Finally, the blessed peace and solitude, when the last stranger with the
curious stare that was now common to them all had quitted the house, and
the last motor had rolled away. Chase, leaning against a column of the
porch, thought that thus must married lovers feel when after the
confusion of their wedding they are at length left alone together.
Certainly—with a wry twist to his lip—the events of the sale had tried
him as sorely as any wedding. But here he was, having won, in
possession, having driven away all that rabble; here he was in the
warmth, and in the hush that sank back upon everything after the ceasing
of all that hubbub; here he was left alone upon the field after that
reckless victory. Poor? yes! but he could work, he would manage; his
poverty would not be bitter, it would be sweet. He suddenly stretched
out his hands and passionately laid them, palms flattened, against the
bricks; bricks warm as their own rosiness with the sun they had drunk
since morning.
Midsummer day. Swallows skimming after the insects above the moat. Their
level wings almost grazed the water as they swooped. Midsummer day. All
the mellowness of Blackboys, all the blood of the Chases, to culminate
in this midsummer day. A marvellous summer. A persistently marvellous
summer. He remembered the procession of days, the dawns and the dusks
and the moon-bathed nights, that had hallowed his romance. He was
inclined to believe that neither hatred nor its ugly kin could any
longer find any place in his heart, which had been so uplifted and had
seen so radiantly the flare of so many beacons lighting up the fields of
wisdom. To cast off the slavery of the Wolverhamptons of this world. To
know what one really wanted, what one really cared for, and to go for it
straight. Wasn’t that a good enough and simple enough working wisdom for
a man to have attained? Simple enough, when it did nobody any harm—yet
so few seemed to learn it.
Blackboys! Wolverhampton! what was Wolverhampton beside Blackboys? What
was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these
exquisite privations? What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this
pride, this Quixotism?
Thane gambolled out, fawning and leaping round Chase, as Fortune opened
the door of the house.
“Will you be having dinner, sir,” he asked demurely, “in the dining-room
or in the garden this evening?”
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
_To A._
I
The street door opened straight into the shop. The shop went back a long
way, and was very dark and crowded with objects; everything seemed to
have something else super-imposed upon it, either set down or hanging;
thus against the walls dangled bunches of masks, like bunches of
bananas, weapons of all kinds, shields and breastplates, swags of tinsel
jewellery, wigs; upon the tops of the cupboards stood ewers, goblets,
candelabra, all in sham gold plate; and the counters themselves were
strewn with a miscellany of smaller theatrical necessities. It was only
little by little that the glance, growing accustomed to the obscurity of
the shop, began to disentangle object from object in this assortment.
Everything was very dusty, with the exception of the shields and stray
pieces of armour, which were brightly furbished and detached themselves
like mirrors in their places on the walls, giving a distorted reflection
in miniature of the recesses of the shop. There were stuffed animals,
particularly dusty, with glass eyes and red open mouths showing two rows
of teeth. There were grotesque cardboard heads, four times life-size,
for giants. There was the figure of a knight in a complete suit of
armour, with a faded blue cloak embroidered with the lilies of France
hanging from his shoulders, and a closed helmet from which sprang a tuft
of plumes that had once been white, but that were now grey with dust and
age. This knight stood on the lowest step of the staircase that started
in the middle of the shop and led to the upper floors of the house. A
door across the top of the flight shut off the secrets of the upper
storey from the observation of customers in the shop on the ground
floor.
On the upper floors the house was old and rambling. It straggled up and
down on different levels, along dark passages and into irregular little
rooms, badly lit by small windows, and, like the shop, encumbered with
objects; not only by the furniture, which was much too bulky for the
size of the rooms, but also by properties which belonged to the shop,
and which at various times had been huddled upstairs in the course of a
clearance below. There were rows of dresses hanging on hooks, halberts
and muskets propped up in the corners, albums of photographs for
reference lying on the tables, pairs of boots and buskins thrust away
behind the curtains and under the valences. You felt convinced that
every drawer was packed so that it could only just be induced to shut,
and that if you opened the door of a cupboard a crowd of imprisoned
articles would come tumbling out helter-skelter. Everything was old and
fusty; tawdry, and pretentious under its grime. Outside, the snow had
gathered in tiny drifts along the leadwork of the latticed windows,
making the rooms darker than they already were, and had heaped itself
against the panes two or three inches above the window-sills. In the
mornings the frost left fern-frond patterns on the panes; but although
it was thus rendered almost impossible to see out, the bright frost and
snow were a not unpleasant relief, for they were something clean and
fresh, something of quite recent arrival and of certain departure, in
contrast to the contents of the house, which had lain there accumulating
for so many years, and which offered no promise of a disturbing hand in
the years to come.