“Ha, ha!. . . .ha, ha, ha! To see your furniture jumping about the room! I’d pretty soon nab the slavey—you take my word for it, Mary, it’s the slavey—who played such tricks on me. I’d bundle ’er off with a flea in ’er ear.”
A glance at Richard showed him black as thunder. Mary adroitly changed the subject. But afterwards she came back on it.
“It’s all very well, Richard, but you can’t expect a common-sense person like Tilly not to be amused by that sort of thing.”
“And pray do you mean to imply that every one who does not mock and jeer is devoid of sense?”
“Of course not. Besides, I didn’t say sense; I said common sense.”
“Well, since you yourself bring in the ‘common,’ I’ll quote you the dictum of a famous man. ‘Commonplace minds usually condemn everything that is beyond the scope of their understanding.’”
“How sweeping! And so conceited. But Tilly is not commonplace. In many ways, she’s just as capable as her mother was. But I don’t think we ought to be discussing her. While she’s our visitor.”
“Good God! Is one to go blind and dumb because a fool is under one’s roof?”
“Well, really! I do wonder what you’ll say next.” Mary was hurt and showed it.
But Mahony did not try to conciliate her. He had a further ground for annoyance. Ever since Tilly had come to the house, that side of Mary’s nature had prevailed with which he was least in sympathy. Never had she seemed so deadly practical, and lacking in humour; so instinctively antagonistic to the imaginative and speculative sides of life. Her attitude, for example, to the subject under discussion. At bottom, this was no whit different from Tilly’s. “That sort of thing,” said as Mary said it, put her opinion of the new movement in a nutshell.
Out of this irritation he now demanded: “Tell me: are we never in this world to have our house to ourselves again?”
“But, Richard, Tilly had to come!. . . .after the time I stayed with her. And now she’s here—even though you despise her so—we’ve got to do all we can to make her visit a success. I should hate her to think we didn’t consider her good enough to introduce to our friends.”
“Among whom she fits about as well as a porpoise in a basin of goldfish.”
“As if a porpoise could get inside a basin! How wildly you do talk! Besides you don’t mean it. For if ever there was a person particular about paying debts, it’s you.’
Late one afternoon he came in from the garden, where he had been superintending the laying out of a new shrubbery. Only the day before he had found, to his dismay, that a gap in the screening hedge of lauristinus and pittosporums allowed of errand-boys and nursemaids spying on a privacy he had believed absolute. The thought was unbearable. But the change had cost him a fierce tussle with his pigheaded Scot of a gardener, who held there were already too many shrubs about the place. Now he felt hot and tired.
As he crossed the verandah Mary came rustling out of the dining-room. She looked mysterious, but also, if he knew his Mary, a trifle uncomfortable. “Richard! I’ve got a surprise for you. I want you in the drawing-room.”
“Well, I suppose it will keep till I’ve washed the dust off.” The drawing-room spelt visitors; and he had looked forward to pipe and book.
In course of making a hasty toilet, however, he pricked up his ears. Down the passage came the tones of a voice that seemed strangely familiar. And, sure enough, when he entered the room he found what he expected: the visitor Tilly was entertaining with such noisy gusto was no other than Purdy.
Purdy sat on the circular yellow-silk ottoman, in the easiest of attitudes. With one leg stuck straight out before him, he hugged the other to him by the knee, rocking his body backwards and forwards as he told what was evidently a capital story—to judge by his own roars of laughter and Tilly’s purple face and moist eyes, at which she made feeble dabs with her pocket-handkerchief.
The shock of the encounter drove the semblance of a hearty greeting out of Mahony. But with this he had exhausted himself; Purdy and he could find no points of contact; and after a few halting remarks and awkward pauses, Purdy faced round to Tilly again and took up the broken thread of his yarn. And from now on, both there and at the high tea to which Mary presently led them, Mahony sat silent and constrained. For one thing, he disdained competition with Tilly in her open touting for Purdy’s notice. Again, as he looked and listened, he understood Mary’s discomfort and embarrassment. On the occasion of last seeing Purdy, they had both been giddy with excitement. Now the scales fell from his eyes. This, his former intimate and friend? This common, shoddy little man, already pot-bellied and bald?—whose language was that of the tap-room and the stable; who sat there bragging of the shady knowledge he had harvested in dark corners, blowing to impress the women; one of life’s failures and aware of it, and, just for this reason, cocksure, bitter, intolerant—a self-lover to the nth degree. In the extravagant fables they were asked to swallow, he, Purdy, had seen the best of everything, the worst of everything, had always been in the thick of a fray and in at the finish.
