“Too unseemlah!”
“Talking about love with a face like that!” she went on, more shrilly than ever. “An old swine like you! And then you only give a girl a rotten old watch and a pair of earrings, and the stones in them aren’t even good ones, because I asked a jeweller and he said they weren’t. And now, on top of everything, I’m going to have a baby.”
“A babah?” repeated Mr. Quarles incredulously, but with a deeper and more dreadful sinking of apprehension. “Surely not a babah.”
“Yes, a baby!” Gladys shouted, stamping her foot. “Can’t you hear what I say, you old idiot? A baby. That’s what I’ve come here about. And I won’t go away till …”
It was at this moment that Mrs. Quarles walked in through the French window from the garden. She had been having a talk with Marjorie at the cottage and had come to tell Sidney that she had asked the two young people to dinner that evening.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, halting on the threshold.
There was a moment’s silence. Then, addressing herself this time to Mrs. Quarles, Gladys began again with uncontrollable fury. Five minutes later she was no less uncontrollably sobbing and Mrs. Quarles was trying to console her. Sidney took the opportunity to sneak out of the room. When the gong sounded for lunch, he sent down word to say that he was feeling very ill and would they please send up two lightly boiled eggs, some toast and butter, and a little stewed fruit.
Meanwhile, in the study Mrs. Quarles had hung solicitously over Gladys’s chair. “It’s all right,” she kept repeating, patting the girl’s shoulder. “It’s all right. You mustn’t cry.” Poor girl! she was thinking. And what a dreadful scent! And how could Sidney? And again, poor girl, poor girl! “Don’t cry. Try to be brave. It’ll be all right.”
Gladys’s sobbing gradually subsided. Mrs. Quarles’s calm voice talked on consolingly. The girl listened. Then suddenly she jumped up. The face that confronted Mrs. Quarles was savagely derisive through the tear stains.
“Ow, shut it!” she said sarcastically, “shut it! What do you take me for? A baby? Talking like that! You think you can talk me quiet, do you? Talk me out of my rights. Talky talky; baby’s going to be good, isn’t she? But you’re mistaken, I tell you. You’re damned well mistaken. And you’ll know it soon enough, I can tell you.”
And with that she bounced out of the room into the garden and was gone.
XXXII
In the little house at the end of the mews Elinor was alone. Faint rumblings of faraway traffic caressed the warm silence. A bowl of her mother’s potpourri peopled the air for her with countless potential memories of childhood. She was arranging roses in a vase; huge white roses with petals of malleable porcelain, orange roses like whorls of congealed and perfumed flame. The chiming clock on the mantelpiece made a sudden and startling comment of eight notes and left the accorded vibrations to tingle mournfully away into nothingness, like music on a departing ship. Half-past three. And at six she was expecting Everard. Expecting Everard for a cocktail, she was at pains to explain to herself, before he took her out to dinner and the play. Just an evening’s entertainment, like any other evening’s entertainment. She kept telling herself so, because she knew, underneath, she was prophetically certain, that the evening wouldn’t be in the least like other evenings, but cardinal, decisive. She would have to make up her mind, she would have to choose. But she didn’t want to choose; that was why she tried to make herself believe that the evening was to be merely trivial and amusing. It was like covering a corpse with flowers. Mountains of flowers. But the corpse was always there, in spite of the concealing lilies. And a choice would have to be made, in spite of dinner at Kettner’s and the theatre.
Sighing, she picked up the heavy vase in both hands and was just lifting it on to the mantelpiece, when there was a loud knock at the door. Elinor started so violently that she almost dropped her burden. And the terror persisted, even when she had recovered from the first shock of surprise. A knock at the door, when she was alone in the lonely house, always set her heart uncomfortably beating. The idea that there was somebody there, waiting, listening, a stranger, an enemy perhaps (for Elinor’s fancy was pregnant with horrible hairy faces peering round corners, with menacing hands, with knives and clubs and pistols), or perhaps a madman, listening intently for any sound of life within the house, waiting, waiting like a spider for her to open—this was a nightmare to her, a terror. The knock was repeated. Setting down the vase, she tiptoed with infinite precautions to the window and peeped between the curtains. On days when she was feeling particularly nervous she lacked the courage even to do this, but sat motionless, hoping that the noise of her heart might not be audible in the street, until the knocker at last wore out his patience and walked away. Next day the man from Selfridge’s would heap coals of fire upon her by apologizing for the retarded delivery. “Called yesterday evening, madam, but there was nobody at home.” And Elinor would feel ashamed of herself and a fool. But the next time she was alone and nervous, she would do exactly the same thing.
This afternoon she had courage; she ventured to look at the enemy—at as much of him, that is to say, as she could see, peeping sideways through the glass toward
