Elinor sighed. “I can’t really expect to receive his surrender,” she said. “When one has become a habit, one can’t very well suddenly turn into an overwhelming revelation.”
Mrs. Quarles shook her head. In recent years Sidney’s overwhelming revelations had come from such unexpectedly humble sources: the little kitchen maid, the gamekeeper’s daughter. How could he? she wondered for the thousandth time. How could he? It was incomprehensible.
“If, at least,” she said almost in a whisper, “you had God as a companion.” God had always been her comfort. God and the doing of God’s will. She could never understand how people could get through life without Him. “If only you could find God.”
Elinor’s smile was sarcastic. Remarks of this sort annoyed her by being so ridiculously beside the point. “It might be simpler—” she began, but checked herself after the first words. She had meant to say that it might be simpler perhaps to find a man. But she remembered her resolution and was silent.
“What were you saying?”
Elinor shook her head. “Nothing.”
Fortunately for Mr. Quarles, the British Museum had no Essex branch. It was only in London that he could make researches and collect the documents necessary for his book. The house in Portman Square was let (Mr. Quarles blamed the income tax, but his own speculations in sugar were mainly responsible), and it was in a modest little flat in Bloomsbury (“convenientlah nyah the Museum”) that he now camped whenever the claims of scholarship brought him to town.
During the last few weeks the claims had been more than usually peremptory. His visits to London had been frequent and prolonged. After the second of these visits Mrs. Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman. And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the woman had been found. She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner table—not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently. Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements. Behind the ink cloud of the Ancient Indians he hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved. Poor Sidney! He thought himself so Machiavellian. But his ink was transparent, his cunning like a child’s.
“Couldn’t you get the books sent down from the London Library?” Mrs. Quarles rather pointedly asked.
Sidney shook his head. “They’re the sort of books,” he said importantly, “that are only in the Museum.”
Rachel sighed and could only hope that the woman could be trusted to look after herself well enough to keep out of serious trouble and not so well as to want to make mischief.
“I think I shall run up to town with you tomorrow,” he announced on the morning before Philip and Elinor took their leave.
“Again?” asked Mrs. Quarles.
“There’s a point about those wretched Indians,” he explained, “that I ryahly must clyah up. I think I may find it in Pramathanatha Banerjea’s book. Or it may be dealt with by Radakhumud Mookerji.” He rolled out the names impressively, professionally. “It’s about local government in Maurya times. So democratic, you know, in spite of the central despotism. For example …”
Through the ink cloud Mrs. Quarles caught glimpses of a female figure.
Breakfast over, Sidney retired to his study and addressed himself to the morning’s crossword. A kind of onion, six letters. Anticipations of the morrow distracted him; he could not fix his attention. Her breasts, he was thinking, her smooth white back. … What about “chive”? No good; only five letters. Walking over to the bookshelf, he took out his Bible; its thin pages rustled under his fingers. “Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like young roes that are twins.” Solomon spoke for him, with what rich thunders! “The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.” He read the words out loud. Gladys had a perfect figure. “Like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor.” These Orientals knew what passion was. Miscalling libidinousness “passion,” Mr. Quarles regarded himself as a very passionate man. “Thy belly is like an heap of wheat.” Passion is respectable, is actually respected by the law in some countries. For the poets it is even sacred. He agreed with the poets. But “like young roes” was an odd, inadequate simile. Gladys was plump without being fat, firmly resilient. Roes, on the contrary … As a man of great passions, Sidney could regard himself as positively a noble and heroic figure. “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy planets are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh …” But, of course, the word was “garlic”! Six letters. A kind of onion. “Myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.”
Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late. “Scandalous!” Mr. Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch. “Disgraceful!”
“You’re in a great hurry to be at your Indians,” said Philip, smiling from his corner.
His father frowned and talked about something else. At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second. Sidney reached his flat only just in time. He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang. He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened. It was Gladys. He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown
