Helena Brett's Career Part 8

There was no answer but she had not waited for one. She burst in.

The room was full of industry. The very air seemed heavy with a wished-for silence. A clock would have been overpowering.

Hubert swung slowly round, with an expression on his face that made it clear he was attempting not to lose touch with some great idea. He kept a finger on the sheet before him.

Helena was rather alarmed. She had not seen his study in its present state, and as she stood there at the door a moment, her eyes took in the litter of loose paper; all the open books on table, chairs, and floor; the derelict type-writer, long abandoned as fatal to all inspiration; the velvet coat; and most of all, the worried look. Her plaint shrank instantly to an excuse.

"Oh Hugh," she said (she never could quite manage "Hubert"), "I _am_ so sorry, but what do you think?"

"I can't imagine," he said in a cold voice so unlike his own. "What?

Is your mother dead?"

Even Helena, so bad at scenting irony, could guess that he did not mean that.

"Of course she isn't," she replied; "but I've lost the lovely little watch she gave me, and I did love it so." She tried not to let too much sorrow come into her voice. He always looked upon her as a baby, anyhow.

Surely he was sorry? He said nothing. He looked at her so oddly that she grew alarmed.

"Isn't it awful?" she added uneasily.

Hubert rose slowly to his feet. "Really, Helena," he said, "you don't mean you've broken my whole morning's work just to tell me you've lost some silly trinket? You might have waited until lunch-time. Now, my whole chapter--well, it simply means I've got to start it all again."

He took up a sheet of paper, tore it dramatically through, and let the two halves fall upon the carpet. Helena, full of an astounded guilt, looked down to see how much of his work her thoughtlessness had wasted.

But all the writing must have been upon the under side....

"Oh, Hugh dear," she said, longing to touch him yet not daring quite; he looked so cross and tall. "I _am_ sorry. It was stupid of me. But I thought you'd be sorry and could--could do something."

She ended lamely and he was not touched by her faith in him.

"Of course," he said bitterly, "I shall at once scour the heath, like a police dog, on my hands and knees. I shall watch the termini. I shall telephone----"

"Oh, I _am_ sorry," she broke in, "awfully. I never thought all that of course. I simply felt it was so terrible and you might help, because you always know about things, somehow."

That touched him at last. He melted suddenly.

"Well," he said quite cheerily, "it's done now, so bother the old work.

We'll see if we can't find the thing and save a reward. That's another way of making money, eh?"

So after cross-examination as to routes and so on, out they went, and he it was who found the watch, exactly where--she now remembered--she had felt hot and pulled hard at the stiff clip of her chinchilla stole.

"Tally-ho!" he shouted gaily, holding it aloft and waving it; then as she ran delightedly across from her own line of search, "so I've not wasted my day's work in vain!"

She felt that more apologies must take the place of thanks. She also wished that she had never spoilt his work but paid five pounds reward instead. And she resolved that nothing short of thieves or fire would take her into his room before lunch again.

Bad news, hereafter, she obediently kept till dinner. His day's work was over, and he had recovered by next morning's bout.

Other things, too, she learnt. When possible, she would suppress a bad review or lose the paper until evening. Unluckily, he had them all sent by an agency and she did not often succeed. She always said, however, that n.o.body went by that paper.... She never praised a writer who was younger and more famous than himself. She was conveniently blind if envelopes arrived addressed in his own writing. She always saw that his room was left properly untidy--all except the flowers, which must never show the slightest sign of age. She came to avoid the word "reliable" and after six months never once split an infinitive at meals. Hubert at such moments would throw down his knife with a grimace of pain. He said it was a physical sensation, like cut corks, and spoilt his appet.i.te, which she could never understand. And sometimes if it happened early in the day, she found at night that she had spoilt his work as well....

Such was the routine of Hubert Brett, ex-bachelor at thirty-five and writer of repute; all sacred and to be taken as an earnest matter--even that half-hour wherein he Kept In Touch With Modern Movements.

Helena learnt this, too, early.

There had been great excitement in the suburb after lunch. An aeroplane had pa.s.sed upon its way to Hendon, and pa.s.sed very low. The noise had been colossal, like six motorcycles. Every one, used as the place was to aeroplanes, had dashed out to the garden--every one but Hubert. Helena, even in her disappointment, could admire his self-restraint.

He seemed quite ignorant about it, too, when she made jokes upon the noise, as they set out for their tramp on the Heath.

"What time about?" he said. "Before lunch?"

"Why, Hugh," she laughed. "You must have heard! It sounded like a motor having its teeth drilled."

"No," he said. "I shouldn't have missed that. It is a sound I've never struck!"

She thought a moment. "Why, I know," she said. "You wouldn't have heard. Of course it was just after two and you were still keeping in touch with the movements."

To her surprise he stopped short, and looking up, she saw his cheeks were flushed below the eyes.

"My dear girl," he said pompously. "I enjoy your humourous way of looking at life, but it's a quite impossible position if a wife's going to be funny at the expense of her husband's ideals."

With which he strode onward and she fell in, a model wife, behind.

But she, of her simplicity, had meant it.

She had always admired his powers of concentration on those dull old literary weeklies. She had not even thought of sleep.

Every wife, perhaps, should be able to see through her husband the exact distance that he sees himself.

CHAPTER VI

GROWTH

Helena, when a year's pa.s.sing had worn away the novelty of keeping house and made its process slower, was naturally rather bored at times, when Hubert was shut up with his work. No one could have been happier so long as she was with her husband; she still thought him immensely clever, which is most good for married happiness; still found their walks and treats the very greatest fun; but in the winter especially, there were so many gaps of idle loneliness.

Luckily the remedy was near at hand.

To a girl almost bursting with the ashamed desire for self-development a garden suburb must be Paradise indeed. There is a natural connection between New Art cottages with gardens round, and (let us say) enthusiasms. The ordinary man--that tame myope who gratefully accepts life as it is--contentedly exists in squares, crescents and straight lines; breathing the common air and never worrying at all whether his house, which may be number 246, has individuality or not. But the enthusiast, whom others call by a less n.o.ble t.i.tle, is of a different sort. He holds that what we see and breathe, especially when young, we are. His children, then, must have a quite uncommon setting; not grown like the sordid brats in 245 "desirable villas" adjoining. No, they must live where there is air and a big back-yard patch; where the word garden throws a soft glamour over muddied and unfinished roads; where everything is beautiful and man himself is not so vile.

For, after all, he asks, what really wicked man would ever trouble to live out at a tube's end? No! Vice ever lurks among the fogs and shrubless rabbit-warrens of mid-London. It would not flourish in a garden suburb.

So out he goes, and sees to it that his house shall have something different from all the other small white dwellings round about him. An architect might say that there was neither use nor fitness in his timbered turret at the north-east corner, but he himself knows just why it is there. He knows that he has flung his little pebble, all he can avail, upon the heap that some day, we all hope, will crush the soul-destroying isms out of life, and make of man, not a type in monotone, but a great hive of multi-coloured individuals.

So far, so good; but more remains to tell.

He settles proudly underneath his turret and waits for the great change to start. The neighbours call and he discovers they are cultured.

They are very cultured. And he--with a sick horror he knows at length that he is not. All these people here have something different, not a mere turret--something different about themselves. Menzies believes that eating sheep is murder in the sight of Heaven, and the same with cows. Du Cane will not let his children wear boots, because the notion is not Greek. Farren is convinced that you must sleep with your feet to the south and your head, of course, in the opposite direction.

Blythe-Egerton believes in ghosts but says they can't have clothes.