On her way home Hal stopped the taxi and bought an evening paper. When
she got it, however, she found Dudley there, so she merely held it
under her cloak.
“You are back early,” he said, in a surprised voice.
“Yes. It was very formal and very dull, and I was tired.”
He glanced up with questioning eyes. It was something new for Hal not
to stay untill the last moment at a festivity. He thought she looked a
little paler than usual, and there were shadows about her eyes, but she
interrupted any comment he might make by an inquiry after Doris.
“She is very well.”
He stopped short rather suddenly, and seemed thoughtful. He had been
urging Doris to fix the date of their wedding, and let him see about
taking a house or a flat, but she had seemed to avoid the subject
lately, and he was a little troubled.
“I suppose poor Basil is much the same?”
“Yes. He and Ethel were both asking what had become of you. They said
you hadn’t been up for a long time.”
“I haven’t. I’ll go tomorrow. Good-night,” and she kissed him, and went
upstairs.
In her own room she sat on the bed, and read the evening paper.
Yes, it was there sure enough, but it was only given as a rumour. “We
understand there is a rumour…” How well she knew the phrase, with its
dangerous suggestiveness, and safe retreat. She wondered who had
started the rumour, and how the paper had got it.
But, again, insistently she asserted it could not be true. If it had
not been for last Saturday she might have believed it. But after that…
no, he could not be so base. She put the thought away from her, and
tried to sleep, but her eyes would look out into the blackness, and her
brain ask questions.
“What if it were true?” She clenched her hands and fought the question.
It could not be true; why worry? Yet he had never made the slightest
suggestion of marrying her. She remembered that, but scorned it.
Why should he? There had been nothing lover-like between them until the
previous Saturday; and of course had there been any one else, it would
have been so easy to go on the same and make no change that particular
afternoon.
Finding what comfort she could out of these thoughts, she fell at last
into a troubled sleep.
The following afternoon, in fulfilment of her promise, she went up to
Holloway from the office. Doris was out, and Ethel not home yet, but
the door was opened to her by a gaunt stranger, who said:
“Come in. This is one of my days. I’m in charge this afternoon.”
Hal looked into the angular face, which appeared to her as if it had
been roughly hewn with a chisel, by some one who was a mere amateur,
and she could not repress a little smile.
“I don’t think I’ve met you before. Are you—are you—a friend of Mr.
Hayward’s?”
“Well, he’s a friend of mine, if that will do as well. I’m generally
know here as G. The letter isn’t stamped on my face, but it’s on the
door of my flat, and that’s much the same.”
She stood aside for Hal to pass down the passage, adding grimly as Hal
loitered, with rather an amused, engaging expression:
“I don’t stand for much more than a door, with a G on it, as I often
tell Mr. Hayward, but I suppose it’s all right.”
“A little more occasionally,” suggested Hal. “A door wouldn’t be much
use to Mr. Hayward, anyhow.”
“That’s what he says. Won’t you go down to his room?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get the tea. It’s one of the few things I can do passably well.”
“Let me come and help. It won’t take long. I’m interested in that door.
You see, I’m not even G; and I don’t possess a front door.”
The music-teacher looked searchingly into her face, and was evidently
pleased with what she saw, for she adopted a friendly note, and seemed
ready to chat. Hal followed her into the little kitchen, and commenced
to take off her hat.
“I’m an old friend,” she volunteered, “and I often leave my hat in
here. Are both Mr. Hayward’s sisters out?”
“Miss Hayward will be late tonight, and her sister is uncertain. It
depends somewhat upon which young man she is out with,” in acid tones.
Hal glanced up in astonishment, but her companion was busy with the
cups and saucers, and did not notice the look.
“All I can say is, I’m sorry for that nice gentleman who is fool enough
to think of marrying her. Lord! he’d be safer with some one with a face
like a door-knocker, such as mine. But there, they’re all the same; and
the nicest of them are generally the biggest fools.”
Hal grasped the situation at once, and instead of enlightening her
concerning her own identity, said casually:
“There’s another young man as well, is there?”
“There is so. A pawnbroker I should take him to be, who wears the
jewellery left in his care on his person for safety. As a matter of
fact, I believe he is a South African millionaire. He brought her home
one day, and Blakde—that’s the housekeeper’s husband down
below—recognised him. He was out in South Africa in the war, and he saw
him then.”
Hal drummed on the table with her fingers to assume nonchalance.
“Does Miss Hayward know?”
“Know? Of course she doesn’t. How should she know, particularly if that
artful monkey did not want her to? I don’t know where the poor sick man
would be now but for me. She’s always off somewhere—that minx—and I
rush back from my music pupils, because I can’t rest for the thought of
him here all alone. I’ve given one up, who wanted a lesson at half-past
four every day. That’s the time he needs his tea.”
“Why do you do all this for him?” Hal found herself asking, a little
unaccountably. “He is nothing to you, is he—no relation, I mean?”
“Nothing to me!… Oh, isn’t he though! I’d like to know what is
anything, if he’s nothing?”
She rattled the cups and saucers a little restlessly, and Hal, with
growing interest, waited for her to go on.
