by George Moore
In the silence which followed Frank wondered why he had tried to kiss her. Decidedly he liked the other better.
Now every evening Maggie went to the writing-table, and all knew what it meant. Mr. Brookes occasionally lamented in a minor key, but without having recourse to his handkerchief. Willy said nothing; his losses on the Stock Exchange had been heavy; and owing to a conversation Frank had drawn him into during dinner the other day, his digestion, he feared, was not quite up to the mark. So on the night of the ball he only answered with an occasional monosyllable the splendid young man of the embroidered waistcoats who related his pleasures in a deep bass; nor did he pretend to take any interest in the crude militia officer who sometimes broke the silence by a declaration that he did not care for politics or poetry, that he liked history better. The young ladies listened devoutly to all that the young men said; Mr. Brookes carved valiantly at the head of the table and appeared resigned. Bouquets were fixed in button-holes in the billiard-room and the ‘bus was announced. A greasy oil-lamp hung from the roof. Sometimes Sally rubbed the windows and said she could tell by the bushes where they were, and the embroidered waistcoat continued to drone out the measure of his amusements. He would have to run up to London, then he must have a shy at trente et quarante at Monte Carlo, then he must get back for the spring meeting at Newmarket. Frank asked him if he didn’t think he could manage to amuse himself without talking it all out beforehand. But undaunted and unchecked he wandered from Homburg to Paris, and from Paris to Ross-shire, until the ‘bus drew up among a small crowd of people.
The ball was a failure. When they entered the rooms there were scarcely twenty people present. It was very cold, and the men said; “How can the women bear it with their naked shoulders?”
“We shall never get near this fire,” said Sally, looking in dismay on the circle of damsels who stood warming themselves, their dresses relieved upon the masses of laurel with which the room was decorated; “there is a beautiful fire in one of those little rooms at the end.”
“Very well, let us come and sit there; or shall we dance this waltz first?”
“Let’s dance it.”
They danced, and Frank shuddered in his evening clothes as he danced.
“Did you notice,” said Sally, as they hurried to the retiring room, “how upset father seemed at dinner? I thought he was going to cry, but he bore up to the end better than I expected.”
“So he did, but I don’t see what there was particularly to upset him this time. Meason is away at sea, and you have promised not to see him any more.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking about the Measons — but haven’t you heard? I only heard it through a friend, but I know for a fact that Willy has lost nearly all his money on the Stock Exchange.”
“You don’t say so; I am so sorry.”
“Father hasn’t heard it all yet; if he had he wouldn’t have come down to dinner. I don’t fancy he knows more than that things have not been going well, and that Willy has been a loser.”
“But how can he have lost? I thought he was junior partner in an old established business.”
“So he is. I can’t tell you how the mischief was done, but I know he has lost all his money.”
“What do you mean by all his money?”
“All the money — three thousand — that father let him draw out of the distillery.”
“This is very sad.”
“Yes, isn’t it? And particularly for a fellow who has so few amusements, and only cares about making money. Just look at him now; he wanders about speaking to no one. Come, let’s dance this dance — are you engaged?”
“No!”
This news about Willy fixed the Harfield ball in Frank’s thoughts, and he remembered the pretty girl in white of whom he could make nothing, of the raw just-brought-out girl who had bored him, of the communicative girl who had amused him by her accounts of her dogs and horses; he remembered, too, how he had seen Maggie disappearing down the ends of certain passages with a young man whose name he did not catch, and whose face he had not noticed. He had danced twice with her, only twice; she was distracted, she did not look at him, her eyes wandered all over the room, she answered his questions indifferently. Sally, on the contrary, had devoted herself to him, and on several occasions he thought that her blunt straightforward manner was better than the other’s slyness. The ‘bus came with its draughts, its sickly lamp and its doleful jolting. Sally was too tired to rub the windows and declare how far they were from home, and the dancers endured their discomforts almost in silence; even the embroidered waistcoat occasionally ceased to talk about Homburg; and in all the extreme bitterness and greyness of a March morning they pulled up before the door of the Manor House.
