Death! At its quietest and least harrowing, but yet—death! The old, the universal anodyne; the common lot! In this bed where she had lain nightly for over fifty years under the low, sagged ceiling, a great little old lady had passed. Of what was called ‘birth,’ of position, wealth, and power, she had none. No plumbing had come her way, no learning, and no fashion. She had borne children, nursed, fed, and washed them, sewn, cooked, and swept, eaten little, travelled not at all in all her years, suffered much pain, never known the ease of superfluity; but her back had been straight, her ways straight, her eyes quiet, and her manners gentle. If she were not the ‘great lady,’ who was?
Dinny stood, with her head bowed, feeling this to the very marrow of her soul. Old Benjy in that dim corner cleared his throat again. She started, and, trembling a little, went over to him.
“Go and look at her, Benjy; she’s asleep.”
She put her hand under his elbow to help the action of his stiffened knees. At his full height he was only up to her shoulder, a little dried-up pippin of a man. She kept at his side, moving across the room.
Together they looked down at the forehead and cheeks, slowly uncreasing in the queer beauty of death. The little old husband’s face went crimson and puffy, like that of a child who had lost its doll; he said in a sort of angered squeak:
“Eh! She’m not asleep. She’m gone. She won’t never speak agen. Look! She an’t Mother no more! Where’s that nurse? She didn’ ought to ‘ave left ‘er—”
“H’ssh! Benjy!”
“But she’m dead. What’ll I do?”
He turned his withered apple face up to Dinny, and there came from him an unwashed odour, as of grief and snuff and old potatoes.
“Can’t stop ’ere,” he said, “with Mother like that. ‘Tain’t nateral.”
“No; go downstairs and smoke your pipe, and tell nurse when she comes.”
“Tell ‘er; I’ll tell ‘er—shoulden never ‘ave left ‘er. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
Putting her hand on his shoulders, Dinny guided him to the stairway, and watched him stumbling and groping and grieving his way down. Then she went back to the bed. The smoothed-out face had an uncanny attraction for her. With every minute that passed it seemed the more to proclaim superiority. Almost triumphant it was, as she gazed, in its slow, sweet relaxation after age and pain; character revealed in the mould of that brief interval between torturing life and corrupting death. ‘Good as gold!’ Those were the words they should grave on the humble stone they would put over her. Wherever she was now, or whether, indeed, she was anywhere, did not matter. She had done her bit. Betty!
She was still standing there gazing when the nurse came back.
CHAPTER 16
Since her husband’s departure Clare had met young Croom constantly, but always at the stipulated arm’s-length. Love had made him unsociable, and to be conspicuously in his company was unwise, so she did not make him known to her friends; they met where they could eat cheaply, see films, or simply walk. To her rooms she had not invited him again, nor had he asked to come. His behaviour, indeed, was exemplary, except when he fell into tense and painful silences, or gazed at her till her hands itched to shake him. He seemed to have paid several visits to Jack Muskham’s stud farm, and to be spending hours over books which debated whether the excellence of ‘Eclipse’ was due to the Lister Turk, rather than to the Darley Arabian, and whether it were preferable to breed-in to Blacklock with St. Simon on Speculum or with Speculum on St. Simon.
When she returned from Condaford after the New Year, she had not heard from him for five consecutive days, so that he was bulking more largely in her thoughts.
“DEAR TONY,” she wrote to him at the Coffee House:
“Where and how are you? I am back. Very happy New Year!
“Yours always,
“CLARE.”
The answer did not come for three days, during which she felt at first huffy, then anxious, and finally a little scared. It was indited from the inn at Bablock Hythe:
“DARLING CLARE,—
“I was ever so relieved to get your note, because I’d determined not to write until I heard from you. Nothing’s further from my thoughts than to bore you with myself, and sometimes I don’t know whether I am or not. So far as a person can be who is not seeing you, I’m all right; I’m overlooking the fitting up of the boxes for those mares. They (the boxes) will be prime. The difficulty is going to be acclimatisation; it’s supposed to be mild here, and the pasture looks as if it would be tip-top. This part of the world is quite pretty, especially the river. Thank God the inn’s cheap, and I can live indefinitely on eggs and bacon. Jack Muskham has been brick enough to start my salary from the New Year, so I’m thinking of laying out my remaining sixty-odd pounds on Stapylton’s old two-seater. He’s just off back to India. Once I’m down here it’ll be vital to have a car if I’m to see anything of you, without which life won’t be worth living. I hope you had a splendid time at Condaford. Do you know I haven’t seen you for sixteen days, and am absolutely starving. I’ll be up on Saturday afternoon. Where can I meet you?
“Your ever devoted
“TONY.”
Clare read this letter on the sofa in her room, frowning a little as she opened, smiling a little as she finished it.
