“Mr. Earlforward told me you would take the cases away with you in your car.”
“Me take them away with me! … Well, in the first place, I’ve come in a taxi. And in the second place, I couldn’t put those in a car. And they won’t hold in a taxi either. I’ll be glad if you’ll send them down.”
“I’m very sorry, but I don’t see how I can send them. I haven’t anybody here, as I’ve told you.” She was unhelpful, adamantine.
“Mr. Earlforward isn’t in?” Mr. Bauersch’s tone had begun to roughen in impatience.
“Oh no!” She swept aside such an absurd impossibility. “But I’m sure he understood you were taking them away.” (She perceived, however, that Henry had involved her in this difficulty in order to escape the cost of delivery.)
“Do you know where he is?”
“I couldn’t say exactly; he might be at a sale at Chingby’s.”
“Well, will you mind telephoning to him and saying—”
“We don’t have the telephone here,” she replied, with cold triumph, remembering Henry’s phrase, “those New Yorkers.”
“Well, can you send to a garage and get a van or something for me?”
“I couldn’t unless I went myself.”
“Well, where is the nearest garage?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t tell you.”
Using words in a sense in which Violet had never heard them used, Mr. Bauersch dashed out of the shop to speak to his taxi-driver. He returned in ten minutes. In the meantime Violet had hammered the lids on the two cases. In possession of both the money and the books she had maintained all her tranquillity. Mr. Bauersch had come back with a Ford van in addition to his taxi. He led the driver of the taxi and the driver of the van into the office, and instructed them to remove the cases.
“The receipt, if you please,” he said dryly to Violet, who handed him the receipt, but showed none of the clemency due from a conqueror to the defeated.
Mr. Bauersch moralized (to himself) about English methods.
“Why do they hate the sight of a customer?” he asked himself, puzzled. “I’ll never come into this damned store again!” he said to himself.
But he well knew that on his next visit he would come into the damned shop again, because the shop had the goods he wanted, and didn’t care whether he bought them or not. If he could have ruined the shop by never coming into it again he would perhaps have ruined the shop. But it was the shop’s cursed indifference that spiritually beat him and ensured the triumph of the astonishing system.
IV
Afternoon
When Henry came home, limping, taciturn and absorbed, in the afternoon, Violet examined him carefully with her glance, and, asking no questions, gave him the written list of the day’s transactions, which he always wanted, and which today was quite a good one. He, on his part, asked no questions either—he said not an inquiring word even about the visit of Mr. Bauersch; the name and the sum noted on the list sufficed his curiosity for the moment. (Out of compassion for his fatigue, Violet said not a word about his trickery in the matter of the removal of Mr. Bauersch’s books.) After a sale he would sit down to his desk and study the catalogue marked with his purchases, and he would transfer the details into a special book; he must do this before anything else. Violet went upstairs, leaving him alone in the office to guard the shop.
She went upstairs to the kitchen and to her conspiracies and to the secret half of her double life which had recently commenced. Although apparently she had accomplished little in the way of modifying the daily routine of the establishment and household, that little amounted spiritually to a great deal. And it had been done almost without increased expense—save for gas. Her achievement generally was symbolized and figured in the abolition of the thermos flask from which Henry was used to take his tea, made many hours earlier when the gas was “going.” The abolition of the thermos flask had been an event in the domestic annals. (Henry afterwards sold the contrivance for half a crown.) Violet would have tea set on the table in the dining room; she would have fresh tea; she refused to drink thermos-preserved tea; she would have plates and bread and margarine on the table. And, considering that tea—now served immediately on the closing of the shop—was the last meal or snack of the day in that abode, none could fairly accuse her of innovating in an extravagant manner. Still, the disappearance of the thermos flask was regarded by everybody in the house as the crown of a sort of revolution. Such was the force of the individuality of Mr. Earlforward, who had scarcely complained, scarcely argued, scarcely protested! He had opposed simply his quiet blandness and had yielded—and the revolutionary yet marvelled at her own courage and her success, and had a sensation akin to being out of breath.
She had never been able to reorganize the kitchen department fundamentally; the problem of doing so was insoluble. In the young days of the house what was now the office had been a parlour-kitchen-scullery. The site of a little range was still distinguishable in it. Henry’s bachelor uncle had transferred the kitchen to the top floor; it could not possibly be brought down again; there was no other room capable of serving as a kitchen. But Violet had humanized the long, narrow cubicle a little by means of polished utensils and white wood, and she had hung a tiny wire-cage larder outside the window, where it was the exasperation of foiled cats. The gas-ring remained, solitary cooker. She had not dared to suggest a small gas-stove or even an oil-stove, and two mere rings would not, in her opinion, have been
