“All the same,” Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous, gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, “the champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.” It was the daemon that had suddenly interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations. Burlap had allowed him to speak out loud. Why not? It amused him to be baffling. He looked at Beatrice.
Beatrice was duly baffled. “I’m sure they were,” she said, readjusting her churchgoing face to make it harmonize with the grin. She laughed rather nervously and turned away to pour out the milk into a cup. “Here’s your milk,” she rapped out, taking refuge from her bafflement in officious command. “Mind you drink it while it’s hot.”
There was a long silence. Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly knew for what.
“You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffett,” said Burlap at last.
Beatrice smiled, “Luckily there’s no big spider.”
“Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.”
“Yes, it is,” said Beatrice. That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she reflected; he was so trustworthy. Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw you about and kiss you. Dreadful that was, quite dreadful. Beatrice had never really gotten over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie’s brother-in-law, whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a hansom. The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such a panic of fear of being touched. She was over thirty now and had never allowed anyone to touch her. The soft, quivering little girl underneath the businesslike shell of her had often fallen in love. But the terror of being pawed about, of being even touched, had always been stronger than the love. At the first sign of danger, she had desperately pecked, she had hardened her shell, she had fled. Arrived in safety, the terrified little girl had drawn a long breath. Thank heaven! But a little sigh of disappointment was always included in the big sigh of relief. She wished she hadn’t been frightened; she wished that the happy relationship that had existed before the pawing could have gone on forever, indefinitely. Sometimes she was angry with herself; more often she thought there was something fundamentally wrong with love, something fundamentally dreadful about men. That was the wonderful thing about Denis Burlap; he was so reassuringly not a pouncer or a pawer. Beatrice could adore him without a qualm.
“Susan used to sit on poufs, like little Miss Muffett,” Burlap resumed after a pause. His voice was melancholy. He had spent the last minutes in ruminating the theme of his dead wife. It was nearly two years now since Susan had been carried off in an influenza epidemic. Nearly two years; but the pain, he assured himself, had not diminished, the sense of loss had remained as overwhelming as ever. Susan, Susan, Susan—he had repeated the name to himself over and over again. He would never see her any more, even if he lived for a million years. A million years, a million years. Gulfs opened all round the words. “Or on the floor,” he went on, reconstructing her image as vividly as he could. “I think she liked sitting on the floor best. Like a child.” A child, a child, he repeated to himself. So young.
Beatrice sat in silence, looking into the empty grate. To have looked at Burlap, she felt, would have been indiscreet, indecent almost. Poor fellow! When she turned toward him at last, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks. The sight filled her with a sudden passion of maternal pity. “Like a child,” he had said. But he was like a child himself. Like a poor unhappy child. Leaning forward, she drew her fingers caressingly along the back of his limply hanging hand.
“Batrachian grapplings!” Lucy repeated and laughed. “That was a stroke of genius, Willie.”
“All my strokes are strokes of genius,” said Willie modestly. He acted himself; he was Willie Weaver in the celebrated role of Willie Weaver. He exploited artistically that love of eloquence, the passion for the rotund and reverberating phrase with which, more than three centuries too late, he had been born. In Shakespeare’s youth he would have been a literary celebrity. Among his contemporaries, Willie’s euphuisms only raised a laugh. But he enjoyed applause, even when it was derisive. Moreover, the laughter was never malicious; for Willie Weaver was so good-natured and obliging that everybody liked him. It was to a hilariously approving audience that he played his part; and, feeling the approval through the hilarity, he played it for all it was worth. “All my strokes are strokes of genius.” The remark was admirably in character. And perhaps true? Willie jested, but with a secret belief. “And mark my words,” he added, “one of these days the batrachians will erump, they’ll break out.”
“But why batrachians?” asked Slipe. “Anything less like a batrachian than Beatrice …”
“And why should they break out?” put in Spandrell.
“Frogs don’t peck.” But Slipe’s thin voice was drowned by Mary Rampion’s.
“Because things do
