Kitabı oku: «These Twain», sayfa 11

"Edwin," said Hilda very curtly and severely, "don't be so clumsy. Janet has to go at once. Mr. Orgreave is very ill-very ill indeed. She only came to oblige us." Then she passionately kissed Janet.

It was like a thunderclap in the room. Johnnie and Tom confirmed the news. Of the rest only Tom's wife and Hilda knew. Janet had told Hilda before the music began. Osmond Orgreave had been taken ill between five and six in the afternoon. Dr. Stirling had gone in at once, and pronounced the attack serious. Everything possible was done; even a nurse was obtained instantly, from the Clowes Hospital by the station. From reasons of sentiment, if from no other, Janet would have stayed at home and foregone the musical evening. But those Orgreaves at home had put their heads together and decided that Janet should still go, because without her the entire musical evening would crumble to naught. Here was the true reason of the absence of Mrs. Orgreave and Elaine-both unnecessary to the musical evening. The boys had come, and Tom's wife had come, because, even considered only as an audience, the Orgreave contingent was almost essential to the musical evening. And so Janet, her father's especial favourite and standby, had come, and she had played, and not a word whispered except to Hilda. It was wondrous. It was impressive. All the Orgreaves departed, and the remnant of guests meditated in proud, gratified silence upon the singular fortitude and heroic commonsense that distinguished their part of the world. The musical evening was dramatically over, the refreshments being almost wasted.

VIII

Hilda was climbing on to the wooden-seated chair in the hall to put out the light there when she heard a noise behind the closed door of the kitchen, which she had thought to be empty. She went to the door and pushed it violently open. Not only was the gas flaring away in an unauthorised manner, not only were both servants (theoretically in bed) still up, capless and apronless and looking most curious in unrelieved black, but the adventurous and wicked George was surreptitiously with them, flattering them with his aristocratic companionship, and eating blanc-mange out of a cut-glass dish with a tablespoon. Twice George had been sent to bed. Once the servants had been told to go to bed. The worst of carnivals is that the dregs of the population, such as George, will take advantage of them to rise to the surface and, conscienceless and mischievous, set at defiance the conventions by which society protects itself.

She merely glanced at George; the menace of her eyes was alarming. His lower lip fell; he put down the dish and spoon, and slunk timorously past her on his way upstairs.

Then she said to the servants:

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, encouraging him! Go to bed at once." And as they began nervously to handle the things on the table, she added, more imperiously: "At once! Don't keep me waiting. I'll see to all this."

And they followed George meekly.

She gazed in disgust at the general litter of broken refreshments, symbolising the traditional inefficiency of servants, and extinguished the gas.

The three criminals were somewhat the victims of her secret resentment against Edwin, who, a mere martyrised perambulating stomach, had retired. Edwin had defeated her in the afternoon; and all the evening, in the disposition of the furniture, the evidence of his victory had confronted her. By prompt and brutal action, uncharacteristic of him and therefore mean, he had defeated her. True he had embraced and comforted her tears, but it was the kiss of a conqueror. And then, on the top of that, he had proved his commercial incompetence by making a large bad debt, and his commercial rashness by definitely adopting a scheme of whose extreme danger she was convinced. One part of her mind intellectually knew that he had not wilfully synchronised these events in order to wound her, but another part of her mind felt deeply that he had. She had been staggered by the revelation that he was definitely committed to the project of lithography and the new works. Not one word about the matter had he said to her since their altercation on the night of the reception; and she had imagined that, with his usual indecision, he was allowing it to slide. She scarcely recognised her Edwin. Now she accused him of a malicious obstinacy, not understanding that he was involved in the great machine of circumstance and perhaps almost as much surprised as herself at the movement of events. At any rate she was being beaten once more, and her spirit rebelled. Through all the misfortunes previous to her marriage that spirit, if occasionally cowed, had never been broken. She had sat grim and fierce against even bum-bailiffs in her time. Yes, her spirit rebelled, and the fact that others had known about the Shawport land before she knew made her still more mutinous against destiny. She looked round dazed at the situation. What? The mild Edwin defying and crushing her? It was scarcely conceivable. The tension of her nerves from this cause only was extreme. Add to it the strain of the musical evening, intensified by the calamity at the Orgreaves'!

