Thomas Keeling was seated before the circular desk in his office at the
Stores, and since nine that morning, when as usual he had arrived on the
stroke of the clock, had been finishing his study of the monthly balance
sheets that had come in two days before. For many years now these
reports had been very pleasant reading for the proprietor, and for the
last eighteen months his accounts had shown a series of record-taking
profits. This was no matter of surprise to him, for Bracebridge during
the past decade had grown enormously since the new docks at Easton
Haven, ten miles away, had converted that town from being a sleepy
watering-place into one of the first ports of the kingdom. This had
reacted on Bracebridge. Fresh avenues of villas had sprung up
mushroom-like for the accommodation business men, who liked to get away
in the evening from crowded streets and the crackle of cobble stones,
while simultaneously the opening of the new railway-works at Bracebridge
itself had implied the erection of miles upon miles of workmen’s
dwellings. From a business point of view (to any who had business in the
town) these were very satisfactory circumstances, provided that he was
sufficiently wide-awake to keep pace with the growing demand, and not,
by letting the demand get ahead of his provision for it, cause or permit
to spring up rival establishments. Keeling, it is hardly necessary to
state, had fallen into no such drowsy error: the growth of Bracebridge,
and in particular of those avenues of villas which housed so many
excellent customers, had always been kept pace with, or indeed had been
a little anticipated by him. He had never waited for a demand to arise,
and then arranged about supplying it. With the imagination that is as
much at the root of successful shop-keeping as it is (in slightly
different form) at the root of successful poesy, he had always foreseen
what customers would want. An instance had been the sudden and huge
expansion of his furniture department made about the time the first
spadefuls of earth were taken out of the hillside for the foundation of
the earliest of the miles of villas which held the families of business
men from Easton Haven. He had foreseen that profitable incursion,
risking much on the strength of his pre-vision, with the result that now
scarcely a new villa was built that was not furnished from the Stores.
The expansion of the catering department had been a similar stroke, and
the prosperous business man of Bracebridge ate the early asparagus from
Keeling’s Stores, and drank Keeling’s sound wine, as he sat on Keeling’s
chair of the No. 1 dining-room suite.
To-day as he finished the perusal of these most satisfactory renderings
of last month’s accounts, Keeling felt that he had arrived at a stage,
at a plateau on the high upland of his financial prosperity. It
stretched all round him sunny and spacious, and he had no doubt in his
own mind as to whether it had not been worth while to devote thirty
years of a busy life in order to attain it. The reward of his efforts,
namely, the establishment of this large and remunerative business, and
the enjoyment of an income of which a fifth part provided him with all
that he could want in the way of material comfort and complete ease in
living, seemed to him a perfectly satisfactory return for his industry.
But as far as he could see, there was no further expansion possible in
Bracebridge: he had attained the limits of commercial prosperity there,
and if he was to devote his energies, now still in their zenith to a
further increase of fortune, he knew that this expansion must take the
form of establishing fresh branches of business in other towns. He did
not for a moment doubt his ability to succeed elsewhere as he had
succeeded here, for he had not in the course of his sober industrious
life arrived at any abatement of the forces that drive an enterprise to
success. But to-day the doubt assailed him as to whether it was worth
while.
He asked himself for what reason he should continue to rise early and
late take rest, and he could not give himself an adequate answer. In
material affluence he had all and more than he could possibly need, his
family was already amply provided for, and the spur of another ten
thousand a year had not, so it appeared now that the time for its
application had arrived, a rowel that stimulated him. He had often
foreseen the coming of this day, and in imagination had seen himself
answer to its call, but now that the day had definitely come he had but
a dull ear for its summons. The big manufacturing town of Nalesborough,
thirty miles off, was, as he knew, an admirable centre for the
establishment of another branch of his business, and he had already
secured a two years’ option on a suitable site there. There was no
reason why he should not instantly exercise this option and get plans
prepared at once. True, there was another year of the option still to
run, and during that time the site was still potentially his, but he
knew well, as he sat and debated with himself, that it was not through
such hesitancy as this that his terra-cotta cupolas aspired so high.
There was waiting for him, if he chose to put out the energy and
capacity that were undoubtedly his, a vast increase of income. But
though an increase of income was that which had been the central purpose
of his last thirty years, he was still uncertain as to his future
course. He was conscious (or some part of him, that perhaps which dwelt
in his secret garden, was conscious) that he really did not want any
more money, though for years he had so much taken for granted that he
did, that the acquisition of it had become a habit as natural to him as
breathing.