“I beg of you not to make a noise. If you wake up father he will never let us go to a ball again. Is there a fire in the billiard-room, Gardner?”
“Yes, miss, there’s a lovely fire; the decanters are on the table and the kettle is on the hob.”
“I think you would all like a glass of something hot,” said Maggie.
“Rather!”
“But don’t make a noise, please.”
They stole along the passages to the billiard-room shivering, their feet aching, feeling very uncomfortable indeed. The waistcoat was now considering if it would be good form to come forward in the Conservative interest at the next election; but every one was too tired, they could not laugh, and amid a few general remarks the young ladies drank their gin and water, casting sheep’s eyes at the young men, and then, glad and yet loth to part, all retired limping to their rooms.
Breakfast was a pleasant meal — full of laughter and anecdotes of the ball, and, laden with Gladstone bags, the young men departed in ones and twos. Frank was going with Willy to London, and when they disappeared among the laurels Sally and Maggie turned indoors, conscious of reaction, and wondering what they should do with the long day that stretched before them. Maggie walked upstairs; she lingered, undecided, and then went down the passage to Frank’s room. He had forgotten a shirt stud; on the chest of drawers there was a crumpled white tie and a soiled pair of white gloves. “How careless he is!” she thought, “I must send him this,” and she put the stud in her pocket. She straightened out the gloves and determined to send the necktie to the wash. Next time he came down she would have it to give him, nice, clean, and white — she must see that it was beautifully made up. Then she found his ball programme. He had danced four times with Sally — only twice with her — what a fool she had been; she had wasted her whole evening with that other fellow. It did make her feel so angry. Then the housemaid entered and turned the bed down.
“What a lot of washing there will be this week, Gardner.”
“There will indeed, miss. Three pairs of sheets, and only slept in once.”
“Yes, isn’t it a pity? It seems absurd to send these sheets to the wash, doesn’t it?”
“It do, indeed, miss.”
“Absurd!” said Sally, who had just come in. “I want a pair of fresh sheets for my bed. I’ll have these.”
“No you won’t — I was going to take them.”
“I should like to know what right you have to them more than I.”
“You promised not to interfere with me, and you have done nothing else. You did nothing at the ball but ask him for dances.”
“That’s a lie! I didn’t ask him for a dance. You went off to hide; no one saw anything of you all the evening.”
“You mean to say you didn’t promise?”
“I never promised anything; if I did I should keep my promise. I am not like you. I want a pair of sheets, and I mean to have these.”
“They are too big for your bed.”
Sally seized the sheet and strove to drag it from Maggie, who, although the weaker, held her own bravely for some time. Finding her strength failing her, she loosed her hold, letting her sister fall against the wall, and taking up the pillow she launched it with her full force. “If you want what he slept in, you can
have it all.”
“I’ll give it to you, my lady,” cried the bully, making a rush round the bed, but Maggie fled through the dressing-room, shutting the door behind her, and locked herself into her room.
