THE FLY ON THE WALL
I only knew one poet in my life:
And this, or something like it, was his way.
_How it strikes a Contemporary._
Three days after the inquest Denis came up to town to interview
a timber merchant as to a contract about which there had been a
difference of opinion. He looked down on the man through his eyeglass,
carried all his points, and departed, leaving exasperation in his wake.
After this, finding he had some hours to spare before he need catch his
train to Bredon, he went to pay a call on his cousin Lettice.
Denis was, like his friend Gardiner, the son of a clergyman; but not of
a poor country parson. Denis's father was honorary canon of Rochester
and rural dean; he held a family living, and had besides a comfortable
income of his own. There was some excuse for the double name. The
Merions were a penniless Irish family with a pedigree derived from the
ancient kings (all Irish pedigrees derive from the ancient kings). The
Smith and the money had come to them together, a couple of generations
back, from an eccentric old bachelor who had loved and lost one of the
daughters of the house. Marrying late, Canon Merion-Smith was over
fifty when his only son was born and his wife died. Denis had only a
nurse to mother him, but he did not suffer; he was a very happy small
boy, who from his babyhood never thought of anything but engines. He
was not at all like his father, an easy-going Irishman with a strong
sense of humor, but they were inseparable friends, who explored the
path of knowledge hand in hand. There was no question of parental
authority. Denis did what was required either because he considered it
reasonable, or else to please his father, to whom the staid small boy
was a perpetual fund of amusement.
Canon Merion-Smith taught his son at home till he was fourteen, and
then, rather doubtfully, sent him to Rochester, whither his friend
Harry Gardiner had preceded him. Doubtfully, because he was beginning
to distrust his own training. He did not think Denis would be happy
at school; but he had no desire to be the parent of a prig. Denis was
not happy. He hated arbitrary rules; he could never get into his head
that it was not his to reason why. Only Gardiner made his schooldays
endurable. He stayed at Rochester till he was nearly seventeen, and
then passed unexpectedly without extra coaching straight into Woolwich.
He was very clever, and strikingly handsome in a thin, aristocratic
way, but he thought no more of his abilities than of his good looks.
Denis was proud, but he had not a trace of vanity. He was an example of
the not uncommon blend of class arrogance and personal modesty.
He passed out of Woolwich first in his batch, went to Chatham, to
Rangoon, saw active service in a frontier campaign--the most unhappy
years of his life. He had gone into the army to please his father, but
he hated discipline, and his heart was set on aeronautics. When Canon
Merion-Smith died, Denis resigned his commission and devoted himself
to the problems of flight. The way of inventors is hard. He lost all
his own money and some of Gardiner's, who came back into his life in
time to do the beloved aeroplane a service which Denis, conservative in
gratitude, never forgot. He brought himself to the verge of bankruptcy.
At his last sixpence he fell in with Sydney Wandesforde, a well-known
motor-racing amateur, who had transferred his interest to the new
sport, and was as keen on the practical side of flying as Denis on the
theoretical. He had what Denis had not--a bottomless purse and family
influence to back it. They joined forces, and from that time Denis's
future was assured.
His cousin Lettice--Lætitia Jane Smith--had been in his life for many
years, since she, with her mother and sisters, came to settle in the
village of which Canon Merion-Smith was incumbent. Rosabel and Stella
were charming, half Irish and half French; but Lettice, the eldest, had
always been Denis's ally. She was deliberate where they were quick,
silent while they chattered, methodical instead of happy-go-lucky. They
were clever, but she was the born student, patient, accurate, thorough.
The household was always short of money, so Lettice, who suffered in
that atmosphere of elegant muddle, left home as soon as she could and
set up for herself. She was very fond of her relations, and they of
her, but she found them trying to live with. Lettice had a temper; she
said herself it was a dumb devil. Still, since it was very strictly
dumb, you had to know her well, and watch her carefully, before you
discovered its existence.
She now occupied an attic in Pimlico, and worked all day in the
British Museum library. She might have been more comfortable in a
boarding-house, but she preferred solitude, or rather silence; she
was perennially interested in her fellow-creatures, but she did not
want to be talked to by them. She was always the spectator, never the
actor, having eyes, and ears, a synthetic mind, and that delicate sense
of humor, pity and irony in one, which is a lamp to the feet of its
possessor.
But what marked Lettice off from other people was her passion for
self-obliteration. Most of us in our hearts love to fill the center of
the stage. Lettice was miserable there. She liked to be the fly on the
wall. Yet she was unselfish as well as selfless, gentle, accommodating,
all things to all men. She was like a penny-in-the-slot machine for
doing good: you put in your need, out came her response: and she asked
no more gratitude than the machine. To thank her was like touching the
horns of a snail. A harmless whim in many ways, yet with elements of
danger; for tastes of this sort strengthen as they grow, and Lettice's
friends were beginning to fear she would fade away altogether to an
impersonal ghost, unless something happened to call her back.