He folded and docketed the sheets that showed the monthly profits, and
most unusually for him at this busy hour of the morning, sat idly at his
desk. The business of his stores here whirled along its course
automatically, with Hugh who had been so sedulously trained in his
father’s thorough-going school to look after it, and no longer needed
his daily supervision. With the income which came to him from years of
prudent investment he wanted no more, and he wondered whether the time
was come to turn the business into a company. As vendor he would receive
a considerable block of shares and yet leave the company with an
excellent return for their money. Hugh would probably become general
director, and he himself, secure in an ample fortune, would have all his
time at his own disposal. Next year, it is true, he would be Mayor of
Bracebridge, which would leave him but little leisure, for he had no
notion of being anything but a hard-worked head of the town’s municipal
affairs, but after that he could retire from active life altogether, as
far as offices and superintendence went. But he by no means looked
forward to a life of well-fed, well-housed idleness; the secret garden
should spread its groves, he would live permanently in the busy
cultivation of it. But it must spread itself considerably: he must be
immersed in its atmosphere and lawns and thickets as thoroughly as,
hitherto, he had been immersed in the fortunes of the Stores.
Of a sudden vistas not wholly new to him, but at present very vaguely
contemplated, rushed into focus. Some three years ago when, at the age
of fourteen, John would naturally have taken his place in the Stores,
beginning at the bottom even as Hugh had done, Keeling had determined
his destiny otherwise, and had sent him to a public school. In taking
this step, he had contemplated the vista that now was growing distinct
and imminent. John was to enter a sphere of life which had not opened
its gate to his father. The public school should be succeeded by the
University, the University by some profession in which a perfectly
different standard of person from that to which his father belonged made
honourable careers. Putting it more bluntly, John was to be a gentleman.
Though there was no one less of a snob than Keeling, he knew the
difference between what John had already begun to be and himself
perfectly well. Already John walked, talked, entered a room, sat down,
got up in a manner quite different from that of the rest of his family.
Even his mother, the daughter of the P. & O. captain, even Alice, for
all the French, German, and music lessons with which her girlhood had
been made so laborious a time, had not--Keeling found it hard to define
his thought to himself--a certain unobtrusive certainty of themselves
which after three years only of a public school was as much a personal
possession of John’s as his brown eyes and his white teeth. That quality
had grown even as John’s stature had grown each time he came back for
his holidays, and it was produced apparently by mere association with
gentlemen. Little as Keeling thought of Mr Silverdale, he was aware that
Mr Silverdale had that quality too. He might be silly and affected and
unmanly, but when he and John ten days ago had sat opposite each other
on Sunday evening, John sick and disgusted, Silverdale familiar and
self-advertising, though he appeared to talk about drunkards, it was
easy to see that they both belonged to a different class from the rest
of them. Keeling admired and envied the quality, whatever it was, which
produced the difference, and, since association with those who had it
produced it, he saw no reason to suppose that it was out of his reach.
There were plenty of people in Bracebridge who possessed it, but except
at meetings and on official occasions he did not come in contact with
them. As ex-fishmonger, as proprietor and managing director of the
Stores, he moved in a society quite distinct from those to whom John
was learning so quickly to belong. But he could see them tellingly
contrasted with each other if he cared to walk along Alfred Street, past
the church where he was so regular an attendant on Sunday, to where
there stood side by side the two social clubs of Bracebridge, namely the
Bracebridge Club to which he himself and other business men belonged,
and next door, the County Club from which those of his own social
standing were excluded. The Bracebridge Club was far the more
flourishing of the two: its bow-windows were always full of sleek and
prosperous merchants, having their glass of sherry before lunch, or
reading the papers when they arrived in the pleasant hour after offices
and shops were shut in the evening. These premises were always crowded
at the sociable hours of the business day, and at the last committee
meeting the subject of an extension of accommodation had been discussed.
There was no such congestion next door, where retired colonels, and
occasional canons of the cathedral, and county magnates in Bracebridge
for the day spoke softly to each other, or sought the isolation of a
screening newspaper in a leather arm-chair. But the quality which
Keeling found so hard to define and so easy to recognize, and which to
him was perfectly distinct from any snobbish appreciation of position or
title, brooded over those portals of the County Club. In the families
of those who frequented it the produce of his own secret garden grew
wild, as it were: the culture, the education of which it was the fruit
were indigenous to the soil. He did not suppose that Colonel Crawshaw,
or Canon Arbuthnot, or Lord Inverbroom discussed _Omar Khayyam_ or the
_Morte d’Arthur_ any more than did Alderman James, or Town-Councillor
Phillips, but there was the soil from which culture sprang, just as from
it sprang that indefinable air of breeding which already he observed in
John. One day he had seen John standing in the window there with Colonel
Crawshaw and his son, who was a schoolfellow of John’s, and Keeling’s
heart had swelled with a strange mixture of admiration and envy to see
how much John was at ease, sitting on the arm of a big chair, and with a
nameless insouciance of respect refusing a cigarette which Colonel
Crawshaw had offered him. Lord Inverbroom stood by John; and John was
perfectly at ease in these surroundings. That was a tiny instance, but
none could have been more typical. Keeling wanted, with the want of a
thirsty man, not so much to belong to the County Club, as to feel
himself at ease there if he did belong.
