Meanwhile the Beaver, like a sensible Beaver, went on calmly
furnishing her house. She thoroughly approved of Keith's acquaintance
with Miss Harden, as she approved of everything that gave importance
to the man she was going to marry. If she had not yet given a thought
to his work, except as a way (rather more uncertain and unsatisfactory
than most ways) of making money, she thought a great deal of the
consideration it brought him with that lady. She was prouder of Keith
now than she ever had been before. But the Beaver was before all
things a practical person; and she had perceived further that for
Keith to make up to people like Miss Harden was one of the surest and
quickest means of getting on. Hitherto she had been both distressed
and annoyed by his backwardness in making up to anybody. And when
Keith told her that he wanted to pay some attention to his editor's
cousin, if she was a little surprised at this unusual display of
smartness (for when had Keith been known to pay attention to any
editors, let alone their cousins?), she accepted the explanation as
entirely natural. She was wide awake now to the importance of
_Metropolis_ and Mr. Jewdwine. By all means, then, let him cultivate
Mr. Jewdwine's cousin. And if there had been no Mr. Jewdwine in the
case, Flossie would still have smiled on the acquaintance; for it
meant social advancement, a step nearer Kensington. So nobody was more
delighted than Flossie when Miss Harden invited Keith to tea in her
own room, especially as she was always included in the invitation.
It was Miss Bishop, primed with all the resources of her science, who
looked upon these advances with alarm. It struck Miss Bishop that Miss
Harden and Mr. Rickman were going it pretty strong. She wouldn't have
liked those goings on if she'd been Flossie. You might take it from
her that gentlemen never knew their own minds when there were two to
choose from; and Miss Bishop hadn't a doubt that it was a toss-up
between Flossie and Miss Harden. Miss Harden would be willing enough;
anybody could see that. Ladies don't keep on asking gentlemen to have
tea with them alone in their rooms if they're not up to something.
It was not only Miss Bishop's fatal science that led her to these
conclusions, but the still more fatal prescience of love. When Flossie
was once securely married to Mr. Rickman the heart of Spinks would
turn to her for consolation, that she knew. It was a matter of common
experience that gentlemen's hearts were thus caught on the rebound.
But if that Miss Harden carried off Rickman, there would be nothing
left for Flossie but to marry Spinks, for the preservation of her
trousseau and her dignity. Therefore Miss Bishop was more than ever
set on Flossie's marrying Mr. Rickman.
They were turning over the trousseau, the trousseau which might play
such a disastrous part in the final adjustment of Flossie's mind.
"Your dresses are orfully smart and that," said Ada; "and yet somehow
they don't seem to do you justice. It would have been worth your while
to go to a tip-top dressmaker, my dear. You'd have a better chance
than that Miss Harden any day. No, I don't like you in that powder
blue; I don't, really." Miss Bishop was nothing if not frank.
"I never go wrong about a colour," said Flossie passionately.
"No. It isn't the colour. It's the cut. It makes her look as if she
'ad a better figure than you; and that's nonsense. You've got a bust,
and she hasn't. Gentlemen don't care to look at a girl who's as flat
as two boards back and front. That's what I say, it's the cut that
gives her her style."
"No, it isn't. It isn't her clothes at all; it's the way she carries
them. She may look as if she was well dressed; but she isn't."
"Anyhow I like that coat of hers better than yours."
"It hasn't got the new sleeves," said Flossie, fondling her
powder-blue.
It was this immobile complacency of hers in the face of his own
profound and sundering agitations that stirred in Rickman the first
stinging of remorse. For he could see that the poor Beaver, with her
blind and ineradicable instinct, was going on building--you couldn't
call them castles in the air--but houses such as Beavers build, houses
of mud in running water. Her ceaseless winding in and out of shops,
her mad and furious buying of furniture, her wild grasping at any
loose articles that came in her way, from rugs to rolling-pins,
appeared to him as so many futile efforts to construct a dam. Over and
over again the insane impulse came on him to seize her little hands
and stop her; to tell her that it was no good, that the absurd thing
could never stand, that he alone knew the strength of the stream, its
sources and its currents. But he hadn't the heart to tell her, and the
Beaver went on constructing her dam, without knowing that it was a
dam, because she was born with the passion thus to build.
