“What a gossip you two have been having!” Basil said, and, seeing the
laughter in Hal’s eyes, he added, “has G been telling you some of her
amazing theories, or tearing the existing order of the universe to
shreds?”
“Oh, I don’t know, but she’s simply immense. Have you heard about the
tin-pot organ that will play its own way, and the choir that gets
convulsed, and the underdone young parson? She’s simply got to know
Dick. He wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Yes; I’ve heard most of it. She plays an organ of laughter for me
nowadays, that makes me bless the day she was born.”
The gaunt spinster positively blushed.
“Oh, that’s just your way,” she snapped, bashfully trying to hide her
pleasure. “If I hadn’t been G, a pretty, charming young woman with real
music in her might have been, and you’d have liked that much better.”
“No, I shouldn’t. She’d have played ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ with
variations, and ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’—I know her at a glance. If you do
only play scales and exercises I’m sure you manage to put a lot of
character into them.”
“That’s only thumping; and who wants thumping?”
“I do, when it’s the universe. I’m just as much askew with it as you
are, only I haven’t got the wit to thump it so satisfactorily. You are
going it for the two of us now.”
“Still, you’re not a gargoyle…” with a queer twist of her face that
delighted Hal.
“I shall positively take you to Dick myself,” she said, “or bring him
here to you. He’ll talk to you about a mother’s patience, and babies;
and you’ll talk to him about gargoyles and organs, and Heaven only
knows where you’ll both get to; but I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“I don’t know who Dick may be, but if he talks to me about mothers and
babies”—grimly—“I shall groan like that organ did at christenings. They
may be useful in the general scheme, but beyond that I don’t know how
any one can put up with them at all; with their potsy-wotsy, and
pucksie-ducksie, and general stickiness. It’s quite enough for me that
I have to knit stupid little socks for their silly little feet, for
bread-and-butter. The most I can say for it is, that it’s a more
satisfactory plan than casting your bread on the waters, on the
off-chance some kindly Elijah will butter it.”
“Where are the socks, G?” Basil asked, looking round. “I should like
Hal to enjoy the edifying spectacle of your knitting babies’ socks.”
“You don’t mean that,” interrupted Hal comically. “I can’t believe it.”
“It’s the horrible truth,” asserted the spinster, calmly going on with
her tea—“most of them go to little black whelps in the Antipodes. After
all, it isn’t any more incongruous than the music—is it?”
“But you don’t do it for the under-done young parson, surely?”
“Goodness gracious, no. What an idea! He wiped his hands of me long
ago. The wildest stretch of imagination, you see, could not picture me
ever looking like an angel; so he left me to my fate!” And again the
humorous twisted smile delighted her small audience.
“Have you seen Splodgkins lately?” Basil asked. “You say all babies are
sticky and objectionable; but you must admit that sticky imp down below
is better than two-thirds of the other babies in the world shining with
soap polish.”
“So he is”; and the grim face relaxed still further. “He was sitting in
my way on the stairs this morning, and as I could not get by, I said,
‘Make room, please, Master Splodgkins; you don’t own the universe.’
‘Eth oi doth,’ he lisped. ‘Noime ain’t thplodums. Damn th’ ooniverth.’”
It was good to hear Basil’s whole-hearted laughter.
“We ought to have had him to tea,” he said regretfully. “He would have
delighted Hal. He’s two-and-a-half years old”—turning to her—“this
remarkable person-age; and, like most gutter snipes, has developed as
an ordinary child of four. He and G have debates occasionally. He
wishes to be called D, because that is the letter on his front door,
and ‘Splodgkins’ hurts his dignity but he’s so funny when he is
indignant we can’t resist teasing him.”
A little wistful smile crept into the invalid’s eyes. “We have lots of
fun in this dingy old barrack between us,” he told Hal. “We are rarely
silly enough to be dull, with so many queer, interesting folks under
the same roof.”
Hal felt something like a sudden lump in her throat, but she smiled
brightly as she looked from one to the other, feeling somehow the
better for knowing such waifs of life and circumstance, who could yet
baffle Fate’s pitilessness with genuine laughter.
“Dick is writing a most weird and incomprehensible book on vegetables
and babies. I’m quite certain you could give him lots of ideas,” she
remarked to G.
“He’d better put Splodgkins in if he wants to make it sell,” said she.
“Only they mightn’t allow it at the libraries. Splodgkins’s vocabulary
is fortunately sometimes indistinguishable for his lisp.”
“Splodgkins couldn’t be translated,” put in Basil. “He sometimes comes
to tea with me and G; but he is almost too exhausting. I think he knows
every bad word in the English language; but one has to forgive him
because he always saves half his cake for his baby sister, and hurls
violent abuse at any one who dares to disparage her.
“Are you going?...” as G got up. “I’m sure Miss Pritchard doesn’t want
you to leave us.”
“Miss Pritchard!...” In a horrified voice.
“Never mind,” said Hal quickly. “It didn’t matter.” Then to Basil, in
explanation: “G said something about Doris’s fiancé, not knowing I was
his sister, but I quite forget what it was. Good-bye, G,” holding out a
frank hand. “I think you’re a delightful person, and I’m just as glad
as Basil that you weren’t left out of the alphabet.”
A few minutes later Doris came in, looking flushed and stealthy, and
the first thing Hal noticed was a loverly little diamond brooch she had
not seen before.
