Mr Keeling was accustomed to consider the hour or two after lunch on
Sunday as the most enjoyable time in the week, for then he gave himself
up to the full and uninterrupted pursuit of his hobby. None of his
family ever came into his study without invitation, and since he never
gave such invitation, he had no fear about being disturbed. Before now
he had tried to establish with one or other of them the communication of
his joy in his books: he had asked Alice into his sanctuary one Sunday,
but when he had shown her an exquisitely tooled binding by Cameron, she
had said, ‘Oh, what a pretty cover!’ A pretty cover!... somehow Alice’s
appreciation was more hopeless than if she had not admired it at all.
Then, opening it, she had come across a slightly compromising picture of
Bacchus and Ariadne, and had turned over in such a hurry she had
crumpled the corner of the page. Her father hardly knew whether her
maidenly confusion was not worse than the outrage on his adored volume.
Stern moralist and Puritan though he was, this sort of prudery seemed to
him an affectation that bordered on imbecility. On another he had asked
Hugh to look at his books, and Hugh had been much struck by the type of
the capital letters in an edition of Omar Khayyam, wondering if it could
be enlarged and used in some advertisement of the approaching summer
sale at the stores. ‘That’s the sort of type we want,’ he said. ‘It hits
you in the eye; that does. You can’t help reading what is written in
it.’ Very likely that was quite true, for Hugh had an excellent
perception in the matter of attractive type and arrangement in the
advertising department, but his father had shut up the book with a snap,
feeling that it was in the nature of a profanity to let the aroma of
business drift into an atmosphere incense-laden with his books. His wife
presented an even more hopeless case, for she was apt to tell her
friends how fond her husband was of reading, and how many new editions
he had ordered for his library. Clearly, if this temple was to retain
its sense of consecration he must permit no more of these infidel
intruders.
It is not too much to say that the room was of the nature of a temple,
for here a very essential and withdrawn part of himself passed hours of
praise and worship. Born in the humblest circumstances, he had, from the
days when he slept on a piece of sacking below the counter in his
father’s most unprofitable shop, devoted all the push, all the activity
of his energies to the grappling of business problems and the pursuit of
money-making. To many this becomes by the period of middle age a
passion not less incurable than drug drinking, and not less ruinous than
that to the nobler appetites of life. But Keeling had never allowed it
thus to usurp and swamp him; he always had guarded his secret garden,
fencing it impenetrably off from the clatter of the till. Here, though
undeveloped and sundered from the rest of his life, grew the rose of
romance, namely the sense of beauty in books; here shone for him the
light which never was on sea or land, which inspires every artist’s
dream. He was not in any degree creative, he had not the desire any more
than the skill to write or to draw when he lost himself in reverie over
the printed page or the illustrations in his sumptuous editions. But the
sense of wonder and admiration which is the oil in the artist’s lamp
burned steadily for him, and lit with a never-flickering flame the hours
he passed among his books. Above all, when he was here he lost
completely a certain sense of loneliness which was his constant
companion.
To-day he did not at once pass through the doors beyond which lay the
garden of enchantment. Mrs Goodford had irritated him beyond endurance,
and what irritated him even more than her rudeness was the fact that he
had allowed it to upset him. He had thought himself safe from annoyance
by virtue of his own contempt, but her gibe about the stale fish had
certainly pricked him in spite of its utter falsity. He would have
liked to cut off his usual Christmas present which enabled her to live
in comfort at Blenheim, and tell her she need not expect more till she
had shown herself capable of politeness. But he knew he would not do
this, and with an effort dismissed the ill-mannered old lady from his
mind.
But other things extraneous to the temple had come in with him as he
entered, like flies through an opened door, and still buzzed about him.
His wife’s want of comprehension was one of them. It was not often that
Mrs Goodford had the power to annoy him so thoroughly as she had done
to-day, but when she did, all that Emmeline had to contribute to the
situation was such a sentence as, ‘What a pity you and Mamma worry each
other so.’ She did not understand, and though he told himself that in
thirty years he should have got used to that, he found now and then, and
to-day with unusual vividness, that he had not done so. She had never
become a companion to him; he had never found in her that for which
ultimately a man is seeking, though at the time he may not know it, when
he goes a-wooing. A mouth, an eyebrow, the curve of a limb may be his
lure, and having attained it he may think for a few years of passion
that in gaining it he has gained what he sought, but unless he has
indeed got that which unconsciously he desired, he will find some day
when the gray ash begins to grow moss-like on his burning coals, that
though his children are round him, there is but a phantom opposite to
him. The romance of passion has burned itself out, and from the ashes
has no phœnix arisen with whom he can soar to the sun. He desired the
mouth or the eyebrow: he got them, and now in the changing lineaments he
can scarcely remember what that which so strangely moved him was like,
while in the fading of its brightness nothing else has emerged.