She should have been Merion-Smith too; she owed the affix to the same
Irish grandmother from whom Denis had inherited his profile, his
accent, his superstitions, and his family pride. He had been known to
send back a letter addressed to the name of Smith. Lettice, on the
other hand, had dropped the hyphen with all celerity. Denis might
lecture her on her slackness; she concurred amiably so long as she was
with him, and then went on her way exactly as before. Lettice on the
surface was all sweet pliability, but underneath lay solid rock. Denis
faced the world as an obstinate, pugnacious Irishman, whereas a skilful
hand could guide him with a silken thread. Lettice read him like a
book and made soft fun of him, but always with a reserve of peculiarly
tender affection; she thought a great deal of her cousin. And Denis
thought a great deal--a very great deal--of her. He was aware that in
half her innocent speeches she was, to put it gracefully, having him
on; but what did that matter? Lettice was Lettice. He did not analyze
his friends; he idealized them.
Denis was received at No. 33 Canning Street by the daughter of the
house, a smart young person in silk stockings who invited him, with
never a "Sir" to her sentence, to step up and find Miss Smith in the
top back attic. The stairs were dark; Denis, gloomily reflecting on the
decadence of the lower classes, fell over a pair of boots and trod in a
dust-pan which flew up and hit him. He was not in the best of tempers
when he knocked at his cousin's door.
"_Come_ in!" called out an abstracted voice, wearily raised; and he
obeyed. There stood Lettice in the middle of the floor, holding out
with both arms before her nose a newspaper which enwrapped her, mind
and body. Lettice had been known, when she came in from the Museum
after her day's work, to read through the whole of a novel, standing
under the gas, before she moved to take off her hat. It took some time
for Denis's presence to penetrate, and then she lowered her arms slowly
and looked round.
"O-oh," she said. "I thought you were the milk. Sit down, sit down."
She folded up her paper and poked it under a book, took away his hat
and stick, and fetched the milk from the passage, hurrying slowly, as
her custom was. Denis sat down, and discovered that he was very glad to
be with her again. A cooling fountain in life's dry, dreary sand, that
was what Lettice represented. She was not a beauty; she had none of the
attributes of a heroine. Her nose was nondescript, her complexion poor,
her mouth large, though there was character in the full under lip;
character also, and brains, in the big forehead which she hid beneath
her soft brown hair. For the rest, she had drooping shoulders and a
long slim neck; she chose and put on her clothes like a Frenchwoman;
but her best points were the set and shape of her graceful little head,
and the somewhat misleading sweetness of her hazel eyes.
Her room was a long white attic, one end curtained off. There was a
window in the gable facing west, and in the window a table overflowing
with manuscripts and books; sheets of foolscap covered with her
graceful writing, an Old English text, a Latin grammar, a treatise on
court hand. She was trying to make up for a haphazard education by
teaching herself. As she passed on her way to the cupboard, she drew a
sheet of paper out of the muddle and presented it to Denis.
"Now you can just look through that while I'm making the tea, and see
if there are any mistakes," she enjoined him in the minute expressive
voice which was one of her charms to those who found her charming.
Denis found himself faced by a Latin exercise. When he had learned all
his cousin could tell him about the wreaths and the roses that adorned
the girls and the queens, he turned the page, and came on something
more attractive. In her hours of ease Lettice was a poet. Looking up
from her task with the bread knife, she saw what he was doing, turned a
deep pink, and silently but swiftly removed the sheet from the fingers.
Denis laughed.
"Haven't you anything to show?"
"No, I haven't," said Lettice, acerb and forbidding.
"'Sheep on a lonely road,
Gray in the gray--'"
Denis quoted maliciously. The poet covered her ears with her hands.
"Oh, do-o-on't!"
"Well, let me see the rest of it!"
"Well, it isn't finished; it's no good looking at a thing till it's
finished, is it?" retorted Lettice in a soft flurry of exasperation.
Her poetry was dug out of her own soul, and she suffered the pains of
vivisection in hearing it discussed. Denis knew this well, and Lettice
knew he knew it. Looking like an affronted kitten, she retired into
a silence that the brutal critic might have called sulky, and seemed
disposed to stay there. But Denis knew how to make his peace. Just
then the kettle boiled over. He was quick to lift it off--and to put
it down again in a hurry, shaking his fingers. Before he could find
his handkerchief, down swooped Lettice's arm; she seized the handle,
bore it away, took her time over filling the teapot, ostentatiously
stayed to settle the cozy; then, having displayed beyond possibility of
oversight the superior hardness of her palm, she replaced the kettle on
the hob, and returned to her toasting fork, exuding vainglory.
This incident settled, they talked of the aeroplane. This was
invariably Lettice's first question, and it brought down a shower of
information, all water on a duck's back. Considering what excellent
brains she had, it was surprising how dense she could be when she
chose. When Denis's fluent Irish tongue ran dry, she was ready with her
next question.
"And did you have a nice time at Grasmere with dear Harry?"
"No, I didn't," said Denis with unexpected force. "I had a perfectly
beastly time!"
