Part 10

This portrait of the banker, who accumulated riches both on earth and in heaven, may possibly be overdrawn, however, because Frances and I were ‘artistic temperaments’ that viewed the type with a dislike and distrust amounting to contempt. The majority considered Samuel Franklyn a worthy man and a good citizen. The majority, doubtless, held the saner view. A few years more, and he certainly would have been made a baronet. He relieved much suffering in the world, as assuredly as he caused many souls the agonies of torturing fear by his emphasis upon damnation. Had there been one point of beauty in him, we might have been more lenient; only we found it not, and, I admit, took little pains to search. I shall never forget the look of dour forgiveness with which he heard our excuses for missing Morning Prayers that Sunday morning of our single visit to The Towers. My sister learned that a change was made soon afterwards, prayers being ‘conducted’ after breakfast instead of before.

The Towers stood solemnly upon a Sussex hill amid park-like modern grounds, but the house cannot better be described--it would be so wearisome for one thing--than by saying that it was a cross between an overgrown, pretentious Norwood villa and one of those saturnine Institutes for cripples the train passes as it slinks ashamed through South London into Surrey. It was ‘wealthily’ furnished and at first sight imposing, but on closer acquaintance revealed a meagre personality, barren and austere. One looked for Rules and Regulations on the walls, all signed By Order. The place was a prison that shut out ‘the world.’ There was, of course, no billiard-room, no smoking-room, no room for play of any kind, and the great hall at the back, once a chapel which might have been used for dancing, theatricals, or other innocent amusements, was consecrated in his day to meetings of various kinds, chiefly brigades, temperance or missionary societies. There was a harmonium at one end--on the level floor--a raised dais or platform at the other, and a gallery above for the servants, gardeners and coachmen. It was heated with hot-water pipes, and hung with Doré’s pictures, though these latter were soon removed and stored out of sight in the attics as being too unspiritual. In polished, shiny wood, it was a representation in miniature of that poky exclusive Heaven he took about with him, externalising it in all he did and planned, even in the grounds about the house.

Changes in The Towers, Frances told me, had been made during Mabel’s year of widowhood abroad--an organ put into the big hall, the library made liveable and recatalogued--when it was permissible to suppose she had found her soul again and returned to her normal, healthy views of life, which included enjoyment and play, literature, music and the arts, without, however, a touch of that trivial thoughtlessness usually termed worldliness. Mrs. Franklyn, as I remembered her, was a quiet little woman, shallow, perhaps, and easily influenced, but sincere as a dog and thorough in her faithful friendships. Her tastes at heart were catholic, and that heart was simple and unimaginative. That she took up with the various movements of the day was sign merely that she was searching in her limited way for a belief that should bring her peace. She was, in fact, a very ordinary woman, her calibre a little less than that of Frances. I knew they used to discuss all kinds of theories together, but as these discussions never resulted in action, I had come to regard her as harmless. Still, I was not sorry when she married, and I did not welcome now a renewal of the former intimacy. The philanthropist had given her no children, or she would have made a good and sensible mother. No doubt she would marry again.

‘Mabel mentions that she’s been alone at The Towers since the end of August,’ Frances told me at tea-time; ‘and I’m sure she feels out of it and lonely. It would be a kindness to go. Besides, I always liked her.’

I agreed. I had recovered from my attack of selfishness. I expressed my pleasure.

‘You’ve written to accept,’ I said, half statement and half question.

Frances nodded. ‘I thanked for you,’ she added quietly, ‘explaining that you were not free at the moment, but that later, if not inconvenient, you might come down for a bit and join me.’

I stared. Frances sometimes had this independent way of deciding things. I was convicted, and punished into the bargain.

Of course there followed argument and explanation, as between brother and sister who were affectionate, but the recording of our talk could be of little interest. It was arranged thus, Frances and I both satisfied. Two days later she departed for The Towers, leaving me alone in the flat with everything planned for my comfort and good behaviour--she was rather a tyrant in her quiet way--and her last words as I saw her off from Charing Cross rang in my head for a long time after she was gone:

‘I’ll write and let you know, Bill. Eat properly, mind, and let me know if anything goes wrong.’

