The Card, page 6
‘I wonder if you’d mind going into the barn for me?’ she murmured.
She generally referred to her academy as the barn. It had once been a warehouse.
He jumped up. ‘Certainly,’ he said, very eager.
‘I think you’ll see a small bottle of eau-de-Cologne on the top of the piano,’ she said, and shut her eyes.
He hastened away, full of his mission, and feeling himself to be a terrific cavalier and guardian of weak women. He felt keenly that he must be equal to the situation. Yes, the small bottle of eau-de-Cologne was on top of the piano. He seized it and bore it to her on the wings of chivalry. He had not been aware that eau-de-Cologne was a remedy for, or a palliative of, headaches.
She opened her eyes, and with a great effort tried to be bright and better. But it was a failure. She took the stopper out of the bottle and sniffed first at the stopper and then at the bottle; then she spilled a few drops of the liquid on her handkerchief and applied the handkerchief to her temples.
‘It’s easier,’ she said.
‘Sure?’ he asked. He did not know what to do with himself – whether to sit down and feign that she was well, or to remain standing in an attitude of respectful and grave anxiety. He thought he ought to depart; yet would it not be ungallant to desert her under the circumstances? She was alone. She had no servant, only an occasional charwoman.
She nodded with brave, false gaiety. And then she had a relapse.
‘Don’t you think you’d better lie down?’ he suggested in more masterful accents. And added: ‘And I’ll go …? You ought to lie down. It’s the only thing.’ He was now speaking to her like a wise uncle.
‘Oh no!’ she said, without conviction. ‘Besides, you can’t go till I’ve paid you.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘Oh! don’t bother about that now!’ But he restrained himself. There was a notable core of common-sense in Denry. He had been puzzling how he might neatly mention the rent while departing in a hurry so that she might lie down. And now she had solved the difficulty for him.
She stretched out her arm, and picked up a bunch of keys from a basket on a little table.
‘You might just unlock that desk for me, will you?’ she said. And, further, as she went through the keys one by one to select the right key: ‘Each quarter I’ve put your precious Mr Herbert Calvert’s rent in a drawer in that desk … Here’s the key.’ She held up the whole ring by the chosen key, and he accepted it. And she lay back once more in her chair, exhausted by her exertions.
‘You must turn the key sharply in the lock,’ she said weakly, as he fumbled at the locked part of the desk.
So he turned the key sharply.
‘You’ll see a bag in the little drawer on the right,’ she murmured.
The key turned round and round. It had begun by resisting, but now it yielded too easily.
‘It doesn’t seem to open,’ he said, feeling clumsy.
The key clicked and slid, and the other keys rattled together.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘I opened it quite easily this morning. It is a bit catchy.’
The key kept going round and round.
‘Here! I’ll do it,’ she said wearily.
‘Oh no!’ he urged.
But she rose courageously, and tottered to the desk, and took the bunch from him.
‘I’m afraid you’ve broken something in the lock,’ she announced, with gentle resignation, after she had tried to open the desk and failed.
‘Have I?’ he mumbled. He knew that he was not shining.
‘Would you mind calling in at Allman’s,’ she said, resuming her chair, ‘and tell them to send a man down at once to pick the lock? There’s nothing else for it. Or perhaps you’d better say first thing tomorrow morning. And then as soon as he’s done it I’ll call and pay you the money myself. And you might tell your precious Mr Herbert Calvert that next quarter I shall give notice to leave.’
‘Don’t you trouble to call, please,’ said he. ‘I can easily pop in here.’
She sped him away in an enigmatic tone. He could not be sure whether he had succeeded or failed, in her estimation, as a man of the world and a partaker of delicate teas.
‘Don’t forget Allman’s!’ she enjoined him as he left the room. He was to let himself out.
III
He was coming home late that night from the Sports Club, from a delectable evening which had lasted till one o’clock in the morning, when just as he put the large door-key into his mother’s cottage he grew aware of peculiar phenomena at the top end of Brougham Street, where it runs into St Luke’s Square. And then in the gas-lit gloom of the warm summer night he perceived a vast and vague rectangular form in slow movement towards the slope of Brougham Street.