It was this undoubtedly which had occurred in the domestic history of
Keeling’s house. He had been infatuated with Emmeline’s prettiness at a
time when as a young man of sternly moral principles and strong physical
needs, the only possible course was to take a wife, while Emmeline, to
tell the truth, had no voice in the matter at all. Certainly she had
liked him, but of love in any ardent, compelling sense, she had never,
in the forty-seven years of her existence, shown the smallest symptom in
any direction whatever, and it was not likely that she was going to
develop the malady now. She had supposed (and her mother quite certainly
had supposed too) that she was going to marry somebody sometime, and
when this strong and splendidly handsome young man insisted that she was
going to marry him, she had really done little more than conclude that
he must be right, especially when her mother agreed with him. Events had
proved that as far as her part of the matter was concerned, she had
acted extremely wisely, for, since anything which might ever so
indulgently be classed under the broad heading of romance, was foreign
to her nature, she had secured the highest prize that life conceivably
held for her in enjoying years of complete and bovine content. When she
wanted a thing very much indeed, such as driving home after church on
Sunday morning instead of walking, she generally got it, and probably
the acutest of her trials were when John had the measles, or her husband
and mother worried each other. But being almost devoid of imagination
she had never thought that John was going to die of the measles or that
her husband was going to cut off his annual Christmas present to her
mother. Things as uncomfortable as that never really came near her; she
seemed to be as little liable to either sorrow or joy as if when a baby
she had been inoculated with some spiritual serum that rendered her
permanently immune. She was fond of her children, her card-bearing
crocodile in the hall, her husband, her comfort, and she quite looked
forward to being Lady Mayoress next year. There would always be
sufficient strawberries and iced coffee at her garden parties; her
husband need not be under any apprehension that she would not have
proper provision made. Dreadful scenes had occurred this year, when Mrs
Alington gave her last garden-party, and two of her guests had been seen
almost pulling the last strawberry in half.
Such in outline was the woman whom, nearly thirty years ago, Keeling had
carried off by the mere determination of his will, and in her must
largely be found the cause of the loneliness which so often beset him.
He was too busy a man to waste time over regretting it, but he knew that
it was there, and it formed the background in front of which the action
of his life took place. His wife had been to him the mother of his
children and an excellent housekeeper, but never had a spark of
intellectual sympathy passed between them, still less the light
invisible of romantic comprehension. Had he been as incapable of it as
she their marriage might have been as successful as to all appearance it
seemed to be. But he was capable of it; hence he felt alone. Only among
his books did he get relief from this secret chronic aching. There he
could pursue the quest of that which can never be attained, and thus is
both pursuit and quarry in one.
And now in his fiftieth year he was as friendless outside his home as he
was companionless there. The years during which friendships can be made,
that is to say, from boyhood up till about the age of forty, had passed
for him in a practically incessant effort of building up the immense
business which was his own property. And even if he had not been so
employed, it is doubtful whether he would ever have made friends. Partly
a certain stark austerity innate in him would have kept intimacy at a
distance, partly he had never penetrated into circles at Bracebridge
where he would have met his intellectual equals. Till now Keeling of the
fish-shop had but expanded into Mr Keeling, proprietor of the Universal
Stores, that reared such lofty terra-cotta cupolas in the High Street,
and the men he met, those with whom he habitually came in contact, he
met on purely business grounds, and they would have felt as little at
ease in the secret atmosphere of his library as he would have been in
entertaining them there. They looked up to him as the shrewdest as well
as the richest of the prosperous tradesmen of Bracebridge, and his
contributions and suggestions at the meetings of the Town Council were
received with the respect that their invariable common sense merited.