She waved her small gloved hand, nodded her head till the feather brushed the window, and was gone.

II

After the note announcing her safe arrival a week of silence passed, and then a letter came; there were various suggestions for my welfare, and the rest was the usual rambling information and description Frances loved, generously italicised.

‘... and we are quite alone,’ she went on in her enormous handwriting that seemed such a waste of space and labour, ‘though some others are coming presently, I believe. You could work here to your heart’s content. Mabel _quite_ understands, and says she would love to have you when you feel free to come. She has changed a bit--back to her old natural self: she never mentions _him_. The place has changed too in certain ways: it has more cheerfulness, I think. _She_ has put it in, this cheerfulness, spaded it in, if you know what I mean; but it lies about uneasily and is not natural--quite. The organ is a beauty. She must be very rich now, but she’s as gentle and sweet as ever. Do you know, Bill, I think he must have _frightened_ her into marrying him. I get the impression she was afraid of him.’ This last sentence was inked out, but I read it through the scratching; the letters being too big to hide. ‘He had an inflexible will beneath all that oily kindness which passed for spiritual. He was a real personality, I mean. I’m sure he’d have sent you and me cheerfully to the stake in another century--_for our own good_. Isn’t it odd she never speaks of him, even to me?’ This, again, was stroked through, though without the intention to obliterate--merely because it was repetition, probably. ‘The only reminder of him in the house now is a big copy of the presentation portrait that stands on the stairs of the Multitechnic Institute at Peckham--you know--that life-size one with his fat hand sprinkled with rings resting on a thick Bible and the other slipped between the buttons of a tight frock-coat. It hangs in the dining-room and rather dominates our meals. I wish Mabel would take it down. I think she’d like to, if she _dared_. There’s not a single photograph of him anywhere, even in her own room. Mrs. Marsh is here--you remember her, _his_ housekeeper, the wife of the man who got penal servitude for killing a baby or something,--_you_ said she robbed him and justified her stealing because the story of the unjust steward was in the Bible! How we laughed over that! _She’s_ just the same too, gliding about all over the house and turning up when least expected.’

Other reminiscences filled the next two sides of the letter, and ran, without a trace of punctuation, into instructions about a Salamander stove for heating my work-room in the flat; these were followed by things I was to tell the cook, and by requests for several articles she had forgotten and would like sent after her, two of them blouses, with descriptions so lengthy and contradictory that I sighed as I read them--‘unless you come down soon, in which case perhaps you wouldn’t mind bringing them; _not_ the mauve one I wear in the evening sometimes, but the pale blue one with lace round the collar and the crinkly front. They’re in the cupboard--or the drawer, I’m not sure which--of my bedroom. _Ask Annie_ if you’re in doubt. Thanks most _awfully_. Send a telegram, remember, and we’ll meet you in the motor _any time_. I don’t quite know if I shall stay the whole month--_alone_. It all depends....’ And she closed the letter, the italicised words increasing recklessly towards the end, with a repetition that Mabel would love to have me ‘for myself,’ as also to have a ‘man in the house,’ and that I only had to telegraph the day and the train.... This letter, coming by the second post, interrupted me in a moment of absorbing work, and, having read it through to make sure there was nothing requiring instant attention, I threw it aside and went on with my notes and reading. Within five minutes, however, it was back at me again. That restless thing called ‘between the lines’ fluttered about my mind. My interest in the Balkan States--political article that had been ‘ordered’--faded. Somewhere, somehow I felt disquieted, disturbed. At first I persisted in my work, forcing myself to concentrate, but soon found that a layer of new impressions floated between the article and my attention. It was like a shadow, though a shadow that dissolved upon inspection. Once or twice I glanced up, expecting to find some one in the room, that the door had opened unobserved and Annie was waiting for instructions. I heard the ’buses thundering across the bridge. I was aware of Oakley Street. Montenegro and the blue Adriatic melted into the October haze along that depressing Embankment that aped a river bank, and sentences from the letter flashed before my eyes and stung me. Picking it up and reading it through more carefully, I rang the bell and told Annie to find the blouses and pack them for the post, showing her finally the written description, and resenting the superior smile with which she at once interrupted, ‘_I_ know them, sir,’ and disappeared.