She could not see that anything had happened, and Heaven forbid that
he should let her see. He might abandon hope, but the Beaver he could
not abandon. That was not to be thought of for an instant. He was too
deeply pledged for that. Lest he should be in danger of forgetting, it
was brought home to him a dozen times a day.
The very moment when Flossie was making that triumphant display of her
wedding finery he had caught a glimpse of her (iniquitously) as he
passed her room on his way to Spinks's. She was standing, a jubilant
little figure, in the line of the half-open door, shaking out and
trailing before her some white, shiny, frilly thing, the sight of
which made him shudder for the terror, and sigh for the pity of it.
And the girls' laughter and the banging of the door as he went by,
what was it but a reminder of the proprieties and decencies that bound
him? A hint that he had pledged himself thrice over by that unlawful
peep?
It seemed to him that was the beginning of many unlawful glimpses,
discoveries of things he ought never to have seen. Was it that he was
more quick to see? Or that Flossie was less careful than she had been?
Or was it simply the result of living in this detestable
boarding-house, where, morally speaking, the doors were never shut?
Propinquity, that had brought them together, had done its best for
Flossie and its worst. It had revealed too little and too much. He had
only to forget her for a week, to come back and see her as she really
was; to wonder what he had ever seen in her. Her very prettiness
offended him. Her flagrantly feminine contours, once admired, now
struck him as exaggerated, as an emphasis of the charm which is most
subduing when subdued. As for her mind, good Heavens! Had it taken him
five years to discover that her mind was a _cul de sac_? When he came
to think of it, he had to own that intellectually, conversationally
even, he had advanced no farther with her than on the first day of
their acquaintance. There was something compact and immovable about
Flossie. In those five years he had never known her change or modify
an opinion of people or of things. And yet Flossie was not stupid, or
if she were her stupidity was a force; it had an invincible impetus
and sweep, dragging the dead weight of character behind it. It was
beginning to terrify him. In fact he was becoming painfully sensitive
to everything she said or did. Her little tongue was neither sharp nor
hard, and yet it hurt him every time it spoke. It did not always speak
good grammar. Sometimes, in moments of flurry or excitement, an
aspirate miscarried. Happily those moments were rare; for at bottom
Flossie's temperament was singularly calm. Remembering his own past
lapses, he felt that he was the last person to throw a stone at her;
but that reflection did not prevent a shudder from going down his back
every time it happened. And if her speech remained irreproachable, the
offending strain ran through all her movements. He disliked the way
she walked, and the way she sat down, the way she spread her skirts or
gathered them, the way she carried her body and turned her head, the
way her black eyes provoked a stare and then resented it, her changes
of posture under observation, the perpetual movement of her hands that
were always settling and resettling her hat, her hair, her veil; all
the blushings and bridlings, the pruderies and impertinences of the
pretty woman of her class, he disliked them all. He more than
disliked, he distrusted her air of over-strained propriety. He
detected in it the first note of falseness in her character. In a
thousand little things her instincts, her perceptions were at fault.
This was disagreeably borne in upon him that first Saturday after
Lucia's arrival, when he and Flossie were in the train going down to
Ealing. The compartment was packed with City men (how he wished
Flossie would turn her head and not her eyes if she must look at
them!); and as they got in at Earl's Court, one of them, a polite
person, gave up his seat to the lady. Flossie turned an unseeing eye
on the polite person, and took his seat with a superb pretence of
having found it herself after much search. And when Rickman said
"Thanks" to the polite person her indignant glance informed him that
she had expected support in her policy of repudiation.
"My dear Beaver," he said as he helped her on to the platform at
Ealing, "when you take another person's seat the least you can do is
to say Thank you."
"I _never_ speak to gentlemen in trains and buses. That's the way they
always begin."