But there their intercourse terminated; he could not conceive what was
the pleasure of hitting a golf-ball over four miles of downland, and
faced with blank incomprehension the fact that those who had been
exercising their brains all day in business should sit up over games of
cards to find themselves richer or poorer by a couple of pounds at one
o’clock in the morning. He would willingly have drawn a cheque for such
a sum in order to be permitted to go to bed at eleven as usual. He had
no notion of sport in any form, neither had he the bonhomie, the
pleasure in the company of cheerful human beings as such, which really
lies at the root of the pursuits which he so frankly despised, nor any
zeal for the chatter of social intercourse. To him a glass of whisky and
soda was no more than half a pint of effervescing fluid, which you were
better without: it had to him no value or existence as a symbol of good
fellowship. There was never a man less _clubbable_. But in spite of the
bleakness of nature here indicated, and the severity of his aspect
towards his fellow men, he had a very considerable fund of kindly
impulses towards any who treated him with sincerity. An appeal for help,
whether it implied the expenditure of time or money was certainly
subjected to a strict scrutiny, but if it passed that, it was as
certainly responded to. He was as reticent about such acts of kindness
as he was about the pleasures of his secret garden, or the steady
increase in his annual receipts from his stores. But all three gave him
considerable satisfaction, and the luxury of giving was to him no whit
inferior to that of getting.
Charles Propert, who presently arrived from the kitchen-passage in
charge of the boy in buttons, was one of those who well knew his
employer’s generosity, for Keeling in a blunt and shamefaced way had
borne all the expense of a long illness which had incapacitated him the
previous winter, not only continuing to pay him his salary as head of
the book department at the stores during the weeks in which he was
invalided, but taking on himself all the charges for medical treatment
and sea-side convalescence. He was an exceedingly well-educated man of
two or three-and-thirty, and Keeling was far more at ease with him than
with any other of his acquaintances, because he frankly enjoyed his
society. He could have imagined himself sitting up till midnight talking
to young Propert, because he had admitted him into the secret garden:
Propert might indeed be described as the head gardener. Keeling nodded
as the young man entered, and from under his big eyebrows observed that
he was dressed entirely in black.
‘Good-afternoon, Propert,’ he said. ‘I got that edition of the _Morte
d’Arthur_ you told me of. But they made me pay for it.’
‘The Singleton Press edition, sir?’ asked Propert.
‘Yes; sit down and have a look at it. It’s a fine page, you know.’
‘Yes, sir, and if you’ll excuse me, I really think you got it rather
cheap.’
‘H’m! I wonder if you’d have thought that if you had been the
purchaser.’
Propert laughed.
‘I think so. As you said to me the other day, sir, good work is always
cheap in comparison with bad work.’
Keeling bent over the book, and with his eyes on the page, just touched
the arm of Propert’s black coat.
‘No trouble, I hope?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. I heard yesterday of my mother’s death.’
‘Very sorry. If you want a couple of days off, just arrange in your
department. Then the copy of the _Rape of the Lock_ illustrated by
Beardsley came yesterday too. I like it better than anything I’ve seen
of his.’
‘There’s a very fine _Morte d’Arthur_ of his which you haven’t got,
sir,’ said Propert.
‘Order it for me, please. The man could draw, couldn’t he? Look at the
design of embroidery on the coat of that fellow kneeling there. There’s
nothing messy about that. But it doesn’t seem much of a poem as far as I
can judge. Not my idea of poetry; there’s more poetry in the prose of
the _Morte d’Arthur_. Take a cigarette and make yourself comfortable.’
He paused a moment.
‘Or perhaps you’d sooner not stop and talk to-day after your news,’ he
said.
Propert shook his head.
‘No, sir, I should like to stop.... Of course the _Rape of the Lock_ is
artificial: it belongs to its age: it’s got no more reality than a
Watteau picture----’
‘Watteau?’ asked Keeling.
‘Yes; you’ve got a book of reproductions of Watteau drawings. I don’t
think you cared for it much. Picnics and fêtes, and groups of people
under trees.’
Keeling nodded.
‘I remember. Stupid, insipid sort of thing. I never could make out why
you recommended me to buy it.’
‘I can sell it again for more than you paid for it, sir. The price of it
has gone up considerably.’
This savoured a little of business.
‘No, you needn’t do that,’ he said. ‘It’s a handsome book enough. And
then there is another Omar Khayyam.’
‘Indeed, sir; you’ve got a quantity of editions of that. But I know it’s
useless for me to urge you to get hold of the original edition.’
Mr Keeling passed him this latest acquisition.
‘Quite useless,’ he said. ‘What a man wants first editions for, unless
they’ve got some special beauty, I can’t understand. I would as soon
spend my money in getting postage-stamps because they are rare. But I
wanted to talk to you about that poem. What’s he after? Is it some
philosophy? Or is it a love poem? Or is he just a tippler?’