But it was not the blouses: it was that exasperating thing ‘between the lines’ that put an end to my work with its elusive teasing nuisance. The first sharp impression is alone of value in such a case, for once analysis begins the imagination constructs all kinds of false interpretation. The more I thought, the more I grew fuddled. The letter, it seemed to me, wanted to say another thing; instead the eight sheets _conveyed_ it merely. It came to the edge of disclosure, then halted. There was something on the writer’s mind, and I felt uneasy. Studying the sentences brought, however, no revelation, but increased confusion only; for while the uneasiness remained, the first clear hint had vanished. In the end I closed my books and went out to look up another matter at the British Museum Library. Perhaps I should discover it that way--by turning the mind in a totally new direction. I lunched at the Express Dairy in Oxford Street close by, and telephoned to Annie that I would be home to tea at five.

And at tea, tired physically and mentally after breathing the exhausted air of the Rotunda for five hours, my mind suddenly delivered up its original impression, vivid and clear-cut; no proof accompanied the revelation; it was mere presentiment, but convincing. Frances was disturbed in her mind, her orderly, sensible, housekeeping mind; she was uneasy, even perhaps afraid; something in the house distressed her, and she had need of me. Unless I went down, her time of rest and change, her quite necessary holiday, in fact, would be spoilt. She was too unselfish to say this, but it ran everywhere between the lines. I saw it clearly now. Mrs. Franklyn, moreover--and that meant Frances too--would like a ‘man in the house.’ It was a disagreeable phrase, a suggestive way of hinting something she dared not state definitely. The two women in that great, lonely barrack of a house were afraid.

My sense of duty, affection, unselfishness, whatever the composite emotion may be termed, was stirred; also my vanity. I acted quickly, lest reflection should warp clear, decent judgment. ‘Annie,’ I said, when she answered the bell, ‘you need not send those blouses by the post. I’ll take them down to-morrow when I go. I shall be away a week or two, possibly longer.’ And, having looked up a train, I hastened out to telegraph before I could change my fickle mind.

But no desire came that night to change my mind. I was doing the right, the necessary thing. I was even in something of a hurry to get down to The Towers as soon as possible. I chose an early afternoon train.

III

A telegram had told me to come to a town ten miles from the house, so I was saved the crawling train to the local station, and travelled down by an express. As soon as we left London the fog cleared off, and an autumn sun, though without heat in it, painted the landscape with golden browns and yellows. My spirits rose as I lay back in the luxurious motor and sped between the woods and hedges. Oddly enough, my anxiety of overnight had disappeared. It was due, no doubt, to that exaggeration of detail which reflection in loneliness brings. Frances and I had not been separated for over a year, and her letters from The Towers told so little. It had seemed unnatural to be deprived of those intimate particulars of mood and feeling I was accustomed to. We had such confidence in one another, and our affection was so deep. Though she was but five years younger than myself, I regarded her as a child. My attitude was fatherly. In return, she certainly mothered me with a solicitude that never cloyed. I felt no desire to marry while she was still alive. She painted in water-colours with a reasonable success, and kept house for me; I wrote, reviewed books and lectured on æsthetics; we were a humdrum couple of quasi-artists, well satisfied with life, and all I feared for her was that she might become a suffragette or be taken captive by one of these wild theories that caught her imagination sometimes, and that Mabel, for one, had fostered. As for myself, no doubt she deemed me a trifle solid or stolid--I forget which word she preferred--but on the whole there was just sufficient difference of opinion to make intercourse suggestive without monotony, and certainly without quarrelling. Drawing in deep draughts of the stinging autumn air, I felt happy and exhilarated. It was like going for a holiday, with comfort at the end of the journey instead of bargaining for centimes.

