The Partnership, page 1
THE
PARTNERSHIP
Phyllis Bentley
TO
LYDIA
WHEREVER SHE MAY BE FOUND
Contents
I. TOLEFREE
II. ENCOUNTER
III. PROFIT AND LOSS
IV. INTERIM
V. RECALL
VI. CATASTROPHE
VII. THE PARTNERSHIP
A Note on the Author
THE PARTNERSHIP
I
TOLEFREE
1
“Come, children!” commanded Lydia in her high light tones. “Make a nice circle, and sing those last two verses again; then we’ll go in.”
The children, nothing loth to leave the biting air of the spring evening for the cosy warmth of the room which formed the headquarters of their troop, obeyed—those in uniform, with solemn and attentive faces; those newcomers who were not yet formally enrolled, with occasional bursts of childish laughter at the oddity of these novel proceedings. Scandalized by their own merriment, they held their heads down and tried to stifle it, but broke into irrepressible gigglings, tossing their slim torsos up and down, staggering back a few paces and putting their hands between their knees in the ecstasy of their enjoyment. At the sound of the childish voices ringing through the evening air two or three passers-by, on their way perhaps to some mournful errand in the neighbouring cemetery, perhaps to some clinching of betrothal in the wood below, put their heads over the schoolyard wall to see what was going on. They stared curiously at the uniformed young woman who was giving other people’s children ethical instruction with such a conscientious, not to say priggish, air; then as their eyes passed on to the circle of giggling children, a sympathetic grin gradually spread over their features, and they nudged each other, whispering. Lydia, conscious of something obscurely hostile in their attitude to her, coloured and felt embarrassed, but broke bravely into the song with which she was trying to inculcate the virtues of early rising. The children obediently followed her, and after a few quaverings settled into the tune.
“This is the way we sleep too long,” they sang, pillowing their charming young heads on their folded hands: “Sleep too long, sleep too long; this is the way we sleep too long, on a cold and frosty morning.”
Titters from the wall showed that this realistic treatment of a common human failing was highly appreciated. But this was the end of a verse; they then proceeded to indicate, in song and pantomime, the lively and punctual manner of rising practised by all who were entitled to wear their uniform; and finally, to show the élan with which they daily greeted the world, they joined hands and danced round in a ring.
“It’s a very good thing to teach them like that,” spoke an elderly voice from the wall, approvingly.
A couple of younger voices tittered in reply, and somebody observed philosophically: “Well, rather her than me.”
The song came to an end; the spectacle was over; the gazers by the wall passed on to their several destinies, and Lydia led the children into the school.
2
Half an hour later, as Lydia passed her uncle’s house on her way to her own home in that respectable private terrace, Cromwell Place, an imperative rapping on one of its side windows startled her from thoughts of the children she had just left. Looking up, she saw the expanse of fresh pink cheek, the mane of long white hair rolling smoothly back from a broad brow, the lively well-opened grey eyes, the full nose, the oratorical lips and the well-worn clerical attire which were familiar to her as comprising the external personality of her father. As usual, he was smiling that jovial, benign smile of his, which with its lurking hint of boyish malice gave a flavour to his mildest platitudes and had made him a man to be reckoned with in his circuit; and his plump white hands beat a humorous tattoo on the pane. Lydia waved to him, whereat he beckoned; without consulting her own inclinations—which were indeed sufficiently undecided—she dutifully turned at once into the short sandy drive of Boothroyd House, the large new residence which her twice-widowed uncle had lately built himself in the vacant land at the end of Cromwell Place. Before she reached the house the door was opened to her, not by her uncle’s eldest son, Wilfred, as she had half hoped, but by Wilfred’s stepbrother, her cousin Eric Dyson. Eric, who was a rather overgrown and awkward lad of twenty, with thick light hair which hung over his forehead, prominent teeth, soft grey eyes, and a muddy complexion disfigured by a birthmark down one side of his face, gave her a sheepish grin in response to her greeting, and without saying anything showed her familiarly into the dining-room.
In this large apartment, which had been recently re-decorated and upholstered in blue velvet regardless of expense, the diffused radiance of several electric lamps of the last word of modernity contended successfully with the spring twilight, and showed the remains of a substantial cold supper on the long table. Herbert Dyson, Lydia’s uncle and the owner of the house, a man in the fifties, with sandy hair and eyebrows just going grey, a bristling moustache of a darker colour, and fierce red-rimmed grey eyes, sat on one side of the blazing fire, wearing excellent cloth and linen, and smoking a good cigar. Facing him Lydia’s mother, Louise, knitted with her usual air of dreamy abstraction, her thick coils of fair hair crowning suitably the placidity of her serene, rather heavily moulded face. Lydia kissed her mother’s forehead, and greeted her uncle, who nodded silently in reply.