Poor dear Tony! Grabbing a telegraph form, she wrote:
“Come to tea Melton Mews.—C.”
and despatched it on her way to the Temple.
The importance attaching to the meeting of two young people depends on the importance which others attach to their not meeting. Tony Croom approached Melton Mews without thinking of anyone but Clare, and failed to observe a shortish man in horn-rimmed spectacles, black boots, and a claret-coloured tie, who looked like the secretary of a learned society. Unobtrusive and unobserved, this individual had already travelled with him from Bablock Hythe to Paddington, from Paddington to the ‘Coffee House,’ from the ‘Coffee House’ to the corner of Melton Mews; had watched him enter No. 2, made an entry in a pocket-book, and with an evening paper in his hand was now waiting for him to come out again. With touching fidelity he read no news, keeping his prominent glance on that peacock-blue door, prepared at any moment to close himself like an umbrella and vanish into the street-scape. And while he waited (which was his normal occupation) he thought, like other citizens, of the price of living, of the cup of tea which he would like, of his small daughter and her collection of foreign stamps, and of whether he would now have to pay income tax. His imagination dwelled, also, on the curves of a young woman at the tobacconist’s where he obtained his ‘gaspers.’
His name was Chayne, and he made his living out of a remarkable memory for faces, inexhaustible patience, careful entries in his pocket-book, the faculty of self-obliteration, and that fortunate resemblance to the secretaries of learned societies. He was, indeed, employed by the Polteed Agency, who made their living by knowing more than was good for those about whom they knew it. Having received his instruction on the day Clare returned to London, he had already been five days ‘on the job,’ and no one knew it except his employer and himself. Spying on other people being, according to the books he read, the chief occupation of the people of these islands, it had never occurred to him to look down on a profession conscientiously pursued for seventeen years. He took a pride in his work, and knew himself for a capable ‘sleuth.’ Though somewhat increasingly troubled in the bronchial regions owing to the draughts he had so often to stand in, he could not by now imagine any other way of passing his time, or any, on the whole, more knowing method of gaining a livelihood. Young Croom’s address he had obtained by the simple expedient of waiting behind Clare while she sent her telegram; but, having just failed to read the message itself, he had started at once for Bablock Hythe, since when until now he had experienced no difficulty. Shifting his position from time to time at the end of the street, he entered the Mews itself when it became dark. At half-past five the peacock door was opened and the two young people emerged. They walked, and Mr. Chayne walked behind them. They walked fast, and Mr. Chayne, with an acquired sense of rhythm, at exactly the same pace. He soon perceived that they were merely going to where he had twice followed Lady Corven already—the Temple. And this gave him a sense of comfort, because of the cup of tea he pined for. Picking his way in and out among the backs of people large enough to screen him, he watched them enter Middle Temple Lane, and part at Harcourt Buildings. Having noted that Lady Corven went in, and that the young man began parading slowly between the entrance and the Embankment, he looked at his watch, doubled back into the Strand, and bolted into an A.B.C. with the words “Cup of tea and Bath bun, miss, please.” While waiting for these he made a prolonged entry in his pocket-book. Then, blowing on his tea, he drank it from the saucer, ate half the bun, concealed the other half in his hand, paid, and re-entered the Strand. He had just finished the bun when he regained the entrance to the Lane. The young man was still parading slowly. Mr. Chayne waited for his back view, and, assuming the air of a belated solicitor’s clerk, bolted down past the entrance to Harcourt Buildings into the Inner Temple. There, in a doorway, he scrutinised names until Clare came out. Rejoined by young Croom, she walked up towards the Strand, and Mr. Chayne walked too. When, shortly, they took tickets for a cinema, he also took a ticket and entered the row behind. Accustomed to the shadowing of people on their guard, the open innocence they were displaying excited in him a slightly amused if not contemptuous compassion. ‘Regular babes in the wood’ they seemed to him. He could not tell whether their feet were touching, and passed behind to note the position of their hands. It seemed satisfactory, and he took an empty seat nearer to the gangway. Sure of them now for a couple of hours, he settled down to smoke, feel warm, and enjoy the film. It was one of sport and travel in Africa, where the two principals were always in positions of danger, recorded by the camera of someone who must surely have been in a position of still greater danger. Mr. Chayne listened to their manly American voices saying to each other: “Gee! He’s on us!” with an interest which never prevented his knowing that his two young people were listening too. When the lights went up he could see their profiles. ‘We’re all young at times,’ he thought, and his imagination dwelled more intensively on the young lady at his tobacconist’s. They looked so settled-in that he took the opportunity to slip out for a moment. It might not occur again for a long time. In his opinion one of the chief defects in detective stories—for he was given to busmen’s holidays—was that authors made their ‘sleuths’ like unto the angels, watching for days without, so to speak, taking their eye off the ball. It was not so in real life.