I
‘I’m over forty, Frances, and rather set in my ways,’ I said
good-naturedly, ready to yield if she insisted that our going together
on the visit involved her happiness. ‘My work is rather heavy just now
too, as you know. The question is, _could_ I work there--with a lot of
unassorted people in the house?’
‘Mabel doesn’t mention any other people, Bill,’ was my sister’s
rejoinder. ‘I gather she’s alone--as well as lonely.’
By the way she looked sideways out of the window at nothing, it was
obvious she was disappointed, but to my surprise she did not urge
the point; and as I glanced at Mrs. Franklyn’s invitation lying
upon her sloping lap, the neat, childish handwriting conjured up a
mental picture of the banker’s widow, with her timid, insignificant
personality, her pale grey eyes and her expression as of a backward
child. I thought, too, of the roomy country mansion her late husband
had altered to suit his particular needs, and of my visit to it a few
years ago when its barren spaciousness suggested a wing of Kensington
Museum fitted up temporarily as a place to eat and sleep in. Comparing
it mentally with the poky Chelsea flat where I and my sister kept
impecunious house, I realised other points as well. Unworthy details
flashed across me to entice: the fine library, the organ, the quiet
work-room I should have, perfect service, the delicious cup of early
tea, and hot baths at any moment of the day--without a geyser!
‘It’s a longish visit, a month--isn’t it?’ I hedged, smiling at the
details that seduced me, and ashamed of my man’s selfishness, yet
knowing that Frances expected it of me. ‘There _are_ points about it, I
admit. If you’re set on my going with you, I could manage it all right.’
I spoke at length in this way because my sister made no answer. I saw
her tired eyes gazing into the dreariness of Oakley Street and felt
a pang strike through me. After a pause, in which again she said no
word, I added: ‘So, when you write the letter, you might hint, perhaps,
that I usually work all the morning, and--er--am not a very lively
visitor! Then she’ll understand, you see.’ And I half-rose to return to
my diminutive study, where I was slaving, just then, at an absorbing
article on Comparative Æsthetic Values in the Blind and Deaf.
But Frances did not move. She kept her grey eyes upon Oakley Street
where the evening mist from the river drew mournful perspectives into
view. It was late October. We heard the omnibuses thundering across the
bridge. The monotony of that broad, characterless street seemed more
than usually depressing. Even in June sunshine it was dead, but with
autumn its melancholy soaked into every house between King’s Road and
the Embankment. It washed thought into the past, instead of inviting
it hopefully towards the future. For me, its easy width was an avenue
through which nameless slums across the river sent creeping messages
of depression, and I always regarded it as Winter’s main entrance into
London--fog, slush, gloom trooped down it every November, waving their
forbidding banners till March came to rout them. Its one claim upon my
love was that the south wind swept sometimes unobstructed up it, soft
with suggestions of the sea. These lugubrious thoughts I naturally
kept to myself, though I never ceased to regret the little flat whose
cheapness had seduced us. Now, as I watched my sister’s impassive face,
I realised that perhaps she, too, felt as I felt, yet, brave woman,
without betraying it.
‘And, look here, Fanny,’ I said, putting a hand upon her shoulder as I
crossed the room, ‘it would be the very thing for you. You’re worn out
with catering and housekeeping. Mabel is your oldest friend, besides,
and you’ve hardly seen her since _he_ died----’
‘She’s been abroad for a year, Bill, and only just came back,’ my
sister interposed. ‘She came back rather unexpectedly, though I never
thought she would go _there_ to live----’ She stopped abruptly.
Clearly, she was only speaking half her mind. ‘Probably,’ she went on,
‘Mabel wants to pick up old links again.’
‘Naturally,’ I put in, ‘yourself chief among them.’ The veiled
reference to the house I let pass. It involved discussing the dead man
for one thing.
‘I feel _I_ ought to go anyhow,’ she resumed, ‘and of course it
would be jollier if you came too. You’d get in such a muddle here by
yourself, and eat wrong things, and forget to air the rooms, and--oh,
everything!’ She looked up laughing. ‘Only,’ she added, ‘there’s the
British Museum----?’
‘But there’s a big library there,’ I answered, ‘and all the books of
reference I could possibly want. It was of you I was thinking. You
could take up your painting again; you always sell half of what you
paint. It would be a splendid rest too, and Sussex is a jolly country
to walk in. By all means, Fanny, I advise----’
Our eyes met, as I stammered in my attempts to avoid expressing the
thought that hid in both our minds. My sister had a weakness for
dabbling in the various ‘new’ theories of the day, and Mabel, who
before her marriage had belonged to foolish societies for investigating
the future life to the neglect of the present one, had fostered this
undesirable tendency. Her amiable, impressionable temperament was
open to every psychic wind that blew. I deplored, detested the whole
business. But even more than this I abhorred the later influence that
Mr. Franklyn had steeped his wife in, capturing her body and soul in
his sombre doctrines. I had dreaded lest my sister also might be caught.
