I
Mr Morfe and Mary Morfe, his sister, were sitting on either side of
their drawing-room fire, on a Friday evening in November, when they
heard a ring at the front door. They both started, and showed symptoms
of nervous disturbance. They both said aloud that no doubt it was a
parcel or something of the kind that had rung at the front door. And
they both bent their eyes again on the respective books which they were
reading. Then they heard voices in the lobby--the servant's voice and
another voice--and a movement of steps over the encaustic tiles towards
the door of the drawing-room. And Miss Morfe ejaculated:
"Really!"
As though she was unwilling to believe that somebody on the other side
of that drawing-room door contemplated committing a social outrage, she
nevertheless began to fear the possibility.
In the ordinary course it is not considered outrageous to enter a
drawing-room--even at nine o'clock at night--with the permission and
encouragement of the servant in charge of portals. But the case of the
Morfes was peculiar. Mr Morfe was a bachelor aged forty-two, and looked
older. Mary Morfe was a spinster aged thirty-eight, and looked
thirty-seven. Brother and sister had kept house together for twenty
years. They were passionately and profoundly attached to each other--and
did not know it. They grumbled at each other freely, and practised no
more conversation, when they were alone, than the necessities of
existence demanded (even at meals they generally read), but still their
mutual affection was tremendous. Moreover, they were very firmly fixed
in their habits. Now one of these habits was never to entertain company
on Friday night. Friday night was their night of solemn privacy. The
explanation of this habit offers a proof of the sentimental relations
between them.
Mr Morfe was an accountant. Indeed, he was _the_ accountant in Bursley,
and perhaps he knew more secrets of the ledgers of the principal
earthenware manufacturers than some of the manufacturers did themselves.
But he did not live for accountancy. At five o'clock every evening he
was capable of absolutely forgetting it. He lived for music. He was
organist of Saint Luke's Church (with an industrious understudy--for he
did not always rise for breakfast on Sundays) and, more important, he
was conductor of the Bursley Orpheus Glee and Madrigal Club. And herein
lay the origin of those Friday nights. A glee and madrigal club
naturally comprises women as well as men; and the women are apt to be
youngish, prettyish, and somewhat fond of music. Further, the
conductorship of a choir involves many and various social encounters.
Now Mary Morfe was jealous. Though Richard Morfe ruled his choir with
whips, though his satiric tongue was a scorpion to the choir, though he
never looked twice at any woman, though she was always saying that she
wished he would marry, Mary Morfe was jealous. It was Mary Morfe who had
created the institution of the Friday night, and she had created it in
order to prove, symbolically and spectacularly, to herself, to him, and
to the world, that he and she lived for each other alone. All their
friends, every member of the choir, in fact the whole of the respectable
part of barsley, knew quite well that in the Morfes' house Friday was
sacredly Friday.
And yet a caller!
"It's a woman," murmured Mary. Until her ear had assured her of this
fact she had seemed to be more disturbed than startled by the stir in
the lobby.
And it was a woman. It was Miss Eva Harracles, one of the principal
contraltos in the glee and madrigal club. She entered richly blushing,
and excusably a little nervous and awkward. She was a tall, agreeable
creature of fewer than thirty years, dark, almost handsome, with fine
lips and eyes, and an effective large hat and a good muff. In every
physical way a marked contrast to the thin, prim, desiccated brother and
sister.
Richard Morfe flushed faintly. Mary Morfe grew more pallid.
"I really must apologize for coming in like this," said Eva, as she
shook hands cordially with Mary Morfe. She knew Mary very well indeed.
For Mary was the "librarian" of the glee and madrigal club; Mary never
missed a rehearsal, though she cared no more for music than she cared
for the National Debt. She was a perfect librarian, and very good at
unofficially prodding indolent members into a more regular attendance
too.
"Not at all!" said Mary. "We were only reading; you aren't disturbing us
in the least." Which, though polite, was a lie.
And Eva Harracles sat down between them. And brother and sister
abandoned their literature.
"I can't stop," said she, glancing at the clock immediately in front of
her eyes. "I must catch the last car for Silverhays."
"You've got twenty minutes yet," said Mr Morfe.
"Because," said Eva, "I don't want that walk from Turnhill to Silverhays
on a dark night like this."
"No, I should think not, indeed!" said Mary Morfe.
"You've got a full twenty minutes," Mr Morfe repeated. The clock showed
three minutes past nine.
The electric cars to and from the town of Turnhill were rumbling past
the very door of the Morfes every five minutes, and would continue to
do so till midnight. But Silverhays is a mining village a couple of
miles beyond Turnhill, and the service between Turnhill and Silverhays
ceases before ten o'clock. Eva's father was a colliery manager who lived
on the outskirts of Silverhays.