"Dear, dear! How was that?"
"Oh, things went wrong," said Denis vaguely. He wanted to tell the
whole story--Lettice seemed to purify and sweeten all she took into
her knowledge, and this badly needed sweetening. He hated it; he hated
his evasions at the inquest, what Gardiner called his adroitness; he
hated soiling his fingers; he was vaguely dissatisfied with his friend.
But since, for Gardiner's sake, he could not tell her all, he told her
nothing. Half-truths were no good with Lettice. "By the by, why didn't
you come?" he said. "I was expectin' you all the time. I couldn't think
where you'd got to. You as good as promised to turn up!"
"Were you very disappointed?"
"No. No, I can't say I was--not altogether. I want you to meet Harry,
but I didn't want you this time. Queer chap he is--you may think you
know a man, but you never do."
Lettice's eyebrows moved upwards ever so little. "How do you mean
queer?"
"Oh, I don't know. He has all sorts of cranks. Last time he was at
Bredon, that cold spell when all the pipes were burstin', nothing would
do but he must sleep out in the garden all the time. And it was just
the same at Grasmere, though it rained cats and dogs. You can't be
even with his fads," Denis added with a sigh, extending himself in his
chair, his long legs stretched half across the hearth. "He's off almost
at once to that place in the Ardennes I was tellin' you about. I've
promised to run over there next summer. I wish you'd come too, Lettice,
as you didn't bring it off this time."
"You _said_ you didn't want me," murmured Lettice reproachfully.
"I didn't want you when things were all beastly. But I do want you to
meet Harry. I want your opinion of him."
To this Lettice made no reply. She set a few slow, neat stitches in the
cloth she was embroidering.
"Whereabouts is it, this place in the Ardennes?"
"Near Bouillon. You can get there for next to nothing, if that's what
you're thinkin' of, but I wish you'd let me take you. I did rather well
over that deal this morning and I'm rollin'. After all, you're as good
as my sister. You might just as well."
Lettice did not thank him; that was taken for granted. They understood
each other so well that words were often superfluous.
"If it's not very expensive I might manage it myself," she said. "My
old man in Harley Street says I've got to take a holiday, so I suppose
I must go somewhere, just to satisfy him. And I should rather like to
see the Ardennes."
"Have you been to the doctor again? Why didn't you tell me before,
Lettice? What does he say?"
"He says," said Lettice with inimitable unction, "that I am in a state
of thorough nervous exhaustion, and ought to take six months' rest. So."
"Then I hope you're going to do it!"
Lettice smiled. She did not look particularly docile. Denis was
beguiled into lecturing her about her health, though he knew it was
time wasted--nay, rather, time misspent. For Miss Smith was like a pig,
and if you pulled her one way she was apt to go the other. In this
case, however, it seemed that she had fairly made up her mind before
he came to a holiday abroad, for presently she let slip that she had
been studying a guide to the Ardennes, which she had borrowed from a
neighbor below. Denis sent her down to borrow it again.
While she was away he wandered about, looking at her books. Under a
fat dictionary he came upon the paper she had been reading when he
entered, and he pulled it out to see if she still took what he called
the Radical rag. Its name stared him in the face: _The Westmorland
Gazette_. It was doubled back at page four: _Fatality at Grasmere_.
He wheeled as she came into the room. "Lettice, how on earth did you
get hold of this thing?"
She stopped dead for a moment, then came on.
"I ordered it."
"What for?"
"Because I'd seen something about the accident, and I wanted to know
more. So I went to Finch's at the corner and asked him to get me the
local paper, and he did."
Lettice had a talent for explaining the obvious.
"Where did you see anything about the accident?"
"There was a paragraph in my halfpenny rag."
"Confound!" said Denis, black as a thunder-cloud.
Lettice smiled, recovering her equanimity as he lost his. "Well, you
shouldn't go and make interesting things like aeroplanes and become a
public character," she murmured _pianissimo_.
"Why didn't you tell me that you knew?"
She looked at him, allowing her speakingly derisive eyes to retaliate
that question.
"I couldn't tell you about it, it wasn't my affair," said Denis hotly
and confusedly. "Gardiner doesn't want the story all over the place.
How could I help it, Lettice? But when I was talkin' about Easedale, I
think you might have let me know you knew!"
"My dear child, I couldn't begin on it if you didn't, could I?" said
Lettice patiently. "I was simply _longing_ to ask questions. It was
nice, proper, lady-like feeling made me hold my tongue, what you always
say you like. And now you're cross with me! Well, well."
Denis was cross; he stood crumpling the paper in his hands, visibly
fuming. Lettice took it away from him and smoothed it out.
"I shan't talk about it to Mr. Gardiner when I come to Rochehaut, if
that's what you're afraid of."
"Are you really comin' to Rochehaut?"
"Don't you want me now you know I know?"
She looked at him with those impish eyes.
"You know too much, Lettice!" said her cousin, discomfited, half
laughing. She turned away with her small foreign shrug.
"Dear, dear! there's no pleasing some people!"