On the day before her birthday, Nan reminded her father of that
anniversary.
“It’s to-morrow,” she said; “have you forgotten?”
“No,” he answered, “nor have you. What do you want? Since you have not
spoken before, I suppose it is nothing I have to buy: something in the
house, is it?”
She shook her head, and he seemed pleased.
“That’s as well; I’d been ashamed of your taste if you had asked for
that iron chest.”
And he would too, though he would have given it, if she had asked for
it. As it was, he was so pleased she had not chosen it that he was
ready to grant a large demand, should she make one. For a moment she
hesitated. She had never come to him with any such request as she had
to make this year, and she did not know how to sum it in one word.
“I want you to give me Michael Annarly,” she said at length.
“What!” he exclaimed. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I’ll try to explain. You know I told you he had got into difficulties
with the people he worked with?”
He did: he probably knew quite as much about that as his brother-in-law
at Hurstbury; possibly more, for Nan had told him, and she knew better
how to convey things to her father than Michael did to his. He nodded
now.
“What’s that got to do with it?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you. It’s like this, Michael cannot get any sort of post at
present——”
“Naturally not; shouldn’t think he’d ever get one in his own line
again, not one worth having, and I don’t suppose he’s much good for
anything else. Go on.”
“That is where the present comes in,” Nan explained. “He can make
drawings. I suppose it is mostly machine-drawings and things like that
which he has done heretofore, but he could do details of furniture
to scale and all that extremely well. I don’t mean he would be worth
anything much to you on that account; but he could do it, and he could
write letters and do some of what Josiah now does, and so leave him
freer for other things, as you have often said lately you wished. What
I want, is that you will let Michael have this work, and that you will
let him live here to do it. That is what I want you to give me this
birthday.”
“Oh?” said Barmister. “Oh, indeed, is it?”
It was an unexpected request, as unexpected as the one which had
inaugurated the birthday custom, the desire of a child for a perfect
specimen of old French cabinet work. He received it in much the same
way that he had received the one of long ago, principally by looking
sharply at the maker to gauge, if possible, what, consciously and
unconsciously, prompted the asking. For a moment he sat thoughtful: not
refusing, as a good business man should; nor conceding, as an indulgent
father might. Now, as long ago, he paid his daughter the compliment of
doing neither hastily; not regarding her choice as a passing whim. If
he gave, or if he refused, he would do it with reason, or, at least,
because he saw she had what she deemed reason for her request.
“Is this your idea, or his?” he asked at length.
“Mine; he knows nothing about it. I do not even know if he will agree
to it.”
“H’m.” Barmister bit his finger thoughtfully. “Where does it lead to,
and what is it for?” he asked.
“It will give him an opportunity of getting and doing other work after
a time,” she said: “draughtsman’s work, the only thing allied to his
original profession, there is a chance of his getting at present. He
couldn’t get enough of that to live on for some while; but he could
get some and do it out of work-hours if he had something to do to keep
going on meanwhile. From that, other things would arise and develop in
time.”
“I see,” Barmister said, and sat thoughtful again.
After a time he looked up. “Where do you come in?” he asked abruptly.
“I want it,” she answered: “I want that—what I have indicated—to
happen.”
“Why? It’s no concern of yours.”
She was obliged to admit that, though it seemed a new idea to her. “I
suppose it isn’t,” she said slowly; “but it somehow seems as if it
were. You see, I happened to be the person there at the moment, that
rainy afternoon when I first brought him here. I happened to be there
when someone was wanted, as one might happen to be the person at hand
in an accident. When that occurs, it seems as if the job were one’s
own, don’t you think? It really is, too. Anyhow, I feel as if this were
mine, and I were concerned in it.”
“H’m,” he said again, and no more.
For some time he sat considering, turning the matter in his mind. At
length he spoke. “You can have it, if you like. Mind you, that’s not
saying I think it sensible, or that what you’ve asked for is going to
get you what you want, if that’s the reinstating of Michael Annarly.
I have my doubts if anything would do that, after what has happened.
I should say he has about done for his career. He’s been a fool, and
if there’s one thing Nature abhors more than a vacuum, it’s a fool:
Nature and Fate and everything else have a deal more use for knaves
than fools, and let them off a deal cheaper. It’ll take a better man
than you, or me, or him either to get over that business. Still, that’s
neither here nor there: you aren’t asking me to make a job of Michael
Annarly for a birthday present, and you aren’t asking me to think what
you have asked for worth the having.”
