Part 15 (1/2)

”Suppose you went up to the City and saw Mr. What's-his-name?” she suggested, meaning the signatory of the letter.

”_Me_!”

It was a cry of the soul aghast, a cry drawn out of him sharply, by a most genuine cruel alarm. Him to go up to the City to interview a solicitor! Why, the poor dear woman must be demented! He could not have done it for a million pounds. The thought of it made him sick, raising the whole of his lunch to his throat, as by some sinister magic.

She saw and translated the look on his face. It was a look of horror.

And at once she made excuses for him to herself. At once she said to herself that it was no use pretending that her Henry was like other men.

He was not. He was a dreamer. He was, at times, amazingly peculiar. But he was her Henry. In any other man than her Henry a hesitation to take charge of his wife's financial affairs would have been ridiculous; it would have been effeminate. But Henry was Henry. She was gradually learning that truth. He was adorable; but he was Henry. With magnificent strength of mind she collected herself.

”No,” she said cheerfully. ”As they're my shares, perhaps I'd better go.

Unless we _both_ go!” She encountered his eye again, and added quietly: ”No, I'll go alone.”

He sighed his relief. He could not help sighing his relief.

And, after meticulously was.h.i.+ng-up and straightening, she departed, and Priam remained solitary with his ideas about married life and the fiscal question.

Alice was a.s.suredly the very mirror of discretion. Never, since that unanswered query as to savings at the Grand Babylon, had she subjected him to any inquisition concerning money. Never had she talked of her own means, save in casual phrase now and then to a.s.sure him that there was enough. She had indeed refused banknotes diffidently offered to her by him, telling him to keep them by him till need of them arose. Never had she discoursed of her own past life, nor led him on to discourse of his.

She was one of those women for whom neither the past nor the future seems to exist--they are always so occupied with the important present.

He and she had both of them relied on their judgment of character as regarded each other's worthiness and trustworthiness. And he was the last man in the world to be a chancellor of the exchequer. To him, money was a quite uninteresting token that had to pa.s.s through your hands. He had always had enough of it. He had always had too much of it. Even at Putney he had had too much of it. The better part of Henry Leek's two hundred pounds remained in his pockets, and under his own will he had his pound a week, of which he never spent more than a few s.h.i.+llings. His distractions were tobacco (which cost him about twopence a day), walking about and enjoying colour effects and the oddities of the streets (which cost him nearly nought), and reading: there were three shops of Putney where all that is greatest in literature could be bought for fourpence-halfpenny a volume. Do what he could, he could not read away more than ninepence a week. He was positively acc.u.mulating money. You may say that he ought to have compelled Alice to accept money. The idea never occurred to him. In his scheme of things money had not been a matter of sufficient urgency to necessitate an argument with one's wife.

She was always welcome to all that he had.

And now suddenly, money acquired urgency in his eyes. It was most disturbing. He was not frightened: he was merely disturbed. If he had ever known the sensation of wanting money and not being able to obtain it, he would probably have been frightened. But this sensation was unfamiliar to him. Not once in his whole career had he hesitated to change gold from fear that the end of gold was at hand.

All kinds of problems crowded round him.

He went out for a stroll to escape the problems. But they accompanied him. He walked through exactly the same streets as had delighted him in the morning. And they had ceased to delight him. This surely could not be ideal Putney that he was in! It must be some other place of the same name. The mismanagement of a brewery a hundred and fifty miles from London; the failure of the British working-man to drink his customary pints in several scattered scores of public-houses, had most unaccountably knocked the bottom out of the Putney system of practical philosophy. Putney posters were now merely disgusting, Putney trade gross and futile, the tobacconist a narrow-minded and stupid bourgeois; and so on.

Alice and he met on their doorstep, each in the act of pulling out a latchkey.

”Oh!” she said, when they were inside, ”it's done for! There's no mistake--it's done for! We shan't get a penny this year, not one penny!

And he doesn't think there'll be anything next year either! And the shares'll go down yet, he says. I never heard of such a thing in all my life! Did you?”

He admitted sympathetically that he had not.

After she had been upstairs and come down again her mood suddenly changed. ”Well,” she smiled, ”whether we get anything or not, it's tea-time. So we'll have tea. I've no patience with worrying. I said I should make pastry after tea, and I will too. See if I don't!”

The tea was perhaps slightly more elaborate than usual.

After tea he heard her singing in the kitchen. And he was moved to go and look at her. There she was, with her sleeves turned back, and a large pinafore ap.r.o.n over her rich bosom, kneading flour. He would have liked to approach her and kiss her. But he never could accomplish feats of that kind at unusual moments.

”Oh!” she laughed. ”You can look! _I'm_ not worrying. I've no patience with worrying.”

Later in the afternoon he went out; rather like a person who has reasons for leaving inconspicuously. He had made a great, a critical resolve. He pa.s.sed furtively down Werter Road into the High Street, and then stood a moment outside Stawley's stationery shop, which is also a library, an emporium of leather-bags, and an artists'-colourman's. He entered Stawley's blus.h.i.+ng, trembling--he a man of fifty who could not see his own toes--and asked for certain tubes of colour. An energetic young lady who seemed to know all about the graphic arts endeavoured to sell to him a magnificent and complicated box of paints, which opened out into an easel and a stool, and contained a palette of a shape preferred by the late Edwin Long, R.A., a selection of colours which had been approved by the late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., and a patent drying-oil which (she said) had been used by Whistler. Priam Farll got away from the shop without this apparatus for the confection of masterpieces, but he did not get away without a sketching-box which he had had no intention of buying.

The young lady was too energetic for him. He was afraid of being too curt with her lest she should turn on him and tell him that pretence was useless--she knew he was Priam Farll. He felt guilty, and he felt that he looked guilty. As he hurried along the High Street towards the river with the paint-box it appeared to him that policemen observed him inimically and c.o.c.ked their helmets at him, as who should say: ”See here; this won't do. You're supposed to be in Westminster Abbey. You'll be locked up if you're too brazen.”