.” “But how jolly that would be! You’ll like that, won’t you?” Her voice rose and fell as it had risen and fallen as long as Roland’s memory had knowledge of her. The same clock ticked over the same mantelpiece; above the table was the same picture of a cow grazing beside a stream; the curtains, once red, had not faded to a deeper brown; the carpet was no more threadbare; the same books lined the shelves that rose on either side of the fire-place; in the bracket beside the window was the calf-bound set of William Morris that had been presented to April as a prize; on the rosewood table lay yesterday’s copy of The Times . Mrs. Curtis and her setting were eternal in the scheme of things. April, too, was as he had left her. Indeed, her life in his absence had been a pause. She had no personal existence outside Roland. She had waited for his return, thinking happily of the future. She had gone to school every morning at a quarter to nine and had returned every evening at half-past five. During the Christmas holidays she had read Nicholas Nickleby and Vanity Fair . She was now halfway through Little Dorrit . At the end of the Michaelmas term she had gained a promotion into a higher form and in her new form she had acquitted herself creditably, finishing halfway up the class. At home she had performed cheerfully the various duties that had been allotted to her. But she had regarded those six months as an interlude in her real life; that was Roland’s now. Happiness could only come to her through him; and, being sure of happiness, she was not fretful nor impatient during the delay. She did not expect nor indeed ask of life violent transports either of ecstasy or sorrow. Her ideas of romance were domestic enough. To love and to be loved faithfully, to have children, to keep a home happy, a home to which her friends would be glad to come—this seemed to her as much as any woman had the right to need. She felt that she would be able to make Roland happy. The prospect was full of a quiet but deep contentment. Roland had no opportunity of speaking to her on that first evening; Mrs. Curtis, as usual, monopolized the conversation. But he sat near to April. From time to time their eyes met and she smiled at him. And the next morning when he came round to see her she ran eagerly to meet him. “It’s lovely to have you back again,” she said; “you can’t think how I’ve been looking forward to it!” Roland was embarrassed by her eagerness. He did not know what to say and stood beside her, smiling stupidly. She pouted. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she said. And a moment later: “I shouldn’t have thought, after six months, you’d have needed asking!” Roland met her reproach with a stammered apology. “I felt shy. I thought you might have got tired of me, all that long time.” “Oh, but Roland, how horrid of you!” And she moved away from him. But he took her in his arms and made love prettily to her and consoled her. “I daresay,” she said, “I daresay. But you didn’t write to me so very often.” “I wanted to, but I thought your mother wouldn’t like it.” “Oh, but, Roland, that’s no excuse; she expected you to. There’s an understanding.” Then with a quiet smile: “Do you remember the row we had about that understanding?” “I was a beast.” “No, you weren’t; I was a silly.” “I was miserable about it.” “So was I. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought you’d never speak to me again, that you’d gone off in a huff, like the heroes in the story books.” “But the heroes always come back in the story books.” “I know, and that’s just why I thought that very likely you wouldn’t in real life. I was so unhappy I cried myself to sleep.” “We were sillies, weren’t we?” “But it was worth it,” said April. “Worth it?” “Don’t you remember how nice you were to me when we made it up?” They laughed and kissed, and the minutes passed pleasantly. But yet their love-making fell short of Roland’s ideal of love. It was jolly; it was comfortable; but it was little more. He was not thrilled when the back of his hand brushed accidentally against hers; their kisses were hardly a lyric ecstasy. Even when he held her in his arms he was conscious of himself, outside their embrace, watching it, saying to himself: “Those two are having a good time together,” and being outside it he was envious, jealous of a happiness he did not share. It was someone else who was holding April’s hand, someone else’s head that bent to her slim shoulder. It was an exciting experience. But then had it not been exciting to walk across Hampstead Heath on a Sunday evening and observe the feverish ardors of the prostrate lovers? He despised himself; he reminded himself that he was extraordinarily lucky to have a girl such as April in love with him; he was unworthy of her. Was not Ralph eating out his heart with envy? And yet he was dissatisfied. The Curtises’ house had become a prison for him; a soft, warm prison, with cushions and shaded lights and gentle voices, but it was a prison none the less. He was still able to leave it at will, but the time was coming when that freedom would be denied him. In a year or two their understanding would be an engagement; the engagement would drift to marriage. For the rest of his life he would be enclosed in that warm, clammy atmosphere. There was a conspiracy at work against him. His father had already begun to speak of his marriage as an accomplished fact. His mother was chiefly glad he was doing well in business because success there would make an early marriage possible. On all sides inducements were being offered him to marry—marriage with its corollary to settle down. Marry and settle down, when he was still under twenty!—before he had begun to live! CHAPTER XII MARSTON AND MARSTON D URING the 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 organization 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 learned 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 armor. When Carus Evans had said to him for the third day running, “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’d 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 there always 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 times to 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 recognized 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 maneuvering 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 realize 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 with pleasure, “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 realize 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, coördinated their work. A one-man business: that was Mr. Marston’s program. 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 travelers’ 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 somber, 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. CHAPTER XIII LILITH OF OLD R OLAND made 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 patronize 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 the end 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 shriveled, 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 honor, “I don’t think they like each other much.” “How do you know?” Roland asked. “They are always quarreling. 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, realizing 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 color of people’s eyes,” he pleaded. “I can’t remember the color of my mother’s or my aunt’s, or——” “Quick, shut your eyes; what’s the color 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 neighbor. 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, and between 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 learned 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 luster of her eyes? And, looking at the meager, 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 neighboring 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 apologize 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 you have 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 savored 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 learned 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—the sort 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 criticizing 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, of whom 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 realized 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 endeavored 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 analyze 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 glamor 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-colored 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 Muriel standing 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 past second 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 fielding side 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 débris 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 attributed to 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 endeavoring 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 recognized 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 quivering silence, 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.

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