IX
AS WILLY WOULD not pay the extra fare, Frank had to travel second class. He was telling his friend of the Stock Exchange, and his losses — nearly four thousand pounds. He had suspected that the firm of which he was junior partner had not played fair with him. Anyhow, he was going to get out of the business, having something better in view — a shop in Brighton. Yes, a shop in Brighton, a greengrocer’s shop. No one had any idea, until they went into the calculation, of the amount of profit that was made on vegetables. Lord This and Lord That, every one who had a handsome place with large gardens, counted on being able to pay his gardener’s wages by the sale of the surplus carrots, artichokes, potatoes, parsley, onions, tomatoes, especially tomatoes — every one nowadays ate tomatoes. He had it all down in figures, and was perfectly astonished at the sums of money that could be made. Grapes had been overdone, that was true; but a profit could be made out of everything else. Flowers, especially gardenias, were sold in the London market at two shillings apiece. Now, there was he within five miles of a large town like Brighton; the rent of a shop in the Western Road would not come to more than seventy or eighty pounds a year; the missus he would put in as shopwoman, and, there was no doubt of it, she would make as good a shopwoman as you could find, after a little practice; the child could run on errands, so it should be all profit. “I shall have none of the expenses that other people have to contend with. In the garden at the Manor House about three times as much stuff is grown as required. I shall buy all the fruit, vegetables, and flowers from my father at cost price, or a little over, and shall sell in my shop at retail price, that is, twenty or thirty per cent more. There is, therefore, no reason why the shop should not bring in from three to four hundred a year. And — would you believe it? — my father, who will be benefited by my scheme, if not more, quite as much as I shall be, is opposed to it; he will get a fair price for a lot of things for which he now gets nothing. But no. He cannot, or will not, see it. I never saw any one like my father. He will not help himself and you can do nothing to help him. The distillery business is going very badly. He had a bad year last year. I know for a fact that he did not make five per cent on his capital. Putting these things together, I should have thought that he would have been glad to make a little money to retrench; but no! he prefers to go on in the old way. He made money in the old way, and he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t make money again in the old way. Odd man my father is, isn’t he?”
It appeared to Frank that Mr. Brookes had managed to help himself very liberally indeed to all the good things in life; but with his false, facile, Celtic nature, he had no difficulty in re-adjusting his ideas and adopting a view of Mr. Brookes more in harmony with Willy’s. He was, as usual, enthusiastic about his friends, and was effervescing with love and goodwill. He saw nothing of their faults — they were the best and truest people he had ever known, and he could not love them too much. Indeed he was angry, and regretted the limitations that nature has set on the human heart, and would if he could have lost himself in one immense and eternal love of the Brookeses.
When he bade Willy good-bye at London Bridge, and wished him well with his shop, these sentiments ceased to be active forces in him, and they lay latent in his life of restaurants and bar rooms until the summer returned, and he received an invitation from the Manor House to come down for a garden party at Mrs. Berkins’s. When he opened the letter he basked in thoughts of them — of Maggie and her fascinating subtleties, of Sally’s blunt speech and sturdy good looks, of Willy, and all the quiet talks they would have together. He counted the tunnels, and, striving to recall the landscape, guessed extravagantly the number of miles that separated him from them. He walked up the drive with a beating heart, looking for the girls between the laurel bushes. He found them, and their habits which endeared them to him, unchanged; and to slip back into the old ways without experiencing the slightest difficulty or jar was like waking from a dream and entering again on a pleasant reality. There was the excellent dinner and the usual complaints about the Southdown Road, the cigars in the billiard-room, conversation about pictures and investments, gin and water, and then a long yarn with Willy in his bedroom. Life moved at the Manor House without any spring creaking, without jolt or jar, and it was this beautiful regularity that made Frank feel so healthily and so unexpectedly happy. He loved the desolation of Ireland. This was the stronger sense, but there was another sense, a half stifled sense, that found an echo in these southern downs interwoven with suburban life — in other words, a faint resurrection of the original English mind in him. He enjoyed and he grew akin to this Saxon prosperity; he learned to recognise it as manifested in the various prospects of the weald and the wold, and he loved this medley of contradictory aspects — the spires of the village churches, the porches of the villas, the rich farmhouses and their elm trees, the orchards jammed between masses of chalk, the shepherds seen against the sky of the Downs. It is true that he felt that this