It was October, five months after Anne's birthday. She was not to know
again the mood which determined her complete surrender. Supreme moods can
never be recaptured or repeated. The passion that inspires them is
unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass
and perish in its exaltation. She would know tenderness, but never just
that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the
peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale.
The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner
thrill of the impulse which had given it birth. It was but seldom that
the moment revived in memory. If Anne had accounted to herself for that
day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to
Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was
exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the
beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations. Anne's mind had a
tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred. Happily
for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen.
Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy. For the
greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible
spiritual content.
She conceived a profound affection for her home. The house in Prior
Street became the centre of her earthward thoughts, and she seldom left
it for very long. Her health remained magnificent; her nature being
adapted to an undisturbed routine, appeased by the well-ordered, even
passage of her days.
She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in
departing from it. To be always down before her husband for eight-o'clock
breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the
early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or
talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had
become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour's.
The hours of even-song struck for her no more.
For, above all, she had made a point of always being at home in time for
Majendie's return from his office. At five o'clock she was ready for him,
beside her tea-table, irreproachably dressed. Her friends complained that
they had lost sight of her. Regularly at a quarter to five she would
forsake the drawing-rooms of Thurston Square. However absorbing Mrs.
Eliott's conversation, towards the quarter, the tender abstraction of
Anne's manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another
charm. Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely
sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession. Anne divided her
friends into those who understood and those who didn't. Fanny Eliott
would never understand. But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality
of her bridal spirit, understood completely. And for Anne Mrs. Gardner's
understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband. Anne's
heart went out to Mrs. Gardner.
Not that she saw much of her, either. She had grown impatient of
interests that lay outside her home. Once she had decided to give herself
up to her husband, other people's claims appeared as an impertinence
beside that perfection of possession.
She was less vividly aware of her own perfect possession of him. Majendie
was hardly aware of it himself. His happiness was so profound that he had
not yet measured it. He, too, had slipped into the same imperturbable
routine. It was seldom that he kept her waiting past five o'clock. He
hated the people who made business appointments with him for that hour.
His old associates saw little of him, and his club knew him no more.
He preferred Anne's society to that of any other person. They had no more
fear of each other. He saw that she was beginning to forget.
In one thing only he was disappointed. The trembling woman who had held
him in her arms at Westleydale had never shown herself to him again. She
had been called, created, for an end beyond herself. The woman he had
married again was pure from passion, and of an uncomfortable reluctance
in the giving and taking of caresses. He forced himself to respect her
reluctance. He had simply to accept this emotional parsimony as one of
the many curious facts about Anne. He no longer went to Edith for an
explanation of them, for the Anne he had known in Westleydale was too
sacred to be spoken of. An immense reverence possessed him when he
thought of her. As for the actual present Anne, loyalty was part of the
large simplicity of his nature, and he could not criticise her.
Remembering Westleydale, he told himself that her blanched susceptibility
was tenderness at white heat. If she said little, he argued that (like
himself) she felt the more. And at times she could say perfect things.
"I wonder, Nancy," he once said to her, "if you know how divinely sweet
your voice is?"
"I shall begin to think it is, if you think so," said she.
"And would you think yourself beautiful, if I thought so?"
"Very beautiful. At any rate, as beautiful as I want to be."
He could not control the demonstration provoked by that admission, and
she asked him if he were coming to church with her to-morrow.
His Nancy chose her moments strangely.
But not for worlds would he have admitted that she was deficient in
a sense of humour. She had her small hilarities that passed for it.
Keenness in that direction would have done violence to the repose and
sweetness of her blessed presence. The peace of it remained with him
during his hours of business.
Anne did not like his business. But, in spite of it, she was proud
of him, of his appearance, his charm, his distinction, his entire
superiority to even the aristocracy of Scale.
She no longer resented his indifference to her friends in Thurston
Square, since it meant that he desired to have her to himself. Of his own
friends he had seen little, and she nothing. If she had not pressed Fanny
Eliott on him, he had spared her Mrs. Lawson Hannay and Mrs. Dick
Ransome. She had been fortunate enough to find both these ladies out when
she returned their calls. And Majendie had spoken of his most intimate
friend, Charlie Gorst, as absent on a holiday in Norway.