‘Now that she is alone again----’
I stopped short. Our eyes now made pretence impossible, for the truth
had slipped out inevitably, stupidly, although unexpressed in definite
language. We laughed, turning our faces a moment to look at other
things in the room. Frances picked up a book and examined its cover
as though she had made an important discovery, while I took my case
out and lit a cigarette I did not want to smoke. We left the matter
there. I went out of the room before further explanation could cause
tension. Disagreements grow into discord from such tiny things--wrong
adjectives, or a chance inflection of the voice. Frances had a right to
her views of life as much as I had. At least, I reflected comfortably,
we had separated upon an agreement this time, recognised mutually,
though not actually stated.
And this point of meeting was, oddly enough, our way of regarding some
one who was dead. For we had both disliked the husband with a great
dislike, and during his three years’ married life had only been to the
house once--for a week-end visit; arriving late on Saturday, we had
left after an early breakfast on Monday morning. Ascribing my sister’s
dislike to a natural jealousy at losing her old friend, I said merely
that he displeased me. Yet we both knew that the real emotion lay
much deeper. Frances, loyal, honourable creature, had kept silence;
and beyond saying that house and grounds--he altered one and laid out
the other--distressed her as an expression of his personality somehow
(“distressed” was the word she used), no further explanation had passed
her lips.
Our dislike of his personality was easily accounted for--up to a point,
since both of us shared the artist’s point of view that a creed, cut
to measure and carefully dried, was an ugly thing, and that a dogma to
which believers must subscribe or perish everlastingly was a barbarism
resting upon cruelty. But while my own dislike was purely due to an
abstract worship of Beauty, my sister’s had another twist in it, for
with her ‘new’ tendencies, she believed that all religions were an
aspect of truth and that no one, even the lowest wretch, could escape
‘heaven’ in the long run.
Samuel Franklyn, the rich banker, was a man universally respected
and admired, and the marriage, though Mabel was fifteen years his
junior, won general applause; his bride was an heiress in her own
right--breweries--and the story of her conversion at a revivalist
meeting where Samuel Franklyn had spoken fervidly of heaven, and
terrifyingly of sin, hell and damnation, even contained a touch of
genuine romance. She was a brand snatched from the burning; his
detailed eloquence had frightened her into heaven; salvation came in
the nick of time; his words had plucked her from the edge of that
lake of fire and brimstone where their worm dieth not and the fire is
not quenched. She regarded him as a hero, sighed her relief upon his
saintly shoulder, and accepted the peace he offered her with a grateful
resignation.
For her husband was a ‘religious man’ who successfully combined great
riches with the glamour of winning souls. He was a portly figure,
though tall, with masterful, big hands, the fingers rather thick
and red; and his dignity, that just escaped being pompous, held in
it something that was implacable. A convinced assurance, almost
remorseless, gleamed in his eyes when he preached especially, and his
threats of hell fire must have scared souls stronger than the timid,
receptive Mabel whom he married. He clad himself in long frock-coats
that buttoned unevenly, big square boots, and trousers that invariably
bagged at the knee and were a little short; he wore low collars, spats
occasionally, and a tall black hat that was not of silk. His voice was
alternately hard and unctuous; and he regarded theatres, ball-rooms
and race-courses as the vestibule of that brimstone lake of whose
geography he was as positive as of his great banking offices in the
City. A philanthropist up to the hilt, however, no one ever doubted his
complete sincerity; his convictions were ingrained, his faith borne out
by his life--as witness his name upon so many admirable Societies,
as treasurer, patron, or heading the donation list. He bulked large
in the world of doing good, a broad and stately stone in the rampart
against evil. And his heart was genuinely kind and soft for others--who
believed as he did.
Yet, in spite of this true sympathy with suffering and his desire to
help, he was narrow as a telegraph wire and unbending as a church
pillar; he was intensely selfish; intolerant as an officer of the
Inquisition, his bourgeois soul constructed a revolting scheme of
heaven that was reproduced in miniature in all he did and planned.
Faith was the _sine qua non_ of salvation, and by ‘faith’ he meant
belief in his own particular view of things--‘which faith, except
every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish
everlastingly.’ All the world but his own small, exclusive sect must be
damned eternally--a pity, but alas, inevitable. _He_ was right.
