"Oh, Clara, Clara!" exclaimed Mrs. Durrant, and Timothy Durrant adding, "Clara, Clara," Jacob named the shape in yellow gauze Timothy's sister, Clara. The girl sat smiling and flushed. With her brother's dark eyes, she was vaguer and softer than he was. When the laugh died down she said: "But, mother, it was true. He said so, didn't he? Miss Eliot agreed with us..."
But Miss Eliot, tall, grey-headed, was making room beside her for the old man who had come in from the terrace. The dinner would never end, Jacob thought, and he did not wish it to end, though the ship had sailed from one corner of the window-frame to the other, and a light marked the end of the pier. He saw Mrs. Durrant gaze at the light. She turned to him.
"Did you take command, or Timothy?" she said. "Forgive me if I call you
Jacob. I've heard so much of you." Then her eyes went back to the sea.
Her eyes glazed as she looked at the view.
"A little village once," she said, "and now grown..." She rose, taking her napkin with her, and stood by the window.
"Did you quarrel with Timothy?" Clara asked shyly. "I should have."
Mrs. Durrant came back from the window.
"It gets later and later," she said, sitting upright, and looking down the table. "You ought to be ashamed-all of you. Mr. Clutterbuck, you ought to be ashamed." She raised her voice, for Mr. Clutterbuck was deaf.
"We ARE ashamed," said a girl. But the old man with the beard went on eating plum tart. Mrs. Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, as if indulging him.
"We put it to you, Mrs. Durrant," said a young man with thick spectacles and a fiery moustache. "I say the conditions were fulfilled. She owes me a sovereign."
"Not BEFORE the fish-with it, Mrs. Durrant," said Charlotte Wilding.
"That was the bet; with the fish," said Clara seriously. "Begonias, mother. To eat them with his fish."
"Oh dear," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Charlotte won't pay you," said Timothy.
"How dare you..." said Charlotte.
"That privilege will be mine," said the courtly Mr. Wortley, producing a silver case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to the table. Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding herself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze followed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosy woman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess. All passed out at the open door.
"When you are as old as I am, Charlotte," said Mrs. Durrant, drawing the girl's arm within hers as they paced up and down the terrace.
"Why are you so sad?" Charlotte asked impulsively.
"Do I seem to you sad? I hope not," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Well, just now. You're NOT old."
"Old enough to be Timothy's mother." They stopped.
Miss Eliot was looking through Mr. Clutterbuck's telescope at the edge of the terrace. The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard, and reciting the names of the constellations: "Andromeda, Bootes, Sidonia, Cassiopeia..."
"Andromeda," murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.
Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument pointed at the skies.
"There are MILLIONS of stars," said Charlotte with conviction. Miss Eliot turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly in the dining-room.
"Let ME look," said Charlotte eagerly.
"The stars bore me," said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace with Julia Eliot. "I read a book once about the stars... What are they saying?" She stopped in front of the dining-room window. "Timothy," she noted.
"The silent young man," said Miss Eliot.
"Yes, Jacob Flanders," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Oh, mother! I didn't recognize you!" exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming from the opposite direction with Elsbeth. "How delicious," she breathed, crushing a verbena leaf.
Mrs. Durrant turned and walked away by herself.
"Clara!" she called. Clara went to her.
"How unlike they are!" said Miss Eliot.
Mr. Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar.
"Every day I live I find myself agreeing..." he said as he passed them.
"It's so interesting to guess..." murmured Julia Eliot.
"When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed," said
Elsbeth.
"We see very little now," said Miss Eliot.
"She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course," said Charlotte. "I suppose Mr. Wortley..." she paused.
"Edward's death was a tragedy," said Miss Eliot decidedly.
Here Mr. Erskine joined them.
"There's no such thing as silence," he said positively. "I can hear twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your voices."
"Make a bet of it?" said Charlotte.
"Done," said Mr. Erskine. "One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog; four..."
The others passed on.
"Poor Timothy," said Elsbeth.
"A very fine night," shouted Miss Eliot into Mr. Clutterbuck's ear.
"Like to look at the stars?" said the old man, turning the telescope towards Elsbeth.
"Doesn't it make you melancholy-looking at the stars?" shouted Miss
Eliot.
"Dear me no, dear me no," Mr. Clutterbuck chuckled when he understood her. "Why should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment-dear me no."
"Thank you, Timothy, but I'm coming in," said Miss Eliot. "Elsbeth, here's a shawl."
"I'm coming in," Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope. "Cassiopeia," she murmured. "Where are you all?" she asked, taking her eye away from the telescope. "How dark it is!"
Mrs. Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool. Mr. Clutterbuck read the Times. In the distance stood a second lamp, and round it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangled stuff for private theatricals. Mr. Wortley read a book.
"Yes; he is perfectly right," said Mrs. Durrant, drawing herself up and ceasing to wind her wool. And while Mr. Clutterbuck read the rest of Lord Lansdowne's speech she sat upright, without touching her ball.
"Ah, Mr. Flanders," she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdowne himself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again.
"Sit THERE," she said.
Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered. The light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; but not a muscle of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden.
"I want to hear about your voyage," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Yes," he said.
"Twenty years ago we did the same thing."
"Yes," he said. She looked at him sharply.
"He is extraordinarily awkward," she thought, noticing how he fingered his socks. "Yet so distinguished-looking."