He was roused from this quarter of an hour’s reverie, most unusual to
him in the middle of the morning, by the entrance of one of the porters
with a card on a tray.
‘His lordship is waiting, sir’ he said, ‘and wants to know if you can
see him for ten minutes.’
Keeling took the card which he found to concern the man of whom he had
this moment been thinking. Lord Inverbroom was Lord Lieutenant of the
County, who lived some six miles outside Bracebridge in a house famed
for its library and pictures. Its owner had held office in the last
Conservative Cabinet, and was now an indefatigable promoter of county
interests. Keeling met him with tolerable frequency on various boards,
and there was no one in the world for whom he entertained a profounder
respect.
‘I’ll see him,’ he said. ‘Show him up.’
Next moment Lord Inverbroom entered. He was small and spare and highly
finished in face, and wore extraordinarily shabby clothes, of which no
one, least of all himself, was conscious.
‘Good-morning, Mr Keeling,’ he said, with great cordiality. ‘I owe you a
thousand apologies for intruding, but I have quite a decent excuse.’
‘No excuse necessary, my lord,’ said Keeling. ‘Please take a chair.’
‘Thanks. Now I won’t occupy your time more than I can help. I have come
to consult you about the County Hospital, of which, as you know, I am
chairman. We have a meeting in half an hour from now, the notice of
which, by some mistake, never reached me till this morning. That’s my
excuse for descending on you like this.’
He paused a moment.
‘There’s a very serious state of affairs,’ he said. ‘We have a heavy
deficit this last year, and unless we can find some means of raising
money, we shall have to abandon the building of that new wing, which we
began in the spring. I’m glad to say that was not my fault, else I
shouldn’t have ventured to come to you, for I only became chairman a
couple of months ago. Now we are going to have the honour of having you
for our Mayor next year, and I wanted to consult you as to whether you
thought it possible that the town would lend us a sum of money to enable
us to complete this new wing, which, in my opinion, is essential for the
proper establishment of the hospital. Would such a scheme have your
support? The Committee is meeting, as I said, in half an hour, and, if
possible, I should like to be able to tell them that some such project
is, or will be, under consideration.’
‘What sum do you require?’ asked Keeling.
‘Eighteen thousand pounds.’
‘That means twenty,’ said Keeling.
‘It probably means twenty,’ assented Lord Inverbroom. ‘We should pay, I
suppose, four or five per cent. on the loan.’
Keeling tapped the table impatiently with his fingers. This was
business, and in his opinion rotten business.
‘And considering that last year there was a deficit,’ he said, ‘where
would you get your money to pay the interest?’
‘That could be managed. I think I may say I could guarantee that.’
‘And how about the repayment of the loan itself?’ asked Keeling. ‘How
will that be guaranteed? The hospital is working at a loss. I don’t mind
that so much: appeals can be made to wipe off small deficits on working
expenses. But an institution that is working at a loss can’t get a
further loan from a public body without giving some security for its
repayment. At least, if I was on that public body, I would resign my
place rather than consent to it. What sort of balance sheet would we
have to show the taxpayers? No, my lord, that’s quite out of the
question.’
Secretly he wondered at the obtuseness of this man, who had thought such
a scheme within the wildest range of possibilities. For himself he would
not have lent a sixpence either of his own or of public money on such an
enterprise. Yet he knew that Lord Inverbroom had been a Foreign
Secretary of outstanding eminence, diplomatic, large-viewed, one who had
earned the well-merited confidence of the public. Without doubt he had
great qualities, but they did not appear to embrace the smallest
perception on the subject of business.
Lord Inverbroom nodded to him, and rose.
‘I quite see your point, Mr Keeling,’ he said. ‘Now you put it to me so
plainly, I only wonder that I did not think of it before. I am afraid
we shall have a melancholy meeting.’
As he spoke he became aware that Keeling was not paying the smallest
attention to him; he appeared unconscious of him. His finger still
tapped his desk, and he was frowning at his ink-bottle. Then he
dismissed, as if settled, whatever was occupying his mind.
‘How much has been spent on the new wing already?’ he asked.
‘Approximately eight thousand pounds.’
‘And that will be thrown away unless you raise twenty thousand more?’