“Well, Lydia,” began her father in a tone of genial malice, advancing upon her from the window, “no doubt you wonder why we are supping here, instead of in the more frugal precincts of number seven.”
Lydia sat down at the table and intimated, in her high pleasant voice, that such was indeed the case.
“The maid’s grandmother,” explained Mr. Mellor in the flowing rhythmic style which thirty years of pulpit oratory had made second nature to him, “—Am I right, love?” he broke off, addressing Louise—“Or was it her aunt? Some female ancestor, at any rate—is ill; and she has had to go home to nurse her.”
“Oh dear!” said Lydia, distressed. “Poor thing!”
“Poor thing, indeed! To my mind you’re well rid of her,” observed Mr. Dyson, drawing at his cigar. “She was an idle, sluttish piece of goods.”
“I liked her,” said Louise mildly.
“I dare say—you like such odd people, Louise,” was her brother-in-law’s contemptuous comment.
“Well, it takes all sorts to make a world,” contended Louise.
“It’s very awkward in any case that she should leave just now,” said Lydia, frowning a little, ‘when I’m going away to-morrow. I suppose it was necessary for her to go at once?”
“Oh, yes! A telegram came,” explained Mr. Mellor, “to command her instant return; Wilfred was in the house at the time, and he very kindly offered to take her down to the station in the car.”
“And he hasn’t come back yet,” put in Louise in her gentle tones. “I can’t think what delays him.”
“Oh, Wilfred’ll be all right,” said Mr. Dyson rather dryly. “Nothing ever goes wrong with Wilfred.”
“He’s missed his supper,” suggested Louise with a glance at the table.
“Eric!” said Mr. Dyson sharply at this, turning in his chair. “Give your cousin some meat.”
Eric started sheepishly forward, and taking up the carving-knife unskilfully hacked some fragments from the joint. Lydia, watching him with an encouraging smile, thought how like he was to the tinted and enlarged photograph of his mother which hung above his head—he had the same faint colouring, the same rather silly but appealing smile, the same moist and gentle gaze, the same drooping angle of nose and jaw, the same childish plumpness. It was odd, she mused, that she and Eric, being first cousins, were so utterly unlike; whereas she and Wilfred, who were no relation at all, might easily have been taken for brother and sister—both had abundant crisp dark hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, clear sallow faces, and slender sinewy limbs. It was even more odd, to her mind, that whereas her aunt’s fair, feeble face looked out from half a dozen ostentatious frames in that room alone, the portrait of Wilfred’s mother—her uncle’s first wife and therefore presumably his first love—was not to be found anywhere in the house. Perhaps Mr. Dyson cared too much for her to be able to look at misleading photographs, thought Lydia, dismissing the matter from her mind as she had done many times before. She thanked Eric for the plate of scraps he offered her, and tried to eat.
Her father could have enlightened her considerably on the subject of her uncle’s first wife.
Thirty years ago the Reverend Charles Tolefree Mellor—son of that eminent Yorkshire Non-conformist divine, the Reverend Tolefree Mellor, whose work on the Atonement still crumbles on the theological shelves of all standard libraries—had accepted his first call to a certain chapel in the West Riding town of Hudley, and had brought his sister, Miss Fanny Tolefree Mellor, with him to keep his house and share his ministerial enthusiasms. At that time Herbert Dyson was an ambitious young working man with a good voice, who sang in the chapel choir, and attended all the educational classes and lectures within his reach with a kind of fierce acquisitive energy which struck the Reverend Charles very forcibly—so forcibly, indeed, that he became a devoted friend to Herbert, lent him books, invited him to the house, and introduced him to his sister. To Dyson, whose life had hitherto been rough and altogether lacking in social amenity, the genteel, if insipid, fairness of Fanny Mellor seemed like the beauty of an angel, and as far above him; he fell deeply in love with her, and as Fanny proved willing to listen to his suit, ann
“You shouldn’t have called the child by that name, Herbert,” he told his friend emphatically when he heard of it, speaking in his customary full and resonant tones and looking him squarely in the face as he did so.
Herbert informed him with equally customary bluntness that the child was his own—or at least he’d been told so often enough—and he should call him what he liked. The two men glared angrily at each other, but in spite of everything remained friends.
