Dr. Evans was looking out of the window of his dining-room as he waited
the next morning for breakfast to be brought in, jingling a pleasant
mixture of money and keys in his trouser pockets and whistling a tune
that sounded vague and De Bussy-like until you perceived that it was
really an air familiar to streets and barrel-organs, and owed its
elusive quality merely to the fact that the present performer was a
little uncertain as to the comparative value of tones and semitones. But
this slightly discouraging detail was more than compensated for by the
evident cheerfulness of the executant; his plump, high-coloured face,
his merry eye, the singular content of his whole aspect betokened a
personality that was on excellent terms with life.
His surroundings were as well furnished and securely comfortable as
himself. The table was invitingly laid; a Sheffield-plate urn (Dr. Evans
was an amateur in Georgian decoration and furniture) hissed and steamed
with little upliftings of the lid under the pressure within, and a
number of hot dishes suggested an English interpretation of breakfast.
Fine mezzotints after the great English portrait-painters hung on the
walls, and a Chippendale sideboard was spread with fruit dishes and
dessert-plates. The morning was very hot, but the high, spacious room,
with its thick walls, was cool and fresh, while its potentialities for
warmth and cosiness in the winter were sponsored for by the large open
fireplace and the stack of hot-water pipes which stood beneath the
sideboard. Outside, the windows at which Dr. Evans stood looked out on
to the large and secluded lawn, which had been the scene of the
garden-party the day before. Red-brick walls ran along the two sides of
it at right angles to the house: opposite, a row of espaliered
fruit-trees screened off the homeliness of the kitchen-garden beyond,
and the railway cutting which formed the boundary of this pleasant
place.
Wilfred Evans had whistled the first dozen bars of the “Merry Widow
Waltz” some six or seven times through, before, with the retarded
consciousness that it was Sunday, he went on to “The Church’s One
Foundation,” and though, with his usual admirable appetite, he felt the
allure of the hot dishes, he waited, still whistling, for some other
member of his household, wife or daughter, to appear. He was one of the
most gregarious and clubbable of men, and no hecatomb of stalled oxen
would have given him content, if he had had to eat his beef alone. A
firm attachment to his domestic circle, combined with the not very
exacting calls of his practice, but truly fervent investigations in the
laboratory at the end of the garden, of the habits and economy of
phagocytes, comfortably filled up, to the furthest horizon, the scenery
of his mental territories.
He had not to wait long for his wife to appear, and he hailed her with
his wonted cordiality.
“Morning, little woman,” he said. “Slept well, I hope?”
Mrs. Evans did not practice at home all those arts of pleasing with
which she was so lavish in other people’s houses. Also, this morning
she felt rather cross, a thing which, to do her justice, was rare with
her.
“Not very,” she said. “I kept waking. It was stiflingly hot.”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said he.
Mrs. Evans busied herself with tea-making; her long, slender hands moved
with extraordinary deftness and silence among clattering things, and her
husband whistled the “Merry Widow Waltz” once or twice more.
“Oh, Wilfred, do stop that odious tune,” she said, without the slightest
hint of impatience in her voice. “It is bad enough on your pianola,
which, after all, is in tune!”
“Which is more than can be said for my penny whistle?” asked he,
good-humouredly. “Right you are, I’m dumb. Tell me about your party last
night.”
“My dear, haven’t you been to enough Riseborough parties to know that
there is nothing to tell about any party?” she asked. “I sat between
Major Ames and the son. I talked gardening on one side with the father,
and something which I suppose was enlightened Cambridge conversation on
the other. Harry Ames is rather a dreadful sort of youth. He took me
into the garden afterwards to show me something about roses. And the
carriage didn’t come. Major Ames saw me home. When did you get in?”
“Not till nearly three. Very difficult maternity case. But we’ll pull
them both through.”
Millie Evans gave a little shudder, which was not quite entirely
instinctive. She emphasized it for her husband’s benefit. Unfortunately,
he did not notice it.
“Will you have your tea now?” she asked.
He looked at her with an air mainly conjugal but tinged with
professionalism.
“Bit upset with the heat, little woman?” he asked. “You look a trifle
off colour. We can’t have you sleeping badly, either. Show me the man
who sleeps his seven hours every night, and I’ll show you who will live
to be ninety.”