The conference lasted some time. Keeling was but learning now, through
this one channel of books, that attitude of mind which through instinct,
whetted and primed by education, came naturally to the younger man, and
it was just this that made these talks the very essence of the secret
garden. Propert, for all that he was but an employee at a few pounds a
week, was gardener there; he knew the names of the flowers, and what
was more, he had that comprehension and love of them which belongs to
the true gardener and not the specimen grower or florist only. It was
that which Keeling sought to acquire, and among the prosperous family
friends, who were associated with him in the management of civic
affairs, or in business relationships, he found no opportunity of coming
in contact with a similar mind. But Propert was freeborn in this
republic of art and letters, and Keeling was eager to acquire at any
cost the sense of native, unconscious citizenship. He felt he belonged
there, but he had to win his way back there.... He must have learned the
language in some psychically dim epoch of his existence, for exploration
among these alleys in his garden had to him the thrill not of discovery,
but the more delicate sense of recollection, of revisiting forgotten
scenes which were remembered as soon as they disentangled themselves
again from the jungle of materialistic interests that absorbed him all
the week. Mr Keeling had very likely hardly heard of the theory of
reincarnation, and had some modern Pythagoras spoken to him of beans, he
would undoubtedly have considered it great nonsense. But he would have
confessed to the illusion (the fancy he would have called it) of having
known something of all this before when Propert, with his handsome face
aglow and his eyes alight, sat and turned over books with him thus,
forgetting, as his own absorption increased, to interject his sentences
with the respectful ‘sir’ of their ordinary week-day intercourse.
Keeling ceased to be the proprietor and master of the universal stores,
he ceased even to be the proprietor of his own books. They and their
pictures and their binding and their aroma of the kingdom of intellect
and beauty, were common possessions of all who chose to claim them, and
belonged to neither of them individually any more than the French
language belongs to the teacher who instructs and the pupil who learns.
The hour that Propert usually stayed had to-day lengthened itself out
(so short was it) to two before the young man looked at his watch, and
jumped up from his chair.
‘I’m afraid I’ve been staying a very long time, sir,’ he said. ‘I had no
idea it was so late.’
Mr Keeling got up also, and walked to the window, where he spoke with
his back towards him.
‘I should like to know a little more about your family trouble,’ he
said. ‘Any other children beside yourself? I remember you once told me
your mother was a widow.’
‘Yes, sir, one sister,’ said Propert.
‘Unmarried? Work for her living?’ asked Keeling.
‘Yes, sir. I think she’ll come and live here with me,’ said he. ‘She’s
got work in London, but I don’t want her to live there alone.’
‘No; quite proper. What’s her work?’
‘Clerical work, including shorthand and typewriting.’
‘Efficient?’
‘Yes, sir. The highest certificates in both. She’s a bit of an artist
too in drawing and wood-cutting.’
Mr Keeling ceased to address the larch-trees that were the sponsors of
his house’s name, and turned round.
‘And a book-worm like you?’ he asked.
Propert laughed.
‘I wish I was a book-worm like her,’ he said. ‘But in London you get so
much more opportunity for study of all sorts. She had a British Museum
ticket, and studied at the Polytechnic.’
Keeling picked up the Singleton _Morte d’Arthur_ and carefully blew a
grain of cigarette ash from the opened page.
‘Let me know when she comes,’ he said. ‘I might be able to find her some
job, if she still wants work. Perhaps your mother’s death has made her
independent.’
He paused a moment.
‘Naturally I don’t want to be impertinent in inquiring into your
affairs, Propert,’ he said. ‘Don’t think that. But if I can help, let
me know. Going, are you? Good-bye; don’t forget to order me Beardsley’s
_Morte d’Arthur_.’
He walked out with him into the square Gothic hall with its hideous
tiles, its castellated chimney-piece, its painted wheelbarrow, its
card-bearing crocodile, and observed Propert going towards the
green-baize door that led to the kitchen passage.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Keeling.
‘I always come and go this way, sir,’ said Propert.
Keeling opened the front door for him.
‘This is the proper door to use, when you come to see me,’ he said.
* * * * *
He stood a minute or two at the front door, with broken melodies from
Omar Khayyam lingering like fragments of half-remembered tunes in his
head. ‘And Thou, beside me singing in the wilderness,’ was one that sang
itself again and again to him. But no one had ever sung to him in the
wilderness. The chink of money, the flattering rustle of bank-notes had
sung to him in the High Street, and he could remember certain ardours of
his early manhood, when the thought that Emmeline was waiting for him at
home made him hurry back from the establishment which had been the
nucleus-cell which had developed into the acres of show-rooms and
passages that he now controlled. But Emmeline’s presence at home never
made him arrive at his work later than nine o’clock next morning. No
emotion, caused either by Emmeline or ledger-entries, had ever dominated
him: there had always been something beyond, something to which perhaps
his books and his Sunday afternoon dimly led. And they could scarcely
lead anywhere except to the Wilderness where the ‘Thou’ yet
unencountered, made Paradise with singing.... Then with a swift and
sudden return to normal consciousness, he became aware that Mrs
Goodford’s bath-chair was no longer drawn up on the grass below the
larches, and that he might, without risk of being worried again, beyond
the usual power of Emmeline to worry him, take his cup of tea in the
drawing-room before going to evening service.
