After the note announcing her safe arrival a week of silence passed,
and then a letter came; there were various suggestions for my welfare,
and the rest was the usual rambling information and description Frances
loved, generously italicised.
‘... and we are quite alone,’ she went on in her enormous handwriting
that seemed such a waste of space and labour, ‘though some others
are coming presently, I believe. You could work here to your heart’s
content. Mabel _quite_ understands, and says she would love to have
you when you feel free to come. She has changed a bit--back to her old
natural self: she never mentions _him_. The place has changed too in
certain ways: it has more cheerfulness, I think. _She_ has put it in,
this cheerfulness, spaded it in, if you know what I mean; but it lies
about uneasily and is not natural--quite. The organ is a beauty. She
must be very rich now, but she’s as gentle and sweet as ever. Do you
know, Bill, I think he must have _frightened_ her into marrying him.
I get the impression she was afraid of him.’ This last sentence was
inked out, but I read it through the scratching; the letters being too
big to hide. ‘He had an inflexible will beneath all that oily kindness
which passed for spiritual. He was a real personality, I mean. I’m
sure he’d have sent you and me cheerfully to the stake in another
century--_for our own good_. Isn’t it odd she never speaks of him, even
to me?’ This, again, was stroked through, though without the intention
to obliterate--merely because it was repetition, probably. ‘The only
reminder of him in the house now is a big copy of the presentation
portrait that stands on the stairs of the Multitechnic Institute at
Peckham--you know--that life-size one with his fat hand sprinkled
with rings resting on a thick Bible and the other slipped between
the buttons of a tight frock-coat. It hangs in the dining-room and
rather dominates our meals. I wish Mabel would take it down. I think
she’d like to, if she _dared_. There’s not a single photograph of him
anywhere, even in her own room. Mrs. Marsh is here--you remember her,
_his_ housekeeper, the wife of the man who got penal servitude for
killing a baby or something,--_you_ said she robbed him and justified
her stealing because the story of the unjust steward was in the Bible!
How we laughed over that! _She’s_ just the same too, gliding about all
over the house and turning up when least expected.’
Other reminiscences filled the next two sides of the letter, and
ran, without a trace of punctuation, into instructions about a
Salamander stove for heating my work-room in the flat; these were
followed by things I was to tell the cook, and by requests for several
articles she had forgotten and would like sent after her, two of
them blouses, with descriptions so lengthy and contradictory that
I sighed as I read them--‘unless you come down soon, in which case
perhaps you wouldn’t mind bringing them; _not_ the mauve one I wear
in the evening sometimes, but the pale blue one with lace round the
collar and the crinkly front. They’re in the cupboard--or the drawer,
I’m not sure which--of my bedroom. _Ask Annie_ if you’re in doubt.
Thanks most _awfully_. Send a telegram, remember, and we’ll meet
you in the motor _any time_. I don’t quite know if I shall stay the
whole month--_alone_. It all depends....’ And she closed the letter,
the italicised words increasing recklessly towards the end, with a
repetition that Mabel would love to have me ‘for myself,’ as also to
have a ‘man in the house,’ and that I only had to telegraph the day
and the train.... This letter, coming by the second post, interrupted
me in a moment of absorbing work, and, having read it through to make
sure there was nothing requiring instant attention, I threw it aside
and went on with my notes and reading. Within five minutes, however, it
was back at me again. That restless thing called ‘between the lines’
fluttered about my mind. My interest in the Balkan States--political
article that had been ‘ordered’--faded. Somewhere, somehow I felt
disquieted, disturbed. At first I persisted in my work, forcing myself
to concentrate, but soon found that a layer of new impressions floated
between the article and my attention. It was like a shadow, though a
shadow that dissolved upon inspection. Once or twice I glanced up,
expecting to find some one in the room, that the door had opened
unobserved and Annie was waiting for instructions. I heard the ’buses
thundering across the bridge. I was aware of Oakley Street. Montenegro
and the blue Adriatic melted into the October haze along that
depressing Embankment that aped a river bank, and sentences from the
letter flashed before my eyes and stung me. Picking it up and reading
it through more carefully, I rang the bell and told Annie to find the
blouses and pack them for the post, showing her finally the written
description, and resenting the superior smile with which she at once
interrupted, ‘_I_ know them, sir,’ and disappeared.
But it was not the blouses: it was that exasperating thing ‘between the
lines’ that put an end to my work with its elusive teasing nuisance.
The first sharp impression is alone of value in such a case, for
once analysis begins the imagination constructs all kinds of false
interpretation. The more I thought, the more I grew fuddled. The
letter, it seemed to me, wanted to say another thing; instead the
eight sheets _conveyed_ it merely. It came to the edge of disclosure,
then halted. There was something on the writer’s mind, and I felt
uneasy. Studying the sentences brought, however, no revelation, but
increased confusion only; for while the uneasiness remained, the first
clear hint had vanished. In the end I closed my books and went out to
look up another matter at the British Museum Library. Perhaps I should
discover it that way--by turning the mind in a totally new direction. I
lunched at the Express Dairy in Oxford Street close by, and telephoned
to Annie that I would be home to tea at five.
And at tea, tired physically and mentally after breathing the exhausted
air of the Rotunda for five hours, my mind suddenly delivered up its
original impression, vivid and clear-cut; no proof accompanied the
revelation; it was mere presentiment, but convincing. Frances was
disturbed in her mind, her orderly, sensible, housekeeping mind; she
was uneasy, even perhaps afraid; something in the house distressed
her, and she had need of me. Unless I went down, her time of rest and
change, her quite necessary holiday, in fact, would be spoilt. She was
too unselfish to say this, but it ran everywhere between the lines. I
saw it clearly now. Mrs. Franklyn, moreover--and that meant Frances
too--would like a ‘man in the house.’ It was a disagreeable phrase, a
suggestive way of hinting something she dared not state definitely. The
two women in that great, lonely barrack of a house were afraid.
My sense of duty, affection, unselfishness, whatever the composite
emotion may be termed, was stirred; also my vanity. I acted quickly,
lest reflection should warp clear, decent judgment. ‘Annie,’ I said,
when she answered the bell, ‘you need not send those blouses by the
post. I’ll take them down to-morrow when I go. I shall be away a week
or two, possibly longer.’ And, having looked up a train, I hastened out
to telegraph before I could change my fickle mind.
But no desire came that night to change my mind. I was doing the right,
the necessary thing. I was even in something of a hurry to get down to
The Towers as soon as possible. I chose an early afternoon train.