This prospect did not for the moment allure his wife.
“I think I would sooner sleep less and die earlier,” she said in her
even voice, “though I’m sure Elsie will live to a hundred at that rate.
You encourage her to be lazy in the morning, Wilfred. I’m sure any one
can manage to be in time for breakfast at a quarter past nine.”
He shook his head.
“No, no, little woman,” he said. “Let a growing girl sleep just as much
as she feels inclined. I would sooner stint a girl’s food than her
sleep. Give the red corpuscles a chance, eh?”
Millie got up from the table, and went to the sideboard to get some
fruit. Then suddenly it struck her all this was hardly worth while. It
seemed a stupid business to come down every morning and eat breakfast,
to manage the household, to go for a walk, perhaps, or sit in the
garden, and after completing the round of these daily futilities, to go
to bed again and sleep, just for the recuperation that sleep gave, to
enable her to do it all over again. But the strawberries looked cool and
moist, and standing by the sideboard she ate a few of them. Just above
it hung the oblong Sheraton mirror, which her husband had bought so
cheaply at a local sale and had brought home so triumphantly. That, too,
seemed to tell her a stale story, and the reflection of her young face,
crowned with the shimmer of yellow hair, against the dark oak background
of the panelling seemed without purpose or significance. She was doing
nothing with her beauty that stayed so long with her. But it would not
stay many years longer: this morning even there seemed to be a shadow
over it, making it dim.... Soon nobody would care if she had ever been
pretty or not; indeed, even now Elsie seemed by her height and the
maturity of her manner to be reminding everybody of the fact that she
herself must be approaching the bar which every woman has to cross when
she is forty or thereabouts.... And, strange enough it may appear, these
doubts and questionings which looked at Millie darkly from the Sheraton
glass above the sideboard, selfish and elementary as they were,
resembled “thought” far more closely than did the generality of those
surface impressions that as a rule mirrored her mind. They were, too,
rather actively disagreeable, and generally speaking, nothing
disagreeable occurred to her. The experiences of every day might be
mildly exhilarating, or mildly tedious. But, whatever they were, she was
not accustomed to think closely about them. Now, for the moment, it
seemed to her that some shadow, some vague presence confronted her, and
menacingly demanded her attention.
Riseborough is notable for the number of its churches, and before long
the air was mellow with bells. As a rule, Millie Evans went to church on
Sunday morning with the same regularity as she ate hot roast beef for
lunch when it was over, but this morning she easily let herself be
persuaded to refrain from any act of public worship. It seemed quite
within the bounds of possibility that she might feel faint during the
psalms and, on her husband’s advice, she settled to stop at home,
leaving him and Elsie, who was quite unaware what faintness felt like,
to attend. But it was not the fear of faintness that prompted her
absence: she wanted, almost for the first time in her life, to be alone
and to think. Even on the occasion of her marriage, she had not found it
necessary to employ herself with original thought: her mother had done
the thinking for her, and had advised her, as she felt quite sure,
sensibly and well. Nor had she needed to think when she was expecting
her only child, for on that occasion she had been perfectly content to
do exactly as her husband told her. But now, at the age of thirty-seven,
the sight of her own face in the glass had suggested to her certain
possibilities, certain limitations.
Ill-health had, on infrequent Sundays, prevented her attendance at
church, and now, following merely the dictates of habit, she took out
with her to a basket chair below the big mulberry-tree in the garden, a
Bible and prayer-book, out of which she supposed that she would read the
psalms and lessons for the day. But the Bible remained long untouched,
and when she opened it eventually at random, she read but one verse. It
was at the end of Ecclesiastes that the leaves parted, and she read,
“When desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home.”
That was enough, for it was that, here succinctly expressed, which had
been troubling her this morning, though so vaguely, that until she saw
her symptoms written down shortly and legibly, she had scarcely known
what they were. But certainly this line and a half described them. No
doubt it was all very elementary; by degrees one ceased to care, and
then one died. But her case was rather different from that, for she
felt that with her desire had not failed, simply because she never had
had desire. She had waked and slept, she had eaten and walked, she had
had a child; but all these things had been of about the same value. Once
she had had a tooth out, without gas; that was a slightly more vivid
experience. But it was very soon over: she had not really cared.