* * * * *
He found Emmeline alone, just beginning to make tea in the heavily
fluted tea-pot with its equipage of harlequin cups and saucers. Alice
and John were somewhere in the ‘grounds.’ Hugh had gone to see his young
lady (the expression was Mrs Keeling’s), and she herself had suffered a
slight eclipse from her usual geniality owing to her mother having
stopped the whole afternoon, and having thus interrupted her reading, by
which she meant going gently to sleep on the sofa, with her book
periodically falling off her lap. The first two times that this happened
she almost invariably picked it up, on the third occasion she had
really gone to sleep, and the rumble of its avalanche did not disturb
her. But the loss of this intellectual refreshment had rendered her
rather querulous, and since she was not of very vigorous vitality, her
querulousness oozed in a leaky manner from her instead of discharging
itself at high pressure. A tea-leaf had stuck, too, in the spout of the
tea-pot, which made that handsome piece contribute to the general
impression of dribbling at Mrs Keeling’s tea-table; it also provided her
with another grievance, though not quite so acute as that which took its
rise from what had occurred at lunch.
‘I’m sure it’s years since I’ve been so upset as I’ve been to-day,
Thomas,’ she said, ‘for what with you and Mamma worrying each other so
at lunch, and Mamma stopping all afternoon and biting my head off, if I
said as much as to hope that her rheumatism hadn’t troubled her lately,
and it’s wonderful how little it does trouble her really, for I’m sure
that though I don’t complain, I suffer twice as much as she does when we
get that damp November weather--Dear me, this tea-pot was always a bad
pourer: I should have been wiser to get a less handsome one with a
straight spout. Well, there’s your cup of tea, I’m sure you’ll be glad
of it. But there are some days when everything combines to vex one, and
it will all be in a piece with what has gone before, if Alice forgets
and takes some salmon-mayonnaise, and Mr Silverdale goes away thinking
that I’m a stingy housekeeper, which has never been said of me yet.’
Keeling failed to find any indication of ‘singing in the wilderness’
here, nor had he got that particular sense of humour which could find
provender for itself in these almost majestic structures of incoherence.
At all times his wife’s ideas ran softly into each other like the marks
left by words on blotting paper; now they exhibited a somewhat greater
energy and ran into each other with something of the vigour of vehicles
moving in opposing directions.
‘I do not know whether you wish to talk to me about your mother, your
rheumatism, your teapot, or your housekeeping,’ he remarked. ‘I will
talk about any you please, but one at a time.’
Mrs Keeling gave him his cup of tea, and waited a little before pouring
out her own. It was necessary to hold the teapot so long in the air in
order to extract a ration of fluid from it.
‘Yes, it’s very pleasant for you, Thomas,’ she said, ‘spending the
afternoon quietly among your books and leaving me to stand up to Mamma
for the way you spoke to her at lunch, when we might have been such a
pleasant family party. I don’t deny that Mamma gets worried at times,
and speaks when she had better have been silent, but----’
Her husband decided that it was her mother she wished to talk about, and
interrupted.
‘You may tell your mother this,’ he said, ‘that I won’t be called a
seller of bad goods by anybody. If another man did that I’d bring a
libel action against him to-morrow. Your mother should remember that
she’s largely dependent on me, and though she may detest me, she must
keep a civil tongue in her head about me in my presence. She may say
what she pleases of me behind my back, but don’t you repeat it to me.’
Mrs Keeling, fractious from her afternoon of absolute insomnia, forced a
small tear out of one of her eyes.
‘And there’s a word to me!’ she said. ‘Fancy telling me that my mother
detests my husband. That’s an un-Christian thing to say about anybody.’
‘It’s an un-Christian feeling, maybe, to have about anybody,’ said he,
‘but that’s your mother’s affair and not mine. She may feel about me
what she pleases, but I wish her to know she must speak properly to me,
or not speak at all. I shouldn’t have referred to it again, unless you
had begun, but now that you’ve begun it’s best you should know what my
opinion on the subject is. Before the children, too: I had better
manners than that when I was in the fish-shop myself.’
Mrs Keeling began to fear the worst, and forced a twin tear from her
other eye.
