The Roll-Call, Arnold Bennett [miss read books TXT] 📗

trotting of the omnibus horses and Lois's nervous giggle. She tried, and did not fail, to be jaunty; but she had had a shock, and the proof was that by mere inadvertence she nearly charged the posts of the next street-refuge.... George switched off the current. She herself had shown him how to do it. She now saw him do it. The engine stopped, and Lois, remembering in a flash that her dignity was at stake, raised her hand and drew up fairly neatly at the pavement.

"What's the matter?" she demanded imperiously.

"Are you going to drive this thing all the way into London, Lois?" he demanded in turn.

They looked at each other. The chauffeur got down. "Of course."

"Not with me in it, anyhow!"

She sneered. "Oh! You boys! You've got no pluck."

"Perhaps not," he returned viciously. "Neither have you got any sense of danger. Girls like you never have. I've noticed that before." Even his mother with horses had no sense of danger.

"You're very rude," she replied. "And it was very rude of you to stop the car."

"I dare say. But you shouldn't have told me you could drive."

He was now angry. And she not less so. He descended, and slammed the door.

"Thanks so much," he said, raised his hat, and walked away. She spoke, but he did not catch what she said. He was saying to himself: "Pluck indeed!" (He did not like her accusation.) "Pluck indeed! Of all the damned cheek!... We might all have been killed--or worse. The least she could have done was to apologize. But no! Pluck indeed! Women oughtn't to be allowed to drive. It's too infernally silly for words."

He glanced backward. The chauffeur had started the car again, and was getting in by Lois's side. Doubtless he was a fatalist by profession. She drove off.

"Yes!" thought George. "And you'd drive home yourself now even if you knew for certain you'd have an accident. You're just that stupid kind."

The car looked superb as it drew away, and she reclined in the driver's seat with a superb effrontery. George was envious; he was pierced by envy. He hated that other people, and especially girls, should command luxuries which he could not possess. He hated that violently. "You wait!" he said to himself. "You wait! I'll have as good a car as that, and a finer girl than you in it. And she won't want to drive either. You wait." He was more excited than he knew by the episode.


CHAPTER V


THE TEA

I


"Tea is ready, Mr. Cannon," said Mr. Haim in his most courteous style, coming softly into George's room. And George looked up at the old man's wrinkled face, and down at his crimson slippers, with the benevolent air of a bookworm permitting himself to be drawn away from an ideal world into the actual. Glasses on the end of George's nose would have set off the tableau, but George had outgrown the spectacles which had disfigured his boyhood. As a fact, since his return that afternoon from Mrs. John's, he had, to the detriment of modesty and the fostering of conceit, accomplished some further study for the Final, although most of the time had been spent in dreaming of women and luxury.

"All right," said he. "I'll come."

"I don't think that lamp's been very well trimmed to-day," said Mr. Haim apologetically, sniffing.

"Does it smell?"

"Well, I do notice a slight odour."

"I'll open the window," said George heartily. He rose, pulled the curtains, and opened the front French window with a large gesture. The wild, raw, damp air of Sunday night rushed in from the nocturnal Grove, and instantly extinguished the lamp.

"Oh!" exclaimed Mr. Haim, rather nervously.

"Saved me the trouble," said George.

As he emerged after Mr. Haim from the dark room, he was thinking that it was ridiculous not to have electricity, and that he must try to come to some arrangement with Mr. Haim for the installation of electricity. Fancy oil-lamps in the middle of London in the twentieth century! Shocks were waiting in George's mind for Mr. Haim. He intended, if he could, to get the room on the first floor, empty since the departure of Marguerite, and to use it for a bedroom, while keeping the ground-floor room exclusively for work and society. His project would involve shocks also for Mr. Edwin Clayhanger in the Five Towns, who would be called upon to pay; but George had an airy confidence in the ability of his stepfather to meet such shocks in a satisfactory manner.

To George's surprise, Mr. Alfred Prince was in the sitting-room. Shabby and creased as usual, he looked far more like a clerk in some establishment where clerks were not morally compelled to imitate dandies than like an etcher of European renown. But, also as usual, he was quietly at ease and conversational; and George at once divined that he had been invited with the object of relieving the social situation created by the presence of the brilliant young lodger at tea. This tea was the first meal to be taken by George with Mr. and Mrs. Haim, for he was almost never at home on Sunday afternoons, and he was not expected to be at home. The table showed, as Mr. Haim's nervousness had shown, that the importance of the occasion had been realized. It was an obviously elaborate table. The repast was ready in every detail; the teapot was under the cosy; the cover was over the hot crumpets; Mrs. Haim alone lacked.

"Where's missus?" asked George lightly. Mr. Haim had not come into the room.

"I don't know," said Mr. Prince. "She brought the tea in a minute ago. You been working this afternoon?"

