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

But I suppose you've been very upset."

"Oh," said Rachel, "I only want a large tin of Singapore Delicious Chunks, please."

But if she had announced her intention of spending a thousand pounds in Ted Malkin's shop she would not have better pleased him. He beamed. He desired the whole shop to hear that order, for it was the vindication of honest, modest trading--of his father's methods and his own. His father, himself, and about a couple of other tradesmen had steadily fought the fight of the market-place against St. Luke's Square in the day of its glory, and more recently against the powerfully magnetic large shops at Hanbridge, and they had not been defeated. As for Ted Malkin, he was now beyond doubt the "best" provision-dealer and grocer in the town, and had drawn ahead even of "Holl's" (as it was still called), the one good historic shop left in Luke's Square. The onslaught of Wason had alarmed him, though he had pretended to ignore it. But he was delectably reassured by this heavenly incident of the representative of one of his most distinguished customers coming into the shop and deliberately choosing to buy preserved pineapple from him at 8-1/2d. when it could be got thirty yards away for 7 1/2d. Rachel read his thoughts plainly. She knew well enough that she had done rather a fine thing, and her demeanour showed it. Ted Malkin enveloped the tin in suitable paper.

"Sure there's nothing else?"

"Not at this counter."

He gave her the tin, smiled, and as he turned to the next waiting customer, called out--

"Singapore Delicious, eight and a half pence."

It was rather a poor affair, that tin--a declension from the great days of Mrs. Maldon's married life, when she spent freely, knowing naught of her husband's income except that it was large and elastic. In those days she would buy a real pineapple, entire, once every three weeks or so, costing five, six, seven, or eight shillings--gorgeous and spectacular fruit. Now she might have pineapple every day if she chose, but it was not quite the same pineapple. She affected to like it, she did like it, but the difference between the old pineapple and the new was the saddening difference, for Mrs. Maldon's secret heart, between the great days and the paltry, facile convenience of the twentieth century.

It was to his aunt, who presided over the opposite side of the shop, including the cash-desk, that Ted Malkin proclaimed in a loud voice the amounts of purchases on his own side. Miss Malkin was a virgin of fifty-eight years' standing, with definite and unchangeable ideas on every subject on earth or in heaven except her own age. As Rachel, followed by Louis Fores, crossed the shop, Miss Malkin looked at them and closed her lips, and lowered her eyelids, and the upper part of her body seemed to curve slightly, with the sinuosity of a serpent--a strange, significant movement, sometimes ill described as "bridling."

The total effect was as though Miss Malkin had suddenly clicked the shutters down on all the windows of her soul and was spying at Rachel and Louis Fores through a tiny concealed orifice in the region of her eye. It was nothing to Miss Malkin that Rachel on that night of all nights had come in to buy Singapore Delicious Chunks at 8-1/2d. It was nothing to her that Mrs. Maldon had had "an attack." Miss Malkin merely saw Rachel and Fores gadding about the town together of a Saturday night while Mrs. Maldon was ill in bed. And she regarded Ted's benevolence as the benevolence of a simpleton. Between Miss Malkin's taciturnity and the voice within her Rachel had a terrible three minutes. She was "sneaped"; which fortunately made her red hair angry, so that she could keep some of her dignity. Louis Fores seemed to be quite unconscious that a fearful scene was enacting between Miss Malkin and Rachel, and he blandly insisted on taking the pineapple-tin and the cocoa-tin and slipping them into the reticule, as though he had been shopping with Rachel all his life and there was a perfect understanding between them. The moral effect was very bad. Rachel blushed again.

When she emerged from the shop she had the illusion of being breathless, and in the midst of a terrific adventure the end of which none could foresee. She was furious against Miss Malkin and against herself. Yet she indignantly justified herself. Was not Louis Fores Mrs. Maiden's nephew, and were not he and she doing the best thing they could together under the difficult circumstances of the old lady's illness? If she was not to co-operate with the old lady's sole relative in Bursley, with whom was she to co-operate? In vain such justifications!... She murderously hated Miss Malkin. She said to herself, without meaning it, that no power should induce her ever to enter the shop again.

And she thought: "I can't possibly go into another shop to-night--I can't possibly do it! And yet I must. Why am I such a silly baby?"

As they walked slowly along the pavement she was in the wild dream anew, and Louis Fores was her only hope and reliance. She clung to him, though not with her arm. She seemed to know him very intimately, and still he was more enigmatic to her than ever he had been.

As for Louis, beneath his tranquil mien of a man of experience and infinite tact, he was undergoing the most extraordinary and delightful sensations, keener even than those which had thrilled him in Rachel's kitchen on the previous evening. The social snob in him had somehow suddenly expired, and he felt intensely the strange charm of going shopping of a Saturday night with a young woman, and making a little purchase here and a little purchase there, and thinking about halfpennies. And in his fancy he built a small house to which he and Rachel would shortly return, and all the brilliant diversions of bachelordom seemed tame and tedious compared to the wondrous existence of this small house.