“No,” Nan agreed, “I’m asking you to let Michael come here to work for
a while, and to live with us while he does it.”
“You shall have it. On the understanding that I can take it back again
if I want to, and when I want to, if I think it’s interfering with
business—that’s to be understood.”
She said it was, and thanked him, and he dismissed her, saying he would
to-morrow give her a letter to Michael offering him such a situation as
she had described—unless he saw reason to change his mind during the
night.
He did not change his mind. The next morning at breakfast she found
the letter lying on her plate. It was a brief, businesslike letter,
offering the specified employment on the condition that the recipient
lived in the house so as to be there to do extra work at extra times
when necessary. The terms were fair, but not liberal; and the method
of expression formal. The offer was business, not philanthropy. But
Nan was satisfied when she read it; it was what she wanted. During
the morning she wrote to Michael, and enclosed the letter with her
own. He might refuse or accept without damage to his self-respect, and
without having to consider any damage to hers or her feelings. She was
merely the medium in the matter. He could judge of the offer on its own
merits, and see it fairly, and without any personal bias or glossing.
Seen so it must have shown extraordinarily bare to one who had done
some of the finest work on one of the most complex subjects known
to man; one who had been a recognised authority to be consulted and
respected by persons of position and intelligence; one who, in spite
of many jars and difficulties, had been considered and courted, as are
few of his age, by important men, and still more by their subordinates.
One, too, who, though always convinced of poverty, had come to look
upon many luxuries as necessaries, and as such had them; and who,
though not quite at one with it, had mixed as equal and as welcome
guest in a well-bred society that accepted him as it found him. The
offer was only to be inferior clerk and handy-man to a dealer in
second-hand furniture; with the ultimate hope, by using all spare time,
and, if Fate proved kind, of becoming a draughtsman, and doing the
worst drudgery of the profession in which former pre-eminence had been
won. The pay was small, the work was worth no more, and the society was
_nil_: there was none in the old house in Soho. All these things must
have been plain to Michael: he must have seen what was offered quite
as it was. Yet he accepted it. The Monday after Nan’s twenty-sixth
birthday found him in Soho.
Robert Barmister was not the easiest man to work for; he cared for
nothing but work, and he dealt much with Jews, who also exalted it to
the same place: his standards and demands on others, consequently, were
high and exacting. Theoretically, he expected little of Michael, seeing
the circumstances in which he employed him: practically, though he was
not aware of it himself, he expected a great deal more than most would
have expected of other and more qualified persons. He was a man of few
words; he spared little speech to make his instructions clear; he had
that impatience of ignorance which will not waste time explaining,
and so demands unusual intelligence when comprehension is desirable.
This did not matter with Josiah who had worked with him so long and so
closely as to be almost a second, and gentler, self. But it did not
make things easy for Michael, although, it must be owned, he himself
used to evince some of the same unconscious intolerance in dealing with
others. At Galhardy’s it had been to a good many people’s interest to
understand what Michael Annarly meant, and to carry out his lightly
indicated instructions—or to get someone more initiated to interpret
them without disturbing him for explanation. Here the positions were
reversed, and, in spite of the help of Josiah and Nan, he was often
humiliatingly at sea until such time as native intelligence enabled him
to understand the trivial but unfamiliar details.
In the main the work he had to do was trivial and mechanical; so
narrow in circumstance, and so totally unsuited to him as might seem
a lamentable waste of time and ability. He did not think of it that
way: he did not think of it at all; he simply did what was before
him without looking before or after. At least, it was much better
than doing nothing at Hurstbury; and he could do it, which was
something—there were moments when he doubted if he could do anything
else, if he could ever do anything at all again. So he plodded with
the unfamiliar tasks, giving exact attention to the careful drawing of
chair-backs and kindred things, and learning what Robert Barmister’s
brief orders and instructions meant in the course of the monotonous
days. Once or twice he went to museums to make drawings of some
specimen of furniture or detail of ornament which was to be reproduced.
