Part 28 (2/2)

They were as unexpected, the conflicts of opinion, in the office as they were at home. The subject would come up, he would enter it according to his ideas and without foreseeing trouble, and suddenly he would find himself in acute opposition and giving acute offence because he was in acute opposition.

The Suffragettes! The day when Mr. Fortune received through the post letters upon which militancy had squirted its oppression and its determination in black and viscid form through the aperture of the letter box. ”And you're sticking up for them!” declared Mr. Fortune in a very great pa.s.sion. ”You're deliberately sticking up for them.

You--pah!--pouff!--paff! I have got the abominable stuff all over my fingers.”

Sabre displayed the ”wrinkled-up nut” of his Puzzlehead boyhood. ”I'm not sticking up for them. I detest their methods as much as you do. I think they're monstrous and indefensible. All I said was that, things being as they are, you can't help seeing that their horrible ways are bringing the vote a jolly sight nearer than it's ever been before.

Millions of people who never would have thought about woman suffrage are thinking about it now. These women are advertising it as it never could be advertised by calmly talking about it, and you can't get anything nowadays except by shouting and smas.h.i.+ng and abusing and advertising. I only wish you could. No one listens to reason. It's got to be what they call a whirlwind campaign or go without. That's not sticking up for them. It's simply recognising a rotten state of affairs.”

”And I say to you,” returned Mr. Fortune, scrubbing furiously at his fingers with a duster, ”and I say to you what I seem to be perpetually forced to say to you, that your ideas are becoming more and more _repugnant_ to me. There's not a solitary subject comes up between us but you adopt in it what I desire to call a stubborn and contumacious att.i.tude towards me. Whoof!” He blew a cyclonic blast down the speaking tube. ”Send Parker up here. Parker! Send _Parker_ up here! Parker!

_Parker! Parker!_ Pah! Pouff! Paff! Now it's all over the speaking tube!

I am by no means recovered yet, Sabre, I am very far from being yet recovered, from your remarks yesterday on the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill. Let me remind you again that your att.i.tude was not only very painful to me in my capacity of one in Holy Orders, it was also outrageously opposed to the traditions and standing of this firm.

We are out of sympathy, Sabre. We are seriously out of sympathy; and let me tell you that you would do well to reflect whether we are not dangerously out of sympathy. Let me--”

The door porter entered in the venerable presence of the summoned Parker, much agitated.

Sabre began, ”If you can't see what I said about the Disestablishment Bill--”

”I did not see; I do not see; I cannot see and I shall not see. I--”

Sabre moved towards his door. ”Well, I'd better be attending to my work.

If anything I've said annoyed you, it certainly was not intended to.”

And there followed him into his room, ”Pumice stone! Pumice stone!

Pumice stone! Go to the chemist's and get some pumice stone.... Very well then, sir, don't stand there staring at me, sir!”

IV

Like living in two empty houses: empty this end; empty that end. More frequently, for these estrangements, appealed to him the places of his refuge: the room of his mind, that private chamber wherein, retired, he a.s.sembled the parts of his puzzles; that familiar garment in which, invested, he sat among the fraternity of his thoughts; the evenings with Young Perch and old Mrs. Perch; the evenings with Mr. Fargus.

Most strongly of all called another refuge; and this, because it called so strongly, he kept locked. Nona.

They met no more frequently than, prior to her two years' absence, they had been wont to meet in the ordinary course of neighbourly life; and their lives, by their situations, were much detached. Northrepps was only visited, never resided at for many months together.

His resolution was not to force encounters. Once, very shortly after that day of her disclosure, he had said to her, ”Look here, we're not going to have any arranged meetings, Nona. I'm not strong enough--not strong enough to resist. I couldn't bear it.”

She answered, ”You're too strong, Marko. You're too strong to do what you think you ought not to do; it isn't not being strong enough.”

He told her she was very wrong. ”That's giving me strength of character.

I haven't any strength of character at all. That's been my failing all my life. I tell you what I've got instead. I've got the most frightfully, the most infernally vivid sense of what's right in my own personal conduct. Lots of people haven't. I envy them. They can do what they like. But I know what I ought to do. I know it so absolutely that there's no excuse for me when I don't do it, certainly no credit if I do. I go in with my eyes open or I stay out merely because my eyes are open. There's nothing in that. If it's anything it's contemptible.”

She said, ”Teach me to be contemptible.”

V

In those words he had expressed his composition. What he had not revealed--that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was wrong) in his conduct forbidding it--was the corroding struggle to preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He would have no meetings with her save only such as thrice happy chance and most kind circ.u.mstance might apportion. That was within the capacity of his strength. He could ”at least” (he used to think) prevent his limbs from taking him to her. But his mind--his mind turned to her; automatically, when he was off his guard, as a swing door ever to its frame; frantically, when he would abate it, as a prisoned animal against its bars. By day, by night, in Fortune's company, in Mabel's company, in solitude, his mind turned to her. This was the refuge he kept locked, using the expression and envisaging it.

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