"I've got a piece of news," said Eva.
"Yes?" said Mary Morfe
Mr Morfe was taciturn. He stooped to nourish the fire.
"About Mr Loggerheads," said Eva, and stared straight at Mary Morfe.
"About Mr Loggerheads!" Mary Morfe echoed, and stared back at Eva. And
the atmosphere seemed to have been thrown into a strange pulsation.
Here perhaps I ought to explain that it was not the peculiarity of Mr
Loggerheads' name that produced the odd effect. Loggerheads is a local
term for a harmless plant called the knapweed _(centaurea nigra_), and
it is also the appellation of a place and of quite excellent people, and
no one regards it as even the least bit odd.
"I'm told," said Eva, "that he's going into the Hanbridge Choir!"
Mr Loggerheads was the principal tenor of the Bursley Glee and Madrigal
Club. And he was reckoned one of the finest "after-dinner tenors" in the
Five Towns. The Hanbridge Choir was a rival organization, a vast and
powerful affair that fascinated and swallowed promising singers from all
the choirs of the vicinity. The Hanbridge Choir had sung at Windsor, and
since that event there had been no holding it. All other choirs hated it
with a homicidal hatred.
"I'm told," Eva proceeded, "that the Birmingham and Sheffield Bank will
promote him to the cashiership of the Hanbridge Branch on the
understanding that he joins the Hanbridge Choir. Shows what influence
they have! And it shows how badly the Hanbridge Choir wants him."
(Mr Loggerheads was cashier of the Bursley branch of the Birmingham and
Sheffield Bank.)
"Who told you?" asked Mary Morfe, curtly.
Richard Morfe said nothing. The machinations of the manager of the
Hanbridge Choir always depressed and disgusted him into silence.
"Oh!" said Eva Harracles. "It's all about." (By which she meant that it
was in the air.) "Everyone's talking of it."
"And do they say Mr Loggerheads has accepted?" Mary demanded.
"Yes," said Eva.
"Well," said Mary, "it's not true!... A mistake!" she added.
"How do you know it isn't true?" Mr Morfe inquired doubtfully.
"Since you're so curious," said Mary, defiantly, "Mr Loggerheads told me
himself."
"When?"
"The other day."
"You never said anything to me," protested Mr Morfe.
"It didn't occur to me," Mary replied.
"Well, I'm very glad!" remarked Eva Harracles. "But I thought I ought to
let you know at once what was being said."
Mary Morfe's expression conveyed the fact that in her opinion Eva
Harracles' evening call was a vain thing, too lightly undertaken, and
conceivably lacking in the nicest discretion. Whereupon Mr Morfe was
evidently struck by the advisability of completely changing the subject.
And he did change it. He began to talk about certain difficulties in the
choral parts of Havergal Brian's _Vision of Cleopatra_, a work which he
meant the Bursley Glee and Madrigal Club to perform though it should
perish in the attempt. Growing excited, in his dry way, concerning the
merits of this composition, he rose from his easy chair and went to
search for it. Before doing so he looked at the clock, which indicated
twenty minutes past nine.
"Am I all right for time?" asked Eva.
"Yes, you're all right," said he. "If you go when that clock strikes
half-past, and take the next car down, you'll make the connection easily
at Turnhill. I'll put you into the car."
"Oh, thanks!" said Eva.
Mr Morfe kept his modern choral music beneath a broad seat under the bow
window. The music was concealed by a low curtain that ran on a rod--the
ingenious device of Mary. He stooped down to find the _Vision of
Cleopatra_, and at first he could not find it. Mary walked towards that
end of the drawing-room with a vague notion of helping him, and then Eva
did the same, and then Mary walked back, and then Mr Morfe happily put
his hand on the _Vision of Cleopatra_.
He opened the score for Eva's inspection, and began to hum passages and
to point out others, and Eva also began to hum, and they hummed in
concert, at intervals exclaiming against the wantonness with which
Havergal Brian had invented difficulties. Eva glanced at the clock.
"You're all right," Mr Morfe assured her somewhat impatiently. And he,
too, glanced at the clock: "You've still nearly ten minutes."
And proceeded with his critical and explanatory comments on the _Vision
of Cleopatra_.
He was capable of becoming almost delirious about music. Mary Morfe had
seated herself in silence.
At last Eva and Mr Morfe approached the fire and the mantelpiece again.
Mr Morfe shut up the score, dismissed his delirium, and looked at the
clock, quite prepared to see it pointing to twenty-nine and a half
minutes past nine. Instead, the clock pointed to only twenty-two
minutes past nine.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. He went nearer.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed again rather more loudly. "I do believe that
clock's stopped!"
It had. The pendulum hung perpendicular, motionless, dead.
