The White People And Other Weird Stories Page 24

  “Well, what do you think? Suppose we bought a really good range with aunt’s money? It would save us a lot, and I expect the things would taste much nicer.”

  Darnell passed the marmalade, and confessed that the idea was brilliant.

  “It’s much better than mine, Mary,” he said quite frankly. “I am so glad you thought of it. But we must talk it over; it doesn’t do to buy in a hurry. There are so many makes.”

  Each had seen ranges which looked miraculous inventions; he in the neighbourhood of the City; she in Oxford Street and Regent Street, on visits to the dentist. They discussed the matter at tea, and afterwards they discussed it walking round and round the garden, in the sweet cool of the evening.

  “They say the ‘Newcastle’ will burn anything, coke even,” said Mary.

  “But the ‘Glow’ got the gold medal at the Paris Exhibition,”6 said Edward.

  “But what about the ‘Eutopia’ Kitchener? Have you seen it at work in Oxford Street?” said Mary. “They say their plan of ventilating the oven is quite unique.”

  “I was in Fleet Street the other day,” answered Edward, “and I was looking at the ‘Bliss’ Patent Stoves. They burn less fuel than any in the market—so the makers declare.”

  He put his arm gently round her waist. She did not repel him; she whispered quite softly—

  “I think Mrs. Parker is at her window,” and he drew his arm back slowly.

  “But we will talk it over,” he said. “There is no hurry, I might call at some of the places near the City, and you might do the same thing in Oxford Street and Regent Street and Piccadilly, and we could compare notes.”

  Mary was quite pleased with her husband’s good temper. It was so nice of him not to find fault with her plan; “He’s so good to me,” she thought, and that was what she often said to her brother, who did not care much for Darnell. They sat down on the seat under the mulberry, close together, and she let Darnell take her hand, and as she felt his shy, hesitating fingers touch her in the shadow, she pressed them ever so softly, and as he fondled her hand, his breath was on her neck, and she heard his passionate, hesitating voice whisper, “My dear, my dear,” as his lips touched her cheek. She trembled a little, and waited. Darnell kissed her gently on the cheek and drew away his hand, and when he spoke he was almost breathless.

  “We had better go in now,” he said. “There is a heavy dew, and you might catch cold.”

  A warm, scented gale came to them from beyond the walls. He longed to ask her to stay out with him all night beneath the tree, that they might whisper to one another, that the scent of her hair might inebriate him, that he might feel her dress still brushing against his ankles. But he could not find the words, and it was absurd, and she was so gentle that she would do whatever he asked, however foolish it might be, just because he asked her. He was not worthy to kiss her lips; he bent down and kissed her silk bodice, and again he felt that she trembled, and he was ashamed, fearing that he had frightened her.

  They went slowly into the house, side by side, and Darnell lit the gas in the drawing-room, where they always sat on Sunday evenings. Mrs. Darnell felt a little tired and lay down on the sofa, and Darnell took the arm-chair opposite. For a while they were silent, and then Darnell said suddenly—

  “What’s wrong with the Sayces? You seemed to think there was something a little strange about them. Their maid looks quite quiet.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that one ought to pay any attention to servants’ gossip. They’re not always very truthful.”

  “It was Alice told you, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. She was speaking to me the other day, when I was in the kitchen in the afternoon.”

  “But what was it?”

  “Oh, I’d rather not tell you, Edward. It’s not pleasant. I scolded Alice for repeating it to me.”

  Darnell got up and took a small, frail chair near the sofa.

  “Tell me,” he said again, with an odd perversity. He did not really care to hear about the household next door, but he remembered how his wife’s cheeks flushed in the afternoon, and now he was looking at her eyes.

  “Oh, I really couldn’t tell you, dear. I should feel ashamed.”

  “But you’re my wife.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t make any difference. A woman doesn’t like to talk about such things.”

  Darnell bent his head down. His heart was beating; he put his ear to her mouth and said, “Whisper.”

  Mary drew his head down still lower with her gentle hand, and her cheeks burned as she whispered—

  “Alice says that—upstairs—they have only—one room furnished. The maid told her—herself.”

  With an unconscious gesture she pressed his head to her breast, and he in turn was bending her red lips to his own, when a violent jangle clamoured through the silent house. They sat up, and Mrs. Darnell went hurriedly to the door.

  “That’s Alice,” she said. “She is always in in time. It has only just struck ten.”