It was, therefore, in a mood of more than usual concession that she
proposed to return, now in October, the second advance made to her by
Mrs. Hannay in July.
Majendie was relieved to think that he would no longer be compelled to
perjure himself on Anne's account. The Hannays had frequently reproached
him with his wife's unreadiness in response, and (as he had told her) he
had exhausted all acceptable explanations of her conduct. He had "worked"
her headaches "for all they were worth" with Hannay; for weeks he had
kept Hannay's wife from calling, by the fiction, discreetly presented, of
a severe facial neuralgia; and his last shameless intimation, that Anne
was "rather shy, you know," had been received with a respectful
incredulity that left him with nothing more to say.
Mrs. Hannay was not at home when Anne called, for Anne had deliberately
avoided her "day." But Mrs. Hannay was irrepressibly forgiving, and Anne
found herself invited to dine at the Hannays' with her husband early in
the following week. It was hardly an hour since she had left Mrs.
Hannay's doorstep when the pressing, the almost alarmingly affectionate
little note came hurrying after her.
"I'll go, dear, if you really want me to," said she.
"Well--I think, if you don't mind. The Hannays have been awfully good to
me."
So they went.
"Don't snub the poor little woman too unmercifully," was Edith's parting
charge.
"I promise you I'll not snub her at all," said Anne.
"You can't," said Majendie. "She's like a soft sofa cushion with lots of
frills on. You can sit on her, as you sit on a sofa cushion, and she's as
plump, and soft, and accommodating as ever the next day."
The Hannays lived in the Park.
Majendie talked a great deal on the way there. His supporting and
attentive manner was not quite the stimulant he had meant it to be. Anne
gathered that the ordeal would be trying; he was so eager to make it
appear otherwise.
"Once you're there, it won't be bad, you know, at all. The Hannays are
really all right. They'll ask the very nicest people they know to meet
you. They think you're doing them a tremendous honour, you know, and
they'll rise to it. You'll see how they'll rise."
Mrs. Hannay had every appearance of having risen to it. Anne's entrance
(she was impressive in her entrances) set the standard high; yet Mrs.
Hannay rose. When agreeably excited Mrs. Hannay was accustomed to move
from one end of her drawing-room to the other with the pleasing and
impalpable velocity of all soft round bodies inspired by gaiety. So
exuberant was the softness of the little lady and so voluminous her
flying frills, that at these moments her descent upon her guests appeared
positively winged like the descent of cherubim. To-night she advanced
slowly from her hearth-rug with no more than the very slightest swaying
and rolling of all her softness, the very faintest tremor of her downy
wings. Mrs. Hannay's face was the round face of innocence, the face of
a cherub with blown cheeks and lips shaped for the trumpet.
"My dear Mrs. Majendie--at last." She retained Mrs. Majendie's hand for
the moment of presenting her to her husband. By this gesture she
appropriated Mrs. Majendie, taking her under her small cherubic wing.
"Wallie, how d'you do?" Her left hand furtively appropriated Mrs.
Majendie's husband. Anne marked the familiarity with dismay. It was
evident that at the Hannays' Walter was in the warm lap of intimacy.
It was evident, too, that Mr. Hannay had married considerably beneath
him. Anne owned that he had a certain dignity, and that there was
something rather pleasing in his loose, clean-shaven face. The sharp
slenderness of youth was now vanishing in a rosy corpulence, corpulence
to which Mr. Hannay resigned himself without a struggle. But above it the
delicate arch of his nose attested the original refinement of his type.
His mouth was not without sweetness, Mr. Hannay being as indulgent to
other people as he was to himself.
He received Anne with a benign air; he assured her of his delight in
making her acquaintance; and he refrained from any allusions to the long
delay of his delight.
Little Mrs. Hannay was rolling softly in another direction.
"Canon Wharton, let me present you to Mrs. Walter Majendie."
She had risen to Canon Wharton. For she had said to her husband: "You
must get the Canon. She can't think us such a shocking bad lot if we have
him." Her face expressed triumph in the capture of Canon Wharton, triumph
in the capture of Mrs. Walter Majendie, triumph in the introduction.