He was astounded. For the clock had never been known to stop. It was a
presentation clock, of the highest guaranteed quality, offered to him as
a small token of regard and esteem by the members of the Bursley Orpheus
Glee and Madrigal Club to celebrate the twelfth anniversary of his
felicitous connection with the said society. It had stood on his
mantelpiece for four years and had earned an absolutely first-class
reputation for itself. He wound it up on the last day of every month,
for it was a thirty-odd day clock, specially made by a famous local
expert; and he had not known it to vary more than ten minutes a month at
the most. And lo! it had stopped in the very middle of the month.
"Did you wind it up last time?" asked Mary.
"Of course," he snapped. He had taken out his watch and was gazing at
it. He turned to Eva. "It's twenty to ten," he said. "You've missed your
connection at Turnhill--that's a certainty. I'm very sorry."
Obviously there was only one course open to a gallant man whose clock
was to blame: namely, to accompany Eva Harracles to Turnhill by car, to
accompany her on foot to Silverhays, then to walk back to Turnhill and
come home again by car. A young woman could not be expected to perform
that bleak and perhaps dangerous journey from Turnhill to Silverhays
alone after ten o'clock at night in November. Such was the clear course.
But he dared scarcely suggest it. He dared scarcely suggest it because
of his sister. He was afraid of Mary. The names of Richard Morfe and Eva
Harracles had already been coupled in the mouth of gossip. And
naturally Eva Harracles herself could not suggest that Richard should
sally out and leave his sister alone on this night specially devoted to
sisterliness and brotherliness. And of course, Eva thought, Mary will
never, never suggest it.
But Eva was wrong there.
To the amazement of both Richard and Eva, Mary calmly said:
"Well, Dick, the least you can do now is to see Miss Harracles home.
You'll easily be able to catch the last car back from Turnhill if you
start at once. I daresay I shall go to bed."
And in three minutes Richard Morfe and Eva Harracles were being sped
into the night by Mary Morfe.
The Morfes' house was at the corner of Trafalgar Road and Beech Street.
The cars stopped at that corner in their wild course towards the town
and towards Turnhill. A car was just coming. But instead of waiting for
it Richard Morfe and Eva Harracles deliberately turned their backs on
Trafalgar Road, and hurried side by side down Beech Street. Beech Street
is a short street, and ends in a nondescript unlighted waste patch of
ground. They arrived in the gloom of this patch, safe from all human
inquisitiveness, and then Richard Morfe warmly kissed Eva Harracles in
the mathematical centre of those lips of hers. And Eva Harracles showed
no resentment of any kind, nor even shame. Yet she had been very
carefully brought up. The sight would have interested Bursley immensely;
it would have appealed strongly to Bursley's strong sense of the
piquant.... That dry old stick Dick Morfe kissing one of his contraltos
in the dark at the bottom end of Beech Street.
"Then you hadn't told her!" murmured Eva Harracles.
"No!" said Richard, with a slight hesitation. "I was just going to begin
to tell her when you called."
Another woman might have pouted to learn that her lover had exhibited
even a little cowardice in informing his family that he was engaged to
be married. But Eva did not pout. She comprehended the situation, and
the psychology of the relations between brothers and sisters. (She
herself possessed both brothers and sisters.) All the courting had been
singularly secret and odd.
"I shall tell her to-morrow morning at breakfast," said Richard, firmly.
"Unless, after all, she isn't gone to bed when I get back."
By a common impulse they now returned towards Trafalgar Road.
"I say," said Richard, "what made you call?"
"I was passing," said the beloved. "And somehow I couldn't help it. Of
course, I knew it wasn't true about Mr Loggerheads. But I had to think
of something."
Richard was in ecstasy; had never been in such ecstasy.
"I say," he said again. "I suppose _you_ didn't put your finger against
the pendulum of that clock?"
"Oh, _no_!" she replied with emphasis.
"Well, I'm jolly glad it did stop, anyway," said Richard. "What a lark,
eh?"
She agreed that the lark was ideal. They walked down the road till a car
should overtake them.
"Do you think she suspects anything?" Eva asked.
"I'll swear she doesn't," said Richard, positively. "It'll be a bit of a
startler for the old girl."
"No doubt you've heard," said Eva, haltingly, "that Mr Loggerheads has
cast eyes on Mary."
"And do you think there's anything _in_ that?" Richard questioned
sharply.
"Well," she said, "I really don't know." Meaning that she decidedly
thought that Mary _had_ been encouraging advances from Mr Loggerheads.
"Well," said Richard, superiorly, "you may just take it from me that
there's nothing in it at all.... Ha!" He laughed shortly. He knew Mary.
Then they got on a car, and tried to behave as though their being
together was a mere accident, as though they had not become engaged to
one another within the previous twenty-four hours.