Читать книгу: «The Country House», страница 14

He went up to the ladies’ drawing-room, clutching that telegram. It worried him. There was something odd about it, and he was not accustomed to pay calls in the morning. He found his sister-in-law seated at an open window, her face unusually pink, her eyes rather defiantly bright. She greeted him gently, and General Pendyce was not the man to discern what was not put under his nose. Fortunately for him, that had never been his practice.

“How are you, Margery?” he said. “Glad to see you in town. How’s Horace? Look here what he’s sent me!” He offered her the telegram, with the air of slightly avenging an offence; then added in surprise, as though he had just thought of it: “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Mrs. Pendyce read the telegram, and she, too, like George, felt sorry for the sender.

“Nothing, thanks, dear Charles,” she said slowly. “I’m all right. Horace gets so nervous!”

General Pendyce looked at her; for a moment his eyes flickered, then, since the truth was so improbable and so utterly in any case beyond his philosophy, he accepted her statement.

“He shouldn’t go sending telegrams like this,” he said. “You might have been ill for all I could tell. It spoiled my breakfast!” For though, as a fact, it had not prevented his completing a hearty meal, he fancied that he felt hungry. “When I was quartered at Halifax there was a fellow who never sent anything but telegrams. Telegraph Jo they called him. He commanded the old Bluebottles. You know the old Bluebottles? If Horace is going to take to this sort of thing he’d better see a specialist; it’s almost certain to mean a breakdown. You’re up about dresses, I see. When do you come to town? The season’s getting on.”

Mrs. Pendyce was not afraid of her husband’s brother, for though punctilious and accustomed to his own way with inferiors, he was hardly a man to inspire awe in his social equals. It was, therefore, not through fear that she did not tell him the truth, but through an instinct for avoiding all unnecessary suffering too strong for her, and because the truth was really untellable. Even to herself it seemed slightly ridiculous, and she knew the poor General would take it so dreadfully to heart.

“I don’t know about coming up this season. The garden is looking so beautiful, and there’s Bee’s engagement. The dear child is so happy!”

The General caressed a whisker with his white hand.

“Ah yes,” he said – “young Tharp! Let’s see, he’s not the eldest. His brother’s in my old corps. What does this young fellow do with himself?”

Mrs. Pendyce answered:

“He’s only farming. I’m afraid he’ll have nothing to speak of, but he’s a dear good boy. It’ll be a long engagement. Of course, there’s nothing in farming, and Horace insists on their having a thousand a year. It depends so much on Mr. Tharp. I think they could do perfectly well on seven hundred to start with, don’t you, Charles?”

General Pendyce’s answer was not more conspicuously to the point than usual, for he was a man who loved to pursue his own trains of thought.

“What about George?”, he said. “I met him in the hall as I was coming in, but he ran off in the very deuce of a hurry. They told me at Epsom that he was hard hit.”

His eyes, distracted by a fly for which he had taken a dislike, failed to observe his sister-in-law’s face.

“Hard hit?” she repeated.

“Lost a lot of money. That won’t do, you know, Margery – that won’t do. A little mild gambling’s one thing.”

Mrs. Pendyce said nothing; her face was rigid: It was the face of a woman on the point of saying: “Do not compel me to hint that you are boring me!”

The General went on:

“A lot of new men have taken to racing that no one knows anything about. That fellow who bought George’s horse, for instance; you’d never have seen his nose in Tattersalls when I was a young man. I find when I go racing I don’t know half the colours. It spoils the pleasure. It’s no longer the close borough that it was. George had better take care what he’s about. I can’t imagine what we’re coming to!”

On Margery Pendyce’s hearing, those words, “I can’t imagine what we’re coming to,” had fallen for four-and-thirty years, in every sort of connection, from many persons. It had become part of her life, indeed, to take it for granted that people could imagine nothing; just as the solid food and solid comfort of Worsted Skeynes and the misty mornings and the rain had become part of her life. And it was only the fact that her nerves were on edge and her heart bursting that made those words seem intolerable that morning; but habit was even now too strong, and she kept silence.

The General, to whom an answer was of no great moment, pursued his thoughts.

“And you mark my words, Margery; the elections will go against us. The country’s in a dangerous state.”

Mrs. Pendyce said:

“Oh, do you think the Liberals will really get in?”

From custom there was a shade of anxiety in her voice which she did not feel.

“Think?” repeated General Pendyce. “I pray every night to God they won’t!”

