The Card, page 16
She glanced into a room.
‘But,’ she cried, ‘it’s all complete, ready! And as warm as toast.’
‘Yes,’ said Denry, ‘he gave orders. I can’t think why on earth he isn’t here.’
At that moment an electric bell rang loud and sharp, and Mrs Machin jumped.
‘There he is!’ said Denry, moving to the door.
‘Bless us! What will he think of us being here like?’ Mrs Machin mumbled.
‘Pooh!’ said Denry, carelessly. And he opened the door.
V
Three persons stood on the newly-washed marble step – Mr and Mrs Cotterill and their daughter.
‘Oh! Come in! Come in! Make yourselves quite at home. That’s what we’re doing,’ said Denry in blithe greeting and added, ‘I suppose he’s invited you too?’
And it appeared that Mr Cecil Wilbraham had indeed invited them too. He had written from London saying that he would be glad if Mr and Mrs Cotterill would ‘drop in’ on this particular evening. Further, he had mentioned that, as he had already had the pleasure of meeting Miss Cotterill, perhaps she would accompany her parents.
‘Well, he isn’t here,’ said Denry, shaking hands. ‘He must have missed his train or something. He can’t possibly be here now till tomorrow. But the house seems to be all ready for him …’
‘Yes, my word! And how’s yourself, Mrs Cotterill?’ put in Mrs Machin.
‘So we may as well look over it in its finished state. I suppose that’s what he asked us up for,’ Denry concluded.
Mrs Machin explained quickly and nervously that she had not been comprised in any invitation; that her errand was pure business.
‘Come on upstairs,’ Denry called out, turning switches and adding radiance to radiance.
‘Denry!’ his mother protested, ‘I’m sure I don’t know what Mr and Mrs Cotterill will think of you! You carry on as if you owned everything in the place. I wonder at you!’
‘Well,’ said Denry, ‘if anybody in this town is the owner’s agent I am. And Mr Cotterill has built the blessed house. If Wilbraham wanted to keep his old shanty to himself, he shouldn’t send out invitations. It’s simple enough not to send out invitations. Now, Nellie!’
He was hanging over the balustrade at the curve of the stairs.
The familiar ease with which he said, ‘Now, Nellie,’ and especially the spontaneity of Nellie’s instant response, put new thoughts into the mind of Mrs Machin. But she neither pricked up her ears, nor started back, nor accomplished any of the acrobatic feats which an ordinary mother of a wealthy son would have performed under similar circumstances. Her ears did not even tremble. And she just said:
‘I like this balustrade knob being of black china.’
‘Every knob in the house is of black china,’ said Denry. ‘Never shows dirt. But if you should take it into your head to clean it, you can do it with a damp cloth in a second.’
Nellie now stood beside him. Nellie had grown up since the Llandudno episode. She did not blush at a glance. When spoken to suddenly she could answer without torture to herself. She could, in fact, maintain a conversation without breaking down for a much longer time than, a few years ago, she had been able to skip without breaking down. She no longer imagined that all the people in the street were staring at her, anxious to find faults in her appearance. She had temporarily ruined the lives of several amiable and fairly innocent young men by refusing to marry them. (For she was pretty, and her father cut a figure in the town, though her mother did not.) And yet, despite the immense accumulation of her experiences and the weight of her varied knowledge of human nature, there was something very girlish and timidly roguish about her as she stood on the stairs near Denry, waiting for the elder generation to follow. The old Nellie still lived in her.
The party passed to the first floor.
And the first floor exceeded the ground floor in marvels. In each bedroom two aluminium taps poured hot and cold water respectively into a marble basin, and below the marble basin was a sink. No porterage of water anywhere in the house. The water came to you, and every room consumed its own slops. The bedsteads were of black enamelled iron and very light. The floors were covered with linoleum, with a few rugs that could be shaken with one hand. The walls were painted with grey enamel. Mrs Cotterill, with her all-seeing eye, observed a detail that Mrs Machin had missed. There were no sharp corners anywhere. Every corner, every angle between wall and floor or wall and wall, was rounded, to facilitate cleaning. And every wall, floor, ceiling, and fixture could be washed, and all the furniture was enamelled and could be wiped with a cloth in a moment instead of having to be polished with three cloths and many odours in a day and a half. The bath-room was absolutely waterproof; you could spray it with a hose, and by means of a gas apparatus you could produce an endless supply of hot water independent of the general supply. Denry was apparently familiar with each detail of Mr Wilbraham’s manifold contrivances, and he explained them with an enormous gusto.