“What a darling brooch,” she exclaimed, after their greeting. “Did
Dudley give you that? He might have shown it to me.”
“No...” stammered Doris, turning red. “I’ve had it a long time. It’s
not real.”
“Well, it’s a wonderful imitation, then” said Hall a little drily—and
remembered the man like a pawnbroker’s shop.
Then Ethel joined them, and Hal’s quick eyes saw the still increasing
anxiety, just as surely as she saw the increased furtiveness in Doris’s
side-long glances. And because of all that she felt for Ethel, she
trust her own care into the background resolutely, and made the evening
as gay as she could while she was there.
Only afterwards she went home through the lamp-lit darkness, feeling as
if some vague shadow had descended silently upon her little world.
What was this insistent, nameless fear at her own heart? Why was
Lorraine weeping when she found her yesterday? Why was trouble steadily
gathering on Ethel’s face? What was this gossip about Doris?—
The gloom of a foggy night added to her depression. Why, in the tube
railway, did all these people about her look so white and tired and
lifeless? Did they just go on in their niches, in the same way that the
grotesque music-teacher had gone on in hers for all those monotonous
years; only to become like an uncared-for, unwanted letter of the
alphabet pushed in to fill up a blank in a big city at last?
Were they all gargoyles-fixed, rigid, joyless, carved things, fastened
in their respective niches, not for ornament, or for use specially, but
just because the general machine seemed to require them?
And if so—why?... why?... why?—
It was so easy to be joyous if one was made for it. Such a little would
make every one gay, if they were fashioned accordingly. What could be
the good of disfiguring a beautiful world with all these vacant,
expressionless, hopeless masks?
Hal did not read poetry. She was perfectly frank about being utterly
bored with it. When she had anything to say, she liked to say it
straight out, she explained, without twisting it about to make it rhyme
with something just shoved in to fill up the line; and she preferred
other people to do the same.
Yet, perhaps, at that particular moment, had she seen the lines:
“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire?”
In her present mood she might have recognised also the stateliness and
the beauty of a thought transcribed into verse.
Or possibly she would have obstinately asserted there was no occasion
to introduce the word Love at all—and it was no one’s Heart’s Desire
she wanted, but just a common-sense, reasonable amount of pleasure for
all, and a spring-cleaning of all the gloomy, wooden faces.
In the sitting-room at Bloomsbury she threw her hat down on the sofa,
and ran her fingers through her hair with an almost petulant air.
“I just feel tonight as if it was a rotten old world after all,” she
said.
Dudley, sitting poring over some plans with a reading-lamp, looked up
in mild surprise.
“And what has made you feel all that?—not Basil, I’m sure.”
“Well, there’s no occasion to be so very sure. I think it’s decidedly
rotten where Basil is concerned.”
She came and half-sat on one of the arms of his chair, and rested her
hand on his coat-collar.
“I wonder what G would think of a sane man spending his evening ruling
pointless-looking lines on a big sheet of paper?”
“And who may ‘G’ be?”
“I hardly know—except that she’s the quaintest person I’ve ever struck
yet—and I’ve seen some funny ones.”
“Oh, I know who you mean. Yes; she is an oddity. Well, how was every
one. How was Doris?”
“I hardly know. She was not there when I arrived, and she did not come
in until a few minutes before Ethel.”
“I wonder where she was?” thoughtfully. “I asked her to come for tea
and a walk in the Park today, and she said she could not leave Basil.”
Hal looked keenly into his face, and immediately he smiled and said:
“I suppose the tenant opposite was free unexpectedly, and Doris was
able to get out after all. Poor little girl. I’m glad. But I wonder she
didn’t telephone me.”
Hal turned away, feeling a little sick at heart.
Were they all then in the maelstrom of this gloomy sense of an
engulfing cloud? What could be the meaning of Doris’s behaviour? Did
Dudley suspect anything? Certainly he had been a good deal preoccupied
of late, and spoken very little of the future.
She looked out of her window across the blue of London lights, and her
thoughts roved a little pitifully across the wide reaches of her own
small world. From Sir Edwin, with his high post in the nation’s
councils, and Lorraine with her brilliant atmosphere of success and
triumph, to the dingy block of flats in Holloway, where, in spite of
almost tragic circumstances, to quote Basil, they had “lots of fun”
among themselves.
She believed he meant it, too. It was no empty phrase. Rather something
in touch with Life’s great scheme of compensations, which she
manipulates in her own great way, beyond the comprehension of puny
humans.
Certainly neither Sir Edwin nor Lorraine could boast of “lots of fun.”
Rather, instead, much care and worry and brain-weary grappling with
problems of modern succesful conditions.
She wondered, with a still further sinking at heart, if perhaps the
time had come when she would have to grapple too. Was it very likely,
after their delightful friendship, and after that confession of his the
previous Saturday, Sir Edwin was prepared tamely to give her up? In her
heart, she knew him better.
And yet, if the rumour was not false, what else could result? Vaguely
she felt it might be one of those problems of modern society, coming
across the evenly flowing river of her life, to demand solution. Not
the solution of the crowd—to follow a beaten track is rarely
difficult—but her own individual solution, which might mean much
warfare of spirit and weary heartache. The foregoing of an alluring
pleasure she deeply longed to take—not for any reward nor any gain, but
solely for the sake of the mysterious power abroad in the world which
is called Good; and which demands of the Present Hour that it is ready
to crucify itself and its deep desires for the sake of the Future.