"Good Heavens, the poor man was only being civil."
"Thank you. I've gone about enough to know what 'is kind of civility
means. I wasn't going to lay myself open to impertinence."
"I should have thought you'd gone about enough to know the
difference."
Flossie said nothing. She was furious with him for his failure to
defend her from the insulting advances of the City gentleman. But
perhaps she would hardly have taken it so seriously, if it had not
been significant to her of a still more intolerable desertion. Ada
Bishop had said something to her just before they started, something
that had been almost too much even for Flossie's complacency.
"I'm glad," she still heard Ada saying, "you're going to take him out
all day. If I were you I shouldn't let him see too much of that Miss
Harden."
There hadn't been much to take hold of in Ada's words, but Ada's
manner had made them unmistakable; and from that moment a little worm
had begun to gnaw at Flossie's heart.
And he, as he looked at her with that strange new sight of his that
was already bringing sorrow to them both, he said to himself that he
supposed it was her "going about," her sad acquaintance with unlovely
manners, that had made her as she was. Only how was it that he had
never noticed it before? Poor little girl; it was only last Saturday
when they had come back from looking over the house at Ealing that,
drawing upon all the appropriate resources of natural history, he had
called her a little vesper Vole, because she lived in a Bank and only
came out of it in the evening. What Flossie called him that time
didn't matter; it was her parsimony in the item of endearments that
provoked him to excesses of the kind. And now the thought of those
things made him furious; furious with himself; furious with Fate for
throwing Flossie in his way; furious with Flossie for being there. And
when he was ready to damn her because she was a woman, he melted, and
could have wept because she was a Beaver. Poor little girl; one day to
be called a vesper Vole, the next to be forgotten altogether, the next
to be remembered after this fashion.
And so they went on silently together, Flossie in pain because of the
little worm gnawing at her heart, he thinking many things, sad and
bitter and tender things, of the woman walking by his side. From time
to time she looked at him as she had looked at those City gentlemen,
not turning her head, but slewing the large dark of her eye into its
corner. Presently she spoke.
"You don't seem to have very much to say for yourself to-day."
"To-day? I'm not given to talking very much at any time."
"Oh, come, you don't seem to have any difficulty in talking to Miss
Harden. I've heard you. Wot a time you did sit yesterday. And you were
up there an hour or more before I came, I know."
"Three quarters of an hour, to be strictly accurate."
"Well, that was long enough, wasn't it?"
"Quite long enough for all I had to say."
Now that was playing into Flossie's hands, for it meant that he had
had nothing to say after her arrival. And she was sharp enough to see
it.
"That's all very well, Keith," said she, apparently ignoring her
advantage, "but Ada says they'll be talking if she keeps on asking you
up there just when she's all by herself. It's not the thing to do. I
wouldn't do it if it was me, no more would Ada."
"My dear child, Miss Harden may do a great many things that you and
Ada mayn't. Because, you see, she knows how to do them and you don't."
"Oh well, if you're satisfied. But it isn't very nice for me to 'ave
you talked about, just when we're going to be married, is it?"
"I think you needn't mind Ada. Miss Harden knows that I _have_ to see
her sometimes, and that I can't very well see her in any other way.
And I think you might know it too."
"Oh, don't you go thinking I'm jealous. I know _you're_ all right."
"If I'm all right, who's wrong?"
"Well--of course I understand what you want with _her_; but I can't
see what she wants with you."
"You _little_ fool. What should she want, except to help me?"
Flossie said nothing to that, for indeed her mind had not formulated
any clear charge against Miss Harden. Keith had annoyed her and she
wanted to punish him a little. She was also curious to see in what
manner the chivalry that had deserted her would defend Miss Harden.
He stood still and looked at her with brilliant, angry eyes.
"You don't understand a great deal, Flossie; but there's one thing you
_shall_ understand--You are not to say these things about Miss Harden.
Not that you'll do her any harm, mind, by saying them. Think for one
minute who and what she is, and you'll see that the only person you
are harming is yourself."
