|THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine
breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to
him: there was a radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than
her physical appeal. He was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him
before--not even applause--but did not see that more had come to him
than loveliness where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that
there were greater things in Effie than her comeliness.
She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his
income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country,
which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got
for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage.
There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge
against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now.
With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She
did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty
and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who
managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift
habits of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a
passion for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In
the East, it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home
and, granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing
for his mother. He could deny himself nothing.
It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go
into the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother’s
luxuries. Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed,
quite sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of
Manchester and withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence.
Was it not by going to offices that Dr. Mannering’s rich patients had
been able to pay their bills? And hadn’t they an army of friends who
used to eat their salt?
But the friends, misunderstanding Effie’s pride, offered no help of the
kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where,
with dress and servants’ tips, it would cost her more to live than in
the rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative
now, and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk’s
place. They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a
typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to
ask.
Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their
popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to
procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared,
Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries
made.
Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality;
Effie’s net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself
was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts
than theirs.
It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot
live by money and then lose money without losing more than money.
Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a
miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that;
that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and
Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did
not buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes
and watched her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old
extravagance, it was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman
moderately happy, she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby
when she came into Mr. Branstone’s office for the post of typist one
bright, revealing afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the
polls and he had made himself a figure on the hustings.
Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the
difference between the friendship which is given and the friendship
which is bought. She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from
their first encounter, seemed to her more like a friend than an
employer. By then, she had experience of employers. That was why she was
out of work.
It wasn’t, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted,
genuinely raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering
notoriety. He had a new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little
was beyond his reach, that he might even hope to come to terms with
Effie. Not, that is to say, to such terms as her last employer had
proposed. Sam was not, in these matters, the average sensual man. The
point was, and it was to his credit, that he discerned something fine
in Effie even at this stage, and the mood of confidence gave him to hope
that he might not seem commonplace to her. Already, that afternoon, he
cared so much. Her opinion mattered.
It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of
surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do.
She might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to
know. He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was
not any employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town
councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn
what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was
going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he
had done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his
record would come better from others than from himself. In the office
they knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much
which the routine work would tell her of him.
He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office,
where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the
business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she
was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was
popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to
her.
All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private
office. It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a
typist-secretary, and to bring her from the general office could excite
no comment. On the contrary, to leave her there so long might look
strange or at least suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much
he cared whether she was efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly
efficient, and still he coquetted with his purpose of having her with
him. It seemed to him that to call her in would be a step definite and
irrevocable, one which he wanted and even yearned to make, but about
which he hesitated sensuously as a bridegroom might hesitate on the
threshold of the bridal chamber. He neglected to make two certainly
profitable journeys to London at this time because he could not deny
himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she bent over her typewriter
when he passed through the office.
And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the
music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with
new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada,
but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t
exist. She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the
step from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness
was almost imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the
radiance of the present. The sun puts out the candlelight.
He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving
eyes. She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she
emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he
took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same
way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till
Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the
course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy;
it certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie
saw him, or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have
expressed more desire to break than to kiss it.
He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at
present as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to
learn. But it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her
who was not used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth
while, his bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the
rankness of him. Chance might not come her way, and she thought it
unlikely that it would, but if it did, she meant to take it with
both hands. Effie, aged twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam
Bran-stone, who was thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her
preposterous audacity, but the more she saw and the more she heard of
him, the more determination bit into her. Droll, officious, absurd--all
these her idea was, and she liked it because it was fantastic and
because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam
seemed bound together. And yet he paid her wages; he was a solid man,
a member of the Council, and a serious politician! She was impertinent
indeed.
But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on
the threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably
nervous, and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple
action of calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a
ritual to which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to
its solemnity, to usher her into that office with all that was most
impressive, to signify to her the importance of being secretary to
Branstone; and, instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was
painfully correct dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there
most comically aghast at his slip.
Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and
conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the
something, at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and
to drop an aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of
the ritualist, it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the
more solemn the occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude
on light pretext.
Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his
confusion was too much for her. She hadn’t the strength to resist, and
though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not
before he had seen.
This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she
giggled at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for
the fraction of a second whether he would get more satisfaction from
smacking her or from kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him,
and nothing seemed to matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very
well, then he wasn’t a superman, and she wasn’t divine. They were human
beings, at this moment in the relationship of employer and employed.
“In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering.” He
met her eye defiantly as he spoke the “here.”
“If you have your notebook you can take this letter down.”
He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to
her had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was
a refuge, and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter
his opportunity to indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was
writing to an author about a manuscript, which he intended to publish,
but broke off before he reached that decisive point of his letter.
“Wait a bit,” he said. “Here is the novel I am writing about. I want
your opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will
you have a look at it in here? I’m due at a Council meeting and must
go.”
