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

but which her deepest instinct it was to counterfeit. George, while admiring, was a little dismayed. She was sarcastic. She had brains and knowledge and ideas. There was an intellectual foundation to her picture. And she could paint--like a witch! Oh! She was ruthlessly clever! Well, he did not like her. What he wanted, though he would not admit it, was old Onway's womanly woman. And especially in that hour he wanted the womanly woman.

"What's Marguerite up to?" he asked quietly.

"After the heat and the toil of the day she's beautifying herself for your august approval," said Agg icily. "I expect she's hurrying all she can. But naturally you expect her to be in a permanent state of waiting for you--fresh out of the cotton-wool."

The next instant Marguerite appeared from the cubicle or dressing-room which had been contrived in a corner of the studio to the left of the door. She was in her plain, everyday attire, but she had obviously just washed, and her smooth hair shone from the brush.

"Well, George."

"Well, Marguerite."

Both spoke casually. Celia Agg was the only person in the world privy to their engagement; but they permitted themselves no freedoms in front of her. As Marguerite came near to George, she delicately touched his arm--nothing more. She was smiling happily, but as soon as she looked close at his face under the lamp, her face changed completely. He thought: "She understands there's something up."

She said, not without embarrassment:

"George, I really must have some fresh air. I haven't had a breath all day. Is it raining?"

"No. Would you like to go for a walk?"

"Oh! I should!"

He was very grateful, and also impressed by the accuracy of her intuitions and her quick resourcefulness. She had comprehended at a glance that he had a profound and urgent need to be alone with her. She was marvellously comforting, precious beyond price. All his susceptibilities, wounded by the scene at Alexandra Grove, and further irritated by Agg, were instantaneously salved and soothed. Her tones, her scarcely perceptible gesture of succour, produced the assuaging miracle. She fulfilled her role to perfection. She was a talented and competent designer, but as the helpmeet of a man she had genius. His mind dwelt on her with rapture.

"You'll be going out as soon as you've changed, dear?" she said affectionately to Agg.

"Yes," answered Agg, who at the mirror was wiping from her face the painted signs of alcoholism. She had thrown off the bag wig. "You'd better take the key with you. You'll be back before I am." She sat down on one of the draped settees which were beds in disguise, and Marguerite got a hat, cloak, and gloves.

While George was resuming his overcoat, which Marguerite held for him, Agg suddenly sprang up and rushed towards them.

"Good night, Flora Macdonald," she murmured in her deep voice in Marguerite's ear, put masculine arms round her, and kissed her. It was a truly remarkable bit of male impersonating, as George had to admit, though he resented it.

Then she gave a short, harsh laugh.

"Good night, old Agg," said Marguerite, with sweet responsiveness, and smiled ingenuously at George.

George, impatient, opened the door, and the damp wind swept anew into the studio.


IV


It was a fine night; the weather had cleared, and the pavements were drying. George, looking up in a pause of the eager conversational exchanges, drew tonic air mightily into his lungs.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"Tite Street," said Marguerite. "That's the Tower House." And she nodded towards the formidable sky-scraper which another grade of landlord had erected for another grade of artists who demanded studios from the capitalist. Marguerite, the Chelsea girl, knew Chelsea, if she knew nothing else; her feet turned corners in the dark with assurance, and she had no need to look at street-signs. George regarded the short thoroughfare made notorious by the dilettantism, the modishness, and the witticisms of art. It had an impressive aspect. From the portico of one highly illuminated house a crimson carpet stretched across the pavement to the gutter; some dashing blade of the brush had maliciously determined to affront the bourgeois Sabbath. George stamped on the carpet; he hated it because it was not his carpet; and he swore to himself to possess that very carpet or its indistinguishable brother.

"I was a most frightful ass to leave that letter lying about!" he exclaimed.

"Oh! George!" she protested lovingly. "It could so easily happen--a thing like that could. It was just bad luck."

A cushion! The divinest down cushion! That was what she was! She was more. She defended a man against himself. She restored him to perfection. Her affectionate faith was a magical inspiration to him; it was, really, the greatest force in the world. Most women would have agreed with him, however tactfully, that he had been careless about the letter. An Adela would certainly have berated him in her shrewish, thin tones. A Lois would have been sarcastic, scornfully patronizing him as a 'boy.' And what would Agg have done?... They might have forgiven and even forgotten, but they would have indulged themselves first. Marguerite was exteriorly simple. She would not perhaps successfully dominate a drawing-room. She would cut no figure playing with lives at the wheel of an automobile. After all, she would no doubt be ridiculous in the costume of Bonnie Prince Charlie. But she was finer than the other women whose images floated in his mind. And she was worth millions of them. He was overpowered by the sense of his good fortune in finding her. He went cold at the thought of what he would have missed if he had not found her. He would not try to conceive what his existence would be without her, for it would be unendurable. Of this he was convinced.