Folding both hands on the silver knob of his Malacca cane, he stared over them at the opposing wall; and there was something universal in that fixed stare, a sort of blank and not quite selfish apprehension. Behind his personal interests his ancestors had drilled into him the impossibility of imagining that he did not stand for the welfare of his country. Mrs. Pendyce, who had so often seen her husband look like that, leaned out of the window above the noisy street.

The General rose.

“Well,” he said, “if I can’t do anything for you, Margery, I’ll take myself off; you’re busy with your dressmakers. Give my love to Horace, and tell him not to send me another telegram like that.”

And bending stiffly, he pressed her hand with a touch of real courtesy and kindness, took up his hat, and went away. Mrs. Pendyce, watching him descend the stairs, watching his stiff sloping shoulders, his head with its grey hair brushed carefully away from the centre parting, the backs of his feeble, active knees, put her hand to her breast and sighed, for with him she seemed to see descending all her past life, and that one cannot see unmoved.

CHAPTER III
MRS. BELLEW SQUARES HER ACCOUNTS

Mrs. Bellew sat on her bed smoothing out the halves of a letter; by her side was her jewel-case. Taking from it an amethyst necklet, an emerald pendant, and a diamond ring, she wrapped them in cottonwool, and put them in an envelope. The other jewels she dropped one by one into her lap, and sat looking at them. At last, putting two necklets and two rings back into the jewel-case, she placed the rest in a little green box, and taking that and the envelope, went out. She called a hansom, drove to a post-office, and sent a telegram:

PENDYCE, STOICS’ CLUB.

“Be at studio six to seven. – H.”

From the post-office she drove to her jeweller’s, and many a man who saw her pass with the flush on her cheeks and the smouldering look in her eyes, as though a fire were alight within her, turned in his tracks and bitterly regretted that he knew not who she was, or whither going. The jeweller took the jewels from the green box, weighed them one by one, and slowly examined each through his lens. He was a little man with a yellow wrinkled face and a weak little beard, and having fixed in his mind the sum that he would give, he looked at his client prepared to mention less. She was sitting with her elbows on the counter, her chin resting in her hands, and her eyes were fixed on him. He decided somehow to mention the exact sum.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, madam; that is the utmost.”

“Very well, but I must have it now in cash!”

The jeweller’s eyes flickered.

“It’s a large sum,” he said – “most unusual. I haven’t got such a sum in the place.”

“Then please send out and get it, or I must go elsewhere.”

The jeweller brought his hands together, and washed them nervously.

“Excuse me a moment; I’ll consult my partner.”

He went away, and from afar he and his partner spied her nervously. He came back with a forced smile. Mrs. Bellew was sitting as he had left her.

“It’s a fortunate chance; I think we can just do it, madam.”

“Give me notes, please, and a sheet of paper.” The jeweller brought them.

Mrs. Bellew wrote a letter, enclosed it with the bank notes in the bulky envelope she had brought, addressed it, and sealed the whole.

“Call a cab, please!”

The jeweller called a cab.

“Chelsea Embankment!”

The cab bore her away.

Again in the crowded streets so full of traffic, people turned to look after her. The cabman, who put her down at the Albert Bridge, gazed alternately at the coins in his hands and the figure of his fare, and wheeling his cab towards the stand, jerked his thumb in her direction.

Mrs. Bellew walked fast down a street till, turning a corner, she came suddenly on a small garden with three poplar-trees in a row. She opened its green gate without pausing, went down a path, and stopped at the first of three green doors. A young man with a beard, resembling an artist, who was standing behind the last of the three doors, watched her with a knowing smile on his face. She took out a latch-key, put it in the lock, opened the door, and passed in.

The sight of her face seemed to have given the artist an idea. Propping his door open, he brought an easel and canvas, and setting them so that he could see the corner where she had gone in, began to sketch.

An old stone fountain with three stone frogs stood in the garden near that corner, and beyond it was a flowering currant-bush, and beyond this again the green door on which a slanting gleam of sunlight fell. He worked for an hour, then put his easel back and went out to get his tea.

Mrs. Bellew came out soon after he was gone. She closed the door behind her, and stood still. Taking from her pocket the bulky envelope, she slipped it into the letter-box; then bending down, picked up a twig, and placed it in the slit, to prevent the lid falling with a rattle. Having done this, she swept her hands down her face and breast as though to brush something from her, and walked away. Beyond the outer gate she turned to the left, and took the same street back to the river. She walked slowly, luxuriously, looking about her. Once or twice she stopped, and drew a deep breath, as though she could not have enough of the air. She went as far as the Embankment, and stood leaning her elbows on the parapet. Between the finger and thumb of one hand she held a small object on which the sun was shining. It was a key. Slowly, luxuriously, she stretched her hand out over the water, parted her thumb and finger, and let it fall.