A bell rang in the kitchen, and all the ganglions of her spinal column answered it. Had Edwin rung? No. It was the front-door.

"Pardon me," said Tertius Ingpen, when she opened. "But all my friends soon learn how difficult it is to get rid of me."

"Come in," she said, liking his tone, which flattered her by assuming her sense of humour.

"As I'm sleeping at the office to-night, I thought I might as well take one or two of my musical instruments after all. So I came back."

"You've been round?" she asked, meaning round to the Orgreaves'.

"Yes."

"What is it, really?"

"Well, it appears to be pericarditis supervening on renal disease. He lost consciousness, you know."

"Yes, I know. But what is pericarditis?"

"Pericarditis is inflammation of the pericardium."

"And what's the pericardium?"

They both smiled faintly.

"The pericardium is the membrane that encloses the heart. I don't mind telling you that I've only just acquired this encyclopædic knowledge from Stirling, – he was there."

"And is it supposed to be very dangerous?"

"I don't know. Doctors never want to tell you anything except what you can find out for yourself."

After a little hesitating pause they went into the drawing-room, where the lights were still burning, and the full disorder of the musical evening persisted, including the cigarette-ash on the carpet. Tertius Ingpen picked up his clarinet case, took out the instrument, examined the mouthpiece lovingly, and with tenderness laid it back.

"Do sit down a moment," said Hilda, sitting limply down. "It's stifling, isn't it?"

"Let me open the window," he suggested politely.

As he returned from the window, he said, pulling his short beard:

"It was wonderful how those Orgreaves went through the musical evening, wasn't it? Makes you proud of being English… I suppose Janet's a great friend of yours?"

His enthusiasm touched her, and her pride in Janet quickened to it. She gave a deliberate, satisfied nod in reply to his question. She was glad to be alone with him in the silence of the house.

"Ed gone to bed?" he questioned, after another little pause.

Already he was calling her husband Ed, and with an affectionate intonation!

She nodded again.

"He stuck it out jolly well," said Ingpen, still standing.

"He brings these attacks on himself," said Hilda, with the calm sententiousness of a good digestion discussing a bad one. She was becoming pleased with herself-with her expensive dress, her position, her philosophy, and her power to hold the full attention of this man.

Ingpen replied, looking steadily at her:

"We bring everything on ourselves."

Then he smiled, as a comrade to another.

She shifted her pose. A desire to discuss Edwin with this man grew in her, for she needed sympathy intensely.

"What do you think of this new scheme of his?" she demanded somewhat self-consciously.

"The new works? Seems all right. But I don't know much about it."

"Well, I'm not so sure." And she exposed her theory of the entire satisfactoriness of their present situation, of the needlessness of fresh risks, and of Edwin's unsuitability for enterprise. "Of course he's splendid," she said. "But he'll never push. I can look at him quite impartially-I mean in all those things."

Ingpen murmured as it were dreamily:

"Have you had much experience of business yourself?"

"It depends what you call business. I suppose you know I used to keep a boarding-house." She was a little defiant.

"No, I didn't know. I may have heard vaguely. Did you make it pay?"

"It did pay in the end."

"But not at first? … Any disasters?"

She could not decide whether she ought to rebuff the cross-examiner or not. His manner was so objective, so disinterested, so innocent, so disarming, that in the end she smiled uncertainly, raising her thick eyebrows.

"Oh yes," she said bravely.

"And who came to the rescue?" Ingpen proceeded.

"Edwin did."

"I see," said Ingpen, still dreamily.

"I believe you knew all about it," she remarked, having flushed.

"Pardon me! Almost nothing."

"Of course you take Edwin's side."

"Are we talking man to man?" he asked suddenly, in a new tone.

"Most decidedly!" She rose to the challenge.

"Then I'll tell you my leading theory," he said in a soft, polite voice. "The proper place for women is the harem."

"Mr. Ingpen!"

"No, no!" he soothed her, but firmly. "We're talking man to man. I can whisper sweet nothings to you, if you prefer it, but I thought we were trying to be honest. I hold a belief. I state it. I may be wrong, but I hold that belief. You can persecute me for my belief if you like. That's your affair. But surely you aren't afraid of an idea! If you don't like the mere word, let's call it zenana. Call it the drawing-room and kitchen."

"So we're to be kept to our sphere!"