"Do you think he'll go talking about it?" George asked, meaning of course Mr. Haim.

"More likely _she_ will," said Marguerite.

He positively could feel her lips tightening. Futile to put in a word for Mrs. Haim! When he had described the swoon, Marguerite had shown neither concern nor curiosity. Not the slightest! Antipathy to her stepmother had radiated from her almost visibly in the night like the nimbus round a street lamp. Well, she did not understand; she was capable of injustice; she was quite wrong about Mrs. Haim. What matter? Her whole being was centralized on himself. He was aware of his superiority.

He went on quietly:

"If the old man gets chattering at the office, the Orgreaves will know, and the next minute the news'll be in the Five Towns. I can't possibly let my people hear from anybody else of _my engagement_ before they hear from me. However, if it comes to the point, we'll tell everybody. Why not?"

"Oh, but dearest! It was so nice it being a secret. It was the loveliest thing in the world."

"Yes, it was jolly."

"Perhaps father will feel differently in the morning, and then you can----"

"He won't," said George flatly. "You don't know what a state he's in. I didn't tell you--he called me a spy in the house, a dirty spy. Likewise a jackanapes. Doubtless a delicate illusion to my tender years."

"He _didn't_!"

"He did, honestly."

"So that was what upset you so!" Marguerite murmured. It was her first admission that she had noticed his agitation.

"Did I look so upset, then?"

"George, you looked terrible. I felt the only thing to do was for us to go out at once."

"Oh! But surely I wasn't so upset as all that?" said George, finding in Marguerite's statement a reflection upon his ability to play the part of an imperturbable man of the world. "Agg didn't seem to see anything."

"Agg doesn't know you like I do."

She insinuated her arm into his. He raised his hand and took hold of hers. In the left pocket of his overcoat he could feel the somewhat unwieldy key of the studio. He was happy. The domestic feel of the key completed his happiness.

"Of course I can't stay on there," said he.

"At father's? Oh! I do wish father hadn't talked like that." She spoke sadly, not critically.

"I suppose I must sleep there to-night. But I'm not going to have my breakfast there to-morrow morning. No fear! I'll have it up town. Lucas'll be able to put me up to some new digs. He always knows about that sort of thing. Then I'll drive down and remove all my worldly in a four-wheeler."

He spoke with jauntiness, in his role of male who is easily equal to any situation. But she said in a low, tenderly commiserating voice:

"It's a shame!"

"Not a bit!" he replied. Then he suddenly stood still and brought her to a halt. Under his erratic guidance they had turned along Dilke Street, and northwards again, past the Botanical Garden. "And this is Paradise Row!" he said, surveying the broad street which they had come into.

"Paradise Row?" she corrected him softly. "No, dear, it's Queen's Road. It runs into Pimlico Road."

"I mean it used to be Paradise Row," he explained. "It was the most fashionable street in Chelsea, you know. Everybody that was anybody lived here."

"Oh! Really!" She showed an amiable desire to be interested, but her interest did not survive more than a few seconds. "I didn't know. I know Paradise Walk. It's that horrid little passage down there on the right."

She had not the historic sense; and she did not understand his mood, did not in the slightest degree suspect that events had been whipping his ambition once more, and that at that moment he was enjoying the seventeenth and even the sixteenth centuries, and thinking of Sir Thomas More and Miss More, and all manner of grandiose personages and abodes, and rebelling obstinately against the fact, that he was as yet a nonentity in Chelsea, whereas he meant in the end to yield to nobody in distinction and renown. He knew that she did not understand, and he would not pretend to himself that she did. There was no reason why she should understand. He did not particularly want her to understand.

"Let's have a look at the river, shall we?" he suggested, and they moved towards Cheyne Walk.

"Dearest," she said, "you must come and have breakfast at the studio to-morrow morning. I shall get it myself."

"But Agg won't like me poking my nose in for breakfast."

"You great silly! Don't you know she simply adores you?"

He was certainly startled by this remark, and he began to like Agg.

"Old Agg! Not she!" he protested, pleased, but a little embarrassed. "Will she be up?"

"You'll see whether she'll be up or not. Nine o'clock's the time, isn't it?"

They reached the gardens of Cheyne Walk. Three bridges hung their double chaplets of lights over the dark river. On the southern shore the shapes of high trees waved mysteriously above the withdrawn woodland glades that in daytime were Battersea Park. Here and there a tiny red gleam gave warning that a pier jutted out into the stream; but nothing moved on the water. The wind that swept clean the pavements had unclouded ten million stars. It was a wind unlike any other wind that ever blew, at once caressing and roughly challenging. The two, putting it behind them, faced eastward, and began to pass one by one the innumerable ornate gas-lamps of Chelsea Embankment, which stretched