‘Bless us!’ said Mrs Machin.
‘Bless us!’ said Mrs Cotterill (doubtless the force of example). They descended to the dining-room, where a supper-table had been laid by order of the invisible Mr Cecil Wilbraham. And there the ladies lauded Mr Wilbraham’s wisdom in eschewing silver. Everything of the table service that could be of earthenware was of earthenware. The forks and spoons were electro-plate.
‘Why,’ Mrs Cotterill said, ‘I could run this house without a servant and have myself tidy by ten o’clock in a morning.’
And Mrs Machin nodded.
‘And then when you want a regular turn-out, as you call it,’ said Denry, ‘there’s the vacuum-cleaner.’
The vacuum-cleaner was at that period the last word of civilization, and the first agency for it was being set up in Bursley. Denry explained the vacuum-cleaner to the housewives, who had got no further than a Ewbank. And they again called down blessings on themselves.
‘What price this supper?’ Denry exclaimed. ‘We ought to eat it. I’m sure he’d like us to eat it. Do sit down, all of you. I’ll take the consequences.’
Mrs Machin hesitated even more than the other ladies.
‘It’s really very strange, him not being here.’ She shook her head.
‘Don’t I tell you he’s quite mad,’ said Denry.
‘I shouldn’t think he was so mad as all that,’ said Mrs Machin, dryly. ‘This is the most sensible kind of a house I’ve ever seen.’
‘Oh! Is it?’ Denry answered. ‘Great Scott! I never noticed those three bottles of wine on the sideboard.’
At length he succeeded in seating them at the table. Thenceforward there was no difficulty. The ample and diversified cold supper began to disappear steadily, and the wine with it. And as the wine disappeared so did Mr Cotterill (who had been pompous and taciturn) grow talkative, offering to the company the exact figures of the cost of the house, and so forth. But ultimately the sheer joy of life killed arithmetic.
Mrs Machin, however, could not quite rid herself of the notion that she was in a dream that outraged the proprieties. The entire affair, for an unromantic spot like Bursley, was too fantastically and wickedly romantic.
‘We must be thinking about home, Denry,’ said she.
‘Plenty of time,’ Denry replied. ‘What! All that wine gone! I’ll see if there’s any more in the sideboard.’
He emerged, with a red face, from bending into the deeps of the enamelled sideboard, and a wine-bottle was in his triumphant hand. It had already been opened.
‘Hooray!’ he proclaimed, pouring a white wine into his glass and raising the glass: ‘here’s to the health of Mr Cecil Wilbraham.’
He made a brave tableau in the brightness of the electric light.
Then he drank. Then he dropped the glass, which broke.
‘Ugh! What’s that?’ he demanded, with the distorted features of a gargoyle.
His mother, who was seated next to him, seized the bottle. Denry’s hand, in clasping the bottle, had hidden a small label, which said:
POISON. – Nettleship’s Patent Enamel-Cleaning Fluid. One wipe does it.
Confusion! Only Nellie Cotterill seemed to be incapable of realizing that a grave accident had occurred. She had laughed throughout the supper, and she still laughed, hysterically, though she had drunk scarcely any wine. Her mother silenced her.
Denry was the first to recover.
‘It’ll be all right,’ said he, leaning back in his chair. ‘They always put a bit of poison in those things. It can’t hurt me, really. I never noticed the label.’
Mrs Machin smelt at the bottle. She could detect no odour, but the fact that she could detect no odour appeared only to increase her alarm.
‘You must have an emetic instantly,’ she said.
‘Oh no!’ said Denry. ‘I shall be all right.’ And he did seem to be suddenly restored.
‘You must have an emetic instantly,’ she repeated.
‘What can I have?’ he grumbled. ‘You can’t expect to find emetics here.’
‘Oh yes, I can,’ said she. ‘I saw a mustard tin in a cupboard in the kitchen. Come along now, and don’t be silly.’
Nellie’s hysteric mirth surged up again.
Denry objected to accompanying his mother into the kitchen. But he was forced to submit. She shut the door on both of them. It is probable that during the seven minutes which they spent mysteriously together in the kitchen, the practicability of the kitchen apparatus for carrying off waste products was duly tested. Denry came forth, very pale and very cross, on his mother’s arm.
‘There’s no danger now,’ said his mother, easily.
Naturally the party was at an end. The Cotterills sympathized, and prepared to depart, and inquired whether Denry could walk home.
Denry replied, from a sofa, in a weak, expiring voice, that he was perfectly incapable of walking home, that his sensations were in the highest degree disconcerting, that he should sleep in that house, as the bedrooms were ready for occupation, and that he should expect his mother to remain also.
And Mrs Machin had to concur. Mrs Machin sped the Cotterills from the door as though it had been her own door. She was exceedingly angry and agitated. But she could not impart her feelings to the suffering Denry. He moaned on a bed for about half-an-hour, and then fell asleep. And in the middle of the night, in the dark, strange house, she also fell asleep.
VI
The next morning she arose and went forth, and in about half-an-hour returned. Denry was still in bed, but his health seemed to have resumed its normal excellence. Mrs Machin burst upon him in such a state of complicated excitement as he had never before seen her in.
‘Denry,’ she cried, ‘what do you think?’
‘What?’ said he.
‘I’ve just been down home, and they’re – they’re pulling the house down. All the furniture’s out, and they’ve got all the tiles off the roof, and the windows out. And there’s a regular crowd watching.’
Denry sat up.
‘And I can tell you another piece of news,’ said he. ‘Mr Cecil Wilbraham is dead.’
‘Dead!’ she breathed.
‘Yes,’ said Denry. ‘I think he’s served his purpose. As we’re here, we’ll stop here. Don’t forget it’s the most sensible kind of a house you’ve ever seen. Don’t forget that Mrs Cotterill could run it without a servant and have herself tidy by ten o’clock in a morning.’
Mrs Machin perceived then, in a flash of terrible illumination, that there never had been any Cecil Wilbraham; that Denry had merely invented him and his long moustaches and his wall eye for the purpose of getting the better of his mother. The whole affair was an immense swindle upon her. Not a Mr Cecil Wilbraham, but her own son had bought her cottage over her head and jockeyed her out of it beyond any chance of getting into it again. And to defeat his mother the rascal had not simply perverted the innocent Nellie Cotterill to some co-operation in his scheme, but he had actually bought four other cottages, because the landlord would not sell one alone, and he was actually demolishing property to the sole end of stopping her from re-entering it!
Of course, the entire town soon knew of the upshot of the battle, of the year-long battle, between Denry and his mother, and the means adopted by Denry to win. The town also had been hoodwinked, but it did not mind that. It loved its Denry the more, and seeing that he was now properly established in the most remarkable house in the district, it soon afterwards made him a Town Councillor as some reward for his talent in amusing it.
And Denry would say to himself:
‘Everything went like clockwork, except the mustard and water. I didn’t bargain for the mustard and water. And yet, if I was clever enough to think of putting a label on the bottle and to have the beds prepared, I ought to have been clever enough to keep mustard out of the house.’ It would be wrong to mince the unpleasant fact that the sham poisoning which he had arranged to the end that he and his mother should pass the night in the house had finished in a manner much too realistic for Denry’s pleasure. Mustard and water, particularly when mixed by Mrs Machin, is mustard and water.
She had that consolation.
9
The Great Newspaper War
I
When Denry and his mother had been established a year and a month in the new house at Bleakridge, Denry received a visit one evening which perhaps flattered him more than anything had ever flattered him. The visitor was Mr Myson. Now Mr Myson was the founder, proprietor and editor of the Five Towns Weekly, a new organ of public opinion which had been in existence about a year; and Denry thought that Mr Myson had popped in to see him in pursuit of an advertisement of the Thrift Club, and at first he was not at all flattered.