‘Well, what Mamma will do unless you help her this Christmas, is more
than I can tell,’ she said. ‘Coal is up now to winter prices, and
Mamma’s cellar is so small that she can’t get in enough to last her
through. And it’s little enough that I can do for her, for with John at
home it’s like having two young lions to feed, and how to save from the
house-money you give me I don’t see. I dare say it would be better if
Mamma got rid of Blenheim for what it would fetch and went into
furnished lodgings.’
‘Now who’s been talking about my not behaving properly to your mother
except yourself?’ said Keeling.
‘There’s other ways of saying a thing than saying it,’ said Mrs Keeling
cryptically. ‘You speak of Mamma detesting you, and not having the
manners of a fishmonger, and what’s that but another way of saying
you’re set against her?’
Mr Keeling regarded his wife with a faint twinkle lurking behind his
gray eyes.
‘Take your tea, Emmeline,’ he said, ‘and you’ll feel better. You haven’t
had your nap this afternoon, but have been listening to your mother
talking all sorts of rabid stuff against me. Don’t you deny it now, but
just remember I don’t care two straws what she says about me behind my
back. But I won’t stand her impertinence to my face. And as for coal in
the winter I can tell you that she still owes me for what she bought at
the Stores last January. Perhaps I’ll county-court her for the bill. I’m
glad you talked about coal, I had almost forgotten about that bill.’
It dawned faintly and vaguely on Mrs Keeling’s mind, as on summits
remote from where she transacted her ordinary mental processes, that her
husband did not quite mean what he said about that county-courting.
Possibly there lurked in those truculent remarks some recondite sort of
humour.
‘Certainly Mamma has no call to be so rude to you, when you do so much
for her,’ she said.
‘Just tell Mamma that,’ said he, rising. ‘That’s what I want her to
understand.’
* * * * *
The prospect of Mr Silverdale’s presence at dinner that night had filled
Alice with secret and gentle flutterings, and accounted for the fact
that she wore her amethyst cross and practised several of Mendelssohn’s
_Songs Without Words_ before evening service, in case she was asked to
play after dinner. She reaped her due reward for these prudent steps,
since Mr Silverdale expressed his admiration for amethysts at dinner,
and afterwards came and sat close by the piano, beating time with
scarcely perceptible movements of a slim white hand, not in the manner
of one assisting her with the rhythm, but as if he himself pulsated with
it. He had produced an extraordinarily unfavourable impression on John
by constantly calling him by his Christian name, by talking about Tom
Brown when he heard he was at Rugby, and by using such fragments of
schoolboy slang as he happened to recollect from his boyish days. These
in the rapidly changing vernacular of schoolboys were now chiefly out of
date, but John saw quite clearly that the design was to be ‘boys
together,’ and despised him accordingly. On Mr Keeling he produced
merely the impression of a very ladylike young man of slightly inane
disposition, and as Hugh was away, spending the evening at the house of
his fiancée, Mr Silverdale was thrown on the hands of the ladies for
mutual entertainment. With them he succeeded as signally as he had
failed with John, saying that though preaching a sermon might be dry
work for his hearers it was hungry work for the performer, eating salmon
mayonnaise with great gusto, and remarking across the table to John,
‘Jolly good grub, isn’t it, John?’ a remark that endeared him to Mrs
Keeling, though it made John feel slightly sick, and caused him to leave
in a pointed manner on his plate the portion of the ‘good grub’ which he
had not yet consumed. Like a wise tactician, therefore, Mr Silverdale
abandoned the impregnable, and delivered his assaults where he was more
likely to be successful. He had an eager and joyful manner, as of one
who found the world an excellent joke.
‘Such a scolding as I had before church from my housekeeper,’ he said,
‘because I didn’t eat the buttered scones she sent me up for tea. I know
some one who would have polished them off, eh, John?’
John’s eye, which had exactly as much expression in it as a dead
codfish’s, cowed him for a moment, but he quickly recovered.
‘Such a scolding!’ he said. ‘She said I didn’t take sufficient care of
myself, and naturally I told her that I had so many others to look after
that I must take my turn with the rest. But when I told her that Mrs
Keeling was going to take care of me this evening, she thought no more
about the scones I hadn’t eaten! She knew I should be well looked
after.’
Mrs Keeling had had a good nap before dinner, and her geniality had
quite returned. She had also seen that Mrs Bellaway was right, and that
there was plenty of mayonnaise.
