The Helpmate Part 10

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted with a magnificent irrelevance.

"You must know her. You would like her."

He didn't in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn't think that he would like her. But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with Anne's a.s.sumption that he would. It was as if in her thoughts she were drawing him towards her. He felt that she was softening, yielding. His approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.

"I would like her, because you like her, is that it?"

"It wouldn't follow."

"Oh, how you spoil it!"

"Spoil what?"

"My inference. It pleased me. But, as you say, the logic wasn't sound."

Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was silent. Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter's smile suggested that he might have it. She was not going to minister to his male delight. Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.

"Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you."

"You will like her for herself when you know her."

"Will she like me for myself when she knows me? It's extremely doubtful.

You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign."

"My dear, she says you've never been near her. You've never come to one of her Thursdays."

"Oh, her Thursdays--no, I haven't."

"Well, how can you expect--but you'll go sometimes, now, to please me?"

"Won't Wednesdays do?"

"Wednesdays?"

"Yes. It wasn't half bad to-night. I'll go to every blessed Wednesday, as long as they last, if you'll only let me off Thursdays."

"Please don't talk about being 'let off.' I thought you might like to know my friends, that's all."

"So I would. I'd like it awfully. By the way, that reminds me. I met Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you.

Would you mind very much?"

"Why should I mind, if she's a friend of yours and Edith's?"

"Oh well, you see, she isn't exactly--"

"Isn't exactly what?"

"A friend of Edith's."

CHAPTER VI

There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified att.i.tudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation, punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian furniture, surrounded by a mult.i.tude of decorative objects. There were great jars and idols from China and j.a.pan; inlaid tables; screens and cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met, Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.

That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear f.a.n.n.y only knew it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear f.a.n.n.y down from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs.

Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."

"If you wait, you may get it from herself."

"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"

"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."

"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this time, she _knows_."

"You can't ask her."