The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

'I simply think work is the noblest function of man,' he burst forth. 'Don't you?'

'I do not,' answered Eileen. 'Work is a curse. If the serpent had not tempted Eve to break God's commandment, we should still be basking in Paradise.'

He looked at her curiously. 'You believe that?'

'Isn't it in the Bible?' she answered, seriously astonished.

'Whatever the primitive Semitic allegorist may have thought, work is a blessing, not a curse.'

'Then you are an atheist!' Eileen recoiled from this strange young man.

'Ah, you shrink back!' he said in tones of bitter pleasure. 'I told you I lived in isolation.'

Eileen's humour shot forth candidly. 'You'll not be isolated when you die.'

His bitterness passed into genial superiority. 'You mean I'll go to hell. How can you believe anything so horrible?'

'Why is that horrible for me to believe? For you-' And she filled up the sentence with a smile.

'I don't believe you do believe it.'

'There's nothing you seem to believe. I do honestly think that you can't be saved if you don't believe.'

'I accept that. The question, however, is what kind of belief and what kind of saving. Do you suppose Plato is in hell?'

'I don't know. He invented Platonic love, didn't he? So that might save him.' She looked at him with her great grey eyes-he couldn't tell whether she was quizzing him or not.

'Is that all you know of Plato?'

'I know he was a Greek philosopher. But I only learned Greek roots at the Convent. So Plato is Greek to me.'

'He has been beautifully Englished by the Master of my College. I wish you'd read him.'

'Is the translation in the library?'

'Of course-with lots of other interesting books, and such queer folios and quartos and first editions. The collector was a man of taste. Why do you never come and let me show them you?'

'You'd run away.'

'No, I wouldn't,' he smiled encouragingly.

'Yes, you would. And leave your pipe on Plato!'

He laughed. 'Was I rude? But I didn't know you then. Come to-morrow afternoon and show you've forgiven me.'

The new interest was sufficiently tempting. But her maidenliness held back. 'I'll come with your mother.'

Disgust lent him wit. 'You're her companion-not she yours.'

'True. Nor I yours.'

'Then I'll come here.'

'Bringing the Plato and the folios-?'

'Why not? You can't forbid me my own drawing-room.'

'I can run away and leave my crochet-hook behind.'

'You'll find me hooked on whenever you return.'

'Well, if you're determined-by hook or by crook! But you're not going to convert me to Socialism?'

'I won't promise.'

'You must. I don't mind reading Plato.'

'He's worse. He isn't a Christian at all.'

'I don't mind that. He's B.C. He couldn't help it. But you Socialists came after Christ.'

'How do you know Socialism isn't a return to Him?'

'Is it?'

'Aha! You are getting interested.... But I hear my mother coming down to dinner. To be continued in our next. A demain, is it not?'

He held out his shapely white hand, and hastened through the conservatory into the garden.

'Going to dig?' Eileen called after him maliciously.

VIII.

Eileen became interested in Robert Maper, for the old books he opened up to her were quite new and enlarging. She had imagined the Church replacing Paganism as light replaced darkness. Now she felt that it was only as gas replaced candle-light. The darkness was less Egyptian than the nuns insinuated. Plato in particular was a veritable chandelier. It occurred to her suddenly that he might be on the black list. But she was afraid to ask her Confessor for fear of hearing her doubt confirmed. To tell the good father of the semi-secret meetings in the library would have been superfluous, since there was nothing to conceal even from Mrs. Maper, though that lady did not happen to know of them. Eileen did not even use the garden door. Besides, there was never a formal appointment, not infrequently, indeed, a disappointment, when the library held nothing but books. Robert Maper merely provided that possibility of an innocent double life, without which existence would have been too savourless for Eileen. Even a single line of railway always appeared dismal to her; she liked the great junctions with their bewildering intertanglements, their possibilities of collision. And now that Lieutenant Doherty had faded away into Afghanistan and silence-he did not even acknowledge the letter announcing her approaching marriage-Robert Maper proved a useful substitute.

One day Mr. Maper senior invited her to drive down with him and go over the factory, and as Mrs. Maper was not averse from impressing her employee by the sight of the other employes, she was permitted to go. Nothing, however, would induce Mrs. Maper to adventure herself in these scenes of her early life, touching which she professed a sovereign ignorance. 'Machines are so clattery,' she said. 'My head wouldn't stand them. I once went to that exhibition in London and I said to myself, never no more for this gal.'

'And you never did go any more since you were a girl?' asked the companion, with professional pointedness.

'No, never no more,' replied Mrs. Maper, serenely, 'once is too often, as the gal said when the black man kissed her.'

Eileen laughed dutifully at this quotation from the latest comic opera, and went off, delighted to companion the husband by way of change. He proved quite a new man, too, in his own element, bringing the most complicated machinery to the level of her understanding. Room after room they passed through, department after department full of tireless machinery, and tired men and women, who seemed slaves to the whims of fantastic iron monsters, all legs and arms and wheels. It took a morning to see everything, down to the pasting and drying and packing rooms, and as a last treat Mr. Maper took her to the engine-room, whence he said came the power that turned those myriad wheels, moved those myriad levers, in whatever department they might be and whatever their function. Eileen gazed long at the mighty engine, rapt in reverie. She could scarcely tear herself away, and when at last Mr. Maper brought her into the counting-house, she had forgotten that she must meet his son there. The white-browed clerk in corduroys did not, however, raise his eyes from his ledger, and Eileen was grateful to him for preserving the piquancy of their relation.

She did not find it so piquant, though, in the library next Sunday afternoon when he was clutching at her hand and asking her to be his wife. She awoke as from a dream to the perception of a solemn and grotesque fact.

'Oh, please!' and she tried to tear her hand away.

He clung on desperately. 'Eileen-don't say you don't care at all.'

'I'm not Eileen, and I particularly dislike you at this moment. Let me have my hand, please.'

He dropped it like a stinging nettle. 'I was hoping you'd let me keep it,' he murmured.

'Why?' She was simple and pitiless. 'Because we read Plato together? That was platonic enough, wasn't it?'

'You can jest about what breaks my heart?'

'I am very sorry. I like you.'

His breathing changed, 'like a fish thrown back into the water,' Eileen thought. She hastened to add, 'But it's not what a wife should feel.'

'How do you know what a wife should feel?'

Eileen screwed up her forehead. 'If I felt it, I should know, I suppose.'