“Here,” said Mr. Quarles, and raised the cover. The dictaphone was revealed. “Wonderful invention!” He spoke with profound self-satisfaction. It was the sudden rising, in all its refulgence, of his moon. He explained the workings of the machine. Then, tilting up his face, “It’s so useful,” he said, “when an idyah occurs to you. You put it into wahds at once. Talk to yourself; the machine remembahs. I have it brought up to my bedroom every night. Such valuable idyahs come to one when one’s in bed, don’t you find? Without a dictaphone they would get lost.”
“And what do you do when you’ve got to the end of one of these phonograph records?” Philip enquired.
“Send it to my secretarah to be typed.”
Philip raised his eyebrows. “You’ve got a secretary now?”
Mr. Quarles nodded importantly. “Only a halftime one, so far,” he said, addressing the cornice of the opposite wall. “You’ve no idyah what a lot I have to do. What with the book, and the estate, and letters, and accounts, and … and … things,” he concluded rather lamely. He sighed, he shook the martyr’s head. “You’re lucky, my dyah boy,” he went on. “You have no distractions. You can give your whole time to writing. I wish I could give all mine. But I have the estate and all the rest. Trivial—but the business must be done.” He sighed again. “I envy you your freedom.”
Philip laughed. “I almost envy myself sometimes. But the dictaphone will be a great help.”
“Oh, it will,” said Mr. Quarles. “Undoubtedlah.”
“How’s the book going?”
“Slowly,” his father replied, “but surely. I think I have most of my materials now.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“You novelists,” said Mr. Quarles patronizingly, “you’re fortunate. You can just sit down and write. No preliminarah labour necessarah. Nothing like this.” He pointed to the filing cabinets and the card-index boxes. They were the proofs of his superiority, as well as of the enormous difficulties against which he had to struggle. Philip’s books might be successful. But after all, what was a novel? An hour’s entertainment, that was all; to be picked up and thrown aside again carelessly. Whereas the largest book on democracy … And anyone could write a novel. It was just a question of living and then proceeding to record the fact. To compose the largest book on democracy one had to take notes, collect materials from innumerable sources, buy filing cabinets and typewriters, portable, polyglottic, calculating; one needed a card index and loose-leaf notebooks and a fountain pen that could write six thousand words without having to be refilled; one required a dictaphone and a halftime secretary who would shortly have to become a whole-time one. “Nothing like this,” he insisted.
“Oh, no,” said Philip, who had been wandering round the room examining the literary apparatus. “Nothing like this.” He picked up some newspaper clippings that were lying under a paper weight on the lid of the unopened Corona. “Puzzles?” he asked, holding up the irregularly chequered diagrams. “I didn’t know you’d become a crossword fiend.”
Mr. Quarles took the clippings from his son and put them away in a drawer. He was annoyed that Philip should have seen them. The crosswords spoiled the effect of the dictaphone. “Childish things,” he said with a little laugh. “But they’re a distraction when the mind is tired. I like to amuse myself with them occasionalah.” In reality Mr. Quarles spent almost the whole of his mornings on crosswords. They exactly suited his type of intelligence. He was one of the most expert puzzle solvers of his epoch.
In the drawing room, meanwhile, Mrs. Quarles was talking with her daughter-in-law. She was a small and active woman, grey-haired, but preserving unblurred and hardly distorted the pure outlines of regular and well-moulded features. The expression of the face was at once vivacious and sensitive. It was a delicate energy, a strong but quiveringly responsive life, that shone in incessant variations of brilliance and shade of colour from her expressive grey-blue eyes. Her lips responded hardly less closely and constantly to her thoughts and feelings than did her eyes, and were grave or firm, smiled or were melancholy through an almost infinitesimally chromatic scale of emotional expression.
“And little Phil?” she said, enquiring after her grandchild.
“Radiant.”
“Darling little man!” The warmth of Mrs. Quarles’s affection enriched her voice and was visible as a light in her eyes. “You must have felt miserable, leaving him for such a long time.”
Elinor gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. “Well, I knew that Miss Fulkes and Mother between them would look after him much better than I could do.” She laughed and shook her head. “I don’t believe nature ever meant me to have children. Either I’m impatient with them, or else I spoil them. Little Phil’s a pet, of course, but I know that a family would have driven me crazy.”
Mrs. Quarles’s expression changed. “But wasn’t it wonderful to see him again after all those months?” The tone of the question was almost anxious. She hoped that Elinor would answer it with the enthusiastic affirmative which would have been natural in the circumstances to herself. But at the same time she was haunted by a fear lest the strange girl might answer (with the frankness which was so admirably a quality in her, but which was also so disquieting in its revelation of unfamiliar and, to Rachel, incomprehensible states of soul) that she hadn’t been in the least pleased to see her child again. Elinor’s first words came to her as a relief.
“Yes, it was wonderful,” she said, but robbed the phrase of its full effect by adding: “I didn’t imagine I could be so glad to see him again. But it was really a wild excitement.”
There was a silence. “A queer girl,” Mrs. Quarles was thinking; and her face reflected something of that bewilderment which she always felt in Elinor’s presence. She did her best to love her daughter-in-law; and up to a point she succeeded. Elinor had many