Flossie did think for a minute, and remembered that Lucia was the
daughter of a baronet and the cousin of an editor; and she did see
that this time she had gone a bit too far.
"And in injuring yourself, you know, you injure me," he said more
gently. "I don't know whether that will appeal at all to you."
It did appeal to her in the sense in which her practical mind
understood that injury.
"Do you really think she'll be able to help you to a good thing?"
He laughed aloud. "I think she'll help me to many good things. She has
done that already.
"Oh, well then, I suppose it's all right."
Though he said it was all right he knew that it was all wrong; that
she was all wrong too. He wondered again how it was that he had never
noticed it before. It seemed to him now that he must always have seen
it, and that he had struggled not to see it, as he was struggling now.
Struggle as he would, he knew that he was only putting off the
inevitable surrender. Putting off the moment that must face him yet,
at some turning of the stair or opening of a door, as they went from
room to room of the house that, empty, had once seemed to him
desirable, and now, littered with the solid irrevocable results of
Flossie's furnishing, inspired him with detestation and despair. How
could he ever live in it? He and his dream, the dream that Lucia had
told him was divorced from reality? She had told him too that his
trouble all lay there, and he remembered that then as now she had
advised a reconciliation. But better a divorce than reconciliation
with any of the realities that faced him now. Better even illusion
than these infallible perceptions. Better to be decently, charitably
blind where women are concerned, than to see them so; to see poor
Flossie as she was, a reality divorced from any dream.
A foolish train of thought that. As if he were only a dreamer. As if
it were a dream that had to do with it. As if his dream had not long
ago loved, followed, and embraced a divine reality. As if it had ever
fallen away after that one superb act of reconciliation.
He had done poor Flossie some injustice. She suffered in his eyes
because she came short, not of the dream, but of the reality. To be
placed beside Lucia Harden would have been a severe test for any
woman; but for Flossie it was cruelty itself. He had never subjected
her to that, not even in thought; for he felt that the comparison,
cruel to one woman, was profanation to the other. It was only feminine
Fate who could be so unkind as to put those two side by side, that he
might look well, and measure his love for Flossie by his love for
Lucia, seeing it too as it was. Maddox had not been far wrong there.
For anything spiritual in that emotion, he might as well have gone
back to Poppy Grace. Better; since between him and Flossie that gross
tie, once formed, could not be broken. Better; since there had at
least been no hypocrisy in his relations with the joyous Poppy. Better
anything than this baseness skulking under the superstition of
morality. If a man has no other feeling for an innocent woman than
that, better that a mill-stone should be hanged about his neck than
that he should offend by marrying her.
And yet there had been something finer and purer in this later love
than in the first infatuation of his youth. On that day, seven days
ago, the last day it had to live, he had been touched by something
more sacred, more immortal than desire. There had been no illusion in
the poetry that clothed the figure of a woman standing in an empty
room, dearer to her than the bridal chamber; a woman whose face grew
soft as her instinct outran the bridal terror and the bridal joy,
divining beyond love the end that sanctifies it.
But beyond all that again he could see that, whereas the love of all
other women had torn him asunder, the love of Lucia made him whole.
Poppy had drawn him by his senses; Flossie by his senses and his
heart; Lucia held him by his senses, his heart, his intellect, his
will, by his spirit, by his genius, by the whole man. Long after his
senses had renounced their part in her, the rest of him would cling to
her, satisfied and appeased. And but for Flossie it would have been so
even now. Though his senses had rest in Lucia's presence, their
longing for her was reawakened, not only by the thought of his
approaching marriage, but by the memory of that one moment when he had
realized the mystery of it, the moment of poor Flossie's
transfiguration, when he had seen through the thick material veil,
deep into the spiritual heart of love. With Lucia the veil had been
transparent from the first. It was not with her as it was with those
women who must wait for the hour of motherhood to glorify them. Of
those two years of his betrothal what was there that he would care to
keep? Only one immortal moment, that yet knew of the mortality before
and after it. While of the last seven days Lucia had made a whole
heavenly procession of ascending hours, every moment winged with the
immortal fire. Flying moments; but flame touched flame in flying, and
they became one life.