It was a pantechnicon van.
But the extraordinary thing was, not that it should be a pantechnicon van, but that it should be moving of its own accord and power. For there were no horses in front of it, and Denry saw that the double shafts had been pushed up perpendicularly, after the manner of carmen when they outspan. The pantechnicon was running away. It had perceived the wrath to come and was fleeing. Its guardians had evidently left it imperfectly scotched or braked, and it had got loose.
It proceeded down the first bit of Brougham Street with a dignity worthy of its dimensions, and at the same time with apparently a certain sense of the humour of the situation. Then it seemed to be saying to itself: ‘Pantechnicons will be pantechnicons.’ Then it took on the absurd gravity of a man who is perfectly sure that he is not drunk. Nevertheless it kept fairly well to the middle of the road, but as though the road were a tight-rope.
The rumble of it increased as it approached Denry. He withdrew the key from his mother’s cottage and put it in his pocket. He was always at his finest in a crisis. And the onrush of the pantechnicon constituted a clear crisis. Lower down the gradient of Brougham Street was more dangerous, and it was within the possibilities that people inhabiting the depths of the street might find themselves pitched out of bed by the sharp corner of a pantechnicon that was determined to be a pantechnicon. A pantechnicon whose ardour is fairly aroused may be capable of surpassing deeds. Whole thoroughfares might crumble before it.
As the pantechnicon passed Denry, at the rate of about three and a half miles an hour, he leaped, or rather he scrambled, on to it, losing nothing in the process except his straw hat, which remained a witness at his mother’s door that her boy had been that way and departed under unusual circumstances. Denry had the bright idea of dropping the shafts down to act as a brake. But, unaccustomed to the manipulation of shafts, he was rather slow in accomplishing the deed, and ere the first pair of shafts had fallen the pantechnicon was doing quite eight miles an hour and the steepest declivity was yet to come. Further, the dropping of the left-hand shafts jerked the van to the left, and Denry dropped the other pair only just in time to avoid the sudden uprooting of a lamp-post. The four points of the shafts digging and prodding into the surface of the road gave the pantechnicon something to think about for a few seconds. But unfortunately the precipitousness of the street encouraged its head-strong caprices, and a few seconds later all four shafts were broken, and the pantechnicon seemed to scent the open prairie. (What it really did scent was the canal.) Then Denry discovered the brake, and furiously struggled with the iron handle. He turned it and turned it, some forty revolutions. It seemed to have no effect. The miracle was that the pantechnicon maintained its course in the middle of the street. Presently Denry could vaguely distinguish the wall and double wooden gates of the canal wharf. He could not jump off; the pantechnicon was now an express, and I doubt whether he would have jumped off, even if jumping off had not been madness. His was the kind of perseverance that, for the fun of it, will perish in an attempt. The final fifty or sixty yards of Brougham Street were level, and the pantechnicon slightly abated its haste. Denry could now plainly see, in the radiance of a gas-lamp, the gates of the wharf, and on them the painted letters:–
SHROPSHIRE UNION CANAL COY., LTD.
GENERAL CARRIERS
No Admittance except on Business
He was heading straight for those gates, and the pantechnicon evidently had business within. It jolted over the iron guard of the weighing-machine, and this jolt deflected it, so that instead of aiming at the gates it aimed for part of a gate and part of a brick pillar. Denry ground his teeth together and clung to his seat. The gate might have been paper, and the brick pillar a cardboard pillar. The pantechnicon went through them as a sword will go through a ghost, and Denry was still alive. The remainder of the journey was brief and violent, owing partly to a number of bags of cement, and partly to the propinquity of the canal basin. The pantechnicon jumped into the canal like a mastodon, and drank.
Denry, clinging to the woodwork, was submerged for a moment, but, by standing on the narrow platform from which sprouted the splintered ends of the shafts, he could get his waist clear of the water. He was not a swimmer.
All was still and dark, save for the faint stream of starlight on the broad bosom of the canal basin. The pantechnicon had encountered nobody whatever en route. Of its strange escapade Denry had been the sole witness.