"Now don't be resentful. Naturally you're to be kept to your own sphere. If Edwin began dancing around in the kitchen, you'd soon begin to talk about his sphere. You can't have the advantages of married life for nothing-neither you nor he. But some of you women nowadays seem to expect them gratis. Let me tell you, everything has to be paid for on this particular planet. I'm a bachelor. I've often thought about marrying, of course. I might get married some day. You never know your luck. If I do-"

"You'll keep your wife in the harem, no doubt! And she'll have to accept without daring to say a word all the risks you choose to take."

"There you are again!" he said. "This notion that marriage ought to be the end of risks for a woman is astonishingly rife, I find. Very curious! Very curious!" He seemed to address the wall. "Why, it's the beginning of them. Doesn't the husband take risks?"

"He chooses his own. He doesn't have business risks thrust upon him by his wife."

"Doesn't he? What about the risk of finding himself tied for life to an inefficient housekeeper? That's a bit of a business risk, isn't it? I've known more than one man let in for it."

"And you've felt so sorry for him!"

"No, not specially. You must run risks. When you've finished running risks you're dead and you ought to be buried. If I was a wife I should enjoy running a risk with my husband. I swear I shouldn't want to shut myself up in a glass case with him out of all the draughts! Why, what are we all alive for?"

The idea of the fineness of running risks struck her as original. It challenged her courage, and she began to meditate.

"Yes," she murmured. "So you sleep at the office sometimes?"

"A certain elasticity in one's domestic arrangements." He waved a hand, seeming to pooh-pooh himself lightly. Then, quickly changing his mood, he bent and said good-night, but not quite with the saccharine artificiality of his first visit-rather with honest, friendly sincerity, in which were mingled both thanks and appreciation. Hilda jumped up responsively. And, the clarinet-case under his left arm, and the fiddle-case in his left hand, leaving the right arm free, Ingpen departed.

She did not immediately go to bed. Now that Ingpen was gone she perceived that though she had really said little in opposition to Edwin's scheme, he had at once assumed that she was a strong opponent of it. Hence she must have shown her feelings far too openly at the first mention of the affair before anybody had left. This annoyed her. Also the immense injustice of nearly all Ingpen's argument grew upon her moment by moment. She was conscious of a grudge against him, even while greatly liking him. But she swore that she would never show the grudge, and that he should never suspect it. To the end she would play a man's part in the man-to-man discussion. Moreover her anger against Edwin had not decreased. Nevertheless, a sort of zest, perhaps an angry joy, filled her with novel and intoxicating sensations. Let the scheme of the new works go forward! Let it fail! Let it ruin them! She would stand in the breach. She would show the whole world that no ordeal could lower her head. She had had enough of being the odalisque and the queen, reclining on the soft couch of security. Her nostrils scented life on the wind… Then she heard a door close upstairs, and began at last rapidly, as it were cruelly, to put out the lights.

IX

The incubus and humiliations of a first-class bilious attack are not eternal. Edwin had not retired very long before the malignant phase of the terrible malady passed inevitably, by phenomena according with all clinical experience, into the next phase. And the patient, who from being chiefly a stomach, had now become chiefly a throbbing head, lay on his pillow exhausted but once more capable of objective thought. His resentment against his wife on account of her gratuitous disbelief in his business faculty, and on account of her interference in a matter that did not concern her, flickered up into new flame. He was absolutely innocent. She was absolutely guilty; no excuse existed or could be invented for her rude and wounding attitude. He esteemed Tertius Ingpen, bachelor, the most fortunate of men… Women-unjust, dishonourable, unintelligent, unscrupulous, giggling, pleasure-loving! Their appetite for pleasure was infantile and tigerish. He had noticed it growing in Hilda. Previous to marriage he had regarded Hilda as combining the best feminine with the best masculine qualities. In many ways she had exhibited the comforting straightforward characteristics of the male. But since marriage her mental resemblance to a man had diminished daily, and now she was the most feminine woman he had ever met, in the unsatisfactory sense of the word. Women … Still, the behaviour of Janet and Hilda during the musical evening had been rather heroic. Impossible to dismiss them as being exclusively of the giggling race! They had decided to play a part, and they had played it with impressive fortitude… And the house of the Orgreaves-was it about to fall? He divined that it was about to fall. No death had so far occurred in the family, which had seemed to be immune through decades and forever. He wondered what would have happened to the house of Orgreave in six months' time… Then he went back into the dark origins of his bilious attack… And then he was at inexcusable Hilda again.