But my heart sank noticeably the moment the house came into view. The long drive, lined with hostile monkey trees and formal wellingtonias that were solemn and sedate, was mere extension of the miniature approach to a thousand semi-detached suburban ‘residences’; and the appearance of The Towers, as we turned the corner with a rush, suggested a commonplace climax to a story that had begun interestingly, almost thrillingly. A villa had escaped from the shadow of the Crystal Palace, thumped its way down by night, grown suddenly monstrous in a shower of rich rain, and settled itself insolently to stay. Ivy climbed about the opulent red-brick walls, but climbed neatly and with disfiguring effect, sham as on a prison or--the simile made me smile--an orphan asylum. There was no hint of the comely roughness of untidy ivy on a ruin. Clipped, trained and precise it was, as on a brand-new protestant church. I swear there was not a bird’s nest nor a single earwig in it anywhere. About the porch it was particularly thick, smothering a seventeenth-century lamp with a contrast that was quite horrible. Extensive glass-houses spread away on the farther side of the house; the numerous towers to which the building owed its name seemed made to hold school bells; and the window-sills, thick with potted flowers, made me think of the desolate suburbs of Brighton or Bexhill. In a commanding position upon the crest of a hill, it overlooked miles of undulating, wooded country southwards to the Downs, but behind it, to the north, thick banks of ilex, holly and privet protected it from the cleaner and more stimulating winds. Hence, though highly placed, it was shut in. Three years had passed since I last set eyes upon it, but the unsightly memory I had retained was justified by the reality. The place was deplorable.

It is my habit to express my opinions audibly sometimes, when impressions are strong enough to warrant it; but now I only sighed ‘Oh, dear,’ as I extricated my legs from many rugs and went into the house. A tall parlour-maid, with the bearing of a grenadier, received me, and standing behind her was Mrs. Marsh, the housekeeper, whom I remembered because her untidy back hair had suggested to me that it had been burnt. I went at once to my room, my hostess already dressing for dinner, but Frances came in to see me just as I was struggling with my black tie that had got tangled like a bootlace. She fastened it for me in a neat, effective bow, and while I held my chin up for the operation, staring blankly at the ceiling, the impression came--I wondered, was it her touch that caused it?--that something in her trembled. Shrinking perhaps is the truer word. Nothing in her face or manner betrayed it, nor in her pleasant, easy talk while she tidied my things and scolded my slovenly packing, as her habit was, questioning me about the servants at the flat. The blouses, though right, were crumpled, and my scolding was deserved. There was no impatience even. Yet somehow or other the suggestion of a shrinking reserve and holding back reached my mind. She had been lonely, of course, but it was more than that; she was glad that I had come, yet for some reason unstated she could have wished that I had stayed away. We discussed the news that had accumulated during our brief separation, and in doing so the impression, at best exceedingly slight, was forgotten. My chamber was large and beautifully furnished; the hall and dining-room of our flat would have gone into it with a good remainder; yet it was not a place I could settle down in for work. It conveyed the idea of impermanence, making me feel transient as in a hotel bedroom. This, of course, was the fact. But some rooms convey a settled, lasting hospitality even in a hotel; this one did not; and as I was accustomed to work in the room I slept in, at least when visiting, a slight frown must have crept between my eyes.

‘Mabel has fitted a work-room for you just out of the library,’ said the clairvoyant Frances. ‘No one will disturb you there, and you’ll have fifteen thousand books all catalogued within easy reach. There’s a private staircase too. You can breakfast in your room and slip down in your dressing-gown if you want to.’ She laughed. My spirits took a turn upwards as absurdly as they had gone down.

‘And how are _you_?’ I asked, giving her a belated kiss. ‘It’s jolly to be together again. I did feel rather lost without you, I’ll admit.’

‘That’s natural,’ she laughed. ‘I’m so glad.’

