Mrs. Ames (7 page)

He finished his letter, and before beginning his poem, lit the candle on his dressing table, and examined his small, commonplace visage in the glass. It was difficult to arrange his hair satisfactorily. If he brushed it back it revealed an excess of high, vacant-looking forehead; if he let it drop over his forehead, though his resemblance to Keats was distinctly strengthened, its resemblance to seaweed was increased also. The absence of positive eyebrow was regrettable, but was there not fire in his rather pale and far-apart eyes? He rather thought there was. His nose certainly turned up a little, but what, if not that, did tip-tilted imply? A rather long upper lip was at present only lightly fledged with an adolescent moustache, but there was decided strength in his chin. It stuck out. And having practised a frown which he
rather fancied, he went back to the table in the window again, read a few stanzas of Dolores, in order to get into tune with passion and bitterness (for this poem was not going to begin or end happily) and wooed the lyric muse.

Major Ames, meantime, had seen Mrs Evans to her door, and retraced his steps as far as the club, where he was in half a mind to go in, and get a game of billiards, which he enjoyed. He played in a loud, hectoring and unskilful manner, and it was noticeable that all the luck (unless, as occasionally happened, he won) was invariably on the side of his opponent. But after an irresolute pause, he went on again, and let himself into his own house. Amy was still sitting in the drawing room, though usually she went to bed as soon as her guests had gone.

‘Very pleasant evening, my dear,' he said, ‘and your plan was a great success. Uncommonly agreeable woman Mrs Evans is. Pretty woman, too; you would never guess she was the mother of that great girl.'

‘She was not considered pretty as a girl,' said his wife.

‘No? Then she must have improved in looks afterwards. Lonely life rather, to be a doctor's wife, with your husband liable to be called away at any hour of the day or night.'

‘I have no doubt Millie occupies herself very well,' said Mrs Ames. ‘Goodnight, Lyndhurst. Are you coming up to bed?'

‘Not just yet. I shall sit up a bit, and smoke another cigar.'

He sat in the window, and every now and then found himself saying half aloud, ‘Uncommonly agreeable woman.' Just overhead Harry was tearing passion to shreds in the style (more or less) of Swinburne.

D
R EVANS
was looking out of the window of his dining room as he waited the next morning for breakfast to be brought in, jingling a pleasant mixture of money and keys in his trouser pockets and whistling a tune that sounded vague and De Bussy-like until you perceived that it was really an air familiar to streets and barrel organs, and owed its elusive quality merely to the fact that the present performer was a little uncertain as to the comparative value of tones and semitones. But this slightly discouraging detail was more than compensated for by the evident cheerfulness of the executant; his plump, high-coloured face, his merry eye, the singular content of his whole aspect be tokened a personality that was on excellent terms with life.

His surroundings were as well furnished and securely comfortable as himself. The table was invitingly laid; a Sheffield-plate urn (Dr Evans was an amateur in Georgian decoration and furniture) hissed and steamed with little upliftings of the lid under the pressure within, and a number of hot dishes suggested an English interpretation of breakfast. Fine mezzotints after the great English
portrait-painters hung on the walls, and a Chippendale sideboard was spread with fruit dishes and dessert plates. The morning was very hot, but the high, spacious room, with its thick walls, was cool and fresh, while its potentialities for warmth and cosiness in the winter were sponsored for by the large open fireplace and the stack of hot-water pipes which stood beneath the sideboard. Outside, the windows at which Dr Evans stood looked out on to the large and secluded lawn, which had been the scene of the garden party the day before. Red brick walls ran along the two sides of it at right angles to the house; opposite, a row of espaliered fruit trees screened off the homeliness of the kitchen garden beyond, and the railway cutting which formed the boundary of this pleasant place.

Wilfred Evans had whistled the first dozen bars of the ‘Merry Widow Waltz' some six or seven times through, before, with the retarded consciousness that it was Sunday, he went on to ‘The Church's One Foundation,' and though, with his usual admirable appetite, he felt the allure of the hot dishes, he waited, still whistling, for some other member of his household, wife or daughter, to appear. He was one of the most gregarious and club-bable of men, and no hecatomb of stalled oxen would have given him content, if he had had to eat his beef alone. A firm attachment to his domestic circle, combined with the not very exacting calls of his practice, but truly fervent investigations in the laboratory at the end of the garden, of the habits and economy of phagocytes, comfortably filled up, to the furthest horizon, the scenery of his mental territories.

He had not to wait long for his wife to appear, and he hailed her with his wonted cordiality.

‘Morning, little woman,' he said. ‘Slept well, I hope?'

Mrs Evans did not practise at home all those arts of pleasing with which she was so lavish in other people's houses. Also, this morning she felt rather cross, a thing which, to do her justice, was rare with her.

‘Not very,' she said. ‘I kept waking. It was stiflingly hot.'

‘I'm sorry, my dear,' said he.

Mrs Evans busied herself with tea-making; her long, slender hands moved with extraordinary deftness and silence among clattering things, and her husband whistled the ‘Merry Widow Waltz' once or twice more.

‘Oh, Wilfred, do stop that odious tune,' she said, without the slightest hint of impatience in her voice. ‘It is bad enough on your pianola, which, after all, is in tune!'

‘Which is more than can be said for my penny whistle?' asked he, good-humouredly. ‘Right you are, I'm dumb. Tell me about your party last night.'