Once or twice he went to the warehouse of a fat Jew dealer for some
similar purpose. The last was unpleasant: he was not used to being
treated as an inferior by men of the Jew’s stamp, and every nerve
in his body resented it; even while he was forced to admit himself
inferior, not only in present position, but also in the special
knowledge which alone was valued here. In the main, however, he had
nothing acutely distasteful to do; there was nothing acute in any way.
Only once was he told to do that from which he shrank as impossible.
It was on a Saturday afternoon. Nan had gone with him to one of the
warehouse rooms to help him look for a Florentine mirror, concerning
which her father had given instructions too slight for him to recognise
it. She found the mirror, and observed, just below it, the iron chest
she had bought the day she met him.
“It’s not sold yet, I see,” she said.
“What is not?” he asked.
She pointed it out to him; he had not seen it before.
“Why!” he exclaimed, “it’s like one the Carsons have.”
He had spoken before he was aware: had he been aware he would
hardly have said it; he had a distaste for even so much as in any
way referring to the past in these days. But the sight of the chest
unexpectedly recalled the facsimile in the hall at Redstoke. He moved
a little nearer as if to examine it, but really to recover himself. He
was much more plainly seeing the other chest and the room; half hall,
half billiard-room, where it stood—where he had told Lady Sibyl of his
achievement that last night.
“They thought theirs the only one in England,” he said for the sake of
saying something, and to cover, even from himself, how much the memory
hurt. “They wanted another, but they have never been able to get one.”
“Who wants?” Barmister’s voice asked quickly. He was at the far end
of the room, and had not been noticed by the other two; had hardly
noticed them either until Michael’s words touched the mainspring of his
interest. “Who is it wants a chest? Write and tell ’em I’ve got one.
Write to-night to them, whoever they are.”
He moved away without waiting for an answer, which was perhaps as well,
as Michael did not speak. The thing was impossible: he could not write
to Lady Sibyl!
“I will write that letter,” Nan said quietly.
For a moment he felt relieved; next minute, however, he said, “Why
should you? It’s good of you to bother, but it doesn’t matter; I am
what I am, I should do the work of it. It is of no consequence really
that it should happen to be these people, I have done with them—with
all that. I shall never come across them again.”
“It matters in that it would make it more difficult for them to deal
about the chest,” Nan answered. “Many people find it difficult to buy
or sell when a friend or acquaintance is concerned in it. I bought the
chest; I would like it sold well, and I think that is more probable if
the writing of the letter was not recognised. Make a drawing, and I
will write the letter.”
And she did, though whether her motive was the business one she alleged
is open to doubt: this, at least, is certain, a service is often
doubled by not seeming to be one.
So the letter was written; and, as a consequence, the chest was
eventually dispatched to Redstoke. And Nan wrote the address-label
for the packing-case, and the letter of advice of its dispatch, and
everything else in connection with it. And in spite of what he had
said, it did matter to Michael; for days after the chance recall of
Lady Sibyl and the past there was an additional greyness in the world,
an additional bitterness in failure and in Fate. But he lived it down;
gradually it died again to apathy and patient acquiescence; but he
avoided all mention of the Carsons’ name, all reference to the chest,
and the price (a high one) for which it was sold.
The price for which Barmister sold things was always high; his profits
may not have been quick, but they were usually large; he seldom
made a mistake in what he bought, and never in what he sold. He was
clearsighted and careful; in some respects careful to meanness; he
never used a penny stamp where a halfpenny would do, or a whole sheet
of paper where a half would serve. He had a way of trimming off the
edges, a hole-and-corner manner of conducting his business very much
at variance with the polished mahogany and plate-glass methods which
obtained in all with which Michael had been concerned heretofore.
In curious contrast too with the large, almost daring quality which
characterised his dealing in some other ways. Probably, like his choice
of living over his work, it was a survival from older times, when
merchants wrote out their own bills, saved wax and firing, and ventured
their thousands in hazards which would make their descendants tremble.