But Mr Myson was not hunting for advertisements, and Denry soon saw him to be the kind of man who would be likely to depute that work to others. Of middle height, well and quietly dressed, with a sober, assured deportment, he spoke in a voice and accent that were not of the Five Towns; they were superior to the Five Towns. And in fact Mr Myson originated in Manchester and had seen London. He was not provincial, and he beheld the Five Towns as part of the provinces; which no native of the Five Towns ever succeeds in doing. Nevertheless, his manner to Denry was the summit of easy and yet deferential politeness.
He asked permission ‘to put something before’ Denry. And when, rather taken aback by such smooth phrases, Denry had graciously accorded the permission, he gave a brief history of the Five Towns Weekly, showing how its circulation had grown, and definitely stating that at that moment it was yielding a profit. Then he said:
‘Now my scheme is to turn it into a daily.’
‘Very good notion,’ said Denry, instinctively.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Mr Myson. ‘Because I’ve come here in the hope of getting your assistance. I’m a stranger to the district, and I want the co-operation of some one who isn’t. So I’ve come to you. I need money, of course, though I have myself what most people would consider sufficient capital. But what I need more than money is – well – moral support.’
‘And who put you on to me?’ asked Denry.
Mr Myson smiled. ‘I put myself on to you,’ said he. ‘I think I may say I’ve got my bearings in the Five Towns, after over a year’s journalism in it, and it appeared to me that you were the best man I could approach. I always believe in flying high.’
Therein was Denry flattered. The visit seemed to him to seal his position in the district in a way in which his election to the Bursley Town Council had failed to do. He had been somehow disappointed with that election. He had desired to display his interest in the serious welfare of the town, and to answer his opponent’s arguments with better ones. But the burgesses of his ward appeared to have no passionate love of logic. They just cried ‘Good old Denry!’ and elected him – with a majority of only forty-one votes. He had expected to feel a different Denry when he could put ‘Councillor’ before his name. It was not so. He had been solemnly in the mayoral procession to church, he had attended meetings of the council, he had been nominated to the Watch Committee. But he was still precisely the same Denry, though the youngest member of the council. But now he was being recognized from the outside. Mr Myson’s keen Manchester eye, ranging over the quarter of a million inhabitants of the Five Towns in search of a representative individual force, had settled on Denry Machin. Yes, he was flattered. Mr Myson’s choice threw a rose-light on all Denry’s career: his wealth and its origin; his house and stable, which were the astonishment and the admiration of the town; his Universal Thrift Club; yea, and his councillorship! After all, these were marvels. (And possibly the greatest marvel was the resigned presence of his mother in that wondrous house, and the fact that she consented to employ Rose Chudd, the incomparable Sappho of charwomen, for three hours every day.)
In fine, he perceived from Mr Myson’s eyes that his position was unique.
And after they had chatted a little, and the conversation had deviated momentarily from journalism to house property, he offered to display Machin House (as he had christened it) to Mr Myson, and Mr Myson was really impressed beyond the ordinary. Mr Myson’s homage to Mrs Machin, whom they chanced on in the paradise of the bath-room, was the polished mirror of courtesy. How Denry wished that he could behave like that when he happened to meet countesses.
Then, once more in the drawing-room, they resumed the subject of newspapers.
‘You know,’ said Mr Myson, ‘it’s really a very bad thing indeed for a district to have only one daily newspaper. I’ve nothing myself to say against The Staffordshire Signal, but you’d perhaps be astonished’ – this in a confidential tone – ‘at the feeling there is against the Signal in many quarters.’
‘Really!’ said Denry.
‘Of course its fault is that it isn’t sufficiently interested in the great public questions of the district. And it can’t be. Because it can’t take a definite side. It must try to please all parties. At any rate it must offend none. That is the great evil of a journalistic monopoly … Two hundred and fifty thousand people – why! there is an ample public for two first-class papers. Look at Nottingham! Look at Bristol! Look at Leeds! Look at Sheffield! … and their newspapers.’