Shortly after this Charles Mellor accepted a call in Darlington, and left Hudley; his undesired wife, Wilfred’s second name, and the interest on Charles’s money, which he duly remitted quarterly, remained Dyson’s only tangible mementoes of the Mellors. Nobody ever found any serious fault with Wilfred, and Dyson’s business prospered exceedingly; but unfortunately the match arranged by Charles in the interests of morality was very far from being a happy one. Mrs. Dyson had inherited certain unfortunate maternal traits, which her husband’s dislike and neglect intensified; so that towards the end of their brief married life it was rare for him to find her sober when he came home. When Wilfred was four years old she died, of pneumonia made fatal by her alcoholic excesses. In these four years old Mrs. Tolefree Mellor had died, and Charles had married the daughter of a highly respected art-master at Darlington. Fanny was thus left without any real home, and it was comparatively easy for Dyson to persuade her brother to allow an early marriage. As for Fanny herself, she had pined for her lover so consistently that she had fallen into what the previous generation would have called a decline; an access of spirit seemed to come to her with her marriage and installation in the neat newly furnished house which the prospering Dyson was able to provide; but this could not carry her through the perils of child-bearing, and at Eric’s birth she died.
Dyson, thus for the second time embittered by the failure of his hopes, engaged a working housekeeper to look after the two children, and devoted himself to his business, which, thanks to his ruthless determination, was quite extraordinarily successful. The Reverend Charles’s loan, added to from time to time, became a very profitable investment, and the relations between the two families were happy, the two Dyson children making frequent visits to the Mellor household wherever the exigencies of a popular minister’s life happened at the time to place it. Lydia—whose second name, following the tradition of the Mellor family, was also Tolefree—and Wilfred had played together all over the map of northern England; Eric, being so much younger, sometimes remained at home on the plea of delicacy, the truth being that his father doted on him and could not bear him out of his sight. Wilfred admired all the Mellors immensely, and had been shaped by his uncle Charles’s advice into a total abstainer and a very kindly, steady, decent and likeable young man; so that while the fact that Wilfred, and not Eric, bore Fanny’s name was now an intense exasperation to their father, to the Reverend Charles, who thought he saw an attachment growing between the holder of the name and his own only child, it seemed an instance where the mills of God had ground exceeding small. The attachment was not, certainly, as visible to Lydia and Wilfred themselves as it was to the Reverend Charles; but if it was no bigger than a man’s hand as yet, it was almost certainly on the horizon. When, therefore, a year or two ago, Mr. Mellor had had a serious illness due to overwork, everything—his dividends, Dyson’s urgings, Lydia’s future, his brother-in-law’s ownership of a vacant house in Cromwell Place adjoining his own newly built residence, Charles’s own inclination—seemed to point to a retirement from active ministry, to a settlement in Hudley and a comparatively leisured life of lecturing, coaching backward youths for examinations, and taking occasional Sunday duty for his brother ministers in the neighbourhood. He had taken this step, and had not so far regretted it; Lydia had been fortunate in securing a post as secretary to the Principal of a neighbouring theological college; and the Mellors had by now settled down into their usual busy, well-regulated life of meetings, lectures, social work, and general usefulness. Needless to say, their elders’ pasts were sealed books to the three members of the younger generation; Wilfred was a particularly loyal son and brother, and if Lydia occasionally ventured to criticize her uncle to herself, it was on the score of present roughnesses which offended her fastidious taste, rather than of past misdeeds.
“And what’s all this mean, Lydia?” he was asking her now, indicating, with the hand which held his cigar, the straps and badges of her uniform.
Lydia explained her official position in relation to her troop of “Brownies.”
At this her uncle said nothing, but the reflection could be read in his face that in his heyday young women had had something better to think about than Brownies—or worse, as his brother-in-law would probably put it. He smiled a rather cynical smile which Lydia knew and disliked, and remained silent for a while, finishing his cigar. Mr. Dyson did not, as a matter of fact, admire his niece. Her figure seemed to him angular and bad, and she walked in quick short steps, which, when she was in a hurry—and she was almost always in a hurry—became a ridiculous fussy pattering which Mr. Dyson particularly detested in a woman. Then there was a deplorable absence of style in her toilets—her skirts were always too short or too long, too wide or too narrow, for the prevailing fashion—and what was worse, she seemed unconscious of it. She dressed her abundant dark hair badly, too, and the rather simple and conscientious expression of her face annoyed Mr. Dyson, while, like her father’s, it commanded his unwilling respect. Various personal mannerisms of hers, too—her superior little smile, her soft careful enunciation, her silly habit of calling her mother by her Christian name—irritated the robust realism of Mr. Dyson’s character. In a word, he thought Lydia old-maidish, and put it down to her unsuitable upbringing by her father, that absurdly inexperienced and unpractical, though lovable, Charles—Louise, of course, in Mr. Dyson’s view, was a mere looker-on at life’s game, a spectator who did not count. It was always a marvel to him that Louise had surrendered her detachment sufficiently to marry and bear a child; and it corroborated his view of her that she seemed to have left no traces of herself in her daughter.
“It’s a pity you don’t smoke, Charles,” he observed after these reflections, throwing the stub of his cigar into the glowing fire.