‘Not permanently thrown away, I hope. But it will give us no return in
the way of hospital accommodation.’
‘And the new wing, on your guarantee, is urgently needed?’ asked
Keeling.
‘I can assure you of that.’
Keeling sat silent for a moment longer. Then he rose too.
‘I will present your committee with the entire new wing,’ he said. ‘It
will be called after me, the Keeling wing. I do not wish my gift to be
made public as yet. I should like that done as soon as it is complete,
at the opening in fact. That should take place during my year of office
as Mayor.’
Lord Inverbroom held out his hand.
‘I won’t keep you any longer, Mr Keeling,’ he said. ‘And any words of
thanks on my part are superfluous. May I just tell my committee that an
anonymous donor has come forward, and that we can proceed with the
work?’
‘Yes, that will do.’
‘I envy you your munificence,’ said Lord Inverbroom.
* * * * *
As soon as his visitor was gone, Keeling went straight on with his
morning’s work. There were a couple of heads of departments to see, and
after that, consulting his memoranda, he found he had made an
appointment to interview a new private type-writer, in place of one whom
he had lately been obliged to dismiss.
Opposite the entry was the word ‘Propert,’ and he recollected that this
was the Miss Propert who had lately come to live with her brother.
Presently, in answer to his summons, she came in, and, as his custom was
with his employees, he remained seated while she stood.
‘I have looked through your testimonials, Miss Propert,’ he said, ‘and
they seem satisfactory. Your work will be to take down my correspondence
in the morning, in shorthand, and bring it back typewritten for
signature after luncheon. The hours will be from nine till five, with an
hour’s interval, Saturday half day. Your salary will be twenty-five
shillings a week.’
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said she.
‘You will do the typewriting in that small room off this. You have a
machine of your own?’
‘Yes, sir. I brought it down this morning.’
‘Very well. I engage you from to-day. There is a good deal to do this
morning. If you are ready we will begin at once.’
In five minutes Norah Propert had deposited her typewriter in the next
room, and was sitting opposite her employer with the breadth of the big
table between them. As she had stood in front of him, Keeling noticed
that she was tall: now as she sat with her eyes bent on her work, he
hardly noticed that she was good-looking, with her light hair, dark
eyebrows, and firm full-lipped mouth. What was of far greater importance
was that she tore the sheets off her writing-pad very swiftly and
noiselessly as each page was filled, and that when she came to some
proper name, she spelled it aloud for confirmation. Occasionally when a
letter was finished he told her to read it aloud, and there again he
noticed not the charming quality of her voice so much as the
distinctness with which she read.
For some hour and a half this dictation went on, with interruption when
heads of departments brought in reports, or when Keeling had to send for
information as to some point in his correspondence. He noticed that on
these occasions she sat with her pencil in her hand, so as to be ready
to proceed as soon as he began again. Once she corrected him about a
date that had occurred previously in a letter, and was right.
‘That is all,’ he said, at the end. ‘I will read them over and sign
them, as soon as they are done.’
She had her hands full of the sheets, and he walked with her as far as
the door of the very small room where the typewriting was to be done,
and opened it for her. It was built out under the tiles, and was
excessively hot and stuffy on this warm September morning.
‘I shall be here till half-past one, if you want to ask me anything,’ he
said, and shut the door between her little cabin and his big cool room.
This door was heavily padded at the edges, so that the clack of the
typewriter hardly reached him.
* * * * *
It was not Keeling’s usage to take any step concerning finance or
business without considering where that step would take him, though that
consideration could often be condensed into a moment’s insight. The
thought of his sudden munificence with regard to the hospital occupied
his mind, when he settled down to work again, as little as did the
thought of his new typist whom he had just shut up in the stuffy little
chamber adjoining his own. Momentary as had been the time required for
his offer, his determination to make it was but the logical next step in
the secret ambition which had so long been growing in his mind. Indeed
his interview with Lord Inverbroom had been his opportunity no less than
the hospital’s, and it would have been very unlike him not to take
advantage of it. But he was not going to snatch at the fruit which it
would help to bring within his reach: he had no wish that the Committee
or the town generally should learn the identity of the benefactor until
at the opening the name of the new wing should flash on the assembled
gathering. That opening must be a day of pomp and magnificence: in
course of time he would talk over that with Lord Inverbroom. At present
he had plenty of occupations to concern himself with. And noticing the
very fluent clacking that came faintly from behind the padded door, he
filed the accounts which he had found so satisfactory, and buried
himself in business again.
