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

rough and dirty desk in the inner room of the works "office," surrounded by dust-covered sample vases and other vessels of all shapes, sizes, and tints--specimens of Horrocleave's "Art Lustre Ware," a melancholy array of ingenious ugliness that nevertheless filled with pride its creators. He looked through a dirt-obscured window and with unseeing gaze surveyed a muddy, littered quadrangle whose twilight was reddened by gleams from the engine-house. In this yard lay flat a sign that had been blown down from the facade of the manufactory six months before: "Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware." Within the room was another sign, itself fashioned in lustre-ware: "Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware." And the envelopes and paper and bill-heads on the desk all bore the same legend: "Horrocleave. Art Lustre Ware."

He owed seventy-three pounds to the petty-cash box, and he was startled and shocked. He was startled because for weeks past he had refrained from adding up the columns of the cash-book--partly from idleness and partly from a desire to remain in ignorance of his own doings. He had hoped for the best. He had faintly hoped that the deficit would not exceed ten pounds, or twelve; he had been prepared for a deficit of twenty-five, or even thirty. But seventy-three really shocked. Nay, it staggered. It meant that in addition to his salary, some thirty shillings a week had been mysteriously trickling through the incurable hole in his pocket. Not to mention other debts! He well knew that to Shillitoe alone (his admirable tailor) he owed eighteen pounds.

It may be asked how a young bachelor, with private means and a fine salary, living in a district where prices are low and social conventions not costly, could have come to such a pass. The answer is that Louis had no private means, and that his salary was not fine. The thousand pounds had gradually vanished, as a thousand pounds will, in the refinements of material existence and in the pursuit of happiness. His bank-account had long been in abeyance. His salary was three pounds a week. Many a member of the liberal professions--many a solicitor, for example--brings up a family on three pounds a week in the provinces. But for a Lieutenant-General's nephew, who had once had a thousand pounds in one lump, three pounds a week was inadequate. As a fact, Louis conceived himself "Art Director" of Horrocleave's, and sincerely thought that as such he was ill-paid. Herein was one of his private excuses for eccentricity with the petty cash. It may also be asked what Louis had to show for his superb expenditure. The answer is, nothing.

With the seventy-three pounds desolatingly clear in his mind, he quitted his desk in order to reconnoitre the outer and larger portion of the counting-house. He went as far as the archway, and saw black smoke being blown downwards from heaven into Friendly Street. A policeman was placidly regarding the smoke as he strolled by. And Louis, though absolutely sure that the officer would not carry out his plain duty of summoning Horrocleave's for committing a smoke-nuisance, did not care for the spectacle of the policeman. He returned to the inner office, and locked the door. The "staff" and the "hands" had all gone, save one or two piece-workers in the painting-shop across the yard.

The night watchman, fresh from bed, was moving fussily about the yard. He nodded with respect to Louis through the grimy window. Louis lit the gas, and spread a newspaper in front of the window by way of blind. And then he began a series of acts on the petty-cash book. The office clock indicated twenty past six. He knew that time was short, but he had a natural gift for the invention and execution of these acts, and he calculated that under half an hour would suffice for them. But when he next looked at the clock, the acts being accomplished, one hour had elapsed; it had seemed to him more like a quarter of an hour. Yet as blotting-paper cannot safely be employed in such delicate calligraphic feats as those of Louis', even an hour was not excessive for what he had done. An operator clumsier, less cool, less cursory, more cautious than himself might well have spent half a night over the job. He locked up the book, washed his hands and face with remarkable celerity in a filthy lavatory basin, brushed his hair, removed his cuff-shields, changed his coat, and fled at speed, leaving the key of the office with the watchman.


III


"I suppose the old lady was getting anxious?" said he brightly (but in a low tone so that the old lady should not hear), as he shook hands with Rachel in the lobby. He had recognized her in front of him up the lane--had, in fact, nearly overtaken her; and she was standing at the open door when he mounted the steps. She had had just time to prove to Mrs. Maldon, by a "He's coming" thrown through the sitting-room doorway, that she had not waited for Louis Fores and walked up with him.

"Yes," Rachel replied in the same tone, most deceitfully leaving him under the false impression that it was the old lady's anxiety that had sent her out. She had, then, emerged scathless in reputation from the indiscreet adventure!

The house was animated by the arrival of Louis; at once it seemed to live more keenly when he had crossed the threshold. And Louis found pleasure in the house--in the welcoming aspect of its interior, in Rachel's evident excited gladness at seeing him, in her honest and agreeable features, and in her sheer girlishness. A few minutes earlier he had been in the sordid and dreadful office. Now he was in another and a cleaner, prettier world. He yielded instantly and fully to its invitation, for he had the singular faculty of being able to cast off care like a garment. He felt sympathetic towards women, and eager to employ for their contentment all the charm which he knew he possessed. He gave himself, generously, in every gesture and intonation.

