For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost mathematically symmetrical. Now she was an English middle-class girl—whose mother had a sufficient income—in blue cloth, a wideawake hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she shouldn’t have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five minutes ago, she had been … She could not even remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town … No, she could not think the words. … A raging stallion then! If now he should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the sable, she would retreat.
It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick. … When the old man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman came out … It was exactly like that! She hadn’t time to work out the analogy. But it was like that. … In rainy weather the whole world altered. Darkened! … The catgut that turned them slackened … slackened. … But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the stick!
Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance:
“We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother. …”
It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr. Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years ago. Her mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting, Mr. Tietjens alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it up to her. He was making it up. In no princely fashion, but adequately, as a gentleman.
Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bellboy came up to him and said: “Mr. Riccardo!” Mark Tietjens said: “No! He’s gone!” He continued:
“Your brother. … Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a practice, a good practice! When he’s a full-fledged sawbones.” He stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his umbrella handle; he was extremely nervous.
“Now you!” he said. “Two or three hundred. A year of course! The capital absolutely your own. …” He paused: “But I warn you! Christopher won’t like it. He’s got his knife into me. I wouldn’t grudge you … oh, any sum!” … He waved his hand to indicate an amount boundless in its figures. “I know you keep Christopher straight,” he said. “The only person that could!” He added: “Poor devil!”
She said:
“He’s got his knife into you? Why?”
He answered vaguely:
“Oh, there’s been all this talk. … Untrue, of course.”
She said:
“People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps because there’s been delay in settling the estate.”
He said:
“Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!”
“Then they have been saying,” she exclaimed, “things against … against me. And him!”
He exclaimed in anguish:
“Oh, but I ask you to believe … I beg you to believe that I believe … you! Miss Wannop!” He added grotesquely: “As pure as dew that lies within Aurora’s sun-tipped …” His eyes stuck out like those of a suffocating fish. He said: “I beg you not on that account to hand the giddy mitten to …” He writhed in his tight double collar. “His wife,” he said, “… she’s no good to … for him. … She’s soppily in love with him. But no good …” He very nearly sobbed. “You’ve the only …” he said, “I know …”
It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Fivepence! But what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year. … Two hundred and forty times five. …
Mark said brightly:
“If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred. … You say that’s ample to give Christopher his chop. … And settled on her three … four … I like to be exact … hundred a year. … The capital of it: with remainder to you …” His interrogative face beamed.
She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood Mrs. Duchemin’s:
“You couldn’t expect us, with our official position … to connive …” Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She couldn’t be expected. … She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! You can’t ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! … It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said—to Mark:
“It’s as if the whole world had conspired … like a carpenter’s voice—to force us …” she was going to say “together. …” But he burst in, astonishingly:
“He must have his buttered toast … and his mutton chop … and Rhum St. James!” He said: “Damn it all. … You were made for him. … You can’t blame people for coupling you. … They’re forced to it. … If you hadn’t existed they’d have had to invent you … Like Dante for … who was it? … Beatrice? There are couples like that.”
She said:
“Like a carpenter’s vise. … Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven’t we resisted?”
His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:
“You won’t … because of my ox’s hoof … desert. …”
She said:—she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.
“I ask you to believe that I will never … abandon …”
It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. Micawber!
Christopher Tietjens—in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his best uniform—said suddenly from behind her back, since he had approached her from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she had been turned towards Mark on his bench:
“Come along! Let’s get out of this!”