‘Well, that does put me in a responsible position,’ she said. ‘At least
I must insist on your having just a morsel more of the mayonnaise before
they take it away. It’s a very simple dinner I’m giving you to-night:
there’s but a chicken and a slice of cold meat and a meringue and a
savoury to follow.’
Mr Silverdale laughed gleefully.
‘Dear me, this is absolute starvation,’ he exclaimed. ‘I should have
eaten my scones.’
Mrs Keeling instantly saw that this was a joke.
‘I’ll leave my husband to starve you over the port afterwards,’ she
said.
Again he laughed.
‘You and Mr Keeling are spoiling me,’ he declared, though it must have
required a singularly vivid imagination to trace in Keeling’s face any
symptom of that indulgent tendency.
Alice, in the depths of her shy, silly heart, found that in spite of his
appreciation of the salmon, the chicken, the cold meat, and the
meringue, the Galahad aspect of this morning was growing. His
housekeeper had told him he did not sufficiently look after himself; it
was clear that he was wearing himself out, while the enthusiasm with
which presently he spoke of his work deepened the knightly impression.
His voice thrilled her; so, too, did the boyish gaiety with which he
spoke of serious things.
‘I adore my new parish,’ he said. ‘I was almost afraid when I took the
living I should find too little to do. But coming home late last night
from a bedside, if I saw one drunken man I must have seen twenty, some
roaring drunk, some simply stupidly drunk, dear fellows! I asked two of
them to come home with me, and have another drink, and there was I in
the middle with two drunken lads, one with a black eye, reeling along
Alfred Street. I don’t know what my parishioners must have thought of
their new pastor. You should seen my housekeeper’s face, when I told
her that I had brought two friends home with me.’
Mrs Keeling paused, laying down on her plate the piece of meringue which
was actually _en route_ for her mouth.
‘But you never gave them another drink, Mr Silverdale?’ she said.
‘Yes, my dear lady, I did. “Ho! Every one that thirsteth!” That was the
drink I had for them. Dear lads! They were too tipsy to kneel, but there
were tears in the eyes of one of them, before they had been with me five
minutes.’
‘Was that the one with the black eye?’ thought John. If his mouth had
not been full he would have said so.
‘I saw them home, of course, and next Saturday I’m going to have a
regular beano in those slums beyond the church. Don’t be shocked, Mrs
Keeling, if it’s your priest who has a black eye on Sunday morning.’
‘And the bedside where you had been before?’ asked Alice.
‘My dear Miss Alice, I wish you could have been with me. There was such
an atmosphere of terror in that room when I went in, that I felt half
stifled: the place was thick with the fear of death. I fought against
it, it was given me to overcome it, and ten minutes later that
disreputable old sinner who lay dying there had such a smile of peace
and rapture on his face that I cannot but believe that he saw the angels
standing round him.’
‘And he got better?’ asked Mrs Keeling, with breathless interest, but
feeling that this was very daring conversation.
Mr Silverdale laughed as if this was an excellent joke.
‘Better?’ he asked. ‘He got well, and sang his psalms in Heaven this
morning. I felt in church as if I could hear his voice.’
Alice remembered the rapt look she had seen there, which her mother
almost profanely had taken to be the sign of an insufficient breakfast,
and thrilled at knowing the true interpretation of it. The rapt look was
there again now, and seemed to her the most adorable expression she had
ever seen on a human countenance. Mrs Keeling was more impressed now,
and the moisture stood in her kind mild eyes.
‘Well, I call that beautiful,’ she said, ‘and if you’ll let me know when
the funeral is, I’ll send a wreath.’
Mr Silverdale laughed again: John considered he was for ever laughing at
nothing at all.
‘That would be delightful of you,’ he said, ‘but pray let us get rid of
the dreadful word funeral. Birthday should it not be?’
This was too much for John.
‘Oh, I thought birthday was the day you were born, not the day you were
buried,’ he said politely.
‘John!’ said his mother.
Mr Silverdale beamed on him.
‘John has had enough shop from his pastor, haven’t you, my dear boy?’ he
said, with the greatest good humour. ‘We clergy are terrible people for
talking shop, and we don’t seem to mind how boring and tiresome we are.
You get enough jaw at school, pi’jaw we used to call it, without being
preached at when you come home.’
But Alice fixed earnest eyes on him.
‘Oh, do tell us a little more,’ she said.
Again he laughed.
‘My dear Miss Alice, I must come to you and your mother,’ he said, ‘to
learn about my new parishioners. You’ve got to tell me all about them. I
want you to point out to me every disreputable man, woman, and child in
the place, and the naughtier they are the better I shall be pleased.