But though she had not cared for any of those things, she had not been
bored with the repetition of them. It had seemed natural that one thing
should follow another, that the days should become weeks, and the weeks
should become months, insensibly. When the months added themselves into
years, she took notice of that fact by having a birthday, and Wilfred,
as he gave her some little present in a morocco case, told her that she
looked as young as when they first met, which was very nearly true. She
had a quantity of these morocco cases now: he never omitted the punctual
presentation of each. And the mental vision of all these morocco cases,
some round, some square, some oblong, and the thought of their
contents--a little pearl brooch, a sapphire brooch, a pair of emerald
ear-rings, a jewelled hat-pin--suddenly came upon her with their
cumulative effect. A lot of time had gone by; it chiefly lived in her
now through the memory of the morocco cases.
By virtue of her unemotional temperament and serene bodily health she
looked very young still, and certainly did not feel old. But as the
bells for church ceased to jangle and clash in the hot still air,
leaving only for the ear the hum of multitudinous bees in the long
flower-bed, it dawned on her that whatever she felt, and however she
looked, she would soon be on the other side of that barrier which for
women marks the end of their essential and characteristic life. There
were a few years left her yet out of the years of which she made so
little use, and with a spasm, the keenest perhaps she had ever known,
even including the extraction of the tooth without gas, the horror of
middle-age fell upon her, making her shiver. All her life she had felt
nothing: soon she would be incapable of feeling, except in so far as
regret, that pale echo of what might once have been emotion, can be
considered an affair of the heart. To feel, she readily perceived,
implied the existence of something or somebody to feel about. But she
did not know where to look for her participant. Long ago her husband had
become as much part of that dead level of life as had her breakfast or
her dressing for dinner. Never had he stirred her from her placid
passivity, she had never yearned for him, in the sense in which a
thirsty man desires water. She had no love of nature: “the primrose by
the river’s brim” might have been a violet for anything that she cared;
charity, in its technical sense, was distasteful to her, because the
curious smell in the houses of the poor made her only long to get away.
It was hard to know where to turn to find an outlet for that drowsily
awakening recognition of life that to-day, so late and as yet so feebly,
stirred within her. Yet, though it stirred but feebly, there was
movement there: it wanted to be alive for a little, before it was
indubitably dead.
Her thoughts went back to the topic concerning which she had told her
husband that there was nothing to be told--namely, the dinner-party at
the Ames’ last night. Certainly there was nothing remarkable about it:
she had conducted herself as usual, with the usual result. She was
accustomed to deal out her little smiles and deferential glances and
flattering speeches to those who sat next her at dinner, because in
herself a mild amiability prompted her to make herself pleasant, and
because, with so little trouble to herself, she could make a man behave
as agreeably as he was capable of behaving. She attracted men very
easily, cursorily one might say, without attaching any importance to the
interest she aroused, and without looking further than the dinner-table
for the fruits of the attraction she exercised. But this morning, this
tardy and drowsy recognition of life, beside which, so to speak, lay the
shadow of middle-age, gave her pause. Was there some fruition and
development of herself, before the withered and barren years came to
her, to be found there? It would be quite beyond the mark to say that,
sitting here, she definitely proposed to herself to try to make herself
emotionally interested in somebody else, in case that might add a zest
to life, but she considered the effect which she so easily produced in
others, and wondered what it meant to feel like that. Certainly Major
Ames had enjoyed escorting her home; certainly Harry had felt a touch of
_gauche_ romance when he showed her the effect of twilight on the
complexion of some rose or other. He had given her a whole bunch of
roses, with an attempt at a pretty speech. Yes, that was it--the shadows
in them looked pale-blue, and he had said that they were just the colour
of her eyes. But the roses were pretty: she hoped that somebody had put
them in water.
She was already more than a little interested in her reflections: there
was something original and exciting to her in them, and it was annoying
to have them broken in upon by the parlour-maid who came towards her
from the house. Personally, she thought it absurd not to keep
men-servants, but Wilfred always maintained that a couple of good
parlour-maids produced greater comfort with less disturbance, and
yielding to him, as she always yielded to anybody who expressed a
definite opinion, she had acquiesced in female service. But she always
called the head parlour-maid Watkins, whereas her husband called her
Mary.
“Major Ames wants to know if you will see him, ma’am,” said Watkins.
The interest returned.
