THE CHASM
I
It is true that Rachel held Councillor Thomas Batchgrew in hatred,
that she had never pardoned him for the insult which he had put upon
her in the Imperial Cinema de Luxe; and that, indeed, she could never
pardon him for simply being Thomas Batchgrew. Nevertheless, there was
that evening in her heart a little softening towards him. The fact
was that the councillor had been flattering her. She would have denied
warmly that she was susceptible to flattery; even if authoritatively
informed that no human being whatever is unsusceptible to flattery,
she would still have protested that she at any rate was, for, like
numerous young and inexperienced women, she had persuaded herself that
she was the one exception to various otherwise universal rules.
It remained that Thomas Batchgrew had been flattering her. On arrival
he had greeted her with that tinge of deference which from an old man
never fails to thrill a girl. Rachel's pride as a young married woman
was tigerishly alert and hungry that evening. Thomas Batchgrew, little
by little, tamed and fed it very judiciously at intervals, until at
length it seemed to purr content around him like a cat. The phenomenon
was remarkable, and the more so in that Rachel was convinced that,
whereas she was as critical and inimical as ever, old Batchgrew had
slightly improved. He behaved "heartily," and everybody appreciates
such behaviour in the Five Towns. He was by nature far too insensitive
to notice that the married lovers were treating each other with
that finished courtesy which is the symptom of a tiff or of a
misunderstanding. And the married lovers, noticing that he noticed
nothing, were soon encouraged to make peace; and by means of certain
tones and gestures peace was declared in the very presence of the
unperceiving old brute, which was peculiarly delightful to the
contracting parties.
Rachel had less difficulty with the supper than she feared, whereby
also her good-humour was fostered. With half a cold leg of mutton,
some cheeses, and the magnificent fancy remains of an At Home tea,
arrayed with the d'oyleys and embroidered cloths which brides always
richly receive in the Five Towns, a most handsome and impressive
supper can be concocted. Rachel was astonished at the splendour of her
own table. Mr. Batchgrew treated this supper with unsurpassable tact.
The adjectives he applied to it were short and emphatic and spoken
with a full mouth. He ate the supper; he kept on eating it; he passed
his plate with alacrity; he refused naught. And as the meal neared its
end he emitted those natural inarticulate noises from his throat which
in Persia are a sign of high breeding. Useless for Rachel in her heart
to call him a glutton--his attitude towards her supper was impeccable.
And now the solid part of the supper was over. One extremity of the
Chesterfield had been drawn closer to the fire--an operation easily
possible in its new advantageous position--and Louis as master of the
house had mended the fire after his own method, and Rachel sat upright
(somewhat in the manner of Mrs. Maldon) in the arm-chair opposite Mr.
Batchgrew, extended half-reclining on the Chesterfield. And Mrs. Tams
entered with coffee.
"You'll have coffee, Mr. Batchgrew?" said the hostess.
"Nay, missis! I canna' sleep after it."
Secretly enchanted by the sweet word "missis," Rachel was nevertheless
piqued by this refusal.
"Oh, but you must have some of Louise's coffee," said Louis, standing
negligently in front of the fire.
Already, though under a month old as a husband, Louis, following the
eternal example of good husbands, had acquired the sure belief that
his wife could achieve a higher degree of excellence in certain
affairs than any other wife in the world. He had selected coffee as
Rachel's speciality.
"Louise's?" repeated old Batchgrew, puzzled, in his heavy voice.
Rachel flushed and smiled.
"He calls me Louise, you know," said she.
"Calls you Louise, does he?" Batchgrew muttered indifferently. But he
took a cup of coffee, stirred part of its contents into the saucer
and on to the Chesterfield, and began to sup the remainder with a
prodigious splutter of ingurgitation.
"And you must have a cigarette, too," Louis carelessly insisted. And
Mr. Batchgrew agreed, though it was notorious that he only smoked once
in a blue moon, because all tobacco was apt to be too strong for him.
"You can clear away," Rachel whispered, in the frigid tones of one
accustomed to command cohorts of servants in the luxury of historic
castles.
"Yes, ma'am," Mrs. Tams whispered back nervously, proud as a
major-domo, though with less than a major-domo's aplomb.
No pride, however, could have outclassed Rachel's. She had had a full
day, and the evening was the crown of the day, because in the evening
she was entertaining privately for the first time. She was the one
lady of the party; for these two men she represented woman, and they
were her men. They depended on her for their physical well-being, and
not in vain. She was the hostess; hers to command; hers the complex
responsibility of the house. She had begun supper with painful
timidity, but the timidity had now nearly vanished in the flush
of social success. Critical as only a young wife can be, she was
excellently well satisfied with Louis' performance in the role of
host. She grew more than ever sure that there was only one Louis. See
him manipulate a cigarette--it was the perfection of worldliness and
agreeable, sensuous grace! See him hold a match to Mr. Batchgrew's
cigarette!
Now Mr. Batchgrew smoked a cigarette clumsily. He seemed not to be
able to decide whether a cigarette was something to smoke or something
to eat. Mr. Batchgrew was more ungainly than ever, stretched in his
characteristic attitude at an angle of forty-five degrees; his long
whiskers were more absurdly than ever like two tails of a wire-haired
white dog; his voice more coarsely than ever rolled about the room
like undignified thunder. He was an old, old man, and a sinister. It
was precisely his age that caressed Rachel's pride. That any man so
old should have come to her house for supper, should be treating her
as an equal and with the directness of allusion in conversation due to
a married woman but improper to a young girl--this was very sweet to
Rachel. The subdued stir made by Mrs. Tams in clearing the table was
for Rachel a delicious background to the scene. The one flaw in it
was her short skirt, which she had not had time to change. Louis
had protested that it was entirely in order, and indeed admirably
coquettish, but Rachel would have preferred a long train of soft
drapery disposed with art round the front of her chair.