CHAPTER IV
MRS. PENDYCE’S INSPIRATION

But George did not come to take his mother to the theatre, and she whose day had been passed in looking forward to the evening, passed that evening in a drawing-room full of furniture whose history she did not know, and a dining-room full of people eating in twos and threes and fours, at whom she might look, but to whom she must not speak, to whom she did not even want to speak, so soon had the wheel of life rolled over her wonder and her expectation, leaving it lifeless in her breast. And all that night, with one short interval of sleep, she ate of bitter isolation and futility, and of the still more bitter knowledge: “George does not want me; I’m no good to him!”

Her heart, seeking consolation, went back again and again to the time when he had wanted her; but it was far to go, to the days of holland suits, when all those things that he desired – slices of pineapple, Benson’s old carriage-whip, the daily reading out of “Tom Brown’s School-days,” the rub with Elliman when he sprained his little ankle, the tuck-up in bed – were in her power alone to give.

This night she saw with fatal clearness that since he went to school he had never wanted her at all. She had tried so many years to believe that he did, till it had become part of her life, as it was part of her life to say her prayers night and morning; and now she found it was all pretence. But, lying awake, she still tried to believe it, because to that she had been bound when she brought him, firstborn, into the world. Her other son, her daughters, she loved them too, but it was not the same thing, quite; she had never wanted them to want her, because that part of her had been given once for all to George.

The street noises died down at last; she had slept two hours when they began again. She lay listening. And the noises and her thoughts became tangled in her exhausted brain – one great web of weariness, a feeling that it was all senseless and unnecessary, the emanation of cross-purposes and cross-grainedness, the negation of that gentle moderation, her own most sacred instinct. And an early wasp, attracted by the sweet perfumes of her dressing-table, roused himself from the corner where he had spent the night, and began to hum and hover over the bed. Mrs. Pendyce was a little afraid of wasps, so, taking a moment when he was otherwise engaged, she stole out, and fanned him with her nightdress-case till, perceiving her to be a lady, he went away. Lying down again, she thought: ‘People will worry them until they sting, and then kill them; it’s so unreasonable,’ not knowing that she was putting all her thoughts on suffering in a single nutshell.

She breakfasted upstairs, unsolaced by any news from George. Then with no definite hope, but a sort of inner certainty, she formed the resolution to call on Mrs. Bellew. She determined, however, first to visit Mr. Paramor, and, having but a hazy notion of the hour when men begin to work, she did not dare to start till past eleven, and told her cabman to drive her slowly. He drove her, therefore, faster than his wont. In Leicester Square the passage of a Personage between two stations blocked the traffic, and on the footways were gathered a crowd of simple folk with much in their hearts and little in their stomachs, who raised a cheer as the Personage passed. Mrs. Pendyce looked eagerly from her cab, for she too loved a show.

The crowd dispersed, and the cab went on.

It was the first time she had ever found herself in the business apartment of any professional man less important than a dentist. From the little waiting-room, where they handed her the Times, which she could not read from excitement, she caught sight of rooms lined to the ceilings with leather books and black tin boxes, initialed in white to indicate the brand, and of young men seated behind lumps of paper that had been written on. She heard a perpetual clicking noise which roused her interest, and smelled a peculiar odour of leather and disinfectant which impressed her disagreeably. A youth with reddish hair and a pen in his hand passed through and looked at her with a curious stare immediately averted. She suddenly felt sorry for him and all those other young men behind the lumps of paper, and the thought went flashing through her mind, ‘I suppose it’s all because people can’t agree.’

She was shown in to Mr. Paramor at last. In his large empty room, with its air of past grandeur, she sat gazing at three La France roses in a tumbler of water with the feeling that she would never be able to begin.

Mr. Paramor’s eyebrows, which jutted from his clean, brown face like little clumps of pothooks, were iron-grey, and iron-grey his hair brushed back from his high forehead. Mrs. Pendyce wondered why he looked five years younger than Horace, who was his junior, and ten years younger than Charles, who, of course, was younger still. His eyes, which from iron-grey some inner process of spiritual manufacture had made into steel colour, looked young too, although they were grave; and the smile which twisted up the corners of his mouth looked very young.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a great pleasure to see you.”

