Part 3 (1/2)

”I suppose he thinks I shall go on living with him forever,” exclaimed Norah, savagely throwing herself down into her father's arm-chair. ”In my opinion most parents are fit to be only children. Light the gas again, Roland; I want to write a note to Wilfred.”

III

By the time morning was come Norah had decided that she would rather go on the stage than be engaged to Wilfred Curlew. The extraordinary thing was that she should never have realized, before her conversation with Mr. Vavasour, how obviously the stage was indicated as the right career for her. It was true that she had never until now seriously contemplated a career, and the mild way she had accepted herself merely as the most important member of a large family was sufficient answer to the silly accusations made by her father last night. Perhaps he would begin to appreciate her now when he was on the point of losing her; perhaps he would regret that he had ever suggested she was indifferent to the claims of family life; in future she should take care to be indifferent to everybody's feelings except her own; she would teach her father a lesson. It never entered Norah's head that there would be any difficulty about going on the stage apart from paternal opposition, and she wondered how many famous people had owed their careers to a fortuitous event like her meeting with Mr. Vavasour. At any rate, it would not be more difficult to obtain her father's permission to embark on this suddenly conceived adventure than it would be to obtain his permission to wear on the third finger of her left hand the rather cheap ring that was the outward sign of her intention to marry Wilfred. Confronted by the two alternatives--success in the theater and matrimony with Wilfred--she felt that success was much the less remote of the two; in fact, the more she thought about it the farther away receded matrimony and the more clearly defined became success. ”I don't want to be a great actress,” she explained to herself; ”I want to be a successful actress.”

She half made up her mind to go out and talk to Lily about the new project, but on second thoughts she decided not to alarm her parents by any prospect so definite as would be implied in availing herself of the practical a.s.sistance that Lily and her mother could afford her in carrying out her plan. It would be more tactful to present as alternatives the definite fact of being engaged to Wilfred or the indefinite idea of being able some time or other in the future to adopt the stage as a profession. The more Norah thought about Wilfred the less in love with him she felt, and the less in love with him she felt the easier would be her task to-night. In her note she had told him to come in after supper, as usual, but she had not said a word about her intention to precipitate their affair. Would it impress her father if she and Wilfred were to meet him at the station and approach the subject before supper? No, on the whole, she decided, it would be more prudent to provoke the final scene otherwise, and her heart quickened slightly at the thought of the surprise she was going to spring upon the family that evening.

Norah was unusually pleasant to everybody all day: she gave Vincent some sweets that she did not like herself; she offered to take Gladys and Marjorie for a walk in Kensington Gardens, because a rumor had reached her of a wonderful display of hats in one of the big shops in Kensington High Street. She noticed that when her father came back from the office he seemed to have forgotten about the scene of last night, and she saw her mother's spirits rising at the prospect of an undisturbed evening.

After supper Mr. Caffyn sat down as usual in his arm-chair; Gladys and Marjorie, tired after their long walk and exhausted with the contemplation of shop-windows in which they had perceived nothing to interest themselves, went off to bed without trying for a moment's grace. The upper leaves of the dining-table were removed, and a party of billiards was made up with Norah and Cecil matched against Roland and Dorothy; Vincent was allowed to chalk the tips of the cues, Agnes and Edna to quarrel over the marking. Mrs. Caffyn, with a sigh of relief for the comfortable wheels on which the evening was running, took the arm-chair opposite her husband and read with unusual concentration what she imagined was yesterday's morning paper, but which, as a matter of fact, was the morning paper of a month ago. Soon the front-door bell rang, and a friend of Roland's, called Arthur Drake, with whom Norah had been in love for a week about a year ago and of whom Dorothy was slightly enamoured at the present, came in full of a new round game for the billiard-table that he had just learned in another house. Cecil went off to his home-work and left Arthur to explain the new game--a complicated invention in which five small skittles, a cork, and a bell suspended from the gas-bracket each played a part. Mr. Caffyn fended off the b.u.t.t-ends of the cues that were continually b.u.mping into him amid a great deal of shouting and laughter; Agnes trod on her mother's corn; Vincent grazed his knuckles in fielding a billiard-ball that was bound for his father's head.

”And where's old Wilfred?” Arthur Drake suddenly inquired.

Another ring at the front door answered his question and Norah's suitor came in. He was a loose-jointed young man of about twenty-two, with tumbled wavy hair, bright gray eyes, and a trick, when he was feeling shy, of supporting with one arm the small of his back. His long, dogmatic chin was balanced by an irregular and humorous mouth; his personality was attractive, and if he had earned five times as much as he earned as reporter on the staff of the _Evening Herald_, or even if he had been paid for the fierce and satirical articles he wrote on the condition of modern society for a socialist weekly called _The Red Lamp_, he might not have been considered an unsuitable mate for Norah.

