The Price of Love, Arnold Bennett [important of reading books .TXT] 📗

with. That's what I say."

"And so there's soda in the water?"

"A little."

"Well, I never knew that either! It's quite a business, it seems to me."

Without doubt Louis' notions upon domestic work were being modified with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic work--and in particular washing up--had been regarded as base, foul, humiliating, unmentionable--as toil that any slut might perform anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive suburban families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash up--of that he was aware--but they washed up in secret and in shame, and it was proper for all parties to pretend that they never had washed up. And here was Rachel converting the horrid process into a dignified and impressive ritual. She made it as fine as fine needlework--so exact, so dainty, so proud were the motions of her fingers and her forearms. Obviously washing up was an art, and the delicate operation could not be scamped nor hurried ...

The triple pile of articles on the cloth grew slowly, but it grew; and then Rachel, having taken a fresh white cloth from a hook, began to wipe, and her wiping was an art. She seemed to recognize each fork as a separate individuality, and to attend to it as to a little animal. Whatever her view of charwomen, never would she have said of forks that they were all alike.

Louis felt in his hip pocket for his reserve cigarette-case.

And Rachel immediately said, with her back to him--

"Have you really got a revolver, or were you teasing--just now in the parlour?"

It was then that he perceived a small unframed mirror, hung at the height of her face on the broad, central, perpendicular bar of the old-fashioned window-frame. Through this mirror the chit--so he named her in his mind at the instant--had been surveying him!

"Yes," he said, producing the second cigarette-case, "I was only teasing." He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the previous one.

"Well," she said, "you did frighten Mrs. Maldon. I was so sorry for her."

"And what about you? Weren't you frightened?"

"Oh no! I wasn't frightened. I guessed, somehow, you were only teasing."

"Well, I just wasn't teasing, then!" said Louis, triumphantly yet with benevolence. And he drew a revolver from his pocket.

She turned her head now, and glanced neutrally at the incontestable revolver for a second. But she made no remark whatever, unless the pouting of her tightly shut lips and a mysterious smile amounted to a remark.

Louis adopted an indifferent tone--

"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night--isn't it?--seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"

"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively, with no sign of irritation against him.

With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like a couple of sparrows--inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that they said had the slightest originality, weight, or importance. But they both thought that their conversation was full of significance; which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited the Koran to each other the inexplicable significance of their words would have been the same.

Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and said with the most enchanting, persuasive friendliness--

"I wasn't frightened--truly! I don't know why I looked as though I was."

"You mean about the revolver--in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly back after her to the revolver question.

"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had one. Only his was a Colt--one of those long things."

"Your brother, eh?"

"Yes. Did you know him?"

"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint.

Rachel said with generous enthusiasm--

"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"

Louis was curiously touched by the warmth of her reference to her brother. In the daily long monotonous column of advertisements headed succinctly "Money" in the _Staffordshire Signal_, there once used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to a responsible applicant. No fussy inquiries. Distance no objection. Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. L3 to L10,000. Apply personally or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately, Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an entirely mediocre and ambitionless clerk in a large works where Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as the nominal registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had already amassed reserves, and--without a drop of Jewish blood in his veins--possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's tool.

In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty and terrible reputation in the world where expenditures exceed incomes. And then the subterranean news of the day--not reported in the _Signal_--was that something serious had happened to Lovelace Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual, hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack behind save Rachel.

It was at this period--only a few months previous to the opening of the present narrative--that the district had first heard aught of the womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt--Reuben, senior's, sister, it appeared--had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour the three had lived in the simplicity of relative poverty, utterly unvisited except by clients. No good smell of money had ever escaped from the small front room which was employed as an office into the domestic portion of the house. It was alleged that Rachel had existed in perfect ignorance of all details of the business. It was also alleged that when the sudden crisis arrived, her brother had told her that she would not be taken to America, and that, briefly, she must shift for herself in the world. It was alleged further that he had given her forty-five pounds. (Why forty-five pounds and not fifty, none knew.) The whole affair had begun and finished--and the house was sold up--in four days. Public opinion in the street and in Knype blew violently against the two Reubens, but as they were on the Atlantic it did not affect them. Rachel, with scarcely an acquaintance in the world in which she was to shift for herself, found that she had a streetful of friends! It transpired that everybody had always divined that she was a girl of admirable efficient qualities. She behaved as though her brother and father had behaved in quite a usual and proper manner. Assistance in the enterprise of shifting for herself she welcomed, but not sympathy. The devotion of the Fleckring women began to form a legend. People said that Rachel's aunt had been another such creature as Rachel.

Hence the effect on Louis, who, through his aunt and his cousin, was acquainted with the main facts and surmises, of Rachel's glowing reference to the vanished Reuben.

"Where did your brother practise?" he asked.

"In the cellar."

"Of course it's easier with a long barrel."

"Is it?" she said incredulously. "You should see my brother's score-card the first time he shot at that new miniature rifle-range in Hanbridge!"

"Why? Is it anything special?"

"Well, you should see it. Five bulls, all cutting into each other."

"I should have liked to see that."

"I've got it upstairs in my trunk," said she proudly. "I dare say I'll show you it some time."

"I wish you would," he urged.

Such loyalty moved him deeply. Louis had had no sisters, and his youthful suburban experience of other people's sisters had not fostered any belief that loyalty was an outstanding quality of sisters. Like very numerous young men of the day, he had passed an unfavourable judgment upon young women. He had found them greedy for diversion, amazingly ruthless in their determination to exact the utmost possible expensiveness of pleasure in return for their casual society, hard, cruelly clever in conversation, efficient in certain directions, but hating any sustained effort, and either socially or artistically or politically snobbish. Snobs all! Money-worshippers all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps that lolled on foot or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim streets of the suburb--the young women would not remain in dalliance with you for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing but insolence or condescension in exchange. Such was Louis' judgment, and scores of times he had confirmed it in private saloon-lounge talk with his compeers. It had not, however, rendered the society of these unconscionable and cold female creatures distasteful to him. Not a bit! He had even sought it and been ready to pay for that society in the correct manner--even to imperturbably beggaring himself of his final sixpence in order to do the honours of the latest cinema. Only, he had a sense of human superiority. It certainly did not occur to him that in the victimized young men there might exist faults which complemented those of the parasitic young women.

And now he contrasted these young women with Rachel! And he fell into a dreamy mood of delight in her.... Her gesture in lighting his cigarette! Marvellous! Tear-compelling!... Flippancy dropped away from him.... She liked him. With the most alluring innocence, she did not conceal that she liked him. He remembered that the last time he called at his aunt's he had remarked something strange, something disturbing, in Rachel's candid demeanour towards himself. He had made an impression on her! He had given her the lightning-stroke! No shadow of a doubt as to his own worthiness crossed his mind.

What did cross his mind was that she was not quite of his own class. In the suburb, where "sets" are divided one from another by unscalable barriers, she could not have aspired to him. But in the kitchen, now become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he had ever seen--in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute clearness that the snobbery of caste was silly, negligible, laughable, contemptible. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen seemed ideal--life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm and that lovely seriousness! Moreover, he could teach her. She had already blossomed--in a fortnight. She was blossoming. She would blossom further.

Odd that, when he had threatened to pull out a revolver, she, so accustomed to revolvers, should have taken a girlish alarm! That queer detail of her behaviour was extraordinarily seductive. But far beyond everything else it was the grand loyalty of her nature