"What you want here is electricity," said Thomas Batchgrew, gazing
at the incandescent gas; he could never miss a chance, and was never
discouraged in the pursuit of his own advantage.
"You think so?" murmured Louis genially.
"I could put ye in summat as 'u'd----"
Rachel broke in a clear, calm decision--
"I don't think we shall have any electricity just yet."
The gesture of the economical wife in her was so final that old
Batchgrew raised his eyebrows with a grin at Louis, and Louis
humorously drew down the corners of his mouth in response. It was as
if they had both said, in awe--
"She has spoken!"
And Rachel, still further flattered and happy, was obliged to smile.
When Mrs. Tams had made her last tiptoe journey from the room and
closed the door with due silent respect upon those great ones, the
expression of Thomas Batchgrew's face changed somewhat; he looked
round, as though for spies, and then drew a packet of papers from his
pocket. And the expression of the other two faces changed also. For
the true purpose of the executor's visit was now to be made formally
manifest.
"Now about this statement of account--_re_ Elizabeth Maldon,
deceased," he growled deeply.
"By the way," Louis interrupted him. "Is Julian back?"
"Julian back? Not as I know of," said Mr. Batchgrew aggressively.
"Why?"
"We thought we saw him walking down Moorthorne Road to-night."
"Yes," said Rachel. "We both thought we saw him."
"Happen he is if he aeroplaned it!" said Batchgrew, and fumbled
nervously with the papers.
"It couldn't have been Julian," said Louis, confidently, to Rachel.
"No, it couldn't," said Rachel.
But neither conjured away the secret uneasiness of the other. And
as for Rachel, she knew that all through the evening she had,
inexplicably, been disturbed by an apprehension that Julian, after
his long and strange sojourn in South Africa, had returned to the
district. Why the possible advent of Julian should disconcert her, she
thought she could not divine. Mr. Batchgrew's demeanour as he answered
Louis' question mysteriously increased her apprehension. At one moment
she said to herself, "Of course it wasn't Julian." At the next, "I'm
quite sure I couldn't be mistaken." At the next, "And supposing it was
Julian--what of it?"
II
When Batchgrew and Louis, sitting side by side on the Chesterfield,
began to turn over documents and peer into columns, and carry the
finger horizontally across sheets of paper in search of figures,
Rachel tactfully withdrew, not from the room, but from the
conversation, it being her proper role to pretend that she did not
and could not understand the complicated details which they were
discussing. She expected some rather dazzling revelation of men's
trained methods at this "business interview" (as Louis had announced
it), for her brother and father had never allowed her the slightest
knowledge of their daily affairs. But she was disappointed. She
thought that both the men were somewhat absurdly and self-consciously
trying to be solemn and learned. Louis beyond doubt was
self-conscious--acting as it were to impress his wife--and Batchgrew's
efforts to be hearty and youthful with the young roused her private
ridicule.
Moreover, nothing fresh emerged from the interview. She had known all
of it before from Louis. Batchgrew was merely repeating and resuming.
And Louis was listening with politeness to recitals with which he was
quite familiar. In words almost identical with those already reported
to her by Louis, Batchgrew insisted on the honesty and efficiency of
the valuer in Hanbridge, a lifelong friend of his own, who had for a
specially low fee put a price on the house at Bycars and its contents
for the purpose of a division between Louis and Julian. And now, as
previously with Louis, Rachel failed to comprehend how the valuer, if
he had been favourably disposed towards Louis, as Batchgrew averred,
could at the same time have behaved honestly towards Julian. But
neither Louis nor Batchgrew seemed to realize the point. They
both apparently flattered themselves with much simplicity upon the
partiality of the lifelong friend and valuer for Louis, without
perceiving the logical deduction that if he was partial he was a
rascal. Further, Thomas Batchgrew "rubbed Rachel the wrong way" by
subtly emphasizing his own marvellous abilities as a trustee and
executor, and by assuring Louis repeatedly that all conceivable books
of account, correspondence, and documents were open for his inspection
at any time. Batchgrew, in Rachel's opinion, might as well have said,
"You naturally suspect me of being a knave, but I can prove to you
that you are wrong."
Finally, they came to the grand total of Louis' inheritance, which
Rachel had known by heart for several days past; yet Batchgrew rolled
it out as a piece of tremendous news, and immediately afterwards
hinted that the sum represented less than the true worth of Louis'
inheritance, and that he, Batchgrew, as well as his lifelong friend
the valuer, had been influenced by a partiality for Louis. For
example, he had contrived to put all the house property, except the
house at Bycars, into Julian's share; which was extremely advantageous
for Louis because the federation of the Five Towns into one borough
had rendered property values the most capricious and least calculable
of all worldly possessions.... And Louis tried to smile knowingly at
the knowing trustee and executor with his amiable partiality for one
legatee as against the other. Louis' share, beyond the Bycars house,
was in the gilt-edged stock of limited companies which sold water and
other necessaries of life to the public on their own terms.
Rachel left the pair for a moment, and returned from upstairs with
a grey jacket of Louis' from which she had to unstitch the black
_crêpe_ armlet announcing to the world Louis' grief for his dead
great-aunt; the period of mourning was long over, and it would not
have been quite nice for Louis to continue announcing his grief.
As she came back into the room she heard the word "debentures,"
and that single word changed her mood instantly from bland feminine
toleration to porcupinish defensiveness. She did not, as a fact, know
what debentures were. She could not for a fortune have defined
the difference between a debenture and a share. She only knew that
debentures were connected with "limited companies"--not waterworks
companies, which she classed with the Bank of England--but just any
limited companies, which were in her mind a bottomless pit for the
savings of the foolish. She had an idea that a debenture was, if
anything, more fatal than a share. She was, of course, quite wrong,
according to general principles; but, unfortunately, women, as all men
sooner or later learn, have a disconcerting habit of being right
in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. In a single moment, without
justification, she had in her heart declared war on all debentures.
And as soon as she gathered that Thomas Batchgrew was suggesting to
Louis the exchange of waterworks stock for seven per cent. debentures
in the United Midland Cinemas Corporation, Limited, she became more
than ever convinced that her instinct about debentures was but too
correct. She sat down primly, and detached the armlet, and removed all
the bits of black cotton from the sleeve, and never raised her head
nor offered a remark, but she was furious--furious to protect her
husband against sharks and against himself.
The conduct and demeanour of Thomas Batchgrew were now explained.
His visit, his flattery, his heartiness, his youthfulness, all had a
motive. He had safeguarded Louis' interests under the will in order
to rob him afterwards as a cinematograph speculator. The thing was
as clear as daylight. And yet Louis did not seem to see it. Louis
listened to Batchgrew's ingenious arguments with naïve interest and
was obviously impressed. When Batchgrew called him "a business man as
smart as they make 'em," and then proved that the money so invested
would be as safe as in a stocking, Louis agreed with a great air of
acumen that certainly it would. When Batchgrew pointed out that, under
the proposed new investment, Louis would be receiving in income thirty
or thirty-five shillings for every pound under the old investments,
Louis' eye glistened--positively glistened! Rachel trembled. She saw
her husband beggared, and there was nothing that frightened her more
than the prospect of Louis without a reserve of private income. She
did not argue the position--she simply knew that Louis without sure
resources behind him would be a very dangerous and uncertain Louis,
perhaps a tragic Louis. She frankly admitted this to herself. And old
Batchgrew went on talking and inveigling until Rachel was ready to
believe that the device of debentures had been originally invented by
Thomas Batchgrew himself with felonious intent.
An automobile hooted in the street.
"Well, ye'll think it over," said Thomas Batchgrew.
"Oh I _will_!" said Louis eagerly.
And Rachel asked herself, almost shaking--"Is it possible that he is
such a simpleton?"
"Only I must know by Tuesday," said Thomas Batchgrew. "I thought I'd
give ye th' chance, but I can't keep it open later than Tuesday."
"Thanks, awfully," said Louis. "I'm very much obliged for the offer.
I'll let you know--before Tuesday."
Rachel frowned as she folded up the jacket. If, however, the two men
could have seen into her mind they would have perceived symptoms of
danger more agitating than one little frown.
"Of course," said Thomas Batchgrew easily, with a short laugh, in the
lobby, "if it hadna been for _her_ making away with that nine
hundred and sixty-odd pound, you'd ha' had a round sum o' thousands to
invest. I've been thinking o'er that matter, and all I can see for it
is as her must ha' thrown th' money into th' fire in mistake for th'
envelope, or with th' envelope. That's all as I can see for it."
Louis flushed slightly as he slapped his thigh.
"Never thought of that!" he cried. "It very probably _was_ that.
Strange it never occurred to me!"
Rachel said nothing. She had extreme difficulty in keeping control of
herself while old Batchgrew, with numerous senile precautions, took
his slow departure. She forgot that she was a hostess and a woman of
the world.
III
"Hello! What's that?" Rachel asked, in a self-conscious voice, when
they were in the parlour again.
Louis had almost surreptitiously taken an envelope from his pocket,
and was extracting a paper from it.
On finding themselves alone they had not followed their usual
custom of bursting into comment, favourable or unfavourable, on the
departed--a practice due more to a desire to rouse and enjoy each
other's individualities than to a genuine interest in the third
person. Nor had they impulsively or deliberately kissed, as they
were liable to do after release from a spell of worldliness. On the
contrary, both were still constrained, as if the third person was
still with them. The fact was that there were two other persons in
the room, darkly discerned by Louis and Rachel--namely, a different,
inimical Rachel and a different, inimical Louis. All four, the seen
and the half-seen, walked stealthily, like rival beasts in the edge of
the jungle.
"Oh!" said Louis with an air of nonchalance. "It came by the last post
while old Batch was here, and I just shoved it into my pocket."
The arrivals of the post were always interesting to them, for during
the weeks after marriage letters are apt to be more numerous than
usual, and to contain delicate and enchanting surprises. Both of
them were always strictly ceremonious in the handling of each other's
letters, and yet both deprecated this ceremoniousness in the beloved.
Louis urged Rachel to open his letters without scruple, and Rachel
did the same to Louis. But both--Louis by chivalry and Rachel by
pride--were prevented from acting on the invitation. The envelope in
Louis' hand did not contain a letter, but only a circular. The fact
that the flap of the envelope was unsealed and the stamp a
mere halfpenny ought rightly to have deprived the packet of all
significance as a subject of curiosity. Nevertheless, the different,
inimical Rachel, probably out of sheer perversity, went up to Louis
and looked over his shoulder as he read the communication, which was a
printed circular, somewhat yellowed, with blanks neatly filled in, and
the whole neatly signed by a churchwarden, informing Louis that his
application for sittings at St. Luke's Church (commonly called the Old
Church) had been granted. It is to be noted that, though applications
for sittings in the Old Church were not overwhelmingly frequent, and
might indeed very easily have been coped with by means of autograph
replies, the authorities had a sufficient sense of dignity always to
circularize the applicants.
This document, harmless enough, and surely a proof of laudable
aspirations in Louis, gravely displeased the different, inimical
Rachel, and was used by her for bellicose purposes.
"So that's it, is it?" she said ominously.
"But wasn't it understood that we were to go to the Old Church?" said
the other Louis, full of ingenious innocence.
"Oh! Was it?"
"Didn't I mention it?"
"I don't remember."
"I'm sure I did."
The truth was that Louis had once casually remarked that he supposed
they would attend the Old Church. Rachel would have joyously attended
any church or any chapel with him. At Knype she had irregularly
attended the Bethesda Chapel--sometimes (in the evenings) with her
father, oftener alone, never with her brother. During her brief
employment with Mrs. Maldon she had been only once to a place of
worship, the new chapel in Moorthorne Road, which was the nearest to
Bycars and had therefore been favoured by Mrs. Maldon when her
limbs were stiff. In the abstract she approved of religious rites.
Theologically her ignorance was such that she could not have
distinguished between the tenets of church and the tenets of chapel,
and this ignorance she shared with the large majority of the serious
inhabitants of the Five Towns. Why, then, should she have "pulled a
face" (as the saying down there is) at the Old Parish Church?
One reason, which would have applied equally to church or chapel, was
that she was disconcerted and even alarmed by Louis' manifest tendency
to settle down into utter correctness. Louis had hitherto been a
devotee of joy--never as a bachelor had he done aught to increase the
labour of churchwardens--and it was somehow as a devotee of joy that
Rachel had married him. Rachel had been settled down all her life, and
naturally desired and expected that an unsettling process should now
occur in her career. It seemed to her that in mere decency Louis
might have allowed at any rate a year or two to pass before occupying
himself so stringently with her eternal welfare. She belonged to the
middle class (intermediate between the industrial and the aristocratic
employing) which is responsible for the Five Towns' reputation for
joylessness, the class which sticks its chin out and gets things done
(however queer the things done may be), the class which keeps the
district together and maintains its solidity, the class which is
ashamed of nothing but idleness, frank enjoyment, and the caprice of
the moment. (Its idiomatic phrase for expressing the experience of
gladness, "I sang 'O be joyful,'" alone demonstrates its unwillingness
to rejoice.) She had espoused the hedonistic class (always secretly
envied by the other), and Louis' behaviour as a member of that class
had already begun to disappoint her. Was it fair of him to say in his
conduct: "The fun is over. We must be strictly conventional now"? His
costly caprices for Llandudno and the pleasures of idleness were quite
beside the point.
Another reason for her objection to Louis' overtures to the Old Church
was that they increased her suspicion of his snobbishness. No person
nourished from infancy in chapel can bring himself to believe that
the chief motive of church-goers is not the snobbish motive of social
propriety. And dissenters are so convinced that, if chapel means
salvation in the next world, church means salvation in this, that to
this day, regardless of the feelings of their pastors, they will go
to church once in their lives--to get married. At any rate, Rachel was
positively sure that no anxiety about his own soul or about hers had
led Louis to join the Old Church.
"Have you been confirmed?" she asked.
"Yes, of course," Louis replied politely.
She did not like that "of course."
"Shall I have to be?"
"I don't know."
"Well," said she, "I can tell you one thing--I shan't be."
IV
Rachel went on--
"You aren't really going to throw your money away on those debenture
things of Mr. Batchgrew's, are you?"
Louis now knew the worst, and he had been suspecting it. Rachel's tone
fully displayed her sentiments, and completed the disclosure that "the
little thing" was angry and aggressive. (In his mind Louis regarded
her at moments, as "the little thing.") But his own politeness was
so profoundly rooted that practically no phenomenon of rudeness could
overthrow it.
"No," he said, "I'm not going to 'throw my money away' on them."
"That's all right, then," she said, affecting not to perceive his
drift. "I thought you were."
"But I propose to put my money into them, subject to anything you, as
a financial expert, may have to say."
Nervously she had gone to the window and was pretending to straighten
a blind.
"I don't think you need to make fun of me," she said. "You think I
don't notice when you make fun of me. But I do--always."
"Look here, young 'un," Louis suddenly began to cajole, very
winningly.
"I'm about as old as you are," said she, "and perhaps in some ways a
bit older. And I must say I really wonder at you being ready to help
Mr. Batchgrew after the way he insulted me in the cinema."
"Insulted you in the cinema!" Louis cried, genuinely startled, and
then somewhat hurt because Rachel argued like a woman instead of like
a man. In reflecting upon the excellences of Rachel he had often
said to himself that her unique charm consisted in the fact that she
combined the attractiveness of woman with the powerful commonsense of
man. In common with a whole enthusiastic army of young husbands he had
been convinced that his wife was the one female creature on earth to
whom you could talk as you would to a male. "Oh!" he murmured.
"Have you forgotten it, then?" she asked coldly. To herself she was
saying: "Why am I behaving like this? After all, he's done no harm
yet." But she had set out, and she must continue, driven by the
terrible fear of what he might do. She stared at the blind. Through a
slit of window at one side of it she could see the lamp-post and the
iron kerb of the pavement.
"But that's all over long ago," he protested amiably. "Just look how
friendly you were with him yourself over supper! Besides--"
"Besides what? I wasn't friendly. I was only polite. I had to be.
Nobody's called Mr. Batchgrew worse names than you have. But you
forget. Only I don't forget. There's lots of things I don't forget,
although I don't make a song about them. I shan't forget in a hurry
how you let go of my bike without telling me and I fell all over the
road. I know I'm lots more black and blue even than I was."
If Rachel would but have argued according to his rules of debate,
Louis was confident that he could have conducted the affair to a
proper issue. But she would not. What could he say? In a flash he
saw a vista of, say, forty years of conjugal argument with a woman
incapable of reason, and trembled. Then he looked again, and saw
the lines of Rachel's figure in her delightful short skirt and was
reassured. But still he did not know what to say. Rachel spared
him further cogitation on that particular aspect of the question
by turning round and exclaiming, passionately, with a break in her
voice--
"Can't you see that he'll swindle you out of the money?"
It seemed to her that the security of their whole future depended on
her firmness and strong sagacity at that moment. She felt herself to
be very wise and also, happily, very vigorous. But at the same time
she was afflicted by a kind of despair at the thought that Louis had
indeed been, and still was, ready to commit the disastrous folly of
confiding money to Thomas Batchgrew for investment. And as Louis had
had a flashing vision of the future, so did Rachel now have such a
vision. But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely
vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal
vigilance on her part and by nothing else--an instant's sleepiness,
and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well.
She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the
strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that
a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic,
but thus it was! She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings
against Louis which she had been compelled to listen to in the
previous year.
"Odd, of course!" said Louis. "But I can't exactly see how he'll
swindle me out of the money! A debenture is a debenture."
"Is it?"
"Do you know what a debenture is, my child?"
"I don't need to know what a debenture is, when Mr. Batchgrew's mixed
up in it."
Louis suppressed a sigh. He first thought of trying to explain to her
just what a debenture was. Then he abandoned the enterprise as too
complicated, and also as futile. Though he should prove to her that
a debenture combined the safety of the Bank of England with the
brilliance of a successful gambling transaction, she would not budge.
He was acquiring valuable and painful knowledge concerning women every
second. He grew sad, not simply with the weight of this new knowledge,
but more because, though he had envisaged certain difficulties of
married existence, he had not envisaged this difficulty. He had not
dreamed that a wife would demand a share, and demand it furiously, in
the control of his business affairs. He had sincerely imagined
that wives listened with much respect and little comprehension when
business was on the carpet, content to murmur soothingly from time to
time, "Just as you think best, dear." Life had unpleasantly astonished
him.
It was on the tip of his tongue to say to Rachel, with steadying
facetiousness--
"You mustn't forget that I know a bit about these things, having spent
years of my young life in a bank."
But a vague instinct told him that to draw attention to his career in
the bank might be unwise--at any rate, in principle.
"Can't you see," Rachel charged again, "that Mr. Batchgrew has only
been flattering you all this time so as to get hold of your money? And
wasn't it just like him to begin again harping on the electricity?>"
"Flattering me?"
"Well, he couldn't bear you before--if you'd only heard the things he
used to say!--and now he simply licks your boots."
"What things did he say?" Louis asked, disturbed.
"Oh, never mind!"
Louis became rather glum and obstinate.
"The money will be perfectly safe," he insisted, "and our income
pretty nearly doubled. I suppose I ought to know more about these
things than you."
"What's the use of income being doubled if you lose the capital?"
Rachel snapped, now taking a horrid, perverse pleasure in the perilous
altercation. "And if it's so safe why is he ready to give you so much
interest?"
The worst of women, Louis reflected, is that in the midst of a silly
argument that you can shatter in ten words they will by a fluke insert
some awkward piece of genuine ratiocination, the answer to which must
necessarily be lengthy and ineffective.
"It's no good arguing," he said pleasantly, and then repeated, "I
ought to know more about these things than you."
Rachel raised her voice in exasperation--
"I don't see it, I don't see it at all. If it hadn't been for me you'd
have thrown up your situation--and a nice state of affairs there would
have been then! And how much money would you have wasted on holidays
and so on and so on if I hadn't stopped you, I should like to know!"
Louis was still more astonished. Indeed, he was rather nettled. His
urbanity was unimpaired, but he permitted himself a slight acidity of
tone as he retorted with gentle malice--
"Well, you can't help the colour of your hair. So I'll keep my nerve."
"I didn't expect to be insulted!" cried Rachel, flushing far redder
than that rich hair of hers, and paced pompously out of the room, her
face working violently. The door was ajar. She passed Mrs. Tams on the
stairs, blindly, with lowered head.
V
In the conjugal bedroom, full of gas-glare and shadows, there were two
old women. One was Mrs. Tams, ministering; the other was Rachel Fores,
once and not long ago the beloved and courted girlish Louise of a
chevalier, now aged by all the sorrow of the world. She lay in bed--in
her bed nearest the fireplace and farthest from the door.
She had undressed herself with every accustomed ceremony, arranging
each article of attire, including the fine frock left on the bed,
carefully in its place, as is meet in a chamber where tidiness depends
on the loyal cooperation of two persons, but through her tears.
She had slipped sobbing into bed. The other bed was empty, and its
emptiness seemed sinister to her. Would it ever be occupied again?
Impossible that it should ever be occupied again! Its rightful
occupant was immeasurably far off, along miles of passages, down
leagues of stairs, separated by impregnable doors, in another
universe, the universe of the ground floor. Of course she might have
sprung up, put on her enchanting dressing-gown, tripped down a few
steps in a moment of time, and peeped in at the parlour door--just
peeped in, in that magic ribboned peignoir, and glanced--and the whole
planet would have been reborn. But she could not. If the salvation of
the human race had depended on it, she could not--partly because she
was a native of the Five Towns, where such things are not done, and no
doubt partly because she was just herself.