She looked well and had country colour in her cheeks. She informed me that she was eating and sleeping well, going out for little walks with Mabel, painting bits of scenery again, and enjoying a complete change and rest; and yet, for all her brave description, the words somehow did not quite ring true. Those last words in particular did not ring true. There lay in her manner, just out of sight, I felt, this suggestion of the exact reverse--of unrest, shrinking, almost of anxiety. Certain small strings in her seemed over-tight. ‘Keyed-up’ was the slang expression that crossed my mind. I looked rather searchingly into her face as she was telling me this.

‘Only--the evenings,’ she added, noticing my query, yet rather avoiding my eyes, ‘the evenings are--well, rather heavy sometimes, and I find it difficult to keep awake.’

‘The strong air after London makes you drowsy,’ I suggested, ‘and you like to get early to bed.’

Frances turned and looked at me for a moment steadily. ‘On the contrary, Bill, I dislike going to bed--here. And Mabel goes so early.’ She said it lightly enough, fingering the disorder upon my dressing-table in such a stupid way that I saw her mind was working in another direction altogether. She looked up suddenly with a kind of nervousness from the brush and scissors. ‘Billy,’ she said abruptly, lowering her voice, ‘isn’t it odd, but I _hate_ sleeping alone here? I can’t make it out quite; I’ve never felt such a thing before in my life. Do you--think it’s all nonsense?’ And she laughed, with her lips but not with her eyes; there was a note of defiance in her I failed to understand.

‘Nothing a nature like yours feels strongly is nonsense, Frances,’ I replied soothingly.

But I, too, answered with my lips only, for another part of my mind was working elsewhere, and among uncomfortable things. A touch of bewilderment passed over me. I was not certain how best to continue. If I laughed she would tell me no more, yet if I took her too seriously the strings would tighten further. Instinctively, then, this flashed rapidly across me: that something of what she felt, I had also felt, though interpreting it differently. Vague it was, as the coming of rain or storm that announce themselves hours in advance with their hint of faint, unsettling excitement in the air. I had been but a short hour in the house,--big, comfortable, luxurious house,--but had experienced this sense of being unsettled, unfixed, fluctuating--a kind of impermanence that transient lodgers in hotels must feel, but that a guest in a friend’s home ought not to feel, be the visit short or long. To Frances, an impressionable woman, the feeling had come in the terms of alarm. She disliked sleeping alone, while yet she longed to sleep. The precise idea in my mind evaded capture, merely brushing through me, three-quarters out of sight; I realised only that we both felt the same thing, and that neither of us could get at it clearly. Degrees of unrest we felt, but the actual thing did not disclose itself. It did not happen.

I felt strangely at sea for a moment. Frances would interpret hesitation as endorsement, and encouragement might be the last thing that could help her.

‘Sleeping in a strange house,’ I answered at length, ‘is often difficult at first, and one feels lonely. After fifteen months in our tiny flat one feels lost and uncared-for in a big house. It’s an uncomfortable feeling--I know it well. And this _is_ a barrack, isn’t it? The masses of furniture only make it worse. One feels in storage somewhere underground--the furniture doesn’t furnish. One must never yield to fancies, though----’

Frances looked away towards the windows; she seemed disappointed a little.

‘After our thickly-populated Chelsea,’ I went on quickly, ‘it seems isolated here.’

But she did not turn back, and clearly I was saying the wrong thing. A wave of pity rushed suddenly over me. Was she really frightened, perhaps? She was imaginative, I knew, but never moody; common sense was strong in her, though she had her times of hypersensitiveness. I caught the echo of some unreasoning, big alarm in her. She stood there, gazing across my balcony towards the sea of wooded country that spread dim and vague in the obscurity of the dusk. The deepening shadows entered the room, I fancied, from the grounds below. Following her abstracted gaze a moment, I experienced a curious sharp desire to leave, to escape. Out yonder was wind and space and freedom. This enormous building was oppressive, silent, still. Great catacombs occurred to me, things beneath the ground, imprisonment and capture. I believe I even shuddered a little.

I touched her shoulder. She turned round slowly, and we looked with a certain deliberation into each other’s eyes.