“Yes, ask him to come out,” she said.
Watkins went back to the house and returned with Major Ames in tow, who
carried a huge bouquet of sweet-peas. There then followed the difficulty
of meeting and greeting gracefully and naturally which is usual when the
visitor is visible a long way off. The Major put on a smile far too
soon, and had to take it off again, since Mrs. Evans had not yet decided
that it was time to see him. Then she began to smile, while he (without
his smile) was looking abstractedly at the top of the mulberry-tree, as
if he expected to find her there. He looked there a moment too long, for
one of the lower branches suddenly knocked his straw hat off his head,
and he said, “God bless my soul,” and dropped the sweet-peas. However,
this was not an unmixed misfortune, for the recognition came quite
naturally after that. She hoped he was not hurt, was he _sure_ that
silly branch had not hit his face? It must be taken off! _What_ lovely
flowers! And were they for her? They were.
Major Ames replaced his hat rather hastily, after a swift manœuvre with
regard to his hair which Mrs. Evans did not accurately follow. The fact
was (though he believed the fact not to be generally known) that the top
of Major Ames’ head was entirely destitute of hair, and that the smooth
crop which covered it was the produce of the side of his head--just
above the ear--grown long, and brushed across the cranium so as to adorn
it with seemingly local wealth and sleekness. The rough and unexpected
removal of his hat by the bough of the mulberry-tree had caused a
considerable portion of it to fall back nearly to the shoulder of the
side on which it actually grew, and his hasty manœuvre with his gathered
tresses was designed to replace them. Necessarily he put back his hat
again quickly, in the manner of a boy capturing a butterfly.
His mind, and the condition of it, on this Sunday morning, would repay a
brief analysis. Briefly, then, a sort of _aurora borealis_ of youth had
visited him: his heaven was streaked with inexplicable lights. He had
told himself that a man of forty-seven was young still, and that when a
most attractive woman had manifested an obvious interest in him, it was
only reasonable to follow it up. He was not a coxcomb, he was not a
loose liver; he was only a very ordinary man, well and healthy, married
to a woman considerably older than himself, and living in a town which,
in spite of his adored garden, presented but moderate excitements. But
indeed, this morning call, paid with this solid tribute of sweet-peas,
was something of an adventure, and had not been mentioned by him to his
wife. He had seen her start for St. Barnabas, and then had hastily
gathered his bouquet and set out, leaving Harry wandering dreamily about
the cinder-paths in the kitchen garden, in the full glory of the
discovery that the colour of the scarlet runners was like a clarion.
Major Ames had plucked almost his rarest varieties, for to pluck the
rarest, since he wished to save their first bloom for seed, would have
been on the further side of quixotism and have verged on imbecility, but
he had brought the best of his second-best. Last night, too, he had
hinted at his own remissness in the matter of church attendance on
Sunday morning, and on his way up here had permitted himself to wonder
whether Millie would prove (in consequence, perhaps, of that) to have
abstained from worship also, expecting, or at least considering
possible, a morning call from him. As a matter of fact she had not
indulged in any such hopes, since it had been a matter of pure
indifference to her whether he went to church on Sunday or not. But when
he found on inquiry at the door that she was at home, it was scarcely
unreasonable, on the part of a rather vain and gallantly minded man, to
connect the fact with the information he had given.
So he hastily readjusted his hat.
“My own stupidity entirely,” he said; “do not blame the tree. Yes, I
have brought you just a few flowers, and though they are not worthy of
your acceptance, they are not the worst bunch of sweet-peas I have ever
seen, not the worst. These, Catherine the Great, for instance, are
not--well--they do not grow quite in every garden.”
Mrs. Evans opened her blue eyes a little wider.
“And are they really for me, Major Ames?” she asked again. “It is good
of you. My precious flowers! They must be put in water at once. Watkins,
bring me one of the big flower-bowls out here. I will arrange them
myself.”
“Lucky flowers, lucky flowers,” chuckled Major Ames.
“It’s I who am lucky,” said she, acknowledging this subtle compliment
with a little smile. “I stop away from church rather lazily, and am
rewarded by a pleasant visit and a beautiful nosegay. And what a
charming party we had last night! I could hardly believe it when I came
back here and found it was nearly half-past eleven. Such hours!”
Major Ames gave his great loud laugh.