"Now I have to go to Heath's the butcher's," said Rachel, determined at all costs to be a woman and not a silly baby. After that plain announcement her cowardice would have no chance to invent an excuse for not going into another shop.

But she added--

"And that'll be all."

"I know Master Bob Heath. Known him a long time," said Louis Fores, with amusement in his voice, as though to imply that he could relate strange and titillating matters about Heath if he chose, and indeed that he was a mine of secret lore concerning the citizens.

The fact was that he had travelled once to Woore races with the talkative Heath, and that Heath had introduced him to his brother Stanny Heath, a local book-maker of some reputation, from whom Louis had won five pounds ten during the felicitous day. Ever afterwards Bob Heath had effusively saluted Louis on every possible occasion, and had indeed once stopped him in the street and said: "My brother treated you all right, didn't he? Stanny's a true sport." And Louis had to be effusive also. It would never do to be cold to a man from whose brother you had won--and received--five pounds ten on a racecourse.

So that when Louis followed Rachel into Heath's shop at the top of Duck Bank the fat and happy Heath gave him a greeting in which astonishment and warm regard were mingled. The shop was empty of customers, and also it contained little meat, for Heath's was not exactly a Saturday-night trade. Bob Heath, clothed from head to foot in slightly blood-stained white, stood behind one hacked counter, and Mrs. Heath, similarly attired, and rather stouter, stood behind the other; and each possessed a long steel which hung from an ample loose girdle.

Heath, a man of forty, had a salute somewhat military in gesture, though conceived in a softer, more accommodating spirit. He raised his chubby hand to his forehead, but all the muscles of it were lax and the fingers loosely curved; at the same time he drew back his left foot and kicked up the heel a few inches. Louis amiably responded. Rachel went direct to Mrs. Heath, a woman of forty-five. She had never before seen Heath in the shop.

"Doing much with the gees lately, Mr. Fores?" Heath inquired in a cheerful, discreet tone.

"Not me!"

"Well, I can't say I've had much luck myself, sir."

The conversation was begun in proper form. Through it Louis could hear Rachel buying a cutlet, and then another cutlet, from Mrs. Heath, and protesting that five-pence was a good price and all she desired to pay even for the finest cutlet in the shop. And then Rachel asked about sweetbreads. Heath's voice grew more and more confidential and at length, after a brief pause, he whispered--

"Ye're not married, are ye, sir? Excuse the liberty."

It was a whisper, but one of those terrible, miscalculated whispers that can be heard for miles around, like the call of the cuckoo. Plainly Heath was not aware of the identity of Rachel Fleckring. And in his world, which was by no means the world of his shop and his wife, it was incredible that a man should run round shopping with a woman on a Saturday night unless he was a husband on unescapable duty.

Louis shook his head.

Mrs. Heath called out in severe accents which were a reproof and a warning: "Got a sweetbread, Robert? It's for Mrs. Maldon."

The clumsy fool understood that he had blundered.

He had no sweetbread--not even for Mrs. Maldon. The cutlets were wrapped in newspaper, and Louis rather self-consciously opened the maw of the reticule for them.

"No offence, I hope, sir," said Heath as the pair left the shop, thus aggravating his blunder. Louis and Rachel crossed Duck Bank in constrained silence. Rachel was scarlet. The new cinema next to the new Congregational chapel blazed in front of them.

"Wouldn't care to look in here, I suppose, would you?" Louis imperturbably suggested.

Rachel did not reply.

"Only for a quarter of an hour or so," said Louis.

Rachel did not venture to glance up at him. She was so agitated that she could scarcely speak.

"I don't think so," she muttered.

"Why not?" he exquisitely pleaded. "It will do you good."

She raised her head and saw the expression of his face, so charming, so provocative, so persuasive. The voice within her was insistent, but she would not listen to it. Nobody had ever looked at her as Louis was looking at her then. The streets, the town faded. She thought: "Whatever happens, I cannot withstand that face." She was feverishly happy, and at the same time ravaged by both pain and fear. She became a fatalist. And she abandoned the pretence that she was not the slave of that face. Her eyes grew candidly acquiescent, as if she were murmuring to him, "I am defenceless against you."


III


It was not surprising that Rachel, who never in her life had beheld at close quarters any of the phenomena of luxury, should blink her ingenuous eyes at the blinding splendour of the antechambers of the Imperial Cinema de Luxe. Eyes less ingenuous than hers had blinked before that prodigious dazzlement. Even Louis, a man of vast experience and sublime imperturbability, visiting the Imperial on its opening night, had allowed the significant words to escape him, "Well, I'm blest!"--proof enough of the triumph of the Imperial!

The Imperial had set out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns;