The White People And Other Weird Stories Page 23

  And the question of the spare room brought back these regrets in an exaggerated degree. He persuaded himself that the extra five pounds would have given a sufficient margin for the outlay that he desired to make; though this was, no doubt, a mistake on his part. But he saw quite clearly that, under the present conditions, there must be no levies made on the very small sum of money that they had saved. The rent of the house was thirty-five, and rates and taxes added another ten pounds—nearly a quarter of their income for house-room. Mary kept down the housekeeping bills to the very best of her ability, but meat was always dear, and she suspected the maid of cutting surreptitious slices from the joint and eating them in her bedroom with bread and treacle in the dead of night, for the girl had disordered and eccentric appetites. Mr. Darnell thought no more of restaurants, cheap or dear; he took his lunch with him to the City, and joined his wife in the evening at high tea—chops, a bit of steak, or cold meat from the Sunday’s dinner. Mrs. Darnell ate bread and jam and drank a little milk in the middle of the day; but, with the utmost economy, the effort to live within their means and to save for future contingencies was a very hard one. They had determined to do without change of air for at least three years, as the honeymoon at Walton-on-the-Naze5 had cost a good deal; and it was on this ground that they had, somewhat illogically, reserved the ten pounds, declaring that as they were not to have any holiday they would spend the money on something useful.

  And it was this consideration of utility that was finally fatal to Darnell’s scheme. They had calculated and recalculated the expense of the bed and bedding, the linoleum, and the ornaments, and by a great deal of exertion the total expenditure had been made to assume the shape of “something very little over ten pounds,” when Mary said quite suddenly—

  “But, after all, Edward, we don’t really want to furnish the room at all. I mean it isn’t necessary. And if we did so it might lead to no end of expense. People would hear of it and be sure to fish for invitations. You know we have relatives in the country, and they would be almost certain, the Mallings, at any rate, to give hints.”

  Darnell saw the force of the argument and gave way. But he was bitterly disappointed.

  “It would have been very nice, wouldn’t it?” he said with a sigh.

  “Never mind, dear,” said Mary, who saw that he was a good deal cast down. “We must think of some other plan that will be nice and useful too.”

  She often spoke to him in that tone of a kind mother, though she was by three years the younger.

  “And now,” she said, “I must get ready for church. Are you coming?”

  Darnell said that he thought not. He usually accompanied his wife to morning service, but that day he felt some bitterness in his heart, and preferred to lounge under the shade of the big mulberry tree that stood in the middle of their patch of garden—relic of the spacious lawns that had once lain smooth and green and sweet, where the dismal streets now swarmed in a hopeless labyrinth.

  So Mary went quietly and alone to church. St. Paul’s stood in a neighbouring street, and its Gothic design would have interested a curious inquirer into the history of a strange revival. Obviously, mechanically, there was nothing amiss. The style chosen was “geometrical decorated,” and the tracery of the windows seemed correct. The nave, the aisles, the spacious chancel, were reasonably proportioned; and, to be quite serious, the only feature obviously wrong was the substitution of a low “chancel wall” with iron gates for the rood screen with the loft and rood. But this, it might plausibly be contended, was merely an adaptation of the old idea to modern requirements, and it would have been quite difficult to explain why the whole building, from the mere mortar setting between the stones to the Gothic gas standards, was a mysterious and elaborate blasphemy. The canticles were sung to Joll in B flat, the chants were “Anglican,” and the sermon was the gospel for the day, amplified and rendered into the more modern and graceful English of the preacher. And Mary came away.

  After their dinner (an excellent piece of Australian mutton, bought in the “World Wide” Stores, in Hammersmith), they sat for some time in the garden, partly sheltered by the big mulberry tree from the observation of their neighbours. Edward smoked his honeydew, and Mary looked at him with placid affection.

  “You never tell me about the men in your office,” she said at length. “Some of them are nice fellows, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes, they’re very decent. I must bring some of them round, one of these days.”

  He remembered with a pang that it would be necessary to provide whisky. One couldn’t ask the guest to drink table beer at tenpence the gallon.

  “Who are they, though?” said Mary. “I think they might have given you a wedding present.”

  “Well, I don’t know. We never have gone in for that sort of thing. But they’re very decent chaps. Well, there’s Harvey; ‘Sauce’ they call him behind his back. He’s mad on bicycling. He went in last year for the Two Miles Amateur Record. He’d have made it, too, if he could have got into better training.

  “Then there’s James, a sporting man. You wouldn’t care for him. I always think he smells of the stable.”

  “How horrid!” said Mrs. Darnell, finding her husband a little frank, lowering her eyes as she spoke.

  “Dickenson might amuse you,” Darnell went on. “He’s always got a joke. A terrible liar, though. When he tells a tale we never know how much to believe. He swore the other day he’d seen one of the governors buying cockles off a barrow near London Bridge, and Jones, who’s just come, believed every word of it.”

  Darnell laughed at the humorous recollection of the jest.

  “And that wasn’t a bad yarn about Salter’s wife,” he went on. “Salter is the manager, you know. Dickenson lives close by, in Notting Hill, and he said one morning that he had seen Mrs. Salter, in the Portobello Road, in red stockings, dancing to a piano organ.”

  “He’s a little coarse, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Darnell. “I don’t see much fun in that.”

  “Well, you know, amongst men it’s different. You might like Wallis; he’s a tremendous photographer. He often shows us photos he’s taken of his children—one, a little girl of three, in her bath. I asked him how he thought she’d like it when she was twenty-three.”

  Mrs. Darnell looked down and made no answer.

  There was silence for some minutes while Darnell smoked his pipe. “I say, Mary,” he said at length, “what do you say to our taking a paying guest?”

  “A paying guest! I never thought of it. Where should we put him?”

  “Why, I was thinking of the spare room. The plan would obviate your objection, wouldn’t it? Lots of men in the City take them, and make money of it too. I dare say it would add ten pounds a year to our income. Redgrave, the cashier, finds it worth his while to take a large house on purpose. They have a regular lawn for tennis and a billiard-room.”

  Mary considered gravely, always with the dream in her eyes. “I don’t think we could manage it, Edward,” she said; “it would be inconvenient in many ways.” She hesitated for a moment. “And I don’t think I should care to have a young man in the house. It is so very small, and our accommodation, as you know, is so limited.”

  She blushed slightly, and Edward, a little disappointed as he was, looked at her with a singular longing, as if he were a scholar confronted with a doubtful hieroglyph, either wholly wonderful or altogether commonplace. Next door children were playing in the garden, playing shrilly, laughing, crying, quarrelling, racing to and fro. Suddenly a clear, pleasant voice sounded from an upper window.

  “Enid! Charles! Come up to my room at once!”

  There was an instant sudden hush. The children’s voices died away.

  “Mrs. Parker is supposed to keep her children in great order,” said Mary. “Alice was telling me about it the other day. She had been talking to Mrs. Parker’s servant, I listened to her without any remark, as I don’t think it right to encourage servants’ gossip; they always exaggerate everything.
And I dare say children often require to be corrected.”

  The children were struck silent as if some ghastly terror had seized them.

  Darnell fancied that he heard a queer sort of cry from the house, but could not be quite sure. He turned to the other side, where an elderly, ordinary man with a grey moustache was strolling up and down on the further side of his garden. He caught Darnell’s eye, and Mrs. Darnell looking towards him at the same moment, he very politely raised his tweed cap. Darnell was surprised to see his wife blushing fiercely.

  “Sayce and I often go into the City by the same ’bus,” he said, “and as it happens we’ve sat next to each other two or three times lately. I believe he’s a traveller for a leather firm in Bermondsey. He struck me as a pleasant man. Haven’t they got rather a goodlooking servant?”

  “Alice has spoken to me about her—and the Sayces,” said Mrs. Darnell. “I understand that they are not very well thought of in the neighbourhood. But I must go in and see whether the tea is ready. Alice will be wanting to go out directly.”