As it was, Mr. Caffyn looked up at him with as much abhorrence as he would have betrayed at the entrance into his dining-room of the dog that his children were always threatening to procure and the purchase of which he was constantly forbidding. Wilfred tried hard to lose himself in the round game, and whenever he was called upon to make a shot from the corner where Mr. Caffyn was sitting he did so with such unwillingness to disturb Mr. Caffyn that he always missed it. Every time he found an opportunity to pa.s.s Norah in the narrow gangway between the wall and the table he tried to squeeze her hand; and he did his best by bribing Vincent with some horse-chestnuts he had collected that morning at Kew, where his work had taken him to investigate an alleged outrage in the Temperate House, to inspire Vincent with an unquenchable desire to play Up Jenkins. Norah, however, had a plan of her own that made the notion of occasionally clasping Wilfred's hand under the table during Up Jenkins seem colorless, and Wilfred, who in his most optimistic prevision of the evening had not counted upon more than two or three kisses s.n.a.t.c.hed by ruse, suddenly found himself invited by her to abandon the game and come into the drawing-room next door.

The drawing-room of No. 17 was invested every Wednesday afternoon by a quant.i.ty of punctilious ladies who came to call on Mrs. Caffyn. Owing to the number of its ornaments and the flimsiness of its furniture, it was not considered a suitable room for general use; moreover, as secretary of the Church of England Purity Society, it occasionally fell to Mr.

Caffyn's lot to interview various clergymen there on confidential matters, and in a house like 17 Lonsdale Road, worn and torn by children, it was essential to preserve one room in a condition of gelid perfection. So rarely was the room used that the over-worked servants had not bothered to draw the curtains at dusk, and when Wilfred and Norah retired into its seclusion the chilly gloom was accentuated by the street-lamps gleaming through the bare lime-trees at the end of the garden. Norah told her lover to light the gas, and not even the sickly green incandescence availed to make her appear less beautiful to him in this desert of ugly knickknacks.

”No, don't pull the curtains,” she said, quickly, ”and don't kiss me here, because people might see you from the street. I didn't ask you to come in here to make love.”

Perhaps a sense of the theater had always been dormant in Norah, for she went on as if she were making a set speech; but Wilfred was much too deep in love to let the cynicism upon which he plumed himself apply to her, and he listened humbly.

”We can't go on like this forever,” she wound up. ”We must be engaged openly. I told father that last night, but he won't hear of it, so what are we to do?”

”Darling, I'm ready to do anything.”

”Oh, anything!” she repeated, petulantly. ”What is anything? He'll be here in a minute, and you've got to tell him that unless he consents to our being engaged you'll persuade me to elope.”

”Do you think he'd give way then?” Wilfred asked, doubtfully. He was very much in love with Norah, but he could not help remembering that he, too, had a father who, after an argument every Sunday evening, still allowed him ten s.h.i.+llings a week for pocket-money. If he were to elope, he should not only be certain to lose that supplement to his own earnings, but he should also involve in deeper discredit the profession he had adopted instead of the law, which Mr. Curlew, senior, had designed him to enter by way of the office of an old friend who was a solicitor.

Norah wished that her father would come in and interrupt what should have been a pa.s.sionate scene, but which was in reality as cold as the room where it was being played. She watched herself and Wilfred, whom the incandescent gas did not set off to advantage, in the large mirror that formed the over-mantel of the fireplace, and she realized now, as she had never realized before in her life, how amazingly she stood out from her surroundings.

”You haven't kissed me once this evening,” Wilfred began; but she shook herself free from his tentative embrace, and with one eye on the door for her father's entrance and the other on the mirror, or rather with both eyes at one moment on the door and immediately afterward on the mirror--a movement which displayed their brilliancy and depth--she went on enumerating to her suitor the material difficulties that made their engagement so hopeless.

”But I'm getting on,” he insisted. ”The editor was very pleased with the way I handled that Kentish Town murder. They don't consider me at all a dud in Fleet Street. I'm sure I give everybody in this house quite a wrong impression of myself because I feel nervous and awkward when I'm here; but I don't think there's really much doubt that in another couple of years I shall be in quite a different position financially. Besides, I hope to do original work, and if a friend of mine can raise the money to start this new weekly--”

”Oh, if, if, if!” interrupted Norah, impatiently.

”Norah, don't you love me any more?”

”Of course I love you,” she said. ”Don't be so stupid.”

”You seem different to-night.”

”You wouldn't like me to be always the same, would you?”

”No, but--” He broke off, and turned away with a sigh to regard the melancholy street-lamps twinkling through the lime-trees at the end of the garden.

”I think it's I who ought to be angry, not you,” said Norah. ”I offered to marry you at once, and you instantly began to make excuses.”

”Norah!” protested the young man.