But he was going to marry Flossie.
And she, the child that was to have borne the burden of his genius and
his passion, poor little blameless victim of the imagination that
glorifies desire, how would it be with her in this empty house, empty
of the love she had looked for and would never find? How would it be
with him? Had he pledged himself to a life of falsehood, and had he
yet to know what torment awaited him at the hands of the avenging
truth? Truth, as he had once defined it, was the soul of the fact. It
was the fact that he was going to marry Flossie; but it was not the
truth. Only love could have given it a soul and made it true. If he
was bound to maintain that it had a soul when it hadn't, that was
where the falseness would come in.
Yet no. He might go mad by thinking about it, but life after all was
simpler than thought. Things righted themselves when you left off
thinking about them. He would be unhappy; but that could only make
Flossie unhappy if she cared for him. And in a year's time, when he
had left off thinking, she would have left off caring. He had shrewdly
divined that what Flossie chiefly wanted was to have children; or if
she did not want it, Nature wanted it for her, which came to the same
thing. As for mating her to a man of genius, that was just Nature's
wanton extravagance. Maddox had once said that any man would have done
as well, perhaps better; Flossie wouldn't care. Well, he would give
her children, and she would care for them. Indeed, he sincerely hoped
that for him she would not care. It would make things simpler.
Maddox, he remembered, had also said that she was the sort of woman
who would immolate her husband for her children; whereas Poppy--but
then, Maddox was a beast.
It never occurred for a moment to him to throw Flossie over. That, he
had settled once for all, could not now be done. Circumstances
conspired to make the thing irrevocable. Her utter dependence on him,
the fact that she had no home but the one he offered her, no choice
between marriage and earning her own living in a way she hated, the
flagrant half-domestic intimacy in which they had been living, more
than all, the baseness of his past love, and the inadequacy of his
present feeling for her, both calling on him to atone, all these
things made a promise of marriage as binding as the actual tie. Their
engagement might possibly have been broken off at any of its earlier
stages without profound dishonour. It was one thing to jilt a girl
within a decent interval of the first congratulations; another thing
altogether to abandon her with her trousseau on her hands. It had gone
so far that his failure at the last moment would be the grossest
insult he could offer her.
Gross indeed; yet not so gross but that he could think of one still
grosser--to let her marry him when he had no feeling to offer her but
such indifference as marriage deepens to disgust, or such disgust as
it tones down into indifference. Would he go on shuddering and wincing
as he had shuddered and winced to-day? Passion that might have
condoned her failings was out of the question; but would it be
possible to keep up the decent appearance of respect?
And yet he was going to marry her.
That was impressed on him by Flossie's voice saying that if he
wouldn't decide which of those two rooms was to be _their_ room, she
must. Because the men wanted to put up the bedstead.
It was an intimation that he was bound to her, not by any fine ties of
feeling or of honour, but by a stout unbreakable chain of material
facts. He looked out of the window. The vans were unloading in the
street. It seemed to him that there was something almost grossly
compromising in the wash-stand, dumped down there in the garden; and
as the bedstead was being borne into the house in portions,
reverentially, processionally, he surrendered before that supreme
symbol of finality. As he had made his bed, he must lie; even if it
was a brass bed with mother-o'-pearl ornaments; and he refused to
listen to the inner voice which suggested that the bed was not made
yet, it was not even paid for, and that he would be a fool to lie on
it. He turned sad eyes on the little woman so flushed and eager over
her packages. He had committed himself more deeply with every purchase
they had made that day. How carefully he had laboured at his own
destruction.
He had gone so far with these absurd reflections, that when Flossie
exclaimed, "There, after all I've forgotten the kitchen hammer," his
nerves relaxed their tension, and he experienced a sense of momentary
but divine release. And when she insisted on repairing her oversight
as they went back, he felt that the kitchen hammer had clinched the
matter; and that if only they had not bought it he might yet be free.
There was something in the Beaver's building, after all.