Yet he prayed without ceasing, and gave heavily to the poor--the
only thing he could not give being big ideas to his provincial and
suburban deity. Pettier than an insect, and more obstinate than a mule,
he had also the superior, sleek humility of a ‘chosen one.’ He was
churchwarden too. He read the Lessons in a ‘place of worship,’ either
chilly or overheated, where neither organ, vestments, nor lighted
candles were permitted, but where the odour of hair-wash on the boys’
heads in the back rows pervaded the entire building.
This portrait of the banker, who accumulated riches both on earth and
in heaven, may possibly be overdrawn, however, because Frances and
I were ‘artistic temperaments’ that viewed the type with a dislike
and distrust amounting to contempt. The majority considered Samuel
Franklyn a worthy man and a good citizen. The majority, doubtless,
held the saner view. A few years more, and he certainly would have been
made a baronet. He relieved much suffering in the world, as assuredly
as he caused many souls the agonies of torturing fear by his emphasis
upon damnation. Had there been one point of beauty in him, we might
have been more lenient; only we found it not, and, I admit, took little
pains to search. I shall never forget the look of dour forgiveness with
which he heard our excuses for missing Morning Prayers that Sunday
morning of our single visit to The Towers. My sister learned that
a change was made soon afterwards, prayers being ‘conducted’ after
breakfast instead of before.
The Towers stood solemnly upon a Sussex hill amid park-like modern
grounds, but the house cannot better be described--it would be so
wearisome for one thing--than by saying that it was a cross between
an overgrown, pretentious Norwood villa and one of those saturnine
Institutes for cripples the train passes as it slinks ashamed through
South London into Surrey. It was ‘wealthily’ furnished and at
first sight imposing, but on closer acquaintance revealed a meagre
personality, barren and austere. One looked for Rules and Regulations
on the walls, all signed By Order. The place was a prison that shut out
‘the world.’ There was, of course, no billiard-room, no smoking-room,
no room for play of any kind, and the great hall at the back, once a
chapel which might have been used for dancing, theatricals, or other
innocent amusements, was consecrated in his day to meetings of various
kinds, chiefly brigades, temperance or missionary societies. There was
a harmonium at one end--on the level floor--a raised dais or platform
at the other, and a gallery above for the servants, gardeners and
coachmen. It was heated with hot-water pipes, and hung with Doré’s
pictures, though these latter were soon removed and stored out of sight
in the attics as being too unspiritual. In polished, shiny wood, it was
a representation in miniature of that poky exclusive Heaven he took
about with him, externalising it in all he did and planned, even in the
grounds about the house.
Changes in The Towers, Frances told me, had been made during Mabel’s
year of widowhood abroad--an organ put into the big hall, the library
made liveable and recatalogued--when it was permissible to suppose she
had found her soul again and returned to her normal, healthy views of
life, which included enjoyment and play, literature, music and the
arts, without, however, a touch of that trivial thoughtlessness usually
termed worldliness. Mrs. Franklyn, as I remembered her, was a quiet
little woman, shallow, perhaps, and easily influenced, but sincere as
a dog and thorough in her faithful friendships. Her tastes at heart
were catholic, and that heart was simple and unimaginative. That she
took up with the various movements of the day was sign merely that she
was searching in her limited way for a belief that should bring her
peace. She was, in fact, a very ordinary woman, her calibre a little
less than that of Frances. I knew they used to discuss all kinds of
theories together, but as these discussions never resulted in action,
I had come to regard her as harmless. Still, I was not sorry when she
married, and I did not welcome now a renewal of the former intimacy.
The philanthropist had given her no children, or she would have made a
good and sensible mother. No doubt she would marry again.
‘Mabel mentions that she’s been alone at The Towers since the end of
August,’ Frances told me at tea-time; ‘and I’m sure she feels out of it
and lonely. It would be a kindness to go. Besides, I always liked her.’
I agreed. I had recovered from my attack of selfishness. I expressed my
pleasure.
‘You’ve written to accept,’ I said, half statement and half question.
Frances nodded. ‘I thanked for you,’ she added quietly, ‘explaining
that you were not free at the moment, but that later, if not
inconvenient, you might come down for a bit and join me.’
I stared. Frances sometimes had this independent way of deciding
things. I was convicted, and punished into the bargain.
Of course there followed argument and explanation, as between brother
and sister who were affectionate, but the recording of our talk
could be of little interest. It was arranged thus, Frances and I
both satisfied. Two days later she departed for The Towers, leaving
me alone in the flat with everything planned for my comfort and good
behaviour--she was rather a tyrant in her quiet way--and her last words
as I saw her off from Charing Cross rang in my head for a long time
after she was gone:
‘I’ll write and let you know, Bill. Eat properly, mind, and let me know
if anything goes wrong.’
She waved her small gloved hand, nodded her head till the feather
brushed the window, and was gone.