In several respects the life in the old house was related to that past
time; dinner was at two there on Saturdays and Sundays, at half-past
one, the nearest the exigencies of modern working hours would allow,
on other days. There was cold supper late in the evening, often set at
one end of a table—of great beauty—so as not to interrupt what might be
doing at the other end. There was usually something doing, the polite
art of doing nothing was unknown to the father and daughter, and they
had practically no visitors to help them to it. Sometimes Barmister
was busy with books or papers, or examining recently purchased
treasures; sometimes he was at work downstairs in the room with the
dolphin mantelpiece. Usually Nan sewed of an evening, not fancy work
with clicking of pins or twitchings of silks and examining stitches,
but plain sewing; a continuous, complete sort of occupation which yet
allowed of talk when talk was pleasing, very tranquil.
Once only in the time before Christmas did an interruption occur to the
daily order of things, and that was not unexpected, for it was a yearly
happening. Every year on the 5th December, the anniversary of the day
that Josiah first entered the business, the father and daughter went to
spend the evening at the Foregoods. The custom had been begun long ago,
in the time of the young wife, when the means of all were so straitened
that a supper out was a real economy to the guests, and the getting of
anything adequate to their hospitable instincts a real problem to the
host and hostess.
This year Michael was invited to be of the party, and he accepted,
though he did not want to. The last time he had been out by invitation
was when he dined at Redstoke. If no recollection of that had occurred
to incline him against this he would still have had a distaste for
it; he shrank from meeting his fellow-creatures in any but business
relations. He felt at first that he could not go. But he did, for
Josiah asked him personally, and so tentatively that he did not know
how to refuse without hurting. So he accepted, and Josiah’s simple and
evident satisfaction made him feel a little ashamed.
“My brother, George, will be with us,” Josiah told him. “He’s a clever
man, my brother, but I’m afraid you won’t quite like him.”
“Why not?” Michael asked. “I expect I shall.”
“I don’t think you will. He’s raspy, that is what he is; he has had a
lot of trouble, and it has soured him. I dare say it would have soured
me, if I had had it, I expect it would, it certainly has him.”
“Yes?” Michael said.
He did not feel particularly interested to hear of what sort the
trouble was till Josiah said, “He’s a failure, you see.”
At that his attention was caught.
“I dare say I should have been a failure too,” Josiah went on. “I am
sure I should if it had not been for Mr. Barmister; the males in our
family are that kind, they haven’t much gumption, Janet says, and I
think she’s right. I haven’t much, I know; and I don’t think George
can have, though he has grit, plenty of grit, but he’s cantankerous
with it. That is how the trouble began years ago; he fell out with his
employers.”
“What was he by profession?” Michael asked.
“He was at some dye works originally,” his brother answered; “he was
foreman-mechanic—he’s clever in a way—very clever. We both of us had
rather a taste for machinery when we were boys: mine was nothing, only
an interest in wheels and so on; it all went off in clocks.” His eyes
wandered to the works of an old French clock which lay near him; clocks
were his hobby. What he did not know of horology, ancient and modern,
was little worth knowing; he fingered the French clock tenderly now.
“George was not like me,” he said; “much cleverer. He had, I believe he
still has, real ability. He invented an apparatus for ‘dyeing in the
sliver,’ I think they call it, which was a very good thing; a lot of
money has been made out of it.”
“Not by him, I suppose,” Michael said.
“No, that is what he quarrelled with his employers over. They gave
him a five-pound note for his invention. Of course, they weren’t bound
to give him anything, since he was their man, and the thing was done
in their time, but it was likely to be worth a great deal to them, so
he naturally expected something. Five pounds wasn’t much, certainly;
still, I think myself George did the wrong thing about it. He tore it
in half and threw it in the senior partner’s face, telling him what he
thought of him. George uses rather strong language sometimes.”
“That must have been a surprise for the senior partner,” Michael
observed. “What did he do?”
“Dismissed George on the spot,” Josiah answered, and probably would
have gone on to give some further details of the inventor’s history had
not an interruption occurred here.
On the 5th December, Michael had the opportunity of seeing the man
himself. On that evening he and Nan and her father went to Bayswater.
Nan wore her Sunday dress, a dark-coloured stuff dress, inconspicuous
as usual—one never noticed what she wore or thought about her
appearance at all. It was as well, perhaps, that her clothes were not
fragile on this occasion, for it rained when they left the station, and
Barmister did not take a cab. He never thought of indulging in such
luxuries, and Nan accepted the doing without as a matter of course,
nothing else had ever come her way.