At length he heard her on the landing.

She entered the bedroom, and quickly he shut his eyes. He felt unpleasantly through his eyelids that she had turned up the gas. Then she was close to him, sat down on the edge of the bed. She asked him a question, calmly, as to occurrences since his retirement. He nodded an affirmative.

"Your forehead's all broken out," she said, moving away.

In a few moments he was aware of the delicious, soothing, heavenly application to his forehead of a handkerchief drenched in eau de cologne and water. The compress descended upon his forehead with the infinite gentleness of an endearment and the sudden solace of a reprieve. He made faint, inarticulate noises.

The light was extinguished for his ease.

He murmured weakly:

"Are you undressed already?"

"No," she said quietly. "I can undress all right in the dark."

He opened his eyes, and could dimly see her moving darkly about, brushing her hair, casting garments. Then she came towards him, a vague whiteness against the gloom, and, bending, felt for his face, and kissed him. She kissed him with superb and passionate violence; she drew his life out of him, and poured in her own. The tremendous kiss seemed to prove that there is no difference between love and hate. It contained everything-surrender, defiance, anger and tenderness.

Neither of them spoke. The kiss dominated and assuaged him. Its illogicalness overthrew him. He could never have kissed like that under such circumstances. It was a high and bold gesture. It expressed and transmitted confidence. She had explained nothing, justified nothing, made no charge, asked no forgiveness. She had just confronted him with one unarguable fact. And it was the only fact that mattered. His pessimism about marriage lifted. If his spirit was splendidly romantic enough to match hers, marriage remained a feasible state. And he threw away logic and the past, and in a magic vision saw that success in marriage was an affair of goodwill and the right tone. With the whole force of his heart he determined to succeed in marriage. And in the mighty resolve marriage presented itself to him as really rather easy after all.

CHAPTER X
THE ORGREAVE CALAMITY

I

On the following Saturday afternoon-that is, six days later-Edwin had unusually been down to the shop after dinner, and he returned home about four o'clock. Ada, hearing his entrance, came into the hall and said:

"Please, sir, missis is over at Miss Orgreave's and will ye please go over?"

"Where's Master George?"

"In missis's own room, sir."

"All right."

The "mistress's own room" was the new nomenclature adopted by the kitchen, doubtless under suggestion, for the breakfast-room or boudoir. Edwin opened the door and glanced in. George, apparently sketching, sat at his mother's desk, with the light falling over his right shoulder.

He looked up quickly in self-excuse:

"Mother said I could! Mother said I could!"

For the theory of the special sanctity of the boudoir had mysteriously established itself in the house during the previous eight or ten days. George was well aware that even Edwin was not entitled to go in and out as he chose.

"Keep calm, sonny," said Edwin, teasing him.

With permissible and discreet curiosity he glanced from afar at the desk, its upper drawers and its pigeon-holes. Obviously it was very untidy. Its untidiness gave him sardonic pleasure, because Hilda was ever implying, or even stating, that she was a very tidy woman. He remembered that many years ago Janet had mentioned orderliness as a trait of the wonderful girl, Hilda Lessways. But he did not personally consider that she was tidy; assuredly she by no means reached his standard of tidiness, which standard indeed she now and then dismissed as old-maidish. Also, he was sardonically amused by the air of importance and busyness which she put on when using the desk and the room; her household accounts, beheld at a distance, were his wicked joy. He saw a bluish envelope lying untidily on the floor between the desk and the fireplace, and he picked it up. It had been addressed to "Mrs. George Cannon, 59 Preston Street, Brighton," and readdressed in a woman's hand to "Mrs. Clayhanger, Trafalgar Road, Bursley." Whether the handwriting of the original address was masculine or feminine he could not decide. The envelope had probably contained only a bill or a circular. Nevertheless he felt at once inimically inquisitive towards the envelope. Without quite knowing it he was jealous of all Hilda's past life up to her marriage with him. After a moment, reflecting that she had made no mention of a letter, he dropped the envelope superciliously, and it floated to the ground.

"I'm going to Lane End House," he said.

"Can I come?"

"No."