"In those days..." she resumed, and told him how they had sailed... "my husband, who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yacht before we married"... and then how rashly they had defied the fishermen, "almost paid for it with our lives, but so proud of ourselves!" She flung the hand out that held the ball of wool.
"Shall I hold your wool?" Jacob asked stiffly.
"You do that for your mother," said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him again keenly, as she transferred the skein. "Yes, it goes much better."
He smiled; but said nothing.
Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm.
"We want," she said... "I've come..." she paused.
"Poor Jacob," said Mrs. Durrant, quietly, as if she had known him all his life. "They're going to make you act in their play."
"How I love you!" said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs. Durrant's chair.
"Give me the wool," said Mrs. Durrant.
"He's come-he's come!" cried Charlotte Wilding. "I've won my bet!"
"There's another bunch higher up," murmured Clara Durrant, mounting another step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladd
er as she stretched out to reach the grapes high up on the vine.
"There!" she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked semi-transparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leaves and the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her in coloured islands. Geraniums and begonias stood in pots along planks; tomatoes climbed the walls.
"The leaves really want thinning," she considered, and one green one, spread like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob's head.
"I have more than I can eat already," he said, looking up.
"It does seem absurd..." Clara began, "going back to London..."
"Ridiculous," said Jacob, firmly.
"Then..." said Clara, "you must come next year, properly," she said, snipping another vine leaf, rather at random.
"If... if..."
A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended the ladder with her basket of grapes.
"One bunch of white, and two of purple," she said, and she placed two great leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket.
"I have enjoyed myself," said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse.
"Yes, it's been delightful," she said vaguely.
"Oh, Miss Durrant," he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walked past him towards the door of the greenhouse.
"You're too good-too good," she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinking that he must not say that he loved her. No, no, no.
The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into the air.
"Little demons!" she cried. "What have they got?" she asked Jacob.
"Onions, I think," said Jacob. He looked at them without moving.
"Next August, remember, Jacob," said Mrs. Durrant, shaking hands with him on the terrace where the fuchsia hung, like a scarlet ear-ring, behind her head. Mr. Wortley came out of the window in yellow slippers, trailing the Times and holding out his hand very cordially.
"Good- bye," said Jacob. "Good-bye," he repeated. "Good-bye," he said once more. Charlotte Wilding flung up her bedroom window and cried out: "Good-bye, Mr. Jacob!"
"Mr. Flanders!" cried Mr. Clutterbuck, trying to extricate himself from his beehive chair. "Jacob Flanders!"
"Too late, Joseph," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Not to sit for me," said Miss Eliot, planting her tripod upon the lawn.
CHAPTER FIVE
"I rather think," said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth, "it's in
Virgil," and pushing back his chair, he went to the window.
The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post-office vans. Swinging down Lamb's Conduit Street, the scarlet van rounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb and make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter look up, half frightened, half curious. She paused with her hand in the mouth of the box; then dropped her letter and ran away. It is seldom only that we see a child on tiptoe with pity-more often a dim discomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it's scarcely worth while to remove-that's our feeling, and so-Jacob turned to the bookcase.
Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from Court past midnight stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-posts while the footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor, hurriedly fastened the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and let them in. The bitter eighteenth-century rain rushed down the kennel. Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. "Showing off the tweed, sir; what the gentry wants is something singular to catch the eye, sir-and clean in their habits, sir!" So they display their tortoises.
At Mudie's corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run together on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spalding going to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd's Bush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other's faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all-save "a man with a red moustache," "a young man in grey smoking a pipe." The October sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune and was soon out of sight-for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every single person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey's end, though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise of indulgence beyond-steak and kidney pudding, drink or a game of dominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul's Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consulted his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in... Does it need an effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.
Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for ever chaunts. If a boot creaks, it's awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy are the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in and out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and organ. For ever requiem-repose. Tired with scrubbing the steps of the Prudential Society's office, which she did year in year out, Mrs. Lidgett took her seat beneath the great Duke's tomb, folded her hands, and half closed her eyes. A magnificent place for an old woman to rest in, by the very side of the great Duke's bones, whose victories mean nothing to her, whose name she knows not, though she never fails to greet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like on her own tomb, for the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped wide, and out steal on tiptoe thoughts of rest, sweet melodies... Old Spicer, jute merchant, thought nothing of the kind though. Strangely enough he'd never been in St. Paul's these fifty years, though his office windows looked on the churchyard. "So that's all? Well, a gloomy old place... Where's Nelson's tomb? No time now-come again-a coin to leave in the box... Rain or fine is it? Well, if it would only make up its mind!" Idly the children stray in-the verger dissuades them-and another and another... man, woman, man, woman, boy... casting their eyes up, pursing their lips, the same shadow brushing the same faces; the leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide.
Nothing could appear more certain from the steps of St. Paul's than that each person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an income; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay's Byzantine Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different; for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirty precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of all these multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets belong to them; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; the stretched office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung high above the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as if the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman stares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you to buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed; a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horse dung shredded to dust.
There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr. Sibley transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe, like provender, a bunch of papers, the day's nut
riment, slowly consumed by the industrious pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward motion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. Beneath the pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of the upper. "Marble Arch-Shepherd's Bush"-to the majority the Arch and the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one point-it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road-does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.
Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart-her sinful, tanned heart-for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.
Jacob's Room Page 6