The Foregoods’ house was very small, and always seemed smaller on these
annual occasions, because the hall was so narrow that when Nan and her
father were both in it there was little room for Josiah, who opened the
door and had to squeeze himself behind it. This evening, Michael, being
an extra person, had to stand on the doorstep until Nan had gone part
of the way upstairs in answer to Miss Janet’s beckoning.
Miss Janet wore a dark green _moiré_ dress, which had graced many
similar occasions, and was brought up to the requirements of a figure
bigger than the one from whom it was inherited by inlets, in unexpected
places, of a younger silk of a different shade. Not that anyone of
taste would have quarrelled with the costume, it was so essentially
suited to the wearer. Certainly, no one would have quarrelled with her
as a hostess; she had the hospitality which is the prerogative of the
good housewife, proudly giving of her best, and conscious that of its
kind it is excellent. Excellent it certainly was: a simple supper,
but in its way perfect, each article personally selected by one who
thoroughly understood the subject and personally prepared with the
same understanding. Miss Janet was frankly proud of it, although, as
she herself was aware, the present company were not gourmets enough to
appreciate it at its true worth.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me what we had this time last year,”
she said; “not Mr. Barmister, nor Nan, nor Josiah, any more than Mr.
Annarly and George, who weren’t here—though they wouldn’t know any
better if they had been.”
Nobody could tell her, and Michael said, “I’m afraid I should only have
remembered that it was very good; when things are that one does not
recollect anything else, unless one is the maker and has been through
the details and difficulties of manufacture—outsiders only enjoy and
forget, which seems unfair.”
“If there wasn’t anything unfairer than that in the world, there
wouldn’t be much to complain of,” George said gruffly, and without
raising his fierce eyes. They were fierce eyes, and distrustful too;
those of one foredoomed by Nature to fight on the losing side, but a
person most would not seek to fight or contradict unnecessarily. Miss
Janet had no such scruples: the man was yet to be found concerning
whom she did have them, if she thought the occasion demanded
contradiction or correction.
“Don’t be grumpy, George,” she said. “It isn’t unfairness people
complain of principally; that’s not at the bottom of most people’s
grumbling, though they may think it is, it’s their own temper and
stupidity generally. Half the time when one’s food disagrees with one,
it’s because one brings a sour stomach and a grievance to table.”
Having announced which, she returned to her original subject, and
recalled other celebrations of the anniversary; not omitting the first
of all, at which Nan, being too small, had not been present.
“I was left at home in charge of the landlady’s daughter,” Nan
explained to Michael. “I remember she put me to bed, and I think she
must have put me wrong, for I woke up after a little while and was
frightened because I thought I heard someone scream downstairs. I
screamed then in good earnest, and she had to leave her friend, the
policeman, to come up and comfort me.”
“Serve her right,” was Miss Janet’s comment. “I have no doubt it was
her giggling and squealing with him that woke you, poor child.”
“Maybe,” Nan said, “but I don’t think she wasted much time; I can
remember being down in the kitchen after that, so I suppose she took me
there. I wonder if I was much in the way of the courtship?”
“Not a bit,” said Miss Janet decidedly; “why, you wouldn’t be in the
way now! In a very little you’d find them going on just as if you
weren’t there.”
This may have been true, though perhaps not altogether flattering. Nan
did not contradict it, and conversation went other ways, only returning
to the subject of the anniversary when supper was over and a bottle of
choice wine was put on the table. It was the annual custom to drink
to the success of the business in the best that Josiah’s resources
could afford; better than he could afford without deprivation in the
early days. This year it was a port worth mention, and the toast was
drunk with a very real meaning on the part of most. Afterwards, George
Foregood, who had made no pretence of sharing the sentiment, proposed
an addition.
“Better drink success to me too,” he said, “and damnation to Blackwell
and Blackwell.”
Josiah lowered the glass he had raised. “Success, if you like,” he
said, “not damnation.”
“Same thing,” his brother returned; “their damnation is my success:
there isn’t another I care for.”
Josiah shook his head. “Pity,” he said. “It’s a pity. There isn’t much
good trying to get even with people; it’s ‘spending your substance for
nought, and your money for that which profiteth not.’ Besides, you
never succeed in doing it really.”
“Depends on who you are,” George said shortly, and Nan pondered the
subject.
“Perhaps a little on how much you are prepared to pay?” she suggested.