II

The same overhanging spirit of a great event which had somehow justified him in being curt to the boy, rendered him self-conscious and furtive as he stood in the porch of the Orgreaves, waiting for the door to open. Along the drive that curved round the oval lawn under the high trees were wheel-marks still surviving from the previous day. The house also survived; the curtains in all the windows, and the plants or the pieces of furniture between the curtains, were exactly as usual. Yet the solid building and its contents had the air of an illusion.

A servant appeared.

"Good afternoon, Selina."

He had probably never before called her by name, but to-day his self-consciousness impelled him to do uncustomary things.

"Good afternoon, sir," said Selina, whose changeless attire ignored even the greatest events. And it was as if she had said:

"Ah, sir! To what have we come!"

She too was self-conscious and furtive.

Aloud she said:

"Miss Orgreave and Mrs. Clayhanger are upstairs, sir. I'll tell Miss Orgreave."

Coughing nervously, he went into the drawing-room, the large obscure room, crowded with old furniture and expensive new furniture, with books, knickknacks, embroidery, and human history, in which he had first set eyes on Hilda. It was precisely the same as it had been a few days earlier; absolutely nothing had been changed, and yet now it had the archæological and forlorn aspect of a museum.

He dreaded the appearance of Janet and Hilda. What could he say to Janet, or she to him? But he was a little comforted by the fact that Hilda had left a message for him to join them.

On the previous Tuesday Osmond Orgreave had died, and within twenty-four hours Mrs. Orgreave was dead also. On the Friday they were buried together. To-day the blinds were up again; the funereal horses with their artificially curved necks had already dragged other corpses to the cemetery; the town existed as usual; and the family of Orgreave was scattered once more. Marian, the eldest daughter, had not been able to come at all, because her husband was seriously ill. Alicia Hesketh, the youngest daughter, far away in her large house in Devonshire, had not been able to come at all, because she was hourly expecting her third child; nor would Harry, her husband, leave her. Charlie, the doctor at Ealing, had only been able to run down for the funeral, because, his partner having broken his leg, the whole work of the practice was on his shoulders. And to-day Tom, the solicitor, was in his office exploring the financial side of his father's affairs; Johnnie was in the office of Orgreave and Sons, busy with the professional side of his father's affairs; Jimmie, who had made a sinister marriage, was nobody knew precisely where; Tom's wife had done what she could and gone home; Jimmie's wife had never appeared; Elaine, Marian's child, was shopping at Hanbridge for Janet; and Janet remained among her souvenirs. An epoch was finished, and the episode that concluded it, in its strange features and its swiftness, resembled a vast hallucination.

Certain funerals will obsess a whole town. And the funeral of Mr. and Mrs. Osmond Orgreave might have been expected to do so. Not only had their deaths been almost simultaneous, but they had been preceded by superficially similar symptoms, though the husband had died of pericarditis following renal disease, and the wife of hyperæmia of the lungs following increasingly frequent attacks of bronchial catarrh. The phenomena had been impressive, and rumour had heightened them. Also Osmond Orgreave for half a century had been an important and celebrated figure in the town; architecturally a large portion of the new parts of it were his creation. Yet the funeral had not been one of the town's great feverish funerals. True, the children would have opposed anything spectacular; but had municipal opinion decided against the children, they would have been compelled to yield. Again and again prominent men in the town had as it were bought their funeral processions in advance by the yard-processions in which their families, willing or not, were reduced to the rôle of stewards.

Tom and Janet, however, had ordained that nobody whatever beyond the family should be invited to the funeral, and there had been no sincere protest from outside.

The fact was that Osmond Orgreave had never related himself to the crowd. He was not a Freemason; he had never been President of the Society for the Prosecution of Felons; he had never held municipal office; he had never pursued any object but the good of his family. He was a particularist. His charm was kept chiefly for his own home. And beneath the cordiality of his more general connections, there had always been a subtle reservation-on both sides. He was admired for his cleverness and his distinction, liked where he chose to be liked, but never loved save by his own kin. Further, he had a name for being "pretty sharp" in business. Clients had had prolonged difficulties with him-Edwin himself among them. The town had made up its mind about Osmond Orgreave, and the verdict, as with most popular verdicts, was roughly just so far as it went, but unjust in its narrowness. The laudatory three-quarters of a column in the Signal and the briefer effusive notice in the new half-penny morning paper, both reflected, for those with perceptions delicate enough to understand, the popular verdict. And though Edwin hated long funerals and the hysteria of a public woe, he had nevertheless a sense of disappointment in the circumstances of the final disappearance of Osmond Orgreave.