Mrs. Pendyce could only answer with a smile.

Mr. Paramor put the roses to his nose.

“Not so good as yours,” he said, “are they? but the best I can do.”

Mrs. Pendyce blushed with pleasure.

“My garden is looking so beautiful – ” Then, remembering that she no longer had a garden, she stopped; but remembering also that, though she had lost her garden, Mr. Paramor still had his, she added quickly: “And yours, Mr. Paramor – I’m sure it must be looking lovely.”

Mr. Paramor drew out a kind of dagger with which he had stabbed some papers to his desk, and took a letter from the bundle.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s looking very nice. You’d like to see this, I expect.”

“Bellew v. Bellew and Pendyce” was written at the top. Mrs. Pendyce stared at those words as though fascinated by their beauty; it was long before she got beyond them. For the first time the full horror of these matters pierced the kindly armour that lies between mortals and what they do not like to think of. Two men and a woman wrangling, fighting, tearing each other before the eyes of all the world. A woman and two men stripped of charity and gentleness, of moderation and sympathy-stripped of all that made life decent and lovable, squabbling like savages before the eyes of all the world. Two men, and one of them her son, and between them a woman whom both of them had loved! “Bellew v. Bellew and Pendyce”! And this would go down to fame in company with the pitiful stories she had read from time to time with a sort of offended interest; in company with “Snooks v. Snooks and Stiles,” “Horaday v. Horaday,” “Bethany v. Bethany and Sweetenham.” In company with all those cases where everybody seemed so dreadful, yet where she had often and often felt so sorry, as if these poor creatures had been fastened in the stocks by some malignant, loutish spirit, for all that would to come and jeer at. And horror filled her heart. It was all so mean, and gross, and common.

The letter contained but a few words from a firm of solicitors confirming an appointment. She looked up at Mr. Paramor. He stopped pencilling on his blotting-paper, and said at once:

“I shall be seeing these people myself tomorrow afternoon. I shall do my best to make them see reason.”

She felt from his eyes that he knew what she was suffering, and was even suffering with her.

“And if – if they won’t?”

“Then I shall go on a different tack altogether, and they must look out for themselves.”

Mrs. Pendyce sank back in her chair; she seemed to smell again that smell of leather and disinfectant, and hear a sound of incessant clicking. She felt faint, and to disguise that faintness asked at random, “What does ‘without prejudice’ in this letter mean?”

Mr. Paramor smiled.

“That’s an expression we always use,” he said. “It means that when we give a thing away, we reserve to ourselves the right of taking it back again.”

Mrs. Pendyce, who did not understand, murmured:

“I see. But what have they given away?”

Paramor put his elbows on the desk, and lightly pressed his finger-tips together.

“Well,” he said, “properly speaking, in a matter like this, the other side and I are cat and dog.

“We are supposed to know nothing about each other and to want to know less, so that when we do each other a courtesy we are obliged to save our faces by saying, ‘We don’t really do you one.’ D’you understand?”

Again Mrs. Pendyce murmured:

“I see.”

“It sounds a little provincial, but we lawyers exist by reason of provincialism. If people were once to begin making allowances for each other, I don’t know where we should be.”

Mrs. Pendyce’s eyes fell again on those words, “Bellew v. Bellew and Pendyce,” and again, as though fascinated by their beauty, rested there.

“But you wanted to see me about something else too, perhaps?” said Mr. Paramor.

A sudden panic came over her.

“Oh no, thank you. I just wanted to know what had been done. I’ve come up on purpose to see George. You told me that I – ”

Mr. Paramor hastened to her aid.

“Yes, yes; quite right – quite right.”

“Horace hasn’t come with me.”

“Good!”

“He and George sometimes don’t quite – ”

“Hit it off? They’re too much alike.”

“Do you think so? I never saw – ”

“Not in face, not in face; but they’ve both got – ”

Mr. Paramor’s meaning was lost in a smile; and Mrs. Pendyce, who did not know that the word “Pendycitis” was on the tip of his tongue, smiled vaguely too.

“George is very determined,” she said. “Do you think – oh, do you think, Mr. Paramor, that you will be able to persuade Captain Bellew’s solicitors – ”

Mr. Paramor threw himself back in his chair, and his hand covered what he had written on his blotting-paper.

“Yes,” he said slowly – “oh yes, yes!”

But Mrs. Pendyce had had her answer. She had meant to speak of her visit to Helen Bellew, but now her thought was:

‘He won’t persuade them; I feel it. Let me get away!’