‘My dear, haven't you been to enough Riseborough parties to know that there is nothing to tell about any party?' she asked. ‘I sat between Major Ames and the son. I talked gardening on one side with the father, and something which I suppose was enlightened Cambridge conversation on the other. Harry Ames is rather a dreadful sort of youth. He took me into the garden afterwards to show me something about roses. And the carriage didn't come. Major Ames saw me home. When did you get in?'

‘Not till nearly three. Very difficult maternity case. But we'll pull them both through.'

Millie Evans gave a little shudder, which was not quite entirely instinctive. She emphasized it for her husband's benefit. Unfortunately, he did not notice it.

‘Will you have your tea now?' she asked.

He looked at her with an air mainly conjugal but tinged with professionalism.

‘Bit upset with the heat, little woman?' he asked. ‘You look a trifle off colour. We can't have you sleeping badly, either. Show me the man who sleeps his seven hours every night, and I'll show you who will live to be ninety.'

This prospect did not for the moment allure his wife.

‘I think I would sooner sleep less and die earlier,' she said in her even voice, ‘though I'm sure Elsie will live to a hundred at that rate. You encourage her to be lazy in the morning, Wilfred. I'm sure anyone can manage to be in time for breakfast at a quarter past nine.'

He shook his head.

‘No, no, little woman,' he said. ‘Let a growing girl sleep just as much as she feels inclined. I would sooner stint a girl's food than her sleep. Give the red corpuscles a chance, eh?'

Millie got up from the table, and went to the sideboard to get some fruit. Then suddenly it struck her that all this was hardly worthwhile. It seemed a stupid business to come down every morning and eat breakfast, to manage the household, to go for a walk, perhaps, or sit in the garden, and after completing the round of these daily futilities, to go to bed again and sleep, just for the recuperation that sleep gave, to enable her to do it all over again. But the strawberries looked cool and moist, and standing by the sideboard she ate a few of them. Just above it hung the oblong Sheraton mirror, which her husband had bought so cheaply at a local sale and had brought home so triumphantly. That, too, seemed to tell her a stale story, and the reflection of her young face, crowned with the shimmer of yellow hair, against the dark oak background of the panelling seemed without purpose or significance. She was doing nothing with her beauty that stayed so long with her. But
it would not stay many years longer: this morning even there seemed to be a shadow over it, making it dim … Soon nobody would care if she had ever been pretty or not; indeed, even now Elsie seemed by her height and the maturity of her manner to be reminding everybody of the fact that she herself must be approaching the bar which every woman has to cross when she is forty or thereabouts … And, strange enough it may appear, these doubts and questionings which looked at Millie darkly from the Sheraton glass above the sideboard, selfish and elementary as they were, resembled ‘thought' far more closely than did the generality of those surface impressions that as a rule mirrored her mind. They were, too, rather actively disagreeable, and generally speaking, nothing disagreeable occurred to her. The experiences of every day might be mildly exhilarating, or mildly tedious. But, whatever they were, she was not accustomed to think closely about them. Now, for the moment, it seemed to her that some shadow, some vague presence confronted her, and menacingly demanded her attention.

Riseborough is notable for the number of its churches, and before long the air was mellow with bells. As a rule, Millie Evans went to church on Sunday morning with the same regularity as she ate hot roast beef for lunch when it was over, but this morning she easily let herself be persuaded to refrain from any act of public worship. It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that she might feel faint during the psalms and, on her husband's advice, she settled to stop at home, leaving him and Elsie, who was quite unaware what faintness felt like, to attend. But it was not the fear of faintness that prompted her absence: she wanted, almost for the first time in her life, to be alone and to think. Even on the occasion of her marriage, she had not found it necessary to employ herself with original thought: her
mother had done the thinking for her, and had advised her, as she felt quite sure, sensibly and well. Nor had she needed to think when she was expecting her only child, for on that occasion she had been perfectly content to do exactly as her husband told her. But now, at the age of thirty-seven, the sight of her own face in the glass had suggested to her certain possibilities, certain limitations.

Ill-health had, on infrequent Sundays, prevented her attendance at church, and now, following merely the dictates of habit, she took out with her to a basket chair below the big mulberry tree in the garden, a Bible and prayer book, out of which she supposed that she would read the psalms and lessons for the day. But the Bible remained long untouched, and when she opened it eventually at random, she read but one verse. It was at the end of Ecclesiastes that the leaves parted, and she read, ‘When desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home.'

That was enough, for it was that, here succinctly expressed, which had been troubling her this morning, though so vaguely, that until she saw her symptoms written down shortly and legibly, she had scarcely known what they were. But certainly this line and a half described them. No doubt it was all very elementary; by degrees one ceased to care, and then one died. But her case was rather different from that, for she felt that with her desire had not failed, simply because she never had had desire. She had waked and slept, she had eaten and walked, she had had a child; but all these things had been of about the same value. Once she had had a tooth out, without gas; that was a slightly more vivid experience. But it was very soon over: she had not really cared.

But though she had not cared for any of those things, she had not been bored with the repetition of them. It had seemed natural that one thing should follow another, that
the days should become weeks, and the weeks should become months, insensibly. When the months added themselves into years, she took notice of that fact by having a birthday, and Wilfred, as he gave her some little present in a morocco case, told her that she looked as young as when they first met, which was very nearly true. She had a quantity of these morocco cases now: he never omitted the punctual presentation of each. And the mental vision of all these morocco cases, some round, some square, some oblong, and the thought of their contents - a little pearl brooch, a sapphire brooch, a pair of emerald earrings, a jewelled hatpin - suddenly came upon her with their cumulative effect. A lot of time had gone by; it chiefly lived in her now through the memory of the morocco cases.