Owing to the Hannays' determination to rise to it, the dinner-party, in
being rigidly select, was of necessity extremely small.
"Miss Mildred Wharton--Sir Rigley Barker--Mr. Gorst. Now you all know
each other."
The last person introduced had lingered with a certain charming
diffidence at Mrs. Majendie's side. He was a man of about her husband's
age, or a little younger, fair and slender, with a restless, flushed face
and brilliant eyes.
"I can't tell you what a pleasure this is, Mrs. Majendie."
He had an engaging voice and a still more engaging smile.
"You may have heard about me from your husband. I was awfully sorry to
miss you when I called before I went to Norway. I only came back this
morning, but I _made_ Hannay invite me."
Anne murmured some suitable politeness. She said afterwards that her
instinct had warned her against Mr. Gorst, with his restlessness and
brilliance; but, as a matter of fact, her instinct had done nothing of
the sort, and his manners had prejudiced her in his favour. Fanny Eliott
had told her that he belonged to a very old Lincolnshire family. There
was a distinction about him. And he really had a particularly engaging
smile.
So she received him amiably; so amiably that Majendie, who had been
observing their encounter with an intent and rather anxious interest,
appeared finally reassured. He joined them, releasing himself adroitly
from Sir Rigley Barker.
"How's Edith?" said Mr. Gorst.
His use of the name and something in his intonation made Anne attentive.
"She's better," said Majendie. "Come and see her soon."
"Oh, rather. I'll come round to-morrow. If," he added, "Mrs. Majendie
will permit me."
"Mrs. Majendie," said her husband, "will be delighted."
Anne smiled assent. Her amiability extended even to Mrs. Hannay, who had
risen to it, so far, well.
During dinner Anne gave her attention to her right-hand neighbour, Canon
Wharton; and Mrs. Hannay, looking down from her end of the table, saw her
selection justified. In rising to the Canon she had risen her highest;
for the ex-member hardly counted; he was a fallen star. But Canon
Wharton, the Vicar of All Souls, stood on an eminence, social and
spiritual, in Scale. He had built himself a church in the new quarter of
the town, and had filled it to overflowing by the power of his eloquence.
Lawson Hannay, in a moment of unkind insight, had described the Canon as
"a speculative builder"; but he lent him money for his building, and
liked him none the less.
Out of the pulpit the Vicar of All Souls was all things to all men. In
the pulpit he was nothing but the Vicar of All Souls. He stood there for
a great light in Scale, "holding," as he said, "the light, carrying the
light, battling for light in the darkness of that capital of commerce,
that stronghold of materialism, founded on money, built up in money,
cemented with money!" He snarled out the word "money," and flung it in
the face of his fashionable congregation; he gnashed his teeth over it;
he shook his fist at them; and they rose to his mood, delighting in
little Tommy Wharton's pluck in "giving it them hot." He was always
giving it them hot, warming himself at his own fire. And then little
Tommy Wharton slipped out of his little surplice and his little cassock,
and into the Hannays' house for whiskey and soda. He could drink peg for
peg with Lawson Hannay, without turning a hair, while poor Lawson turned
many hairs, till his little wife ran in and hid the whiskey and shook her
handkerchief at the little Canon, and "shooed" him merrily away. And
Lawson, big, good-natured Lawson, would lend him more "money" to build
his church with.
So the Vicar of All Souls, who aspired to be all things to all men, was
hand in glove with the Lawson Hannays. He had occasionally been known to
provide for the tables of the poor, but he dearly loved to sit at the
tables of the rich; and he justified his predilection by the highest
example.
Anne, who knew the Canon by his spiritual reputation only, turned to him
with interest. Her eye, keen to discern these differences, saw at once
that he was a man of the people. He had the unfinished features, the
stunted form of an artisan; his body sacrificed, his admirers said, to
the energies of his mighty brain. His face was a heavy, powerful oval,
bilious-coloured, scarred with deep lines, and cleft by the wide mouth of
an orator, a mouth that had acquired the appearance of strength through
the Canon's habit of bringing his lips together with a snap at the close
of his periods. His eyes were a strange, opaque grey, but the clever
Canon made them seem almost uncomfortably penetrating by simply knitting
his eyebrows in a savage pent-house over them. They now looked forth at
Anne as if the Canon knew very well that her soul had a secret, and that
it would not long be hidden from him.