Well! one person present seemed to enjoy the tasteless performance, and that was Tilly, who hung on his lips. She even urged him to repeat some of his tallest stories, for the benefit of Mary who had been out of the room.
“Oh, love, you must ’ear that yarn of the splitter and the goanna. I’ve laughed to burst my sides. Go on, Purd, tell it again. It was a regular corker.” And, belonging to the class of those who pre-indulge, Tilly hee-hawed at full lung-strength, in anticipation of the coming joke. After which Mahony had to listen for the second time to some witless anecdote, the real point of which was to show Purdy in his rôle of top dog.
Was it possible that he had ever enjoyed, or even put up with this kind of thing? Had Purdy always been a vainglorious braggart, or had the boasting habit grown on him as he went downhill? Of course he himself had not become more tolerant as the years went by; and he could afford to yield to his antipathies, now that no business reasons made civility incumbent. But there was more in it than this. In earlier days a dash of the old boyish affection had persisted, to blind him to Purdy’s failings; just as the memory of their boyhood’s standing—he the senior, Purdy the junior—had caused Purdy to look up to him and defer to his opinion. Now, nothing of this remained. On either side. Long-suffering, deference, affection had alike been flung on time’s scrap-heap—at least, during the two distasteful hours spent in Purdy’s company, not even the ghosts of such feelings stirred. Then what had brought him back? Mere tuft-hunting? Where, too, in the name of Christendom had Mary fished him up, who would have been so much better left in obscurity? Had she really fancied she would give him, Mahony, a pleasure thereby? Poor Mary!
But the thin smile of amusement that curled his lips at the thought faded, when he heard her pressing Purdy to come again. And the first time he got her alone—it was not till bedtime—he took her soundly to task.
“Your surprise this afternoon was a surprise indeed—in more ways than one. But what possessed you, Mary, to ask him to repeat the visit? My dear, you must surely see for yourself we cannot have the eyesore he has become, about this house?”
Mary paused in the act of slipping the rings off her fingers and on the branches of her ring-tree, and looked surprised. “What, Richard? Your oldest friend?” But Mahony, versed in every lightest expression that flitted across the candid face before him, felt the emphasis to be overdone. Like himself it was plain Mary had suffered something of a shock.
So he swallowed a caustic rejoinder, and said dryly: “I know your intentions were of the best. But. . . .well, frankly, my dear, I think it’s bad enough if you fill the house with your old friends.”
He was right. Her discomfiture showed in the way she now flared up. “Fill the house?. . . .with only one person here at a time, and never more than two? But—since you put it that way, Richard—I think i
t’s rather a good thing I do. If we are ever to see anyone at all!”
“Give me books and I don’t want people.”
“Oh, I’ve no patience with such a selfish standpoint. Whatever would be the good of all this—I mean the nice house, and our not needing to worry about expense—if we didn’t ask other people to share it with us?”
“Pray, have I hindered you from doing so?”
“Well, not exactly. But why start to grumble now, when it’s a question of your best friend?”
At the repetition his patience failed him. “Best friend! Oldest friend! Good heavens, Mary! do think what you are saying. How can one continue to be friends with a person one never sees or hears of? Surely the word implies somebody with whom one has at least half an idea in common? People don’t stand still in this world. They’re always growing and changing—up or down or off at a tangent. Panta rei is the eternal truth: semper idem the lie we long to see confirmed. And to hug a sentimental memory of what a mortal once was to you, and go on trying to bolster up an intimacy on the strength of it—why, that’s to drag a dead carcase behind you, which impedes your own progress.—No, the real friend is one you pick up at certain points in your life, whose way runs along with yours—for a time. A time only. A milestone on your passage—no more. Few or none march together the whole way.”
“Milestones? Why not tombstones while you’re about it?” cried Mary hotly, repudiating a theory that seemed to her wholly perverse. “Of course, you’re able to use words I don’t understand; but I say, once a friend, always a friend. I know I’d be sorry to forget anyone I had ever liked—even if I didn’t find much to talk to them about. But you must always have your own ideas. I declare you’re going on now about people just as you do about places, about not wanting to see them again once you’ve left.”
“Yes, places and people—one as the other. Let me face forward—not back. But to return to the matter in hand: I don’t mind telling you I’d gladly pay our visitor of this afternoon to stop away. . . .and drink his tea elsewhere.”
“I never heard such a thing!” Then, however, another thought struck her. “You’re not letting that silly old affair in Ballarat still prejudice you against him?”
Mahony laughed out loud. “Good Lord, no! The grass has been green over that for what seems like half a century.”
“Then it’s because he drank his tea out of his saucer—and things like that.”
“Tch!” On the verge of letting his temper get away with him, Mahony pulled up. “Well, my dear. . . .well, perhaps you’re not altogether wrong. I’ll put it even more plainly though. Mary, it’s because he spoke and looked like what I veritably believe him to be: an ostler in some stable. Horsey checks, dirty nails, sham brilliants; and a mind and tongue to match. No, I stick to what I’ve said: I’d offer him a ten-pound note to stop away.”
“I never knew anyone so hard on people as you.”
“Come, do I need to mix with ostlers at my time of life?. . . .and in my present position. It’s not my fault that I’ve gone up in the world and he down.”
“No, but all the more reason not to turn your back on somebody who hasn’t had your luck.”
“I deny that I’m a snob. I’d invite my butcher or my baker to the house any day, so long as he had decent manners and took an interest in what interests me.”
“My dear Richard, you only say that because you know you’ll never have to! And if you did, you wouldn’t like them a bit better than you do Purdy. But I’m sure I sometimes don’t know what’s coming over you. You used to be such a stickler for remembering old friends and old kindnesses, and hadn’t bad enough to say about people who didn’t. I believe it was the going home that changed you. Yet when you were in England, how you railed at people there for letting themselves be influenced by a person’s outside—how he ate peas, or drank his soup, and things like that.”
“England had nothing whatever to do with it. But it was a very different thing in Ballarat, Mary, where my practice brought me up against all sorts of people to whom I was forced to be civil. Now, there’s no such obligation. And so I decline, once and for all, to exhibit the specimen we saw to-day to our social circle. If you’re absolutely bent on befriending him—and I know doing good is, to you, the temptation strong drink is to others—although in my opinion, my dear, you’ll end by overdoing it: you’ve not looked yourself for weeks past. If you must have Purdy here, kindly let it be when no one else is present, and if possible when I, too, am out of the way. What you’re to say about me? Anything you like. He won’t miss me so long as your friend Tilly is at hand to drink in his words. You certainly hit the bull’s-eye this time, my dear, in providing her with entertainment. Purdy’s egregious lying was pabulum after her own heart.”
With which Richard slung a towel round his neck and retired to the bathroom, leaving Mary to the reflection that, if ever there was a person who knew how to complicate the doing of a simple kindness, it was Richard. Here he went, detesting Tilly with all his old fervour, and dead set from the start against Purdy and his coming to the house. (It was true Purdy had got rather loud and bumptious; but a sensible woman like Tilly might be trusted soon to knock the nonsense out of him.) Meanwhile she, Mary, had somehow to propitiate all three; and in particular to hinder Richard from showing what he felt. For if the match came off, Purdy would become a rich and important personage to whom every door would open. And then Richard, too, would come round—would have to. If, that was, she could meanwhile contrive to keep him from making lifelong enemies of the happy pair.