She was now more grieved than angry with Louis. He had been wrong; he
was a foolish, unreliable boy--but he was a boy. Whereas she was his
mother, and ought to have known better. Yes, she had become his mother
in the interval. For herself she experienced both pity and anger. What
angered her was her clumsiness. Why had she lost her temper and her
head? She saw clearly how she might have brought him round to her view
with a soft phrase, a peculiar inflection, a tiny appeal, a caress,
a mere dimpling of the cheek. She saw him revolving on her little
finger.... She knew all things now because she was so old. And then
suddenly she was bathing luxuriously in self-pity, and young and
imperious, and violently resentful of the insult which he had put upon
her--an insult which recalled the half-forgotten humiliations of her
school-days, when loutish girls had baptized her with the name of a
vegetable.... And then, again suddenly, she deeply desired that Louis
should come upstairs and bully her.
She attached a superstitious and terrible importance to the tragical
episode in the parlour because it was their first quarrel as husband
and wife. True, she had stormed at him before their engagement, but
even then he had kept intact his respect for her, whereas now, a
husband, he had shamed her. The breach, she knew, could never be
closed. She had only to glance at the empty bed to be sure that it was
eternal. It had been made slowly yet swiftly; and it was complete and
unbridgable ere she had realized its existence. When she contrasted
the idyllic afternoon with the tragedy of the night, she was astounded
by the swiftness of the change. The catastrophe lay, not in the
threatened loss of vast sums of money and consequent ruin--that had
diminished to insignificance!--but in the breach.
And then Mrs. Tams had inserted herself in the bedroom. Mrs. Tams knew
or guessed everything. And she would not pretend that she did not; and
Rachel would not pretend--did not even care to pretend, for Mrs. Tams
was so unimportant that nobody minded her. Mrs. Tams had heard and
seen. She commiserated. She stroked timidly with her gnarled hand the
short, fragile sleeve of the nightgown, whereat Rachel sobbed afresh,
with more plenteous tears, and tried to articulate a word, and could
not till the third attempt. The word was "handkerchief." She was not
weeping in comfort. Mrs. Tams was aware of the right drawer and
drew from it a little white thing--yet not so little, for Rachel was
Rachel!--and shook out its quadrangular folds, and it seemed beautiful
in the gaslight; and Rachel took it and sobbed "Thank you."
Mrs. Tams rose higher than even a general servant; she was the
soubrette, the confidential maid, the very echo of the young and
haughty mistress, leagued with the worshipped creature against the
wickedness and wile of a whole sex. Mrs. Tams had no illusions save
the sublime illusion that her mistress was an angel and a martyr. Mrs.
Tams had been married, and she had seen a daughter married. She was
an authority on first quarrels and could and did tell tales of first
quarrels--tales in which the husband, while admittedly an utterly
callous monster, had at the same time somehow some leaven of decency.
Soon she was launched in the epic recital of the birth and death of
a grandchild; Rachel, being a married women like the rest, could
properly listen to every interesting and recondite detail. Rachel
sobbed and sympathized with the classic tale. And both women, as it
was unrolled, kept well in their minds the vision of the vile man,
mysterious and implacable, alone in the parlour. Occasionally Mrs.
Tams listened for a footstep, ready discreetly to withdraw at the
slightest symptom on the stairs. Once when she did this, Rachel
murmured, weakly, "He won't--" and then lapsed into new weeping. And
after a little time Mrs. Tams departed.
VI
Mrs. Tams had decided to undertake an enterprise involving extreme
gallantry--surpassing the physical. She went downstairs and stood
outside the parlour door, which was not quite shut. Within the
parlour, or throne-room, existed a beautiful and superior being, full
of grace and authority, who belonged to a race quite different from
her own, who was beyond her comprehension, who commanded her and kept
her alive and paid money to her, who accepted her devotion casually
as a right, who treated her as a soft cushion between himself and
the drift and inconvenience of the world, and who occasionally, as a
supreme favour, caught her a smart slap on the back, which flattered
her to excess. She went into the throne-room if she was called
thither, or if she had cleansing or tidying work there; she spoke to
the superior being if he spoke to her. But she had never till then
conceived the breath-taking scheme of entering the throne-room for
a purpose of her own, and addressing the superior being without an
invitation to do so.
Nevertheless, since by long practice she was courageous, she meant to
execute the scheme. And she began by knocking at the door. Although
Rachel had seriously warned her that for a domestic servant to
knock at the parlour door was a grave sin, she simply could not help
knocking. Not to knock seemed to her wantonly sacrilegious. Thus she
knocked, and a voice told her to come in.
There was the superior being, his back to the fire and his legs
apart--formidable!
She curtsied--another sin according to the new code. Then she
discovered that she was inarticulate.
"Well?"
Words burst from her--
"Her's crying her eyes out up yon, mester."
And Mrs. Tams also snivelled.
The superior being frowned and said testily, yet not without a touch
of careless toleration--
"Oh, get away, you silly old fool of a woman!"
Mrs. Tarns got away, not entirely ill-content.
In the lobby she heard an unusual rapping on the glass of the front
door, and sharply opened it to inform the late disturber that there
existed a bell and a knocker for respectable people. A shabby youth
gave her a note for "Louis Fores, Esq.," and said that there was an
answer. So that she was forced to renew the enterprise of entering the
throne-room.
In another couple of minutes Louis was running upstairs. His wife
heard him, and shook in bed from excitement at the crisis which
approached. But she could never have divined the nature of the
phenomenon by which the unbridgable breach was about to be closed.
"Louise!"
"Yes," she whimpered. Then she ventured to spy at his face through
an interstice of the bedclothes, and saw thereon a most queer, white
expression.
"Some one's just brought this. Read it."
He gave her the note, and she deciphered it as well as she could--
DEAR Louis,--If you aren't gone to bed I want to see you
to-night about that missing money of aunt's. I've something I
must tell you and Rachel. I'm at the "Three Tuns."
JULIAN MALDON.
"But what does he mean?" demanded Rachel, roused from her heavy mood
of self-pity.
"I don't know."
"But what can he mean?" she insisted.
"Haven't a notion."
"But he must mean something!"
Louis asked--
"Well, what should _you_ say he means?"
"How very strange!" Rachel murmured, not attempting to answer the
question. "And the 'Three Tuns'! Why does he write from the 'Three
Tuns'? What's he doing at the 'Three Tuns'? Isn't it a very low
public-house? And everybody thought he was still in South Africa!... I
suppose, then, it _must_ have been him that we saw to-night."
"You may bet it was."
"Then why didn't he come straight here? That's what I want to know. He
couldn't have called before we got here, because if he had Mrs. Tams
would have told us."
Louis nodded.
"Didn't you think Mr. Batchgrew looked very _queer_ when you
mentioned Julian to-night?" Rachel continued to express her curiosity
and wonder.
"No. I didn't notice anything particular," Louis replied vaguely.
Throughout the conversation his manner was self-conscious. Rachel
observed it, while feigning the contrary, and in her turn grew uneasy
and even self-conscious also. Further, she had the feeling that Louis
was depending upon her for support, and perhaps for initiative. His
glance, though furtive, had the appealing quality which rendered him
sometimes so exquisitely wistful to her. As he stood over her by the
bed, he made a peculiar compound of the negligent, dominant masculine
and the clinging feminine.
"And why didn't he let anybody know of his return?" Rachel went on.
Louis, veering towards the masculine, clenched the immediate point--
"The question before the meeting is," he smiled demurely, "what answer
am I to send?"
"I suppose you must see him to-night."
"Nothing else for it, is there? Well, I'll scribble him a bit of a
note."
"But I shan't see him, Louis."
"No?"
In an instant Rachel thought to herself: "He doesn't want me to see
him."
Aloud she said: "I should have to dress myself all over again.
Besides, I'm not fit to be seen."
She was referring, without any apparent sort of shame, to the redness
of her eyes.
"Well, I'll see him by myself, then."
Louis turned to leave the bedroom. Whereat Rachel was very
disconcerted and disappointed. Although the startling note from Julian
had alarmed her and excited in her profound apprehensions whose very
nature she would scarcely admit to herself, the main occupation of her
mind was still her own quarrel with Louis. The quarrel was now over,
for they had conversed in quite sincere tones of friendliness, but she
had desired and expected an overt, tangible proof and symbol of peace.
That proof and symbol was a kiss.
Louis was at the door ... he was beyond the door ... she was lost.
"Louis!" she cried.
He put his face in at the door.
"Will you just pass me my hand-mirror. It's on the dressing-table."
Louis was thrilled by this simple request. The hand-mirror had arrived
in the house as a wedding-present. It was backed with tortoise-shell,
and seemingly the one thing that had reconciled Rachel the
downright to the possession of a hand-mirror was the fact that the
tortoise-shell was real tortoise-shell. She had "made out" that a
hand-mirror was too frivolous an object for the dressing-table of
a serious Five Towns woman. She had always referred to it as "the"
hand-mirror--as though disdaining special ownership. She had derided
it once by using it in front of Louis with the mimic foolish graces of
an empty-headed doll. And now she was asking for it because she wanted
it; and she had said "my" hand-mirror!
This revelation of the odalisque in his Rachel enchanted Louis, and
incidentally it also enchanted Rachel. She had employed a desperate
remedy, and the result on both of them filled her with a most
surprising gladness. Louis judged it to be deliciously right that
Rachel should be anxious to know whether her weeping had indeed made
her into an object improper for the beholding of the male eye, and
Rachel to her astonishment shared his opinion. She was "vain," and
they were both well content. In taking it she touched his hand. He
bent and kissed her. Each of them was ravaged by formidable fears for
the future, tremendously disturbed in secret by the mysterious word
from Julian; and yet that kiss stood unique among their kisses, and
in their simplicity they knew not why. And as they kissed they hated
Julian, and the past, and the whole world, for thus coming between
them and deranging their love. They would, had it been possible, have
sold all the future for tranquillity in that moment.
VII
Going downstairs, Louis found Mrs. Tarns standing in the back part of
the lobby between the parlour door and the kitchen; obviously she had
stationed herself there in order to keep watch on the messenger from
the "Three Tuns." As the master of the house approached with dignity
the foot of the stairs, the messenger stirred, and in the classic
manner of messengers fingered uneasily his hat. The fingers were
dirty. The hat was dirty and shabby. It had been somebody else's hat
before coming into the possession of the messenger. The same applied
to his jacket and trousers. The jacket was well cut, but green; the
trousers, with their ragged, muddy edges, yet betrayed a pattern of
distinction. Round his neck the messenger wore a thin muffler, and
on his feet an exhausted pair of tennis-shoes. These noiseless shoes
accentuated and confirmed the stealthy glance of his eyes. Except for
an unshaven chin, and the confidence-destroying quality that lurked
subtly in his aspect, he was not repulsive to look upon. His features
were delicate enough, his restless mouth was even pretty, and
his carriage graceful. He had little of the coarseness of
industrialism--probably because he was not industrial. His age was
about twenty, and he might have sold _Signals_ in the street, or
run illegal errands for street-bookmakers. At any rate, it was certain
that he was not above earning a chance copper from a customer of the
"Three Tuns." His clear destiny was never to inspire respect or trust,
nor to live regularly (save conceivably in prison), nor to do any
honest daily labour. And if he did not know this, he felt it. All his
movements were those of an outcast who both feared and execrated the
organism that was rejecting him.