“Before I knew him, I was nothing in the world but a door with a letter
on it, as I’ve just told you. That’s all I stood for, a mere letter of
the alphabet who paid a monthly rent. I told him so, when I first came
across, and he said, ‘Well, I’m very glad they didn’t leave G out of
the alphabet.’ That’s all.”
“But I’m his slave now. Nobody cared whether there was a G or not
before. It isn’t pleasant to feel you’re a mere cypher, with no
particular meaning to any one; just shot in haphazard to fill up a
blank—a mere creature, useful to teach exercises and scales to odious
children one only longs to slap.
“Fancy being expected to keep yourself alive in a dingy little flat,
for ever alone, just to do that!” The cups rattled more restively
still. “I say, the universe is the grimmest jester there ever was. Me
to teach music to keep life in a body that doesn’t want it! If I’d been
employed laying out corpses in their grave-clothes there’d have been
some sense in it. I’m not much more that a figurehead of an old hulk
myself. But music!… music!… Oh Lord, and I haven’t one real note of it
in my whole composition.”
Hal seated herself on the table. With her quick intuition she perceived
at once entertainment of an original kind was before her, and she
promptly laid herself out to obtain all she could.
“Why do you teach music? I don’t think you do quite suggest a
musician?”
“Of course I don’t.”
The gaunt spinster was cutting some bread-and-butter now with a savage
air.
“Do I suggest anything, except perhaps a butcher or an undertaker? Yet
I can only keep myself alive with music. That’s the jest of the Arch
Humorist. My father was a clergyman. He droned out services for fifty
years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box.
I was taught music so that I could—well—make the tin-pot organ groan, I
used to call it. I had twenty-five years of that, with never a break. I
got so that, to keep myself from turning into a stone gargoyle on the
organ seat, I must have my little jest too.
“One way I had it was by making the organ groan dismallest at weddings
and christenings, and squeak hilariously at funerals. Father never
noticed, he’d already turned gargoyle, you see, and as for the village
people! well, it suited them, because they always wept at weddings, and
overate themselves at funerals.”
“And then?…” Hal was so thoroughly enjoying herself now, she had almost
forgotten the invalid.
“Well, then the gargoyle died, or ran down, or something. I should
think he got tired of sing-song the tender mercies of God to the devout
people, and His judgments on the wicked. It always seemed to me the
good folks got the nastiest knocks; and the wicked, well, they fairly
left the green bay tree behind.
“Anyhow, I’d been devout enough, as far as sinning goes, for forty
years. I wasn’t even blessed with the chance to be anything else. Then
a new parson came, an underdone young man with new fal-da-dal ideas. I
wonder how soon _he’d_ become a gargoyle? I defy him to stand out long
against the cast-iron nonentity of that village. But he didn’t take
kindly either to me or my music. Hadn’t any sense of humour at all. I
don’t know what I ever knew a clergyman who had. Perhaps a man couldn’t
very well go on being a clergyman if he possessed such a trait.
“Anyhow, this particular one did not think I put enough expression into
the tunes. He said they hardly sounded like sacred tunes at all; which
wasn’t surprising, when you come to think that sometimes a low note and
sometimes a high note on that little tin-pot organ would take it into
its head to stick, and would either boom or squeak all through the
thing I was playing.” Hal burst out laughing, quite unable to contain
herself any longer, but the spinster went on calmly: “The tune might
just as well have been ‘Down by the Old Bull and Bush’ then, but it
wasn’t my fault, because when your hands and arms and feet and eyes and
ears are all struggling to keep time with a village choir that varies
its pace every few bars, you’ve got nothing left to release a stuck
note with.”
“I hope you didn’t tell the under-done young parson about ‘The Old Bull
and Bush’?” said Hal, still rocking with enjoyment and bent chiefly
upon leading her on.
“I’d never heard of it then, or I might have. Even that won’t reach the
village I’m thinking of for a hundred years; and then they’ll play it
until the very birds lose heart, and think they are uncannily up to
date. So they are if you count it when things come round the second
time. I told him if the organ seemed to be playing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ I
supposed it was because it felt like it; as, for twenty-five years, it
had more or less pleased itself at my expense.
“But he’ll be a gargoyle soon, and then he won’t notice, and it will
boom and squaek to its heart’s content. Of course I ought to have
stayed on because I matched it all, and I didn’t mind the booming and
squeaking as long as the choir didn’t get convulsed, and stop
altogether—because that was liable to catch father’s attention. A
gargoyle is out of place in London. It’s as mad for me to be here as
that I’m here to teach music. After I became fossilised I ought to have
stayed on till I died, and then that self-willed organ could have
fairly squeaked itself out over my corpse. Come along and have some tea
now. Poor Mr. Hayward will be getting faint.”
“But you’re too perfectly delicious for anything!” Hal cried, springing
off the table. “Why haven’t I known you for years? Why haven’t I known
you all my life? You must meet my cousin Dick Bruce. You absolutely
_must_, with the least possible delay. He’ll simply dote on you. Come
along to Basil, and tell me heaps and heaps more”; and she caught her
by the arm in the friendliest fashion, and half-pulled her along to the
little sitting-room.