At that moment Mr. Haim entered. He said:

"Mrs. Haim isn't feeling very well. She's upstairs. She says she's sure she'll be all right in a little while. In the meantime she prefers us to go on with our tea."

Mr. Prince and Mr. Haim looked at each other, and George looked at Mr. Haim. The older men showed apprehension. The strange idea of unconquerable destiny crossed George's mind--destiny clashing ruthlessly with ambition and desire. The three males sat down in obedience to the wish of the woman who had hidden herself in the room above. All of them were dominated by the thought of her. They did not want to sit down and eat and drink, and they were obliged to do so by the invisible volitional force of which Mr. Haim was the unwilling channel. Mr. Haim, highly self-conscious, began to pour out the tea. Mr. Prince, highly self-conscious, suggested that he should make himself useful by distributing the crumpets while they were hot. George, highly selfconscious, accepted a crumpet. Mr. Prince chatted; George responded in a brave worldly fashion; Mr. Haim said 'Yes,' 'Ye-es,' very absently.

And then Mrs. Haim appeared smiling in the doorway. "Ah!" breathed everybody, assuaged. "Ah!" Mr. Haim moved from in front of the tea-tray to the next seat. Mrs. Haim was perhaps somewhat pale, but she gave a sincere, positive assurance that she was perfectly well again. Reassurance spread throughout the company. Forebodings vanished; hearts lightened; gladness reigned; the excellence of crumpets became apparent. And all this swift, wonderful change was brought about by the simple entry of the woman. But beneath the genuine relief and satisfaction of the men there stirred vaguely the thought of the mysteriousness of women, of the entire female sex. Mrs. Haim, charwoman, was just as mysterious as any other woman. As for George, despite the exhilaration which he could feel rising in him effortless and unsought, he was preoccupied by more than women's mysteriousness; the conception of destiny lingered and faintly troubled him. It was as though he had been walking on a clear path through a vast and empty and safe forest, and the eyes of a tiger had gleamed for an instant in the bush and gone. Not a real tiger! And if a real tiger, then a tiger that would never recur, and the only tiger in the forest!... Yet the entire forest was transformed.

Mrs. Haim was wearing the blue sateen. It was a dress unsuited to her because it emphasized her large bulk; but it was her best dress; it shone and glittered; it imposed. Her duty was to wear it on that Sunday afternoon. She was shy, without being self-conscious. To preside over a society consisting of young bloods, etchers of European renown, and pillars of the architectural profession was an ordeal for her. She did not pretend that it was not an ordeal. She did not pretend that the occasion was not extraordinary. She was quite natural in her calm confusion. She was not even proud, being perhaps utterly incapable of social pride. Her husband was proud for her. He looked at her earnestly, wistfully. He could not disguise his anxiety for her success. Was she equal to the role? She was. Of course she was. He had never doubted that she would be (he said to himself). His pride increased, scarcely escaped being fatuous.

"I must congratulate you on the new front doormat, Mrs. Haim," said Mr. Prince, with notable conversational tact. "I felt it at once in the dark."

Mrs. Haim smiled.

"I do like a good doormat," she said. "It saves so much work, I always think. I told Mr. Haim I thought we needed a new one, and bless me if he didn't take me straight out to buy one."

The new doormat expressed Mrs. Haim's sole and characteristic criticism of the organism into which she had so unassumingly entered. Secure in the adoration of Mr. Haim, she might safely have turned the place upside-down and proved to the Grove that she could act the mistress with the best of them; but she changed nothing except the doormat. The kitchen and scullery had already been hers before the eye of Mr. Haim had fallen upon her; she was accustomed to them and had largely fashioned their arrangements. Her own furniture, such of it as was retained, had been put into the spare bedroom and the kitchen, and was hardly noticeable there. The dramatic thing for her to do would have been to engage another charwoman. But Mrs. Haim was not dramatic; she was accommodating. She fitted herself in. The answer to people who asked what Mr. Haim could see in her, was that what Mr. Haim first saw was her mere way of existing, and that in the same way she loved. At her tea-table, as elsewhere, she exhibited no special quality; she said little; she certainly did not shine. Nevertheless the three men were quite happy and at ease, because her way of existing soothed and reinspired them. George especially got gay; and he narrated the automobile adventure of the afternoon with amusing gusto. He was thereby a sort of hero, and he liked that. He was bound by his position in the world and by his clothes and his style to pretend to some extent that the adventure was much less extraordinary to him than it seemed to them. The others made no pretence. They were open-mouthed. Their attitude admitted frankly that above them was a world to which they could not climb, that they were not familiar with it and knew nothing about it. They admired George; they put it to his credit that he was acquainted with these lofty matters and moved carelessly and freely among them; and George too somehow thought that credit was due to him and that his superiority was genuine.

"And do you mean to say