It was now the third week in September, and the wedding was fixed for
the twenty-fifth of October. Everything was fixed, even Flossie's
ideas on the subject of her trousseau. There never was a little woman
so unwavering in her choice of such things as clothes and furniture.
To be married in ivory white, and to go away in powder blue; to have a
drawing-room furnished in imitation rosewood and tapestry, and a
dining-room in stamped velvet and black oak (imitation, too), had been
Flossie's firm determination from the first. It saves endless time and
contention when a young woman so absolutely knows her own mind.
Not but what she required approval and support in her decisions;
otherwise she would have been hardly recognizable as a young woman.
And for Rickman to go shopping with the Beaver in Tottenham Court
Road, to follow her undeviating course through the furniture
galleries, to note the infallible instinct by which she made for and
seized upon the objects of her choice, to see the austerity with which
she resisted the seductions of the salesman who sought to entangle her
with a more expensive article, the calmness of her mind in dealing
with the most intricate problems of measurement and price, was to be
led a helpless captive in a triumph of practical ability. Ability,
good Lord! was there ever anything like Flossie's grasp of all facts
that can be expressed in figures? His brain reeled before the
terrifying velocity of her mental arithmetic. What a little woman it
was to do sums in the top of its head!
Not that she dragged him on the chain for ever. There were idyllic
resting-places, delicious, thrilling pauses in her progress; when she
tried every chair in succession in the drawing-room suite; when she
settled herself in the tapestry one, before the little rosewood
tea-table (spread, for the heightening of the illusion, with a
tea-service all complete); when she pretended to pour out tea, smiling
over the tea-pot in the prettiest delight. With such a smile she would
welcome him, with such a smile she would pour out his tea when he came
back from Fleet Street to the home that was to be. (It did not occur
to him that at the moment Flossie was only smiling at the tea-pot.)
Though he stood aloof from the anticipatory scene, as he looked at her
he grew positively weak with tenderness. In everything Flossie had her
way. When they climbed (as they inevitably did) to the upper galleries
he indeed offered some show of resistance when she insisted on
choosing a terrible bedstead of brass with mother-o'-pearl ornaments.
But to do him justice, it was sheer nervous terror which prompted the
brutal remark that, "Really, mother-o'-pearl ornaments were more than
he could stand"; for he melted and gave in at once at the sight of
Flossie feeling the rosy down coverlet with her little hands. When
their eyes met, Flossie's face was as rosy as the coverlet; so that
the attendant spirit of commerce himself turned from them abashed.
That there would, that there must be, such a moment Keith had had a
horrible foreboding as he followed up the stairs.
Nobody could have been more happy than Flossie following the dream in
Tottenham Court Road; and Rickman was happy because she was. Happy for
a whole fortnight; and then for the first time they quarrelled.
And this was how it happened. They were going to live at Ealing; not
because they liked it, but because the neighbourhood was cheap.
Flossie had said, "When we're rich, we'll go to Kensington"; and he
had answered with an odious flippancy, "Yes, and when we die we'll go
to heaven"; but for the present, Flossie (wise Flossie who loved
economy even more than Kensington) was content with Ealing. That she
was obliged to be content with it made her feel, naturally, that she
was entitled to gratification on every other point. It was not over
Ealing, then, that they quarrelled, but over the choosing of the
house. Flossie was all for a gay little brand-new, red-brick villa,
with nice clean white paint about it, only two minutes from the tram;
he for a little old-fashioned brown-brick house with jasmine all over
it, and a garden all grass and lilac bushes at the back. He said the
garden would be nice to sit in. She said, what was the good of sitting
in a garden when you had to walk ever so far to the tram? He retorted
that walking was a reason for sitting; and she that if it came to that
they could sit in the house. She wouldn't hear of the old brown house,
nor he of the brand-new villa. He was peculiarly sensitive to his
surroundings.
"The villa," said he, "is a detestable little den."
"It isn't," said she, "it's got a lovely bay window in the drawing
room, and a _dear_ little balcony on the top."
"But there isn't a quiet place in it, dear, where I could write."
"Oh, that's all you're thinking of--"
"Well, there isn't, really. Whereas here" (they were going now through
the little brown house), "there's a jolly big room at the back, where
you can see miles away over the fields towards Harrow."
"Oh, you've got time to look out of the window, have you, though you
_are_ so busy?"
"Never mind the window, let's look at the house. What's wrong with
it?"
"What's wrong with the house? It won't suit the furniture, that's
what's wrong with it."
"You mean the furniture won't suit it?"
"The furniture's chosen and the house isn't. There's no good going
back on that."
"Look here, this is the room I meant." They had climbed to the top of
the little brown house, and Flossie had hardly condescended to glance
through the doors he had opened on their way. He opened one now at the
head of the stairs, and this time she looked in.
"It would make all the difference to me, Floss," he said humbly, "if I
had a place like this when I want to get away to write."
"When you want to get away from me, you mean." Her lips shook; she
looked round her with angry eyes, as if jealous of the place, and all
that he meant to do in it.
It was a large room, with a wide window looking on to the garden and
away across meadows and cornfields to Harrow Hill with its thin church
spire. The window was guarded with iron bars. The wall-paper was
designed in little circles; and in each circle there were figures of
little boys and girls, absurd and gay. So many hundreds of little
figures, and so absurd and gay, that to sit in that room surrounded by
them, to look at them and endeavour to count them, was to go mad. But
those figures fascinated Flossie.
"Oh, Lord, what a beastly wall-paper," said he.
"I think it's sweet," said she. And though she wasn't going to let him
have the house, she was ready to quarrel with him again about the
wall-paper. And then, in the corner by the window they came upon a
child's toy, a little wooden horse, broken. He pointed it out to her,
half-smiling. "Some kiddy must have left that there."
"Of course," said she, "it's been a nursery. And, I say, Keith, I
think it must have _died_."
"How do you make that out?"
"It couldn't have been long here. Don't you see, the wall-paper's all
new." (He thought that was rather sharp of her, the practical Beaver!)
"And yet," she said continuing her train of induction; "it couldn't.
If it had, they'd never have left _that_ here."
Ah, that was not sharp; it was something better. There was, after all,
about his Beaver a certain poetry and tenderness.
She picked up the little wooden horse, and held it in her hands, and
adjusted its loosened mane, and mended its broken legs, fitting the
edges delicately with her clever fingers. And it seemed to him that as
she bent over the toy her face grew soft again. When she lifted her
head her eyes rested on him, but without seeing him. Never had Flossie
had so poignant a vision of Muriel Maud.
He looked at her with a new wonder in his heart. For the first time he
was made aware of the change that two years had worked in her. She had
grown, he thought, finer in growing firmer; her body in its maturity
was acquiring a strength and richness that had been wanting in its
youth; as if through that time of waiting it were being fashioned for
the end it waited for. But that was not all. She had clothed herself
unconsciously with poetry. She stood for a moment transfigured before
him; a woman with sweet eyes beholding her desired destiny from far.
Her soul (for a moment) rose in her face like a star--a dim prophetic
star that trembled between darkness and dawn. He knew that she saw
herself now as the possible mother of his children.
The anger and the jealousy were over; and all of a sudden she gave in.
"You can have the house, if you like, Keith."
"All right; I do like it. That's a dear little Beaver."
As he approached her her glance fled. "I didn't say you could have the
room. I want to keep it empty."
He put his arm round her and led her to the window. "What do you want
to keep it empty for, Flossie?"
Her poor little thoughts, surprised and dismayed, went scurrying
hither and thither, trying to hide their trail.
"Oh," she said, still looking away from him. "To store things in." He
drew her closer to him and kissed her tenderly.
It seemed to him that a serene and happy light rested on the garden,
on the empty house, and on the empty room that she had peopled already
with her innocent dream. It seemed to him that in that remote gaze of
her woman's eyes, abstracted from her lover, unconsciously desirous of
the end beyond desire, he saw revealed the mystery, the sanctity, the
purity of wedded love. And seeing it he forgave her that momentary
abstraction.
But the Beaver never dreamed; she was far too practical. She was
building, that was all.