  Darnell shivered with annoyance. His lips, he knew, had almost been opened. Mary’s pretty handkerchief, delicately scented from a little flagon that a school friend had given her, lay on the floor, and he picked it up, and kissed it, and hid it away.

  The question of the range occupied them all through June and far into July. Mrs. Darnell took every opportunity of going to the West End and investigating the capacity of the latest makes, gravely viewing the new improvements and hearing what the shopmen had to say; while Darnell, as he said, “kept his eyes open” about the City. They accumulated quite a literature of the subject, bringing away illustrated pamphlets, and in the evenings it was an amusement to look at the pictures. They viewed with reverence and interest the drawings of great ranges for hotels and public institutions, mighty contrivances furnished with a series of ovens each for a different use, with wonderful apparatus for grilling, with batteries of accessories which seemed to invest the cook almost with the dignity of a chief engineer. But when, in one of the lists, they encountered the images of little toy “cottage” ranges, for four pounds, and even for three pounds ten, they grew scornful, on the strength of the eight or ten pound article which they meant to purchase—when the merits of the divers patents had been thoroughly thrashed out.

  The “Raven” was for a long time Mary’s favourite. It promised the utmost economy with the highest efficiency, and many times they were on the point of giving the order. But the “Glow” seemed equally seductive, and it was only £8. 5s. as compared with £9. 7s, 6d., and though the “Raven” was supplied to the Royal Kitchen, the “Glow” could show more fervent testimonials from continental potentates.

  It seemed a debate without end, and it endured day after day till that morning, when Darnell woke from the dream of the ancient wood, of the fountains rising into grey vapour beneath the heat of the sun. As he dressed, an idea struck him, and he brought it as a shock to the hurried breakfast, disturbed by the thought of the City ’bus which passed the corner of the street at 9.15.

  “I’ve got an improvement on your plan, Mary,” he said, with triumph. “Look at that,” and he flung a little book on the table.

  He laughed. “It beats your notion all to fits. After all, the great expense is the coal. It’s not the stove—at least that’s not the real mischief. It’s the coal is so dear. And here you are. Look at those oil stoves. They don’t burn any coal, but the cheapest fuel in the world—oil; and for two pounds ten you can get a range that will do everything you want.”

  “Give me the book,” said Mary, “and we will talk it over in the evening, when you come home. Must you be going?”

  Darnell cast an anxious glance at the clock.

  “Good-bye,” and they kissed each other seriously and dutifully, and Mary’s eyes made Darnell think of those lonely water-pools, hidden in the shadow of the ancient woods.

  So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life. To Darnell
the true life would have seemed madness, and when, now and again, the shadows and vague images reflected from its splendour fell across his path, he was afraid, and took refuge in what he would have called the sane “reality” of common and usual incidents and interests. His absurdity was, perhaps, the more evident, inasmuch as “reality” for him was a matter of kitchen ranges, of saving a few shillings; but in truth the folly would have been greater if it had been concerned with racing stables, steam yachts, and the spending of many thousand pounds.

  But so went forth Darnell, day by day, strangely mistaking death for life, madness for sanity, and purposeless and wandering phantoms for true beings. He was sincerely of opinion that he was a City clerk, living in Shepherd’s Bush—having forgotten the mysteries and the far-shining glories of the kingdom which was his by legitimate inheritance.

  II

  All day long a fierce and heavy heat had brooded over the City, and as Darnell neared home he saw the mist lying on all the damp lowlands, wreathed in coils about Bedford Park to the south, and mounting to the west, so that the tower of Acton Church loomed out of a grey lake. The grass in the squares and on the lawns which he overlooked as the ’bus lumbered wearily along was burnt to the colour of dust. Shepherd’s Bush Green was a wretched desert, trampled brown, bordered with monotonous poplars, whose leaves hung motionless in air that was still, hot smoke. The foot passengers struggled wearily along the pavements, and the reek of the summer’s end mingled with the breath of the brick-fields made Darnell gasp, as if he were inhaling the poison of some foul sick-room.

  He made but a slight inroad into the cold mutton that adorned the tea-table, and confessed that he felt rather “done up” by the weather and the day’s work.

  “I have had a trying day, too,” said Mary. “Alice has been very queer and troublesome all day, and I have had to speak to her quite seriously. You know I think her Sunday evenings out have a rather unsettling influence on the girl. But what is one to do?”

  “Has she got a young man?”

