“Give Mélie some more drink, Percy,” said Mrs. Corrie. “It’s all wrong you two sittin’ together.”
“She likes to sit near me, don’t you, my duck?” said Mr. Craven, looking about for the wine and bowing to and fro from his hips.
“You’ve been away so long,” murmured Mr. Corrie. “What sort of a place is Balone to stay in?”
“Oh, nothing of a place in itself, nothing of a place. Why do you call it Balone?”
“Isn’t that right? That’s right enough. Come.”
Miriam waited eagerly, her eyes on Mr. Craven’s pink face with the grizzled hair above and below it. How perfectly awful he must look in his nightshirt, she thought, and flushed violently. “Balloyne,” he was saying carefully, showing his red lips and two rows of unnaturally even teeth. … “Oh, Lord, they mean Bologne.” Both men were talking together. “Balloyne is perfectly correct; the correct pronunciation,” said Mr. Craven in a loud testy voice, with loose lips. Mrs. Craven gazed up … like a distressed fish … into his flushed face. Mrs. Corrie was throwing out her little wavering broken laughs. Keeping his angry voice Mr. Craven went on. Miriam sat eagerly up and glanced at Mr. Corrie. He was sitting with his lips drawn down and his eyebrows raised … his law-court face. … Suddenly his face relaxed and the dark boyish brown head with the clear thoughtful brow and the gentle kind eyes turned towards her. “Let’s ask Miss Henderson. She shall be umpire.”
Miriam carefully enunciated the word. The blood sang in her ears as everyone looked her way. The furniture and all the room mimicked her. What did it matter, after all, the right pronunciation? It did matter; not that Balone was wrong, but the awfulness of being able to miss the right sound if you had once heard it spoken. There was some awful meaning in the way English people missed the right sound; all the names in India, all the Eastern words. How could an English traveller hear hahreem, and speak it hairum, Aswân and say Ass-ou-ann? It made them miss other things and think wrongly about them. “That’s more like it,” she heard Mr. Corrie say. There was sheeny braiding round the edges of his curious little coat. “Got you there, Craven, got you there,” he was saying somewhere in his mind … his mind went on by itself repeating things wearily. His small austere face shone a little with dining; the corners of his thin lips slackened. “I can read all your thoughts. None of you can disturb my enjoyment of this excellent dinner; none of you can enhance it” … but he was not quite conscious of his thoughts. Why did not the others read them? Perhaps they did. Perhaps they were too much occupied to notice what people were thinking. Perhaps in society people always were. The Staple-Cravens did not notice. But they were neither of them quite sure of themselves. Mrs. Corrie was busy all the time dancing and singing somewhere alone, wistfully. Joey kept throwing her smile at Mr. Corrie—lounging a little, easily, over the table and saying in her mind, “I understand you, the others don’t, I do,” and he smiled at her, broadened the smile that had settled faintly all over his face, now and again in her direction. But she did not understand him. “Divine,” perhaps he was, or could be. But Joey did not know him. She only knew that he had a life of his own and no one else at the table had quite completely. She did not know that with all his worldly happiness and success and self-control he was miserable and lost and needing consolation … but neither did he. Perhaps he never would; would not find it out because he had so many thoughts and was always talking. So he thought he liked Joey. Because she smiled and responded. “Jabez Balfour,” he was saying slowly, savouring the words and smiling through his raised wineglass with half closed eyes. That was for Mr. Staple-Craven; there was some exciting secret in it. Presently they would be two men over their wine and nuts. Mr. Staple-Craven took this remark for himself at once, scorning the women with a thick polite insolence. His lips shot out. “Ah,” he said busily, “Jabez Balfour, Jabez Balfour; ah,” he swung from side to side from his waist. “Let me see, Jabez. …”
“The Liberator scheme,” said Mr. Corrie interestedly with a bright young eye. “They’ve got ’im this time; fairly got ’im on the hop.”
Jabez Balfour; what a beautiful name. He could not have done anything wrong. There was a soft glare of anger in Mr. Corrie’s eyes; as if he were accusing Mr. Staple-Craven of some crime, or everybody. Perhaps one would hear something about crime; crime. That’s crime—somebody taking down a book and saying triumphantly, “that’s crime,” and people talking excitedly about it, in the warm, at dinners … like that moment at Richmond Park, the ragged man with panting mouth, running … the quiet grass, the scattered deer, the kindly trees, the gentlemen with triumphant faces, running after him; enough, enough, he had suffered enough … his poor face, their dreadful faces. He knew more than they did. Crime could not be allowed. People murdering you in your sleep. But criminals knew that—the running man knew. He was running away from himself. He knew he had spoiled the grass and the trees and the deer. To have stopped him and hidden him and let him get over it. His poor face. …