CHAPTER NINE
Tilly said:
“My dear! the minute I set eyes on ’er, I knew she was a fraud. And I thinks to myself: ‘Just you wait, milady, till the lights go out, and I’ll cook your goose for you!’ Well, sure enough, there we all sat ’and-in-hand in the dark, like a party of kids playing ’unt-the-slipper. And by-and-by one and another squeals: ‘I’m touched!’ What do I do, Mary? Why, I gradually work the hand I’m ’olding in me right, closer to me left, till I’d got them joined and me right ’and free. (It’s as easy as Punch if you know ’ow to do it.) And when the man next me—oh, ’e was a solemn old josser!—when ’e said in a voice that seemed to come from ’is boots: ‘The spirits ’ave deigned to touch me’—as if ’e’d said: ‘God Almighty ’as arrived and is present!’—I made one grab, and got ’old of—now what do you think? I thought she was going to give me the slip then, after all: she wriggled like an eel. But I held on like grim death and, luckily for me, she’d a few ’airs left still clinging to her cranium. She squeals like a pig. ‘Up with the lights,’ says I; ‘I’ve got ’er!’ ‘Turn up the lights if you dare,’ cries she: ‘it’ll kill me.’ Over goes a chair in the scrimmage, and then they did turn ’em up, and there was she squirming on the floor, bald like an egg, with I don’t know how many false gloves and feathers and things pinned on to ’er body!”
Tilly sat by the fire, in Mary’s bedroom, her black silk skirts turned back from the blaze. She was in high feather, exhilarated by her own acumen as by the smartness with which she had conducted the exposure. Opposite her Mary, her head tied up in red flannel, crippled by the heavy cold and the face-ache that had confined her to the house, listened with a sinking heart. It was all very well for Tilly to preen herself on what she had done: Richard would see it in a very different light. He had gone straight to his study on entering; and hurrying out in her dressing-gown to learn what had brought the two of them home so early, Mary had caught a glimpse of his face. It was enough. When Richard looked like that, all was over. His hatred of a scene in public amounted to a mania.
It was most discouraging. For a fortnight past she had done everything a friend could do, to advance Tilly’s suit; plotting and planning, always with an anxious ear to the study-door, in a twitter lest Richard should suddenly come out and complain about the noise. For the happy couple, to whom she had giv
en up the drawing-room, conversed in tones that were audible throughout the house: a louder courtship Mary had never heard; it seemed to consist chiefly of comic stories, divided one from the next by bursts of laughter. Personally she thought the signs and portents would not be really favourable till the pair grew quieter: every wooing she had assisted at had been punctuated by long, long silences, in which the listener puzzled his brains to imagine what the lovers could be doing. However, Tilly seemed satisfied. After an afternoon of this kind she went into the seventh heaven, and leaning on Mary’s neck shed tears of joy: it was a case of middle-aged lovesickness and no mistake! True, she also knew moments of uncertainty, when things seemed to hang fire, under the influence of which she would vehemently declare: “Upon my soul, Mary love, if he doesn’t, I shall! I feel it in my bones.” A state of mind which alarmed Mary and made her exclaim: “Oh no, don’t, Tilly!—don’t do that. I’m sure you’d regret it. You know, later on he might cast it up at you.”
And now Tilly had probably spoilt everything, by her hasty, ill-considered action.
Fortunately for her she didn’t realise how deeply she had sinned; though even she could see that Richard was angry. “Of course, love, the doctor’s in a bit of a taking. I couldn’t get a word out of ’im all the way ’ome.—Lor’, Mary, what geese men are, to be sure!. . . .even the best of ’em. Not to speak of the cleverest. To see all those learned old mopokes sitting there to-night, solemn as hens on eggs. . . .it was enough to make a cat laugh. But even if ’e does bear me a bit of a grudge, it can’t be helped. I’m not a one, love, to sit by and see a cheat and keep my mouth shut. A fraud’s a fraud, and even if it’s the Queen ’erself.”
“Of course it is. I feel just the same as you. It makes my blood boil to watch Richard, with all his brains, letting himself be duped by some dishonest creature who only wants to make money out of him. But. . . .when he once gets an idea in his head. . . .And he’s not a bit grateful for having his eyes opened.”
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony Page 67