“Certainly, Mr. Branstone,” she said; “but my judgment isn’t very
reliable.”
“We don’t know that until you try,” he said, escaping from his office
to the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting
began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a
feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again.
Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than
seriously, not supposing that her verdict either way would go for
anything, but appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that,
considered as work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the
manuscript at the office, she took it home with her to Rusholme.
In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive
Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have
avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter
at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be
called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner.
One must, of course, choose one’s landlady with discretion.
Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had
suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had
her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited
from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her.
Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded;
but a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many
callers, and they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a
contribution to the feast.
To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one
Sunday by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at
her last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he
could. He was not at the _Warden_ office that night, for the same reason
which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone’s. He
was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism
of the _Warden_, well enough to come out to take the tonic called Effie.
“I ought not to let you in to-night,” she said. “Thank Heaven for
that,” he said, coming in. “Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I
know--unless you’re really serious, Effie? In which case I’ll go.” His
hand was on the door-knob.
“I’m really serious,” she said with mock impressiveness. “I’m working
overtime. Behold!” She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in
hand. “This,” she announced, “is Work.”
“I can believe it,” he said, “because that looks like the typescript of
a novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is
not mine, it is probably work.”
“Oh, it’s work all right,” she said. “Hard labour, too. I’m reading it
by order of my new chief. He publishes things like this.”
Stewart sat up. “Not Branstone?” he, said. “Don’t say you’ve gone to
Sammy!”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better
say I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in
his office are one of’em.”
“Why? Don’t you like his office?”
“It’s an office. So long as you’ve to be in an office, you could pick
worse--easily. Sammy’s a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but there
are also depths, and I’ve never fathomed them. There’s mud in him, but
it’s not the nasty sort of mud.”
“I’ve seen that much,” she said. “Polluted but curable.”
“You’re not by any chance thinking of yourself as a Branstone River
Conservancy, are you?”
“I rather like him, Dubby,” she said.
“Good Lord! You and Sam: I say, old thing, no offence, but you know he’s
married?”
“I know,” said Ellie. “What’s she like?”
“Haven’t seen her since I was his best man. Wasn’t tempted to see more
of her.”
“It’s as bad as that?”
“Oh, rather worse, I believe. Pitch that novel over. I’ll tell you in
five minutes if it’s any use.”
“Five minutes isn’t very fair to the author,” she protested.
“Oh, quite. I’m a reviewer, and reviewing’s badly paid. It teaches you
to rip the guts out of a novel quickly. Smoke that cigarette and I’ll
tell you all about it by the time you’re through.”
He fluttered the pages while she smoked. “Utter,” he decided. “Utter.”
“I haven’t finished it,” she said; “but so far I agree with you.”
“You’ll agree with me to the end. Pluperfect trash. Sam will love it.”
“What!”
“You’ll see. It’s just his line.”
“Aren’t you trying to prejudice me against him?”
He stared. “I’m trying to save you the trouble of reading the beastly
thing. I’ve given you expert opinion. It’s trash and the brand of trash
that he likes. Didn’t I tell you there, was mud in Sam?”
“You told me you invented him. I don’t believe your influence has been
for good.”
“Don’t be hard on a fellow, Effie; I only introduced him to the mud. I
didn’t know he’d wallow. Anyhow, let’s talk of something else.”
“You know,” she said, “you do influence people, Dubby.”
“Of course. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m a journalist. Have you never
heard of the power of the Press? It means a lot of little journalists
like me writing as their editors tell ‘em to. But I don’t appear to
have much influence on you. I asked you to change the subject and you’re
still thinking about Sam.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “I’m still thinking of Sam.”
“You and Sam!” he repeated, looking incredulously at her.
Effie nodded. “But,” she said, “I don’t know yet.”
He rose to his feet. “You’re sure, Effie? You’re sure you don’t know
about him yet?”
“Quite sure.”
“Then you do know about me? Effie, I’ve got to ask. Are you sure about
me?”
She met his eyes bravely, knowing that she must hurt. She was sure she
did not love Stewart, who was free, and not sure about Branstone, who
was married. “I am quite, quite sure, Dubby,” she said softly.
“I see,” he said. “Well, I’m not the sort that pesters, but if you want
me, Effie, if you find you want me, I’ll be there. I... I suppose I’d
better go now. It will take some doing to change the subject after
this.”
“Dubby, I’m sorry. You’re not well, and----”
She could see him trembling.
“Not that, old thing,” he interrupted. “Not pity. That would make me
really ill. Love’s just a thing that happens along, but one starter
doesn’t make a race.” He held out his hand. “Well, doctor’s orders to go
to bed early. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Dubby,” she said, and added hesitatingly: “You’ll come on
Sunday?”
“Lord, yes,” he said. “I don’t love and run away. Good-night.”
She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something
wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up
again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional
dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it
did not confirm the book’s verbosity.
She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not
strike her as humorous at all.