It was barely four o’clock when Miss Propert came in with her sheaf of
typewritten correspondence for his inspection and signature. He had
thought that this would occupy her for at least an hour longer, and as
he read it over he looked for signs of carelessness that should betray
haste rather than speed. But none such revealed themselves: all she had
done was exceedingly accurate and neat, and showed no trace of hurry. He
passed each sheet over to her, when he had read and signed it, for her
to place it in its envelope, and looking across the table without
raising his eyes he noticed the decision and swiftness of her fingers
as she folded the paper with sharp, accurate creases. He liked seeing
things handled like that: that was the way to do a job, whether that job
was the giving of a wing to the hospital or the insertion of a letter
into its envelope. You knew what you meant to do and did it. And though
it was not his habit to praise work when it was well done (for he paid
for its being well done), but only to find fault with work badly done
(since work badly done was not worth the hire of the labourer), he felt
moved to give a word of commendation.
‘I see you can work quickly as well as carefully,’ he said.
‘I will do my best to satisfy you, sir,’ she answered.
He looked at her, and saw that her face seemed flushed. That, no doubt,
was owing to the heat of the room where she had been working. He pushed
a ledger and a pile of typewritten sheets towards her.
‘I want those entered by hand in the ledger,’ he said. ‘You can use that
table over there in the window. When that is finished you can go.’
For another half-hour the two worked on at their separate tables. The
girl never once raised her eyes from her task, but sat with one hand
following down the list of names and figures, while with the other she
entered them in their due places in the ledger. But her employer more
than once looked up at her, and noted, as he had noted before, the
decision and quickness of her hands, and, as he had not noted before,
the distinction of her profile. She was remarkably like her handsome
brother; she was also like the picture of one of the Rhine-maidens in an
illustrated edition of the _Rheinegold_. But he gave less thought to
that than to the fact that he had evidently secured an efficient
secretary.
He came to the end of his day’s work before her, and rose to go.
‘You can leave the ledger on this table when you have finished,’ he
said.
She raised her eyes for a half-second.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
‘Your brother tells me you are as devoted to books as he,’ said Keeling.
This time she did not look up.
‘Yes, sir, I am very fond of them,’ she said, finishing an entry.
Keeling went out through his book department, where he nodded to
Propert, into the bustle of the square, noticing, with a satisfaction
that never failed him, as he walked by the various doors of his block of
building, how busy was the traffic in and out of the Stores. It was
still an hour to sunset: on the left the municipal offices and town-hall
rose pretentious and hideous against the blue of the southern sky, while
in front to the west the gray Gothic glories of the Cathedral,
separated from the square by a line of canonical houses, aspired high
above the house-roofs and leaf-laden elm-towers in the Close. The fact
struck him that the front of the town-hall, with its wealth of fussy
adornment, its meaningless rows of polished marble pilasters, its
foolish little pinnacles and finials, was somehow strangely like the
drawing-room in his own house, with its decorations selected by the
amazingly futile taste of his wife. There was a very similar confusion
of detail about the two, a kindred ostentation of unnecessary objects.
There was waste in them both, expense that was not represented on the
other side of the ledger by a credit balance of efficiency. No one took
pleasure in the little pink granite pilasters between the lights of the
windows in the town-hall, and certainly they were entirely useless. The
money spent on them was thrown away: whereas money spent ought to yield
its dividend, producing either something that was useful or something
that gave pleasure. If you liked a thing it was worth paying for it, if
it was directly useful it was worth paying for it. But where was the
return on the money spent on pink pilasters or on the lilies painted on
the huge looking-glass above his wife’s drawing-room chimney-piece?
Those lilies certainly were not useful, since they prevented the mirror
exercising its proper function of reflecting what stood in front of it.
Or did they yield a dividend in pleasure to Emmeline? He did not
believe that they did: he felt sure that she had just bought No. 1
drawing-room suite dining-room suite with extras, as set forth in his
catalogue. He knew the catalogues well: with extras No. 1 suite came to
£117. It had much in common with the front of the town-hall. So, too, if
you came to consider it, had the crocodile with the calling-cards in the
abominable hall.
The day, as Miss Propert had already discovered in her little stuffy
den, was exceedingly hot and airless, and Keeling, when he had passed
through the reverberating square and under the arch leading into the
Cathedral Close, found it pleasant to sit down on one of the benches
below the elm-trees, which soared loftily among the tombs of the disused
graveyard facing the west front of the Cathedral. Owing to Miss
Propert’s rapidity in typewriting he had left the Stores half an hour
earlier than usual, and here, thanks to her, was half an hour of leisure
gained, for which he had no imperative employment. The quiet gray graves
with head-stones standing out from the smooth mown grass formed his
foreground: behind them sprang the flying buttresses of the nave. They
were intensely different from the decorations of the town-hall; they
had, as he for all his ignorance in architecture could see, an obvious
purpose to serve. Like the arm of a strong man akimbo, they gave the
sense of strength, like the legs of a strong man they propped that
glorious trunk. They were decorated, it is true, and the decoration
served no useful purpose, but somehow the carved stone-work appeared a
work of love, a fantasy done for the pleasure of its performance, an
ecstasy of the hammer and chisel and of him who wielded them. They were
like flames on the edge of a smouldering log of wood. He felt sure that
the man who had executed them had enjoyed the work, or at the least the
man who had planned them had planned them, you might say, ‘for fun.’