country was alien to him, but he was not individually conscious that his love of suburban Sussex was a morbid affection, opposed to the normal and indissoluble bonds of inherited aspirations and prejudices, and the forms and colours that had filled his eyes in childhood. Consciousness in Frank Escott was always slow, and always so governed and coloured by the sentiment of the moment that his comprehension of things were always deformed or incomplete. In his mind the phenomenon of life was ever in nebulae, and though very often one thought would define itself, no group of thoughts, or part of a group, ever became clear, so there was no abiding principle, nothing that he might know and steer by. He was, of course, aware that the Brookes were not equal to him in rank, but he did not know, or, rather, he would not know, that they were vulgar; nor did he think that Mount Rorke might marry again, if he were to marry Maggie or Sally. All that was really alive and distinct in him was love of them; and this love thrived in a sensation of class which he would not acknowledge, even to himself, had any existence. The glass-houses, and swards, and laurels had a meaning and fascination for him that he could not account for or describe, and he found these feelings, which were mainly class feelings of an unusual kind, not only in the aspect of the country but in the accent and speech of his friends, in the expression of their eyes and very hands. The English servants pleased him, and he strove to detect qualities in the carriage and horses, and he compared them to their advantage with Mount Rorke’s. He loved to wrap the rug about the young ladies’ knees, and they seemed to him quite perfect and delightful as they lay back in their carriage, driving beneath a sky full of blue, and through the changing views of the Downs, all distinct with light and shade. Sally and Maggie made much of him, covered him up, and addressed to him pleasant speeches. His eyes and ears were open and eager for new impressions, and his heart panted with readiness to admire and praise all he saw. He was ready to think that he had never seen anything so lovely as the laurels and the numerous glass-houses; and he wondered why he had ever thought so little of Berkins, and he listened with interest to that gentleman’s explanation of the superiority of his possessions over everybody else’s possessions. He even allowed himself to be persuaded that there was no pheasant shooting in the kingdom — for its size — equal to that in the little wood. Sally, who did not attempt to conceal her dislike of her brother-in-law, whispered: “That’s the way to bring them down,” and Frank was obliged to laugh. Then she and Maggie disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them for several hours. The Grenadier Guards played on the lawn, and Frank was introduced to ladies of all ages and sizes; and as these bored him, he began to see that the place was vulgar and the people shoddy, and he wondered what Mount Rorke would say if he were to come suddenly across him. Grace was the subject of much concern, and obviously enceinte, she passed through the different groups. She had introduced Frank as Lord Mount Ro
rke’s son, then as his nephew, then as his heir, and, fearing she might succumb to the temptation of introducing him as Mount Rorke himself, Frank escaped from her, and joined a party that Berkins was personally conducting through the grounds.
The stables had been built by So-and-so on the most approved principles. There were no stables like them in Sussex — the fittings of the harness-room alone had cost him three hundred. The horses he had bought at the Duke’s sale, the Duke would not have thought of parting with them had he known how they would turn out. He had driven them along the Brighton road at the rate of fifteen miles an hour; he would back them to do fifteen miles in the hour. There was not a pair of horses in England equal to them. That was Mrs. Berkins’s riding horse — was it possible to imagine a more perfect cob? He could get a hundred for him any day, he did not know of anything like him. “Did any of you gentleman ever see anything like him?” They went to the kennels. A brace of Irish setters were declared to be the finest dogs that Ireland had ever produced, they had taken two prizes, one in Dublin and another in Brighton — and the little fox terrier was the gamest dog in Sussex. She would go into any hole after a fox, and never leave him till she brought him out. You couldn’t find her equal. Then the glass-houses were perfect. They contained all the latest improvements, and all these were fully explained. “Berkins is excelling himself to-day,” thought Frank.
Presently they came upon a basket of peaches.
“These peaches were, of course, grown under glass, but I think I am right in saying, Jackson, that they were produced without artificial heat.”
“Yes, sir, quite right, sir. It couldn’t be done nowhere else, sir, but all the sun in Sussex seems to come down here — a regular little sun trap, I think that’s what you called it the other day, sir, when you were speaking to me about them there peaches.”
“Yes, I did. If you move nearer the sea you get fogs and cold winds, further inland you lose the sun, but just here the climate is equal to the south of Europe! I ask you to look at these peaches, it seems impossible — does it not? — to have peaches like these at the end of May, and without any heat, merely glass.”