"Office, auntie, office!" he exclaimed, elegantly entering the parlour. "Sack-cloth! Ashes! Hallo! where's Julian? Is he late too?"

When he had received the news about Julian Maldon he asked to see the telegram, and searched out its place of origin, and drew forth a pocket time-table, and remarked in a wise way that he hoped Julian would "make the connection" at Derby. Lastly he predicted the precise minute at which Julian "ought" to be knocking at the front door. And both women felt their ignorant, puzzled inferiority in these recondite matters of travel, and the comfort of having an omniscient male in the house.

Then slightly drawing up his dark blue trousers with an accustomed movement, he carefully sat down on the Chesterfield, and stroked his soft black moustache (which was estimably long for a fellow of twenty-three) and patted his black hair.

"Rachel, you didn't fasten that landing window, after all!" said Mrs. Maldon, looking over Louis' head at the lady companion, who hesitated modestly near the door. "I've tried, but I couldn't."

"Neither could I, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel. "I was thinking perhaps Mr. Fores wouldn't mind--"

She did not explain that her failure to fasten the window had been more or less deliberate, since, while actually tugging at the window, she had been visited by the sudden delicious thought: "How nice it would be to ask Louis Fores to do this hard thing for me!"

And now she had asked him.

"Certainly!" Louis jumped to his feet, and off he went upstairs. Most probably, if the sudden delicious thought had not skipped into Rachel's brain, he would never have made that critical ascent to the first floor.

A gas-jet burned low on the landing.

"Let's have a little light on the subject," he cheerfully muttered to himself, as he turned on the gas to the full.

Then in the noisy blaze of yellow and blue light he went to the window and with a single fierce wrench he succeeded in pulling the catch into position. He was proud of his strength. It pleased him to think of the weakness of women; it pleased him to anticipate the impressed thanks of the weak women for this exertion of his power on their behalf. "Have you managed it so soon?" his aunt would exclaim, and he would answer in a carefully offhand way, "Of course. Why not?"

He was about to descend, but he remembered that he must not leave the gas at full. With his hand on the tap, he glanced perfunctorily around the little landing. The door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom was in front of him, at right angles to the window. By the door, which was ajar, stood a cane-seated chair. Underneath the chair he perceived a whitish package or roll that seemed to be out of place there on the floor. He stooped and picked it up. And as the paper rustled peculiarly in his hand, he could feel his heart give a swift bound. He opened the roll. It consisted of nothing whatever but bank-notes. He listened intently, with ear cocked and rigid limbs, and he could just catch the soothing murmur of women's voices in the parlour beneath the reverberating, solemn pulse of the lobby clock.


IV


Louis Fores had been intoxicated into a condition of poesy. He was deliciously incapable of any precise thinking; he could not formulate any theory to account for the startling phenomenon of a roll of bank-notes loose under a chair on a first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house; he could not even estimate the value of the roll--he felt only that it was indefinitely prodigious. But he had the most sensitive appreciation of the exquisite beauty of those pieces of paper. They were not merely beautiful because they stood for delight and indulgence, raising lovely visions of hosiers' and jewellers' shops and the night interiors of clubs and restaurants--raising one clear vision of himself clasping a watch-bracelet on the soft arm of Rachel who had so excitingly smiled upon him a moment ago. They were beautiful in themselves; the aspect and very texture of them were beautiful--surpassing pictures and fine scenery. They were the most poetic things in the world. They transfigured the narrow, gaslit first-floor landing of his great-aunt's house into a secret and unearthly grove of bliss. He was drunk with quivering emotion.

And then, as he gazed at the divine characters printed in sable on the rustling whiteness, he was aware of a stab of ugly, coarse pain. Up to the instant of beholding those bank-notes he had been convinced that his operations upon the petty-cash book would be entirely successful and that the immediate future of Horrocleave's was assured of tranquillity; he had been blandly certain that Horrocleave held no horrid suspicion against him, and that even if Horrocleave's pate did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. But now his mind was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible to gull the acute and mighty Horrocleave. Failure, exposure, disgrace, ruin, seemed inevitable--and also intolerable. It was astonishing that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. The bank-notes, by some magic virtue which they possessed, had opened his eyes to the truth. And they presented themselves as absolutely indispensable to him. They had sprung from naught, they belonged to nobody, they existed without a creative cause in the material world--and they were indispensable to him! Could it be conceived that he should lose his high and brilliant position in the town, that two policemen should hustle him into the black van, that the gates of a prison should