  Darnell looked after his wife as she walked quickly away. He only dimly understood, but he could see the charm of her figure, the delight of the brown curls clustering about her neck, and he again felt that sense of the scholar confronted by the hieroglyphic. He could not have expressed his emotion, but he wondered whether he would ever find the key, and something told him that before she could speak to him his own lips must be unclosed. She had gone into the house by the back kitchen door, leaving it open, and he heard her speaking to the girl about the water being “really boiling.” He was amazed, almost indignant with himself; but the sound of the words came to his ears as strange, heartpiercing music, tones from another, wonderful sphere. And yet he was her husband, and they had been married nearly a year; and yet, whenever she spoke, he had to listen to the sense of what she said, constraining himself, lest he should believe she was a magic creature, knowing the secrets of immeasurable delight.

  He looked out through the leaves of the mulberry tree. Mr. Sayce had disappeared from his view, but he saw the light-blue fume of the cigar that he was smoking floating slowly across the shadowed air. He was wondering at his wife’s manner when Sayce’s name was mentioned, puzzling his head as to what could be amiss in the household of a most respectable personage, when his wife appeared at the dining-room window and called him in to tea. She smiled as he looked up, and he rose hastily and walked in, wondering whether he were not a little “queer,” so strange were the dim emotions and the dimmer impulses that rose within him.

  Alice was all shining purple and strong scent, as she brought in the teapot and the jug of hot water. It seemed that a visit to the kitchen had inspired Mrs. Darnell in her turn with a novel plan for disposing of the famous ten pounds. The range had always been a trouble to her, and when sometimes she went into the kitchen, and found, as she said, the fire “roaring halfway up the chimney,” it was in vain that she reproved the maid on the ground of extravagance and waste of coal. Alice was ready to admit the absurdity of making up such an enormous fire merely to bake (they called it “roast”) a bit of beef or mutton, and to boil the potatoes and the cabbage; but she was able to show Mrs. Darnell that the fault lay in the defective contrivance of the range, in an oven which “would not get hot.” Even with a chop or a steak it was almost as bad; the heat seemed to escape up the chimney or into the room, and Mary had spoken several times to her husband on the shocking waste of coal, and the cheapest coal procurable was never less than eighteen shillings the ton. Mr. Darnell had written to the landlord, a builder, who had replied in an illiterate but offensive communication, maintaining the excellence of the stove and charging all the faults to the account of “your good lady,” which really implied that the Darnells kept no servant, and that Mrs. Darnell did everything. The range, then, remained, a standing annoyance and expense. Every morning, Alice said, she had the greatest difficulty in getting the fire to light at all, and once lighted it “seemed as if it fled right up the chimney.” Only a few nights before Mrs. Darnell had spoken seriously to her husband about it; she had got Alice to weigh the coals expended in cooking a cottage pie, the dish of the evening, and deducting what remained in the scuttle after the pie was done, it appeared that the wretched thing had consumed nearly twice the proper quantity of fuel.

  “You remember what I said the other night about the range?” said Mrs. Darnell, as she poured out the tea and watered the leaves. She thought the introduction a good one, for though her husband was a most amiable man, she guessed that he had been just a little hurt by her decision against his furnishing scheme.

  “The range?” said Darnell. He paused as he helped himself to the marmalade and considered for a moment. “No, I don’t recollect. What night was it?”

  “Tuesday. Don’t you remember? You had ‘overtime,’ and didn’t get home till quite late.”

  She paused for a moment, blushing slightly; and then began to recapitulate the misdeeds of the range, and the outrageous outlay of coal in the preparation of the cottage pie.

  “Oh, I recollect now. That was the night I thought I heard the nightingale (people say there are nightingales in Bedford Park), and the sky was such a wonderful deep blue.”

  He remembered how he had walked from Uxbridge Road Station, where the green ’bus stopped, and in spite of the fuming kilns under Acton, a delicate odour of the woods and summer fields was mysteriously in the air, and he had fancied that he smelt the red wild roses, drooping from the hedge. As he came to his gate he saw his wife standing in the doorway, with a light in her hand, and he threw his arms violently about her as she welcomed him, and whispered something in her ear, kissing her scented hair. He had felt quite abashed a moment afterwards, and he was afraid that he had frightened her by his nonsense; she seemed trembling and confused. And then she had told him how they had weighed the coal.

  “Yes, I remember now,” he said. “It is a great nuisance, isn’t it? I hate to throw away money like that.”