‘Well, I’m dashed!’ he murmured aloud.
And a voice replied from the belly of the pantechnicon:
‘Who is there?’
All Denry’s body shook.
‘It’s me!’ said he.
‘Not Mr Machin?’ said the voice.
‘Yes,’ said he. ‘I jumped on as it came down the street – and here we are!’
‘Oh!’ cried the voice. ‘I do wish you could get round to me.’
Ruth Earp’s voice.
He saw the truth in a moment of piercing insight. Ruth had been playing with him! She had performed a comedy for him in two acts. She had meant to do what is called in the Five Towns ‘a moonlight flit’. The pantechnicon (doubtless from Birmingham, where her father was) had been brought to her door late in the evening, and was to have been filled and taken away during the night. The horses had been stabled, probably in Ruth’s own yard, and while the carmen were reposing the pantechnicon had got off, Ruth in it. She had no money locked in her unlockable desk. Her reason for not having paid the precious Mr Herbert Calvert was not the reason which she had advanced.
His first staggered thought was:
‘She’s got a nerve! No mistake!’
Her duplicity, her wickedness, did not shock him. He admired her tremendous and audacious enterprise: it appealed strongly to every cell in his brain. He felt that she and he were kindred spirits.
He tried to clamber round the side of the van so as to get to the doors at the back, but a pantechnicon has a wheel-base which forbids leaping from wheel to wheel, especially when the wheels are under water. Hence he was obliged to climb on to the roof, and so slide down on to the top of one of the doors, which was swinging loose. The feat was not simple. At last he felt the floor of the van under half a yard of water.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here,’ said Ruth, very plaintively. ‘I’m on a table. It was the only thing they had put into the van before they went off to have their supper or something. Furniture removers are always like that. Haven’t you got a match?’
‘I’ve got scores of matches,’ said Denry. ‘But what good do you suppose they’ll be now, all soaked through?’
A short silence. He noticed that she had offered no explanation of her conduct towards himself. She seemed to take it for granted that he would understand.
‘I’m frightfully bumped, and I believe my nose is bleeding,’ said Ruth, still more plaintively. ‘It’s a good thing there was a lot of straw and sacks here.’
Then, after much groping, his hand touched her wet dress.
‘You know you’re a very naughty girl,’ he said.
He heard a sob, a wild sob. The proud, independent creature had broken down under the stress of events. He climbed out of the water on to the part of the table which she was not occupying. And the van was as black as Erebus.
Gradually, out of the welter of sobs, came faint articulations, and little by little he learnt the entire story of her difficulties, her misfortunes, her struggles, and her defeats. He listened to a frank confession of guilt. But what could she do? She had meant well. But what could she do? She had been driven into a corner. And she had her father to think of! Honestly, on the previous day, she had intended to pay the rent, or part of it. But there had been a disappointment! And she had been so unwell. In short …
The van gave a lurch. She clutched at him and he at her. The van was settling down for a comfortable night in the mud.
(Queer that it had not occurred to him before, but at the first visit she had postponed paying him on the plea that the bank was closed, while at the second visit she had stated that the actual cash had been slowly accumulating in her desk! And the discrepancy had not struck him. Such is the influence of a tea-gown. However, he forgave her, in consideration of her immense audacity.)
‘What can we do?’ she almost whispered. Her confidence in him affected him.
‘Wait till it gets light,’ said he.
So they waited, amid the waste of waters. In a hot July it is not unpleasant to dangle one’s feet in water during the sultry dark hours. She told him more and more.
When the inspiring grey preliminaries of the dawn began, Denry saw that at the back of the pantechnicon the waste of waters extended for at most a yard, and that it was easy, by climbing on to the roof, to jump therefrom to the wharf. He did so, and then fixed a plank so that Ruth could get ashore. Relieved of their weight the table floated out after them. Denry seized it, and set about smashing it to pieces with his feet.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked faintly. She was too enfeebled to protest more vigorously.
‘Leave it to me,’ said Denry. ‘This table is the only thing that can give your show away. We can’t carry it back. We might meet some one.’