“It might be like Samson and the Philistines: he pulled the house down
on them, certainly, but on himself too. I suppose it was worth while to
him?”
Josiah looked doubtful. “Perhaps so,” he said, “perhaps so. You always
do have to pull down to get even with people; them down and often
yourself down to the same level of dirty tricks, or injustice, or bad
feeling, or something: it hardly seems worth it. You vindicate yourself
that way, certainly, or you may—but it doesn’t seem much—just be able
to stick out your chest and say, ‘You see, I’m right after all.’”
George did not agree, and said so emphatically. Barmister, who had
been talking to Miss Janet, turned to give his curt, and a trifle
contemptuous, opinion of those who ever allowed a score to accumulate
to need avenging. Miss Janet and Nan left him doing so when they
retired to the other room, where the re-covered chairs stood in a row,
and the clocks of Josiah’s collecting ticked softly from brackets and
shelves.
Nothing more was heard of George’s enterprise that night, though it
was obvious, from what he had said, that he had an ambition set before
himself which he hoped soon to accomplish. Michael rather wondered what
it was: for the first time since the happenings at Galhardy’s he felt
some small interest in a fellow-creature. On the next day, a Sunday,
when he was out with Nan, he asked her about the man.
“George Foregood?” she said. “He hopes to ruin or, at all events,
seriously damage the trade of his old employers. He has invented
another apparatus, or else much improved the one he invented before,
and it is so much better than the first that he believes the dyers who
have it will easily get all the trade of those using the first. He has
been years perfecting it. All the spare money he had has gone that way,
and some of Josiah’s too, and what little he got with his wife. She is
dead now, which is perhaps as well. I believe she was an unsatisfactory
wife, and I’m sure he must have been a still more unsatisfactory
husband.”
It was easy to believe this, Michael said; then asked, “Has he really
perfected his invention now?”
“He thinks so,” Nan answered; “and done it with his own time and own
money, so there can be no dispute about ownership. Now he is looking
out for someone who will float it for him. He wants to make money out
of it; but he is set, above all things, on his old employers suffering
through it.”
“One can understand that,” Michael said.
Nan agreed, but added: “I’m not sure it’s wise. I don’t believe it’s
really the best thing: rather grasping the shadow, don’t you think?”
She stopped by a stile as she spoke, and turned to him, though she was
questioning herself more than him. They had taken the train a little
way out of London, and were spending the short day in walking out
into the country. They sometimes made such excursions on a Sunday.
Rather bare excursions, perhaps; they had never enough money for any
but third-class travelling, and never lunch at country inns, only
sandwiches provided from home, and eaten under a southern hedge, or
among trees; any shelter from the weather which could be found. But
there was something in the expeditions: something akin to the quiet
brown land and low sky, in a way tranquil and apart from ordinary life.
The landscape that day was soft-toned. Nan, leaning against the stile,
looked out across bare fields, green and brown with a film of mist on
them. Even the sun was meek, only a white shining in the higher haze.
“I wonder,” she speculated, her eyes on a little copse, where some
belated leaves still lingered—“I wonder if George will find it worth
while?”
“To wipe off his score with those people?” Michael said. “I suppose so.”
“He will have given a good deal for it,” she said: “all his life; not
only work, and time, and money, but most other things too. I doubt if
it is worth it.”
“Nothing is,” Michael said wearily. “I sometimes doubt if anything is
worth while.”
He offered a hand to help her over the stile as he spoke, and they went
on together in silence.
It was one of her distinctive characteristics, her capacity for
companionable silence: Michael came to value it a good deal on those
Sunday excursions. There was usually an excursion on a Sunday. When,
as sometimes, they could not afford the railway to the country, they
went somewhere in town. Nan knew the City and its purlieus as few
Londoners did, and they wandered down the deserted streets and into
old forgotten corners, finding places little known and beauties not
often recognised. Attending quiet City churches: old churches with
their glories half obscured in the dim light of leaded windows and
overshadowing buildings. Places where worshippers were few, and that
few half lost in high, dark pews; and the clergy and sweet-voiced
choir held the service, as of old, more for the glory of God than the
edification of man. Strange, peaceful places, where a man may seek and,
perhaps, find for himself something of the Mystery which lies behind
the Universe.