Elsewhere on the battlemented angles of the nave were grotesque
gargoyles of devils and bats and nameless winged things with lead spouts
in their mouths to carry off the rain-water from the roof. Commercially
they might perhaps have been omitted, and a more economical device of
piping have served the same purpose, but they had about them a certain
joy of execution. There was imagination in them, something that
justified them for all their nightmare hideousness. The people who made
them laughed in their hearts, they executed some strange dream, and put
it up there to glorify God. But the man who perpetrated the little pink
granite pilasters on the town-hall, and the man who painted the lilies
on the looking-glass above Mrs Keeling’s drawing-room chimney-piece had
nothing to justify them. The lilies and the pilasters were no manner of
good: there was a difference between them the flying buttresses and the
gargoyles. But the latter gave pleasure: they paid their dividends to
any one who looked at them. So did the verses in _Omar Khayyam_ to those
who cared to read them. They were justified, too, in a way that No. 1
drawing-room suite was not justified for the £117 that, with extras, it
cost the purchaser.
Dimly, like the moving of an unborn child, the sense of beauty, that
profitless thing, without which there is no profit in all the concerns
of the world, began to trouble Keeling with a livelier indication of
life than any that he had yet experienced from it. In some disconnected
way it was connected with John’s education and Lord Inverbroom’s manner,
and the denizens of the windows of the County Club as opposed to those
who more numerously gathered in the windows of the Town Club next door.
Propert, his salesman in the book department, had a cousinship to these
men who made gargoyles and beautiful books, whereas Emmeline was only
cousin to the pilasters in the Town Hall and the No. 1 drawing-room
suite. Propert’s sister, according to her brother’s account, had the
same type of relationship as himself. But the main point about her was
her swiftness in shorthand writing and the accuracy of her transcription
on to the typewriting machine. Keeling had never had a secretary who
finished a heavy day’s work in so short a time. He owed her the extra
half-hour’s leisure, which had led to this appreciation of the
gargoyles and buttresses of the Cathedral. For thirty years he had
passed this way almost daily, but until to-day he had never seen them
before in the sense that seeing means a digestion of sight.
Behind him, where he sat, ran a thick-set hedge of clipped hornbeams,
bordering the asphalt walk that led through the graveyard. It was still
in full leaf, and completely screened him from passengers going through
the Close. There had been many passengers going along the path there,
and he had heard a score of sentences spoken as they passed within a
yard of him behind the hornbeam hedge. Sentence after sentence had
entered his ears without being really conveyed to his brain. Then
suddenly close behind him he heard a voice speaking very distinctly. It
said this:--
‘It’s so horrid to work for a cad, Charles. I haven’t done it before.
Oh, I know he was awfully kind to you----’
The voice merged into the buzz of autumn noises, and footsteps and other
conversation, but it had stood apart and distinct. Keeling knew he
recognised the voice, but for the moment could not put a name to its
owner; it was a woman’s voice, very distinct and pleasant in tone. And
in order to satisfy a sudden, unreasonable curiosity, he got up from his
seat and, looking out down the path over the hornbeam hedge, saw but a
few yards down the path the head of his book department and his sister,
the very efficient secretary and typewriter whom he had engaged that
morning. Their heads were turned to each other and there was no doubt
whatever about their identity.
Well, nothing could possibly matter less to him, so it seemed at that
moment, than what his typewriter thought about him. All that mattered
was what he thought about his typewriter, whom he considered a very
efficient young woman, who got through her work with extraordinary
accuracy and speed. He did not care two straws whether she considered
him a cad, for what signified the opinion of a girl whose sole
connection with you was the nimbleness of her fingers, employed at
twenty-five shillings a week? As long as she did her work well, she
might take any view she chose about her employer who, for his part, had
no views about her except those concerned with the speed and accuracy of
her transcriptions.... And then, even as he assured himself that he was
as indifferent to her opinion as the moon, he found himself hating the
fact that she thought him a cad. Why had she thought that, he asked
himself. He had been perfectly polite to her with the icy aloofness of
the employer; he had even melted a little from that, for he had opened
the door for her to go into her typewriting den, because her hands were
full of the papers that composed her work. Why a cad then?