Again she seemed to hear the incessant clicking, to smell leather and disinfectant, to see those words, “Bellew v. Bellew and, Pendyce.”

She held out her hand.

Mr. Paramor took it in his own and looked at the floor.

“Good-bye,” he said, “good-bye. What’s your address – Green’s Hotel? I’ll come and tell you what I do. I know – I know!”

Mrs. Pendyce, on whom those words “I know – I know!” had a strange, emotionalising effect, as though no one had ever known before, went away with quivering lips. In her life no one had ever “known” – not indeed that she could or would complain of such a trifle, but the fact remained. And at this moment, oddly, she thought of her husband, and wondered what he was doing, and felt sorry for him.

But Mr. Paramor went back to his seat and stared at what he had written on his blotting paper. It ran thus:

 
"We stand on our petty rights here,
And our potty dignity there;
We make no allowance for others,
They make no allowance for us;
We catch hold of them by the ear,
They grab hold of us by the hair
The result is a bit of a muddle
That ends in a bit of a fuss."
 

He saw that it neither rhymed nor scanned, and with a grave face he tore it up.

Again Mrs. Pendyce told her cabman to drive slowly, and again he drove her faster than usual; yet that drive to Chelsea seemed to last for ever, and interminable were the turnings which the cabman took, each one shorter than the last, as if he had resolved to see how much his horse’s mouth could bear.

‘Poor thing!’ thought Mrs. Pendyce; ‘its mouth must be so sore, and it’s quite unnecessary.’ She put her hand up through the trap. “Please take me in a straight line. I don’t like corners.”

The cabman obeyed. It worried him terribly to take one corner instead of the six he had purposed on his way; and when she asked him his fare, he charged her a shilling extra for the distance he had saved by going straight. Mrs. Pendyce paid it, knowing no better, and gave him sixpence over, thinking it might benefit the horse; and the cabman, touching his hat, said:

“Thank you, my lady,” for to say “my lady” was his principle when he received eighteen pence above his fare.

Mrs. Pendyce stood quite a minute on the pavement, stroking the horse’s nose and thinking:

‘I must go in; it’s silly to come all this way and not go in!’

But her heart beat so that she could hardly swallow.

At last she rang.

Mrs. Bellew was seated on the sofa in her little drawing-room whistling to a canary in the open window. In the affairs of men there is an irony constant and deep, mingled with the very springs of life. The expectations of Mrs. Pendyce, those timid apprehensions of this meeting which had racked her all the way, were lamentably unfulfilled. She had rehearsed the scene ever since it came into her head; the reality seemed unfamiliar. She felt no nervousness and no hostility, only a sort of painful interest and admiration. And how could this or any other woman help falling in love with George?

The first uncertain minute over, Mrs. Bellew’s eyes were as friendly as if she had been quite within her rights in all she had done; and Mrs. Pendyce could not help meeting friendliness halfway.

“Don’t be angry with me for coming. George doesn’t know. I felt I must come to see you. Do you think that you two quite know all you’re doing? It seems so dreadful, and it’s not only yourselves, is it?”

Mrs. Bellew’s smile vanished.

“Please don’t say ‘you two,’.rdquo; she said.

Mrs. Pendyce stammered:

“I don’t understand.”

Mrs. Bellew looked her in the face and smiled; and as she smiled she seemed to become a little coarser.

“Well, I think it’s quite time you did! I don’t love your son. I did once, but I don’t now. I told him so yesterday, once for all.”

Mrs. Pendyce heard those words, which made so vast, so wonderful a difference – words which should have been like water in a wilderness – with a sort of horror, and all her spirit flamed up into her eyes.

“You don’t love him?” she cried.

She felt only a blind sense of insult and affront.

This woman tire of George? Tire of her son? She looked at Mrs. Bellew, on whose face was a kind of inquisitive compassion, with eyes that had never before held hatred.

“You have tired of him? You have given him up? Then the sooner I go to him the better! Give me the address of his rooms, please.”

Helen Bellew knelt down at the bureau and wrote on an envelope, and the grace of the woman pierced Mrs. Pendyce to the heart.

She took the paper. She had never learned the art of abuse, and no words could express what was in her heart, so she turned and went out.

Mrs. Bellew’s voice sounded quick and fierce behind her.

“How could I help getting tired? I am not you. Now go!”

Mrs. Pendyce wrenched open the outer door. Descending the stairs, she felt for the bannister. She had that awful sense of physical soreness and shrinking which violence, whether their own or others’, brings to gentle souls.