The Little Nugget

'Oh, you wouldn't remember. It's only one particular evening when you played that thing. It sticks in my mind. It was at your father's studio.'

She looked up quickly.

'We went out afterwards and sat in the park.'

I sat up thrilled.

'A man came by with a dog,' I said.

'Two dogs.'

'One surely!'

'Two. A bull-dog and a fox-terrier.'

'I remember the bull-dog, but—by Jove, you're right. A fox-terrier with a black patch over his left eye.'

'Right eye.'

'Right eye. They came up to us, and you—'

'Gave them chocolates.'

I sank back slowly in my chair.

'You've got a wonderful memory,' I said.

She bent over the fire without speaking. The rain rattled on the window.

'So you still like my playing, Peter?'

'I like it better than ever; there's something in it now that I don't believe there used to be. I can't describe it—something—'

'I think it's knowledge, Peter,' she said quietly. 'Experience. I'm five years older than I was when I used to play to you before, and I've seen a good deal in those five years. It may not be altogether pleasant seeing life, but—well, it makes you play the piano better. Experience goes in at the heart and comes out at the finger-tips.'

It seemed to me that she spoke a little bitterly.

'Have you had a bad time, Audrey, these last years?' I said.

'Pretty bad.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I'm not—altogether. I've learned a lot.'

She was silent again, her eyes fixed on the fire.

'What are you thinking about?' I said.

'Oh, a great many things.'

'Pleasant?'

'Mixed. The last thing I thought about was pleasant. That was, that I am very lucky to be doing the work I am doing now. Compared with some of the things I have done—'

She shivered.

'I wish you would tell me about those years, Audrey,' I said. 'What were some of the things you did?'

She leaned back in her chair and shaded her face from the fire with a newspaper. Her eyes were in the shadow.

'Well, let me see. I was a nurse for some time at the Lafayette Hospital in New York.'

'That's hard work?'

'Horribly hard. I had to give it up after a while. But—it teaches you.... You learn.... You learn—all sorts of things. Realities. How much of your own trouble is imagination. You get real trouble in a hospital. You get it thrown at you.'

I said nothing. I was feeling—I don't know why—a little uncomfortable, a little at a disadvantage, as one feels in the presence of some one bigger than oneself.

'Then I was a waitress.'

'A waitress?'

'I tell you I did everything. I was a waitress, and a very bad one. I broke plates. I muddled orders. Finally I was very rude to a customer and I went on to try something else. I forget what came next. I think it was the stage. I travelled for a year with a touring company. That was hard work, too, but I liked it. After that came dressmaking, which was harder and which I hated. And then I had my first stroke of real luck.'

'What was that?'

'I met Mr Ford.'

'How did that happen?'

'You wouldn't remember a Miss Vanderley, an American girl who was over in London five or six years ago? My father taught her painting. She was very rich, but she was wild at that time to be Bohemian. I think that's why she chose Father as a teacher. Well, she was always at the studio, and we became great friends, and one day, after all these things I have been telling you of, I thought I would write to her, and see if she could not find me something to do. She was a dear.' Her voice trembled, and she lowered the newspaper till her whole face was hidden. 'She wanted me to come to their home and live on her for ever, but I couldn't have that. I told her I must work. So she sent me to Mr Ford, whom the Vanderleys knew very well, and I became Ogden's governess.'

'Great Scott!' I cried. 'What!'

She laughed rather shakily.

'I don't think I was a very good governess. I knew next to nothing. I ought to have been having a governess myself. But I managed somehow.'

'But Ogden?' I said. 'That little fiend, didn't he worry the life out of you?'

'Oh, I had luck there again. He happened to take a mild liking to me, and he was as good as gold—for him; that's to say, if I didn't interfere with him too much, and I didn't. I was horribly weak; he let me alone. It was the happiest time I had had for ages.'

'And when he came here, you came too, as a sort of ex-governess, to continue exerting your moral influence over him?'

She laughed.

'More or less that.'

We sat in silence for a while, and then she put into words the thought which was in both our minds.

'How odd it seems, you and I sitting together chatting like this, Peter, after all—all these years.'

'Like a dream!'

'Just like a dream ... I'm so glad.... You don't know how I've hated myself sometimes for—for—'

'Audrey! You mustn't talk like that. Don't let's think of it. Besides, it was my fault.'

She shook her head.

'Well, put it that we didn't understand one another.'

She nodded slowly.

'No, we didn't understand one another.'

'But we do now,' I said. 'We're friends, Audrey.'

She did not answer. For a long time we sat in silence. And then the newspaper must have moved—a gleam from the fire fell upon her face, lighting up her eyes; and at the sight something in me began to throb, like a drum warning a city against danger. The next moment the shadow had covered them again.

I sat there, tense, gripping the arms of my chair. I was tingling. Something was happening to me. I had a curious sensation of being on the threshold of something wonderful and perilous.

From downstairs there came the sound of boys' voices. Work was over, and with it this talk by the firelight. In a few minutes somebody, Glossop, or Mr Abney, would be breaking in on our retreat.

We both rose, and then—it happened. She must have tripped in the darkness. She stumbled forward, her hand caught at my coat, and she was in my arms.

It was a thing of an instant. She recovered herself, moved to the door, and was gone.

But I stood where I was, motionless, aghast at the revelation which had come to me in that brief moment. It was the physical contact, the feel of her, warm and alive, that had shattered for ever that flimsy structure of friendship which I had fancied so strong. I had said to Love, 'Thus far, and no farther', and Love had swept over me, the more powerful for being checked. The time of self-deception was over. I knew myself.

Chapter 8

I

That Buck MacGinnis was not the man to let the grass grow under his feet in a situation like the present one, I would have gathered from White's remarks if I had not already done so from personal observation. The world is divided into dreamers and men of action. From what little I had seen of him I placed Buck MacGinnis in the latter class. Every day I expected him to act, and was agreeably surprised as each twenty-four hours passed and left me still unfixed. But I knew the hour would come, and it did.

I looked for frontal attack from Buck, not subtlety; but, when the attack came, it was so excessively frontal that my chief emotion was a sort of paralysed amazement. It seemed incredible that such peculiarly Wild Western events could happen in peaceful England, even in so isolated a spot as Sanstead House.

It had been one of those interminable days which occur only at schools. A school, more than any other institution, is dependent on the weather. Every small boy rises from his bed of a morning charged with a definite quantity of devilry; and this, if he is to sleep the sound sleep of health, he has got to work off somehow before bedtime. That is why the summer term is the one a master longs for, when the intervals between classes can be spent in the open. There is no pleasanter sight for an assistant-master at a private school than that of a number of boys expending their venom harmlessly in the sunshine.