He gave orders to his mind to dismiss the matter, and with his
long-striding, sauntering walk that carried him so quickly over the
ground, continued his way homewards. But despite his determination, he
found that his thoughts went hovering back to that unfortunate and
unintentional piece of eavesdropping. He wondered whether Charles
Propert agreed with his sister (as if that mattered either!) and quite
strongly hoped that he did not. Certainly Keeling had been kind enough
and generous enough to him.... Then, more decidedly still, he pished the
whole subject away: there were other things in the world to think about.
* * * * *
For the next week Miss Propert continued to display a galaxy of
unvarying excellence in her duties, and Keeling, though he told himself
that he had dismissed her overheard criticism from his mind altogether,
and perhaps believed that he had done so, acted towards her in sundry
little ways, as if he consciously deprecated her opinion and sought to
change it. The weather, for instance, continuing very hot, he ordered an
electric fan to be placed in the small stuffy den where she did her
work, saying nothing about it to her, but setting it going while she was
absent for her hour’s interval in the middle of the day. On another
occasion when he was sitting at his table with his hat on, he took it
off as she entered, on a third he cleared a space for her to write at
when she came to receive his dictation for the morning. In part, though
he would have denied it, his dislike of her verdict on him prompted
these infinitesimal courtesies, but in part another incentive dictated
them. Vaguely and distantly she was beginning to mean something to him
personally, she was acquiring a significance apart from her duties. He
began to notice not only the speed and efficiency of her fingers, but
the comely shape of her hand: he began to heed not only the distinctness
of her voice as she read over her shorthand transcripts to him, but its
quality. It reminded him rather of John’s voice.... And oftener and
oftener as he dictated his correspondence he looked up with his gray
eyes set deep below their bushy eyebrows at that quiet, handsome face,
which hardly ever raised its eyes to his. Somehow her perfect fulfilment
of the complete duties of the secretary, devoid of any other human
relationship to him whatever, began to pique him. She treated him as if
he had no existence apart from his function as her employer. He had
never before had so ideal a secretary, so intelligent and accurate a
piece of office-furniture, and now, having got it, he was inconsistent
enough to harbour a smothered wish that she was a shade more human in
her dealings with him. He wished that she would not call him ‘sir’ so
invariably, whenever she spoke to him: he looked out for the smallest
indication on her part of being conscious of him in some human manner.
But no such indication appeared, and the complete absence of it vexed
him, though as often as it vexed him (the vexation was the smallest of
annoyances) he strenuously denied to himself that such a feeling existed
at all in his mind.
He had made an engagement with her brother that he should come up one
Sunday afternoon some fortnight after Miss Propert had entered his
employment, to spend a couple of hours among the herbage of the secret
garden. The young man had come into his room just before midday closing
time on Saturday, with the weekly returns of the lending library that
had just been added to the book department, when a sudden idea struck
Keeling.
‘I shall see you to-morrow afternoon, then,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will
bring your sister with you, as you tell me she is a book-lover too.’
She was at the moment in the little typewriting den adjoining, the door
of which was open. Through it he could just see her hands arranging the
papers on her table; the rest of her was invisible. But as he spoke in a
voice loud enough to be heard by her, he observed that her hands paused
in the deft speed of their tidying and remained quite motionless for a
second or two. And he knew as well as if some flawless telegraphic
communication had been set up between her brain and his that she was
debating in her mind whether she should come or not. ‘She thought him a
cad, but no doubt she wanted to see his books;’ that was the message
that came to him from her.
Keeling nodded towards the room where the hands had become busy again.
He knew she had heard, overheard if you will, and since she did not
choose to give her answer herself, he did not choose to convey the
invitation to her again. Some faint stirrings of human relationship
began at that moment to enter into living existence, for each set up
their little screen of pride. Neither would have done that had there not
been something, ever so small, to screen.
‘Will you ask her?’ he said to her brother. ‘She is in there.’
He waited, hat and stick in hand, while a couple of sentences passed
between them. Then Charles came out.
‘She is very much obliged to you, sir,’ he said. ‘She will be very much
pleased to come.’
‘Damned condescending of her,’ thought Keeling to himself. What right
had a secretary at twenty-five shillings a week to send him messages
through her brother? But if a message was to be sent, he was glad it was
that one.