  “Of course: a grocer’s assistant from the Goldhawk Road—Wilkin’s, you know. I tried them when we settled here, but they were not very satisfactory.”

  “What do they do with themselves all the evening? They have from five to ten, haven’t they?”

  “Yes; five, or sometimes half-past, when the water won’t boil. Well, I believe they go for walks usually. Once or twice he has taken her to the City Temple,7 and the Sunday before last they walked up and down Oxford Street, and then sat in the Park. But it seems that last Sunday they went to tea with his mother at Putney. I should like to tell the old woman what I really think of her.”

  “Why? What happened? Was she nasty to the girl?”

  “No; that’s just it. Before this, she has been very unpleasant on several occasions. When the young man first took Alice to see her—that was in March—the girl came away crying; she told me so herself. Indeed, she said she never wanted to see old Mrs. Murry again; and I told Alice that, if she had not exaggerated things, I could hardly blame her for feeling like that.”

  “Why? What did she cry for?”

  “Well, it seems that the old lady—she lives in quite a small cottage in some Putney back street—was so stately that she would hardly speak. She had borrowed a little girl from some neighbour’s family, and had managed to dress her up to imitate a servant, and Alice said nothing could be sillier than to see that mite opening the door, with her black dress and her white cap and apron, and she hardly able to turn the handle, as Alice said. George (that’s the young man’s name) had told Alice that it was a little bit of a house; but he said the kitchen was comfortable, though very plain and old-fashioned. But, instead of going straight to the back, and sitting by a big fire on the old settle that they had brought up from the country, that child asked for their names (did you ever hear such nonsense?) and showed them into a little poky parlour, where old Mrs. Murry was sitting ‘like a duchess,’ by a fire-place full of coloured paper, and the room as cold as ice. And she was so grand that she would hardly speak to Alice.”

  “That must have been very unpleasant.”

  “Oh, the poor girl had a dreadful time. She began with: ‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Dill. I know so very few persons in service.’ Alice imitates her mincing way of talking, but I can’t do it. And then she went on to talk about her family, how they had farmed their own land for five hundred years—such stuff! George had told Alice all about it: they had had an old cottage with a good strip of garden and two fields somewhere in Essex, and that old woman talked almost as if they had been country gentry, and boasted about the Rector, Dr. Somebody, coming to see them so often, and of Squire Somebody Else always looking them up, as if they didn’t visit them out of kindness. Alice told me it was as much as she could do to keep from laughing in Mrs. Murry’s face, her young man having told her all about the place, and how small it was, and how the Squire had been so kind about buying it when old Murry died and George was a little boy, and his mother not able to keep things going. However, that silly old woman ‘laid it on thick,’ as you say, and the young man got more and more uncomfortable, especially when she went on to speak about marrying in one’s own class, and how unhappy she had known young men to be who had married beneath them, giving some very pointed looks at Alice as she talked. And then such an amusing thing happened: Alice had noticed George looking about him in a puzzled sort of way, as if he couldn’t make out something or other, and at last he burst out and asked his mother if she had been buying up the neighbours’ ornaments, as he remembered the two green cut-glass vases on the mantelpiece at Mrs. Ellis’s, and the wax flowers at Miss Turvey’s. He was going on, but his mother scowled at him, and upset some books, which he had to pick up; but Alice quite understood she had been borrowing things from her neighbours, just as she had borrowed the little girl, so as to look grander. And then they had tea—water bewitched, Alice calls it—and very thin bread and butter, and rubbishy foreign pastry from the Swiss shop in the High Street—all sour froth and rancid fat, Alice declares. And then Mrs. Murry began boasting again about her family, and snubbing Alice and talking at her, till the girl came away quite furious, and very unhappy, too. I don’t wonder at it, do you?”

  “It doesn’t sound very enjoyable, certainly,” said Darnell, looking dreamily at his wife. He had not been attending very carefully to the subject-matter of her story, but he loved to hear a voice that was incantation in his ears, tones that summoned before him the vision of a magic world.

  “And has the young man’s mother always been like this?” he said after a long pause, desiring that the music should continue.