“You are making fun of us, Mrs. Evans,” he said; “‘pon my word you are
making fun of us and our quiet ways down at Riseborough. I’ll be bound
that when you were in London, half-past eleven was more the sort of time
when you began to go out to your dances.”
“I used to go out a good deal when I was quite young,” she said.
“Wilfred used quite to urge me to go out, and certainly people were very
kind in asking me. I remember one night in the season, I was asked to
two dinner-parties and a ball and an evening party. After all, it is
natural to take pleasure in innocent gaiety when one is young.”
Major Ames felt very hot after his walk, and, forgetting the adventure
of his hair, nearly removed his straw hat. But providentially he
remembered it again just in time.
“Upon my word, Mrs. Evans,” he said jovially, “you make me feel a
hundred years old when you talk like that, as if your days of youth and
success were over. Why, some one at your garden-party yesterday
afternoon told me for a fact that Miss Elsie was the daughter of your
husband’s first wife. Wouldn’t believe me when I said she was your
daughter. Poor Sanders--it was Mr. Sanders who said it--had to pay ten
shillings to me for his positiveness. He betted, you know, he insisted
on betting. But really, any one who didn’t happen to know would be
right to make such a bet ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
She gave him a little smile with lowered eyelids.
“Dear Elsie!” she said. “She is such a comfort to me. She quite manages
the house for me, and spares me all the trouble. She always knows how
much asparagus ought to cost, and what happens to strawberry ice after a
party. I never was a good housekeeper. Wilfred always used to say to me,
‘Go out and enjoy yourself, my dear, and I’ll pay the bills.’ Of course,
it was all his kindness, I know, but sometimes I wonder if it would not
have been truer kindness to have made me think and contrive more. Elsie
does it all now, but when my little girl marries it will be my turn
again. Tell me, Major Ames, is it you or cousin Amy who makes everything
go so beautifully at your house? I think--shall I say it--I think it
must be you. When a man manages a house there is always more precision
somehow: you feel sure that everything has been foreseen and provided
for. Printed menu-cards, for instance--so _chic_, so perfectly
_comme-il-faut_.”
Watkins had brought out a large dish, rather like a sponging-tin, for
the sweet-peas, and Mrs. Evans had begun the really Herculean labour of
putting them in water. A grille of wire network fitted over the rim of
it: each pea was stuck in separately. She looked up from her task at
him.
“Am I right?” she asked.
Major Ames was not really an untruthful man, but many men who are not
really untruthful get through a wonderful lot of misrepresentation.
“Oh, you mustn’t give me credit for that,” he said (truthfully so far);
“it’s a dodge we always used to have at mess, so why not at one’s own
house also? It’s better than written cards, which take a lot of time to
copy out again and again, and then, you see, my dear Amy is not very
strong at French, and doesn’t want always to be bothering me to tell her
whether there’s an accent in one word, or two ‘s’s’ in another. Saves
time and trouble.”
Mrs. Evans applauded softly with pink finger-tips.
“Ah, I knew it was you!” she said.
Now, clearly (though almost without intention) Major Ames had gone too
far to retreat: also retreat implied a flat contradiction of what Mrs.
Evans said she knew, which would have been a rudeness from which his
habitual gallantry naturally revolted. Consequently, being unable to
retreat, he had to make himself as safe as possible, to entrench
himself.
“Perhaps it’s a little extravagance,” he said. “Indeed, Amy thinks it
is, and I never mention the subject of menu-cards to her. She’s apt to
turn the subject a bit abruptly on the word menu-card. Dear Amy! After
all, it would be a very dull affair, our pleasant life down here, if we
all completely agreed with each other.”
She gave a little sigh, shaking her head, and smiling at her sweet-peas.
“Ah, how often I think that too,” she said. “At least, now you say it, I
feel I have often thought it. It is so true. Dear Wilfred is such an
angel to me, you see! Whatever I do, he is sure to think right. But
sometimes you wonder whether the people who know you best, really
understand you. It is like--it is like learning things by heart. If you
learn a thing by heart, you so often cease to think what it means.”
Mrs. Evans, it must be confessed, did not mean anything very precisely
by this: her life, that is to say, was not at all circumstanced in the
manner that her speech implied it to be, except in so far that she often
wished that more amusing things happened to her, and that she would not
so soon be forty years old. But she certainly intended Major Ames to
attach to her words their natural implication: she wanted to seem
vaguely unappreciated. At the same time, she desired him to see that she
in no way blamed her dear unconscious Wilfred. If Major Ames thought
that, it would spoil a most essential feature of the picture she wished
to present of herself. Why she wished to present it was also quite easy
of comprehension. She wanted to be interesting, and was by nature silly.
The fact that she was close on thirty-eight largely conduced to her
speech.
Major Ames made a perfectly satisfactory interpretation of it. He saw
all the things he was meant to see, and nothing else. And it was
deliciously delivered, so affectionately as regarded Wilfred, so shyly
as regarded herself. He instantly made the astounding mental discovery
that she was somehow not very happy, owing to a failure in domestic
affinities. He felt also that it was intuitive of him to have guessed
that, since she had not actually said it. And he was tremendously
conscious of the seduction of her presence, as she sat there, cool and
white on this hot morning, putting in the last of the sweet-peas he had
brought her. She looked enchantingly young and fresh, and evidently
found something in him which disposed her to confidences. In justice to
him, it may be said that he did not inquire in his own mind as to what
that was, but it was easy to see she trusted him.
“I think we all must feel that at times, my dear lady,” he said, anxious
to haul the circumstance of his own home into the discussion. “I
suppose that all of us who are not quite old yet, not quite quite old
yet, let us say, in order to include me, feel at times that life is not
giving us all that it might give; that people do not really understand
us. No doubt many people, and I daresay those, as you said, who know one
best, do not understand one. And then we mustn’t mind that, but march
straight on, march straight on, according to orders.”
He sat up very straight in his chair as if about to march, as he made
thrillingly noble remarks, and hit himself a couple of sounding blows
with his clenched fist on his broad chest. Then a sudden suspicion
seized him that he had displayed an almost too Spartan unflinchingness,
as if soldiers had no hearts.
“And then perhaps we shall meet some one who does understand us,” he
added.
The critical observer, the cynic, and that rarest of all products, the
entirely sincere and straightforward person, would have found in this
conversation nothing that would move anything beyond his raillery or
disgust. Here sitting under the mulberry-tree in this pleasant garden,
on a Sunday morning, were two people, the man nearly fifty, the woman
nearly forty, both trying, with God knows how many little insincerities
by the way, to draw near to each other. Both had reached ages that were
dangerous to such as had lived (even as they had) extremely respectable
and well-conducted lives, without any paramount reason for their
morality. About Major Ames’ mode of life before he married, which, after
all, was at the early age of twenty-five, nothing need be said, because
there is really very little to say, and in any case the conduct of a
young man not yet in his twenty-fifth year has almost nothing to do with
the character of the same man when he is forty-seven. In that very long
interval he had conducted himself always as a married man should, and
those years, married as he was to a woman much his senior, had not been
at all discreditably passed. This chronicle does not in the least intend
to impute to him any high principled character, for he had nothing of
Galahad in his composition. But he was not a satyr. Consequently, for
this is part of the ironical composition of a man--just in the years
with which we are dealing, at a time of life when a man might have been
condoned for having sown wild oats and seen the huskiness of them, he
was in that far more precarious position of not having sown them
(except, so to speak, in the smallest of flower-pots), nor of having
experienced the jejune quality of such a crop. But it is not implied
that he now regretted the respectability of those twenty-two years. He
did not do so: he had had a happy and contented life, but he would soon
be old. Nor did he now at all contemplate adventure. Merely an Odysseus
who had never voyaged wondered what voyaging was like. He was not in
love with this seductive long-lashed face that bent over the sweet-peas
had brought her. But if he had the picking of those sweet-peas over
again, he would probably have picked the very best, regardless of the
fact that he wanted the seeds for next year’s sowing. So as regards him
the cynic’s sneers would have been out of place; he contemplated nothing
that the cynic would have called “a conquest.” The sincere,
straight-forward gentleman would have been equally excessive in his
disgust. There was nothing, except the slight absurdity of Major Ames’
nature, to justify either laughter or tears. He was a moderate man of
middle-age, about as well intentioned as most of us.
Mrs. Evans, perhaps, was less laudable, and more deserved laughter and
tears. She had consciously tried to produce a false impression without
saying false things--a lamentable posture. She had wanted, as was her
nature, to attract without being correspondingly attracted. She was
prepared for him to go a little further, which is characteristic of the
flirt. She succeeded, as the flirt usually does.
His last sentence was received in silence, and he thought well to repeat
it with slight variation. The theme was clear.
“We may meet some one who understands us,” he said. “Who looks into us,
not at us, eh? Who sees not what we wish only, but what we want.”
She put the last sweet-pea into the wire-netting.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she said; “how beautiful that distinction is.”
He was not aware of its being particularly beautiful, until she
mentioned it, but then it struck him that it was rather fine. Also the
respectability of all his long years tugged at him, as with a chain. He
was quite conscious that he was encouraged, and so he was slightly
terrified. He had not much power of imagination, but he could picture to
himself a very uncomfortable home....
Providence came to his aid--probably Providence. Church time was spent,
and two black Aberdeen terriers, followed by Elsie, followed by Dr.
Evans, came out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn. They were all
in the genial exhilaration that accompanies the sense of duty done. The
dogs had been let out from the house, where they were penned on Sunday
morning to prevent their unexpected appearance in church; the other two
had been let out from church.
Wilfred Evans had most clearly left church behind him: he had also left
in the house not only his top hat but his coat, as befitted the heat of
the morning, and appeared, stout, and strong, and brisk. Elsie was less
vigorous: she sat down on the grass as soon as she reached the shade of
the tree. She had the good sense to shake hands with Major Ames first:
otherwise her mother would have made remarks to him about her manners.
But she was markedly less elderly now than she had been at the formal
dinner-party of the night before.
Dr. Evans arrived last at the mulberry-tree.
“Jove! what jolly flowers,” he said. “That’s you, Major Ames, isn’t it?
How de’do? Well, little woman, how goes it? You did well not to come to
church. Awfully hot it was.”
“And a very long sermon, Daddy,” said Elsie.
“Twenty-two minutes: I timed it. Very interesting, though. You’ll stop
to lunch, Major Ames, won’t you? We lunch at one always on Sunday.”
Now Major Ames knew quite well that there was going to be at his house
the lunch that followed parties, the resurrection lunch of what was dead
last night. There would be little bits of salmon slightly greyer than on
the evening before, peeping out from the fresh salad that covered them.
There would be some sort of _chaud-froid_; there would be a pink and
viscous fluid which was the debilitated descendant of the strawberry ice
which Amy had given them. There would also be several people, including
Mrs. Altham, who had not been bidden to the feast last night, but who,
since they came according to the authorized Riseborough version of
festivities, to the lunch next day, would certainly be bidden to dinner
on the next occasion. Also, he knew well, he would have to say to Mrs.
Altham, “Amy has given us cold luncheon to-day. Well, I don’t mind a
cold luncheon on as hot a day as it is. _Chaud-froid_ of chicken, Mrs.
Altham. I think you’ll find that Amy’s cook understands _chaud-froid_.”
And all the time he knew that _chaud-froid_ meant a dinner-party on the
night before. So did the viscous fluid in the jelly glasses, so did
everything else. And of course Mrs. Altham knew: everybody knew all
about the lunch that followed a dinner-party. Even if the dinner-party
last night had been as secret as George the Fourth’s marriage with Mrs.
Fitzherbert, the lunch to-day would have made it as public as any
function at St. Peter’s, Eaton Square.
He thought over the unimaginable dislocation in all this routine that
his absence would entail.
“I wonder if I ought to,” he said. “I fancy Amy told me she had a few
friends to lunch.”
Millie Evans looked up at him. Infinitesimal as was the point as to
whether he should lunch here or at home, she knew that she definitely
entered herself against his wife at this moment.
“Ah, do stop,” she said. “If Cousin Amy has a few friends why shouldn’t
we have one?”
He got up: he nearly took off his hat again, but again remembered.
“I take it as a command,” he said. “Am I ordered to stop?”
“Certainly. Telephone to Mrs. Ames, Wilfred, and say that Major Ames is
lunching with us.”
“_À les ordres de votre Majesté_,” said he brightly, forgetting for the
moment that his wife came to him for help with the elusive language of
our neighbours. But the Frenchness of his bearing and sentiment,
perhaps, diverted attention from the curious character of his grammar.