They talked about the Eliotts, for the Canon's catholicity bridged the
gulf between Thurston Square and vociferous, high-living, fashionable
Scale. He had lately succeeded (by the power of his eloquence) in winning
over Mrs. Eliott from St. Saviour's to All Souls. He hoped also to win
over Mrs. Eliott's distinguished friend. For the Canon was mortal. He had
yielded to the unspiritual seduction of filling All Souls by emptying
other men's churches. Lawson Hannay smiled on the parson's success,
hoping (he said) to see his money back again.
Money or no money, he left him a clear field with Mrs. Majendie. Ladies,
when they were pretty, appealed to Lawson as part of the appropriate
decoration of a table; but, much as he loved their charming society, he
loved his dinner more. He loved it with a certain pure extravagance,
illuminated by thought and imagination. Mrs. Hannay was one with him in
this affection. Her heart shared it; her fancy ministered to it, rising
higher and higher in unwearying flights. It was a link between them;
almost (so fine was the passion) an intellectual tie. But reticence was
not in Hannay's nature; and his emotion affected Anne very unpleasantly.
She missed the high lyric note in it. All epicurean pleasures, even so
delicate and fantastic a joy as Hannay's in his dinner, appeared gross
to Anne.
Majendie at the other end of the table caught sight of her detached,
unhappy look, and became detached and unhappy himself, till Mrs. Hannay
rallied him on his abstraction.
"If you _are_ in love, my dear Wallie," she whispered, "you needn't show
it so much. It's barely decent."
"Isn't it? Anyhow, I hope it's quite decently bare," he answered, tempted
by her folly. They were gay at Mrs. Hannay's end of the table. But Anne,
who watched her husband intently, looked in vain for that brilliance
which had distinguished him the other night, when he dined in Thurston
Square. These Hannays, she said to herself, made him dull.
Now, though Anne didn't in the least want to talk to Mr. Hannay, Mr.
Hannay displeased her by not wanting to talk more to her. Not that he
talked very much to anybody. Now and then the Canon's niece, Mildred
Wharton, the pretty girl on his left, moved him to a high irrelevance, in
those rare moments when she was not absorbed in Mr. Gorst. Pretty Mildred
and Mr. Gorst were flirting unabashed behind the roses, and it struck
Anne that the Canon kept an alarmed and watchful eye upon their
intercourse.
To Anne the dinner was intolerably long. She tried to be patient with it,
judging that its length was a measure of the height her hosts had risen
to. There she did them an injustice; for in the matter of a menu the
Hannays could not rise; for they lived habitually on a noble elevation.
At the other end of the table Mrs. Hannay called gaily on her guests
to eat and drink. But, when the wine went round, Anne noticed that she
whispered to the butler, and after that, the butler only made a feint
of filling his master's glass, and turned a politely deaf ear to his
protests. And then her voice rose.
"Lawson, that pineapple ice is delicious. Gould, hand the pineapple ice
to Mr. Hannay. I adore pineapple ice," said Mrs. Hannay. "Wallie, you're
drinking nothing. Fill Mr. Majendie's glass, Gould, fill it--fill it."
She was the immortal soul of hospitality, was Mrs. Hannay.
In the drawing-room Mrs. Hannay again took possession of Anne and led her
to the sofa. She fairly enthroned her there; she hovered round her; she
put cushions at her head, and more cushions under her feet; for Mrs.
Hannay liked to be comfortable herself, and to see every one comfortable
about her. "You come," said she, "and sit down by me on this sofa,
and let's have a cosy talk. That's it. Only you want another cushion.
No?--Do--Won't you really? Then it's four for me," said Mrs. Hannay,
supporting herself in various postures of experimental comfort, "one for
my back, two for my fat sides, and one for my head. Now I'm comfy. I
adore cushions, don't you? My husband says I'm a little down cushion
myself, so I suppose that's why."