We’ll rout them out, won’t we, and not give them a minute’s peace, till
they promise to be good.’
Mr Keeling was almost as surfeited with this conversation as was John.
It appeared to him that though Mr Silverdale wished to give the
impression that he was talking about his flock, he was really talking
about himself, and seemed to find it an unusually engrossing topic. This
notion was strongly confirmed when he found himself with him afterwards
over a cigarette and a glass of port, for Mr Silverdale seemed to have a
never-ending fund of anecdotes about besotted wife-beaters and scoffing
atheists who were really dear fellows with any quantity of good in them,
as was proved from the remarkable response they invariably made to his
ministrations. These stories seemed to be about them, but in each the
point was that their floods of tears and subsequent baptism,
confirmation, or death-bed, as the case might be, were the result of the
moment when they first came across Mr Silverdale, who, as he told those
edifying occurrences, had an air of boisterous jollity, cracking nuts in
his teeth to impress John, and sipping his port with the air of a
connoisseur to impress his host, and interspersing the conversions with
knowing allusions to famous vintages. Subconsciously or consciously
(probably the latter) he was living up to the idea of being all things
to all men, without considering that it was possible to be the wrong
thing to the wrong man.
This sitting, though full of sparkle, was but brief, for Keeling was
sure that his guest’s presence would be more welcome to his wife and
daughter than it was to him, and before long he conducted him to the
drawing-room where Alice happened to be sitting at the piano, dreamily
recalling fragments of Mendelssohn (which she knew very accurately by
heart) with both pedals down. She had been watching the door, and so
when she saw it opening, she looked towards the window, so that Mr
Silverdale was half-way across the room to the piano before she
perceived his entrance. Then, very naturally, she got up, and under
threat of Mr Silverdale instantly going home if she did not consent to
sit down again and continue, resumed her melodies. He came and sat on a
low stool close to her, clasped one knee with his slim white hands, and
half closed his eyes.
‘Now for a breath of Heaven!’ he said. ‘I am quite wicked about music: I
adore it too much. Little bits of anything you can remember, dear Miss
Alice; what a delicious touch you have.’
Alice could do better than give him little bits, thanks to her excellent
memory and her practice this afternoon, and in addition to several
_Songs Without Words_, gave him a couple of pretty solid slow movements
out of Beethoven’s _Sonatas_. It was not altogether her fault that she
went on so long, for once when she attempted to get up, he said quite
aloud so that everybody could hear, ‘You naughty girl, sit down and play
that other piece at once.’ But when eventually the concert came to a
close, he pressed her hand for quite a considerable time behind the
shelter of the piano, and said almost in a whisper, ‘Oh, such rest, such
refreshment!’ Then instantly he became not so much the brisk man of the
world as the brisk boy of the world again, and playfully insisted on
performing that remarkable duet called ‘Chopsticks’ with her, and made
her promise that if Mr Keeling lost all his money, and she had to work
for her living, she would give him lessons on the piano at
seven-and-sixpence an hour. There was a little chaffering over this, for
as a poor priest he said that he ought not to give more than five
shillings an hour, while Mrs Keeling, joining in the pleasantries, urged
Alice to charge ten. The only possible term to the argument seemed to be
to split the difference and call it seven-and-sixpence, cash prepaid....
Mr Keeling was appealed to and thought that fair. But he thought it
remarkably foolish also.
Alice’s music had lasted so long that already the respectable hour of
half-past ten, at which in Bracebridge parties, the crunch of carriage
wheels on the gravel was invariably heard, had arrived, Mr Silverdale
had received such rest and refreshment that he sat on the edge of his
chair and talked buoyantly and boyishly for another half-hour. The
Galahad-aspect had vanished, so, too, had the entranced listener to slow
movements, and his conversation was more like that of a rather fast
young woman than a man of any kind. He told a Limerick-rhyme with a
distinct point to it, having warned them that it was rather naughty, and
eventually jumped up with a little scream when the ormolu clock struck
eleven, saying that he would get no end of a scolding from his
housekeeper for being late.
‘And I shall never be asked here again, either,’ he said, ‘if I inflict
myself on you so long. Good-night, Mrs Keeling: I have had a dear
evening, a dear evening, though I have wasted so much of it in silly
chatter. But if ever I am asked again, I will show you I can be serious
as well.’
He shook hands with her and Alice, just whispering to the latter, ‘Thank
you once more,’ and went out with his host. Through the open window of
the drawing-room they could hear him whistling ‘Oh, happy band of
pilgrims,’ as he ran lightly along Alfred Road to be scolded by his
housekeeper.