The New Warden Part 41

"Sundays?" he interrupted.

"My Sundays I spend with friends in Surrey."

Boreham jerked his head nervously. "I shall be living in Town almost immediately," he said; "I will come and see what times would be convenient."

"I am very stupid when my day's work is done," said May.

"Stupid!" Boreham laughed harshly. "But your work is too hard and most unsuitable. Any woman can attend to babies."

"I flatter myself," said May, "that I can wash a baby without forgetting to dry it."

"Why do you hide yourself?" he exclaimed. "Why do you throw yourself away?" He felt that, with her beside him, he could dictate to the world like a G.o.d. "Why don't you organise?"

"Do you mean run about and talk," asked May, "and leave the work to other people? Don't you think that we are beginning to hate people who run about and talk?"

"Because the wrong people do it," said Boreham.

"The people who do it are usually the wrong people," corrected May; "the right people are generally occupied with skilled work--technical or intellectual. That clears the way for the unskilled to run about and talk, and so the world goes round, infinite labour and talent quietly building up the Empire, and idleness talking about it and interrupting it."

Boreham stared at her with petulant admiration. "You could do anything,"

he said bluntly.

"I shall put an advertis.e.m.e.nt into the _Times_," said May. "'A gentlewoman of independent means, unable to do any work properly, but anxious to organise.'"

They had now turned into a narrow lane and were almost at the gates of the Lodgings. May did not want Boreham to come into the Court with her, she wanted to dismiss him now. She had a queer feeling of dislike that he should tread upon the gravel of the Court, and perhaps come actually to the front door of the Lodgings. She stopped and held out her hand.

"I have your promise," he said, "I can come and see you?" He looked thwarted and miserable.

"If you happen to be in town," she said.

"But I mean to live there," he said. This insinuation on her part, that she had not accepted the fact that he was going to live in town, was unsympathetic of her. "I can't stand the loneliness of Chartcote, it has become intolerable."

The word "loneliness" melted May. She knew what loneliness meant. After all, how could he help being the man he was? Was it his fault that he had been born with his share of the Boreham heredity? Was he able to control his irritability, to suppress his exaggerated self-esteem; both of them, perhaps, symptoms of some obscure form of neurosis?

May felt a pang of pity for him. His face showed signs of pain and discontent and restlessness.

"I shall leave Chartcote any day, immediately. London draws me back to it. I can think there. I can't at Chartcote, the atmosphere is sodden at Chartcote, my neighbours are clods."

May looked at him anxiously. "It is dull for you," she said.

Encouraged by this he went on rapidly. "Art, literature is nothing to them. They are centaurs. They ought to eat gra.s.s. They don't know a sunset from a swede. They don't know the name of a bird, except game birds; they are ignorant fools, they are d.a.m.ned----" Boreham's breathing was loud and rapid.

"And yet you hate Oxford," murmured May, as she held out her hand. She still did not mean Boreham to come inside the Court, her hand was a dismissal.

"Because Oxford is so smug," said Boreham. "And the country is smug.

England is the land that begets effeteness and smuggishness. Yes, I should be pretty desperate," he added, and he held her hand with some pressure--"I should be pretty desperate, only you have promised to let me come and see you."

May withdrew her hand. "As a friend," she said. "Yes, come as a friend."

Boreham gave a curious toss to his head. "I am under your orders," he said, "I obey. You don't wish me to come with you to the door--I obey!"

"Thank you," said May, simply. "And if you are lonely, well, so am I.

There are many lonely people in this world just now, and many, many lonely women!" She turned away and left him.

Boreham raced rather than walked away from the Lodgings towards the stables where he had put up his horse. He hardly knew what his thoughts were. He was more strangely moved than he had ever thought he could be.

And how solitary he was! What permanent joy is there in the world, after all? There _is_ nothing permanent in life! It takes years to find that out--years--if you are well in health and full of vanity! But you do find it out--at last.

As he went headlong he came suddenly against an obstacle. Somebody caught him by the arm and slowed him down.

"Hullo, Boreham!" said Bingham. "Stop a moment!"

Boreham allowed himself to be fastened upon, and suffered Bingham's arm to rest on his, but he puffed with irritation. He felt like a poet who has been interrupted in a fit of inspiration.

"I thought this was one of your War Office days," he said bluntly.

"It is," replied Bingham, in his sweetest curate tones. "But there is special College business to-day, and I'm putting in an extra day next week instead. Look here, do you want a job of work?"

No, of course, Boreham didn't.

"I'm leaving Chartcote," he said, and was glad to think it was true.

"This week?" asked Bingham.

"No," said Boreham, suddenly wild with indignation, "but any time--next week, perhaps."

"This job will only take four or five days," said Bingham.

"What job?" demanded Boreham.

"There's a small library just been given us by the widow of a General."

"Didn't know soldiers ever read books," said Boreham.

"I don't know if he read them," said Bingham, "but there they are. We want some one to look through them--put aside the sort suitable for hospitals, and make a _catalogue raisonne_ of the others for the camps in Germany."

Boreham wanted to say, "Be d.a.m.ned with your _raisonne_," but he limited himself to saying: "Can't you get some college chaplain, or some bloke of the sort to do it?"

"All are thick busy," said Bingham--"those that are left."

"It must be a new experience for them," said Boreham.

"There are plenty of new experiences going," said Bingham.

"And you won't deny," said Boreham, smiling the smile of self-righteousness, as he tried to a.s.sume a calm bantering tone, "that experience--of life, I mean--is a bit lacking in Oxford?"

"It depends on what you mean," said Bingham, sweetly. "We haven't the experience of making money here. Also Oxford Dons are expected to go about with the motto 'Pereunt et imputantur' written upon our brows (see the sundial in my college), 'The hours pa.s.s and we must give an account of them.'"

Bingham always translated his Latin, however simple, for Boreham's benefit. Just now this angered Boreham.