* * * * *
Keeling received the two next afternoon in his secret garden, and had
taken the trouble to bring in a couple of more comfortable chairs. For
the first time he looked at his secretary without the sundering
spectacles of the employer, and on the instant became aware that she, on
her side, had, so to speak, taken off the blinkers of the employed. She
was here as his guest, asked by him personally because he wished to
welcome her and show her his books, and her eyes, instead of being glued
to her work, met his with a frank cordiality. He was not accustomed to
shake hands with her brother on his Sunday visits here, but the girl
advanced to him with her hand out, presupposing his welcome. Whatever
hesitancy she might have had in accepting his invitation, she had, by
the fact of her accepting it, put her indecision completely away, and
for the first time she smiled at him.
‘It was so good of you to let me come and see your books, Mr Keeling,’
she said. ‘My brother has often told me what delightful Sunday
afternoons he has passed with you here.’
He did not fail to notice that he was ‘sir’ no longer, but ‘Mr Keeling,’
nor did he fail to grasp the significance. He was ‘sir’ in his office,
he was Mr Keeling in his house. Somehow that pleased him: it was like a
_mot juste_ in a comedy.
‘Your brother has often been very useful to me in my collecting,’ he
said, with a hint of ‘employer’ still lingering in his attitude towards
him.
She sat down in one of the big chairs that Keeling had brought in. That
was the purpose for which he had fetched them, but for the moment he put
on his employer-spectacles again to observe the unusual sight of his
secretary sitting unbidden while he stood. Then the girl’s complete and
unconscious certainty that she knew how to behave herself, whisked them
from in front of his eyes again, and he saw only his guest sitting
there, to whom were due his powers of entertaining and interesting her.
‘Charles tells me you go in for beautiful books rather than rare ones,’
she said. ‘Charles, have you told Mr Keeling about the official Italian
book on Leonardo?’
‘No; I was going to mention it to you to-day, sir,’ he said.
‘Leonardo?’ asked Keeling.
‘Yes, Leonardo da Vinci....’
Immediately she saw that he had never heard of him, and without pause
conveyed incidental information.
‘It will reproduce all pictures certainly by him,’ she said, ‘and a
quantity of his sketches, with his drawings of flying machines, the
Venice ones, you know. It will be published to subscribers only.’
Keeling nodded to Charles.
‘Will you see to that for me?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. It’s published at £25, isn’t it, Norah?’
‘Yes, or is it £30? Ah, there’s the Singleton Press _Morte d’Arthur_.
May I look at that? It is one I have never seen. Ah, what a page! What
type!’
For the next hour the three burrowed into or nibbled at Keeling’s
volumes, now losing themselves completely in the interest which was in
common between them, now for a moment conscious of their mutual
relations as employer and employed. But those intervals grew rarer, and
in Keeling’s mind were replaced by the new consciousness of his
secretary with her mask off. She, on her part, found no difficulty in
separating her employer from Mr Keeling with this really wonderful
collection of beautiful modern books, and indeed there was little in
common between them. The hobby was like a thawing sun of February that
uncongealed the ice of the office, and, as long as it shone on them, the
melting seemed not less than a complete break up of the frost.
‘Lord Inverbroom lives near, does he not?’ she asked. ‘That’s a
wonderful library. Is the public allowed to see it? I suppose not. I
would not trust Charles within arm’s length of a Caxton if I had one.’
‘Kind of you,’ remarked Charles. ‘My sister designed and cut a
book-plate for him, sir.’
Keeling saw her out of the corner of his eye just shake her head at her
brother, and she instantly changed the subject. The reason seemed clear
enough in the midst of these walls of books that had no such decoration.
But she need not have shown such delicacy, he thought to himself, for he
had no notion of ordering a plate from her. And very soon she rose.
‘We must be off, Charles,’ she said, ‘if we are to have our walk. Thank
you so much, Mr Keeling, for showing me your treasures.’
He was sorry she was going, but made no attempt to detain her, and
presently she was walking back along the still sunny road with her
brother.
‘I’m sorry I called him a cad,’ she said. ‘He’s only a cad in his office
perhaps. My dear, did you see the crocodile holding a tray for cards?
What an awful house.’
‘Nice books,’ said Charles.
‘Very. He’s worthy of them too: he really likes them. Perhaps they’ll
civilise him. Do you know, I feel rather a brute for having gone there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t like him. But he’s kind; and that makes it worse. What
does he think about apart from his books? Just money, I suppose. I won’t
go there again anyhow.’
‘Until he gets the Leonardo book.’
She sighed.
‘I shall have to then, if he asks me,’ she said. ‘Or couldn’t you manage
to steal it?’
Charles made no definite promise on this point, and they walked on for a
little in silence.
‘I’m not even quite certain if I do dislike him,’ she said.
‘Have you been thinking about that all this time?’ he asked.
‘I suppose I must have been. Let’s think about something else.’