The two women entered the room, silently. Hilda looked fierce and protective. Janet Orgreave, pale and in black, seemed very thin. She did not speak. She gave a little nod of greeting.

Edwin, scarcely controlling his voice and his eyes, murmured:

"Good afternoon."

They would not shake hands; the effort would have broken them. All remained standing, uncertainly. Edwin saw before him two girls aged by the accumulation of experience. Janet, though apparently healthy, with her smooth fair skin, was like an old woman in the shell of a young one. Her eyes were dulled, her glance plaintive, her carriage slack. The conscious wish to please had left her, together with her main excuse for being alive. She was over thirty-seven, and more and more during the last ten years she had lived for her parents. She alone among all the children had remained absolutely faithful to them. To them, and to nobody else, she had been essential-a fountain of vigour and brightness and kindliness from which they drew. To see her in the familiar and historic room which she had humanised and illuminated with her very spirit, was heartrending. In a day she had become unnecessary, and shrunk to the unneeded, undesired virgin which in truth she was. She knew it. Everybody knew it. All the waves of passionate sympathy which Hilda and Edwin in their different ways ardently directed towards her broke in vain upon that fact.

Edwin thought:

"And only the other day she was keen on tennis!"

"Edwin," said Hilda. "Don't you think she ought to come across to our place for a bit? I'm sure it would be better for her not to sleep here."

"Most decidedly," Edwin answered, only too glad to agree heartily with his wife.

"But Johnnie?" Janet objected.

"Pooh! Surely he can stay at Tom's."

"And Elaine?"

"She can come with you. Heaps of room for two."

"I couldn't leave the servants all alone. I really couldn't. They wouldn't like it," Janet persisted. "Moreover, I've got to give them notice."

Edwin had to make the motion of swallowing.

"Well," said Hilda obstinately. "Come along now-for the evening, anyhow. We shall be by ourselves."

"Yes, you must," said Edwin, curtly.

"I-I don't like walking down the street," Janet faltered, blushing.

"You needn't. You can get over the wall," said Edwin.

"Of course you can," Hilda concurred. "Just as you are now. I'll tell Selina."

She left the room with decision, and the next instant returned with a telegram in her hand.

"Open it, please. I can't," said Janet.

Hilda read:

"Mother and boy both doing splendidly. Harry."

Janet dropped onto a chair and burst into tears.

"I'm so glad. I'm so glad," she spluttered. "I can't help it."

Then she jumped up, wiped her eyes, and smiled.

For a few yards the Clayhanger and the Orgreave properties were contiguous, and separated by a fairly new wall, which, after much procrastination on the part of owners, had at last replaced an unsatisfactory thorn-hedge. While Selina put a chair in position for the ladies to stand on as a preliminary to climbing the wall, Edwin suddenly remembered that in the days of the untidy thorn-hedge Janet had climbed a pair of steps in order to surmount the hedge and visit his garden. He saw her balanced on the steps, and smiling and then jumping, like a child. Now, he preceded her and Hilda on to the wall, and they climbed carefully, and when they were all up Selina handed him the chair and he dropped it on his own side of the wall so that they might descend more easily.

"Be careful, Edwin. Be careful," cried Hilda, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly.

And as he tried to read her mood in her voice, the mysterious and changeful ever-flowing undercurrent of their joint life bore rushingly away his sense of Janet's tragedy; and he knew that no events exterior to his marriage could ever overcome for long that constant secret preoccupation of his concerning Hilda's mood.

III

When they came into the house, Ada met them with zest and calamity in her whispering voice:

"Please 'm, Mr. and Mrs. Benbow are here. They're in the drawing-room. They said they'd wait a bit to see if you came back."

Ada had foreseen that, whatever their superficially indifferent demeanour as members of the powerful ruling caste, her master and mistress would be struck all of a heap by this piece of news. And they were. For the Benbows did not pay chance calls; in the arrangement of their lives every act was neatly planned and foreordained. Therefore this call was formal, and behind it was an intention.