He tied the fragments of the table together with rope that was afloat in the van, and attached the heavy iron bar whose function was to keep the doors closed. Then he sank the faggot of wood and iron in a distant corner of the basin.
‘There!’ he said. ‘Now you understand. Nothing’s happened except that a furniture van’s run off and fallen into the canal owing to the men’s carelessness. We can settle the rest later – I mean about the rent and so on.’
They looked at each other.
Her skirts were nearly dry. Her nose showed no trace of bleeding, but there was a bluish lump over her left eye. Save that he was hatless, and that his trousers clung, he was not utterly unpresentable.
They were alone in the silent dawn.
‘You’d better go home by Acre Lane, not up Brougham Street,’ he said. ‘I’ll come in during the morning.’
It was a parting in which more was felt than said.
They went one after the other through the devastated gateway, baptizing the path as they walked. The Town Hall clock struck three as Denry crept up his mother’s stairs. He had seen not a soul.
IV
The exact truth in its details was never known to more than two inhabitants of Bursley. The one thing clear certainly appeared to be that Denry, in endeavouring to prevent a runaway pantechnicon from destroying the town, had travelled with it into the canal. The romantic trip was accepted as perfectly characteristic of Denry. Around this island of fact washed a fabulous sea of uninformed gossip, in which assertion conflicted with assertion, and the names of Denry and Ruth were continually bumping against each other.
Mr Herbert Calvert glanced queerly and perhaps sardonically at Denry when Denry called and handed over ten pounds (less commission) which he said Miss Earp had paid on account.
‘Look here,’ said the little Calvert, his mean little eyes gleaming. ‘You must get in the balance at once.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Denry. ‘I shall.’
‘Was she trying to hook it on the q.t.?’ Calvert demanded.
‘Oh, no!’ said Denry. ‘That was a very funny misunderstanding. The only explanation I can think of is that that van must have come to the wrong house.’
‘Are you engaged to her?’ Calvert asked, with amazing effrontery.
Denry paused. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Are you?’ Mr Calvert wondered what he meant.
He admitted to himself that the courtship had begun in a manner surpassingly strange.
4
Wrecking of a Life
I
In the Five Towns, and perhaps elsewhere, there exists a custom in virtue of which a couple who have become engaged in the early summer find themselves by a most curious coincidence at the same seaside resort, and often in the same street thereof, during August. Thus it happened to Denry and to Ruth Earp. There had been difficulties – there always are. A business man who lives by collecting weekly rents obviously cannot go away for an indefinite period. And a young woman who lives alone in the world is bound to respect public opinion. However, Ruth arranged that her girlish friend, Nellie Cotterill, who had generous parents, should accompany her. And the North Staffordshire Railway’s philanthropic scheme of issuing four-shilling tourist return tickets to the seaside enabled Denry to persuade himself that he was not absolutely mad in contemplating a fortnight on the shores of England.
Ruth chose Llandudno, Llandudno being more stylish than either Rhyl or Blackpool, and not dearer. Ruth and Nellie had a double room in a boarding-house, No. 26 St Asaph’s Road (off the Marine Parade), and Denry had a small single room in another boarding-house, No. 28 St Asaph’s Road. The ideal could scarcely have been approached more nearly.
Denry had never seen the sea before. As, in his gayest clothes, he strolled along the esplanade or on the pier between those two girls in their gayest clothes, and mingled with the immense crowd of pleasure-seekers and money-spenders, he was undoubtedly much impressed by the beauty and grandeur of the sea. But what impressed him far more than the beauty and grandeur of the sea was the field for profitable commercial enterprise which a place like Llandudno presented. He had not only his first vision of the sea, but his first genuine vision of the possibilities of amassing wealth by honest ingenuity. On the morning after his arrival he went out for a walk and lost himself near the Great Orme, and had to return hurriedly along the whole length of the Parade about nine o’clock. And through every ground-floor window of every house he saw a long table full of people eating and drinking the same kinds of food. In Llandudno fifty thousand souls desired always to perform the same act at the same time; they wanted to be distracted and they would do anything for the sake of distraction, and would pay for the privilege. And they would all pay at once.