  “Always, till quite lately, till last Sunday in fact. Of course Alice spoke to George Murry at once, and said, like a sensible girl, that she didn’t think it ever answered for a married couple to live with the man’s mother, ‘especially,’ she went on, ‘as I can see your mother hasn’t taken much of a fancy to me.’ He told her, in the usual style, it was only his mother’s way, that she didn’t really mean anything, and so on; but Alice kept away for a long time, and rather hinted, I think, that it might come to having to choose between her and his mother. And so affairs went on all through the spring and summer, and then, just before the August Bank Holiday, George spoke to Alice again about it, and told her how sorry the thought of any unpleasantness made him, and how he wanted his mother and her to get on with each other, and how she was only a bit old-fashioned and queer in her ways, and had spoken very nicely to him about her when there was nobody by. So the long and the short of it was that Alice said she might come with them on the Monday, when they had settled to go to Hampton Court—the girl was always talking about Hampton Court, and wanting to see it. You remember what a beautiful day it was, don’t you?”

  “Let me see,” said Darnell dreamily. “Oh yes, of course—I sat out under the mulberry tree all day, and we had our meals there: it was quite a picnic. The caterpillars were a nuisance, but I enjoyed the day very much.�
� His ears were charmed, ravished with the grave, supernal melody, as of antique song, rather of the first made world in which all speech was descant, and all words were sacraments of might, speaking not to the mind but to the soul. He lay back in his chair, and said—

  “Well, what happened to them?”

  “My dear, would you believe it; but that wretched old woman behaved worse than ever. They met as had been arranged, at Kew Bridge, and got places, with a good deal of difficulty, in one of those char-à-banc8 things, and Alice thought she was going to enjoy herself tremendously. Nothing of the kind. They had hardly said ‘Good morning,’ when old Mrs. Murry began to talk about Kew Gardens, and how beautiful it must be there, and how much more convenient it was than Hampton, and no expense at all; just the trouble of walking over the bridge. Then she went on to say, as they were waiting for the char-à-banc, that she had always heard there was nothing to see at Hampton, except a lot of nasty, grimy old pictures, and some of them not fit for any decent woman, let alone girl, to look at, and she wondered why the Queen allowed such things to be shown, putting all kinds of notions into girls’ heads that were light enough already; and as she said that she looked at Alice so nastily—horrid old thing—that, as she told me afterwards, Alice would have slapped her face if she hadn’t been an elderly woman, and George’s mother. Then she talked about Kew again, saying how wonderful the hothouses were, with palms and all sorts of wonderful things, and a lily as big as a parlour table, and the view over the river. George was very good, Alice told me. He was quite taken aback at first, as the old woman had promised faithfully to be as nice as ever she could be; but then he said, gently but firmly, ‘Well, mother, we must go to Kew some other day, as Alice has set her heart on Hampton for to-day, and I want to see it myself!’ All Mrs. Murry did was to snort, and look at the girl like vinegar, and just then the char-à-banc came up, and they had to scramble for their seats. Mrs. Murry grumbled to herself in an indistinct sort of voice all the way to Hampton Court. Alice couldn’t very well make out what she said, but now and then she seemed to hear bits of sentences, like: Pity to grow old, if sons grow bold; and Honour thy father and mother;9 and Lie on the shelf, said the housewife to the old shoe, and the wicked son to his mother; and I gave you milk and you give me the go-by. Alice thought they must be proverbs (except the Commandment, of course), as George was always saying how old-fashioned his mother is; but she says there were so many of them, and all pointed at her and George, that she thinks now Mrs. Murry must have made them up as they drove along. She says it would be just like her to do it, being old-fashioned, and ill-natured too, and fuller of talk than a butcher on Saturday night. Well, they got to Hampton at last, and Alice thought the place would please her, perhaps, and they might have some enjoyment. But she did nothing but grumble, and out loud too, so that people looked at them, and a woman said, so that they could hear, ‘Ah well, they’ll be old themselves some day,’ which made Alice very angry, for, as she said, they weren’t doing anything. When they showed her the chestnut avenue in Bushey Park, she said it was so long and straight that it made her quite dull to look at it, and she thought the deer (you know how pretty they are, really) looked thin and miserable, as if they would be all the better for a good feed of hog-wash, with plenty of meal in it. She said she knew they weren’t happy by the look in their eyes, which seemed to tell her that their keepers beat them. It was the same with everything; she said she remembered market-gardens in Hammersmith and Gunnersbury that had a better show of flowers, and when they took her to the place where the water is, under the trees, she burst out with its being rather hard to tramp her off her legs to show her a common canal, with not so much as a barge on it to liven it up a bit. She went on like that the whole day, and Alice told me she was only too thankful to get home and get rid of her. Wasn’t it wretched for the girl?”