Anne, in her mood, had crushed many innocent vulgarities before now; but
she owned that she could no more have snubbed Mrs. Hannay effectually
than you could snub a little down cushion. It would be impossible, she
thought, to make any impression at all on that yielding surface.
Impossible to take any impression from her, to say where her gaiety ended
and her vulgarity began.
"Isn't it funny?" the little lady went on, unconscious of Mrs. Majendie's
attitude. "My husband's your husband's oldest friend. So I think you and
I ought to be friends too."
Anne's face intimated that she hardly considered the chain of reasoning
unbreakable; but Mrs. Hannay continued to play cheerful elaborations on
the theme of friendship, till her husband appeared with the other three
men. He had his hand on Majendie's shoulder, and Mrs. Hannay's soft smile
drew Mrs. Majendie's attention to this manifestation of intimacy. And it
dawned on Anne that Mrs. Hannay's gaiety would not end here; though it
was here, with the mixing of the company, that her vulgarity would begin.
"Did you ever see such a pair? I tell Lawson he's fonder of Wallie than
he is of me. I believe he'd go down on his knees and black his boots for
nothing, if he asked him. I'd do it myself, only you mustn't tell Lawson
I said so." She paused. "I think Lawson wants to come and have a little
talk with you."
Hannay approached heavily, and his wife gave up her place to him,
cushions and all. He seated himself heavily. His eyes wandered heavily to
the other side of the room, following Majendie. And as they rested on his
friend there was a light in them that redeemed their heaviness.
He had come to Mrs. Majendie prepared for weighty utterance.
"That man," said Hannay, "is the best man I know. You've married, dear
lady, my dearest and most intimate friend. He's a saint--a Bayard." He
flung the name at her defiantly, and with a gesture he emphasised the
crescendo of his thought. "A _preux chevalier, sans peur_" said Mr.
Hannay, "_et sans reproche_."
Having delivered his soul, he sat, still heavily, in silence.
Anne repressed the rising of her indignation. To her it was as if he had
been defending her husband against some accusation brought by his wife.
And so, indeed, he was. Poor Hannay had been conscious of her
attitude--conscious under her pure and austere eyes, of his own
shortcomings, and it struck him that Majendie needed some defence against
her judgment of his taste in friendship.
When the door closed behind the Majendies, Mr. Gorst was left the last
lingering guest.
"Poor Wallie," said Mrs. Hannay.
"_Poor_ Wallie," said Mr. Hannay, and sighed.
"What do you think of her?" said the lady to Mr. Gorst.
"Oh, I think she's magnificent."
"Do you think he'll be able to live up to it?"
"Why not?" said Mr. Gorst cheerfully.
"Well, it wasn't very gay for him before he married, and I don't imagine
it's going to be any gayer now."
"_Now_" said Mr. Hannay, "I understand what's meant by the solemnisation
of holy matrimony. That woman would solemnise a farce at the Vaudeville,
with Gwen Richards on."
"She very nearly solemnised my dinner," said Mrs. Hannay.
"She doesn't know," said Mr. Hannay, "what a dinner is. She's got no
appetite herself, and she tried to take mine away from me. A regular
dog-in-the-manger of a woman."
"Oh, come, you know," said Gorst. "She can't be as bad as all that.
Edith's awfully fond of her."
"And _that's_ good enough for you?" said Mrs. Hannay.
"Yes. That's good enough for me. _I_ like her," said Gorst stoutly; and
Mrs. Hannay hid in her pocket-handkerchief a face quivering with mirth.
But Gorst, as he departed, turned on the doorstep and repeated,
"Honestly, I like her."
"Well, honestly," said Mr. Hannay, "I don't." And, lost in gloomy
forebodings for his friend, he sought consolation in whiskey and soda.
Mrs. Hannay took a seat beside him.
"And what did you think of the dinner?" said she.
"It was a dead failure, Pussy."
"You old stupid, I mean the dinner, not the dinner-party."
Mrs. Hannay rubbed her soft, cherubic face against his sleeve, and as she
did so she gently removed the whiskey from his field of vision. She was a
woman of exquisite tact.
"Oh, the dinner, my plump Pussy-cat, was a dream--a happy dream."