Louis, elegant, self-possessed, and superior, passed into the parlour
exactly as if the messenger had been invisible. He was separated from
the messenger by an immeasurable social prestige. He was raised to
such an altitude above the messenger that he positively could not see
the messenger with the naked eye. And yet for one fraction of a second
he had the illusion of being so intimately akin to the messenger
that a mere nothing might have pushed him into those vile clothes
and endowed him with that furtive look and that sinister aspect of
a helot. For one infinitesimal instant he was the messenger; and
shuddered. Then the illusion as swiftly faded, and--such being Louis'
happy temperament--was forgotten. He disappeared into the parlour,
took a piece of paper and an envelope from the small writing-table
behind Rachel's chair, and wrote a short note to Julian--a note from
which facetiousness was not absent--inviting him to come at once. He
rang the bell. Mrs. Tams entered, full of felicity because the great
altercation was over and concord established.
"Give this to that chap," said Louis, casually imperative, holding out
the note but scarcely glancing at Mrs. Tams.
"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Tarns with humble eagerness, content to be a
very minor tool in the hidden designs of the exalted.
"And then you can go to bed."
"Oh! It's of no consequence, I'm sure, sir," Mrs. Tams answered.
Louis heard her say importantly and condescendingly to the messenger--
"Here ye are, young man."
She shut the front door as though much relieved to get such a source
of peril and infection out of the respectable house.
Immediately afterwards strange things happened to Louis in the
parlour. He had intended to return at once to his wife in order to
continue the vague, staggered conversation about Julian's thunderbolt.
But he discovered that he could not persuade himself to rejoin Rachel.
A self-consciousness, growing every moment more acute and troublesome,
prevented him from so doing. He was afraid that he could not discuss
the vanished money without blushing, and it happened rarely that he
lost control of his features, which indeed he could as a rule mould
to the expression of a cherub whenever desirable. So he sat down in
a chair, the first chair to hand, any chair, and began to reflect. Of
course he was safe. The greatest saint on earth could not have been
safer than he was from conviction of a crime. He might be suspected,
but nothing could possibly be proved against him. Moreover, despite
his self-consciousness, he felt innocent; he really did feel innocent,
and even ill-used. The money had forced itself upon him in an
inexcusable way; he was convinced that he had never meant to
misappropriate it; assuredly he had received not a halfpenny of
benefit from it. The fault was entirely the old lady's. Yes, he was
innocent and he was safe.
Nevertheless, he did not at all like the resuscitation of the affair.
The affair had been buried. How characteristic of the inconvenient
Julian to rush in from South Africa and dig it up! Everybody concerned
had decided that the old lady on the night of her attack had not been
responsible for her actions. She had annihilated the money--whether by
fire, as Batchgrew had lately suggested, or otherwise, did not matter.
Or, if she had not annihilated the money, she had "done something"
with it--something unknown and unknowable. Such was the acceptable
theory, in which Louis heartily concurred. The loss was his--at least
half the loss was his--and others had no right to complain. But Julian
was without discretion. Within twenty-four hours Julian might well set
the whole district talking.
Louis was dimly aware that the district already had talked, but he was
not aware to what extent it had talked. Neither he nor anybody else
was aware how the secret had escaped out of the house. Mrs. Tarns
would have died rather than breathe a word. Rachel, naturally, had
said naught; nor had Louis. Old Batchgrew had decided that his highest
interest also was to say naught, and he had informed none save Julian.
Julian might have set the secret free in South Africa, but in a highly
distorted form it had been current in certain strata of Five Towns
society long before it could have returned from South Africa. The
rough, commonsense verdict of those select few who had winded the
secret was simply that "there had been some hanky-panky," and that
beyond doubt Louis was "at the bottom of it," but that it had little
importance, as Mrs. Maldon was dead, poor thing. As for Julian, "a
rough customer, though honest as the day," he was reckoned to be
capable of protecting his own interests.
And then, amid all his apprehensions, a new hope sprouted in Louis'
mind. Perhaps Julian was acquainted with some fact that might lead to
the recovery of a part of the money. Had Louis not always held
that the pile of notes which had penetrated into his pocket did
not represent the whole of the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds?
Conceivably it represented about half of the total, in which case a
further sum of, say, two hundred and fifty pounds might be coming to
Louis. Already he was treating this two hundred and fifty pounds as
a windfall, and wondering in what most pleasant ways he could employ
it!... But with what kind of fact could Julian be acquainted?...
Had Julian been dishonest? Louis would have liked to think Julian
dishonest, but he could not. Then what ...?
He heard movements above. And the front gate creaked. As if a spring
had been loosed, he jumped from the chair and ran upstairs--away from
the arriving Julian and towards his wife. Rachel was just getting up.
"Don't trouble," he said. "I'll see him. I'll deal with him. Much
better for you to stay in bed."
He perceived that he did not want Rachel to hear what Julian had to
say until after he had heard it himself.
Rachel hesitated.
"Do you think so?... What have you been doing? I thought you were
coming up again at once."
"I had one or two little things--"
A terrific knock resounded on the front door.
"There he is!" Louis muttered, as it were aghast.