The Gods and Mr. Perrin

Everyone was surprised, and Comber so astonished that for some time he could find no words at all.

At last he broke out, “Well, all I can say is that you people don’t know what you ‘re in for; if you go on encouraging people like Traill to go about stealing people’s things—”

“Look here, Comber,” Birkland broke in. “You’ve no right to say stealing. You may as well try and be fair. Traill never stole anything; you’d better be more careful of your words.”

“Well, I call it stealing anyhow,” said Comber hotly. “You can call it what you like, Birkland. I daresay you’ve got pet words of your own for these things. But when a man takes something that is n’t his and keeps it—”

“He didn’t keep it,” Birkland said angrily. “You ‘re grossly prejudiced, just as you always are.”

“What about yourself?” West broke in. “People in glass houses—”

At this point the temperature of the room became very warm indeed. Comber was pale with rage; he had never been so insulted before—not that it very much mattered what a wretched creature like Birkland said.

He began to explain in a loud voice that some people weren’t fit to be in gentlemen’s society, and that though, of course, he wouldn’t like to mention names, nevertheless, if certain persons thought about it long enough, they would probably find that the cap fitted, and that if only people could occasionally see themselves as others saw them—well, it might be better for everyone concerned, and then perhaps there would be a chance of their behaving decently in decent society, although of course, if one’s education had been neglected....

Meanwhile, M. Pons was explaining to West that whether you went in for science or modern languages one’s opinion of this sort of affair must be the same, there was no question about it.

Birkland was sitting back, white and stiff in his chair and wishing that he might take all their heads and crash them together in one big debacle.

Then suddenly, when another two minutes might have been dangerous for everyone concerned, the door was flung open, and Clinton entered. He was excited, he was stirred; it was obvious that he had news.

“I say!” he cried, and then stopped. All eyes were upon him.

“What do you think?” he cried again, “Traill has just told me. He ‘s engaged to Miss Desart.”

At that there was dead silence—for an instant nobody spoke. Then Comber got up from his chair. “Well, I’m damned!” he said.

This was a new development; it is hard to say whether he saw at once then the domestic complications into which it would lead him. Miss Desart had stayed with them again and again; she was their intimate friend. His wife was devoted to her and would, of course, at once espouse her cause. But this piece of news made him, Comber, even angrier than he had been before. His feeling about the engagement defied analysis, but it rested in some curious, hidden way on some strange streak of vanity in him. He had always cared very especially for Miss Desart; he had given her, in his clumsy, heavy way, little attentions and regards that he gave to very few people. He had always thought that she had very great admiration and reverence for himself, and now she had engaged herself without a word to him about it to someone whom he disliked and disapproved of. He was hurt and displeased, he knew that his wife would be delighted—more trouble at home. Here was White openly insulting him in the common room; he was called names by Birkland; a nice, pleasant girl had defied him (it had already come to that); his wife would probably defy him also in an hour or two—with a muttered word or two, he left the gathering.

For the others, this engagement was a piquant development that lent a new color to everything. They had all noticed that Mr. Perrin cared for Miss Desart, and now this sudden dramatic announcement was another knock in the face for that poor, battered gentleman. Of course, she would never have accepted him; but, nevertheless, it was rather hard that she should be handed over to his hated rival.

“Does Perrin know?” was West’s eager question.

“No,” said Clinton smiling, “I’m just going to tell him.”

III

Meanwhile, there is our Mr. Perrin sitting very drearily and alone in front of his somber fire. As he sat there it was n’t that he was so much depressed by the morning’s affair as that he was so frightened by it—not frightened because of anything that Traill could do, or indeed of anything that anyone could very especially say: he was long past the terror of tongues—but rather afraid of himself and the way that he might be going to behave.

He had long ago, when he was a very young man indeed, recognized that there were two Mr. Perrins; indeed, in all probability, more than two. He knew that when he had been quite a boy he had had ideas of being a hero—a hero, of course, just as other young things meant to be heroes, with a great deal of recognition and trumpets and bands and one’s face in the papers. He had, moreover, in those days, a stern and ready belief in his own powers and judged, from a comparison of himself with other boys, that he was really promising and had a future. He had heard some preacher in a sermon—he went to sermons very often in those days—say that every man had, once at any rate during his lifetime, his chance, and that it was his own fault if he missed it; that very often people did not know that it had ever come, because they had not been looking out for it, and then they cursed Fate when it was really their own fault—all this Perrin remembered, and he would lie awake at nights on the watch for this chance—this splendid moment.

That was one Mr. Perrin; rather a fine one, with a great desire to do the right thing, with a very great love for his mother, and with rather a pathetic anxiety to have friends and affection and to do good.

Then there was the other Mr. Perrin—the ill-tempered, pompous, sarcastic, bitter Mr. Perrin. When Perrin No. 1 was uppermost, he recognized and deeply regretted Perrin No. 2; but when Perrin No. 2 was in command, he saw nothing but a spiteful and malignant world trying, as he phrased it, to “do him down.”

Now, as he sat sadly by his fire, he saw them both. That Mr. Perrin this morning had, of course, been Perrin No. 2, and Perrin No. 2 very fierce and strong and warlike. Perrin No. 1 was afraid. If this sort of thing continued, then Perrin No. 1 would disappear altogether. This term had been worse than ever, and he had begun it with so strong a determination to make a good thing of it! This young Traill—and then Perrin No. 2 showed his head again, and the room grew dark and there was thunder in the air. But, oh! if he could only have his chance! If he could only prove the kind of man that he could be! If he could only get out of this, away from it—if someone would take him away from it: he did not feel strong enough, after all these years, to go away by himself. And then, suddenly, he thought of Miss Desart. He saw her as his shining light, his beacon. There was his salvation; he would make her love him and care for him. He would show her the kind of man that he could be; and then at the thought of it he began to smile, and a little color crept into his pale cheeks, and he felt that if only that were possible, he might be quite pleasant to Traill and the rest. Oh! they would matter so little!

He nodded humorously to the little man on the mantelpiece and fell into a delicious reverie. He forgot the quarrel of the morning, the insults that he had received, all the talk that there would be, all the opportunities that it would give to his enemies to say what they thought about him. And then, perhaps, with her by his side, he might rise to great things: he would have a little house, there would be children, he would be his own master, life would be free, splendid, above all, tranquil. He could make her so fond of him—he was sure that he could; there were sides of him that no one had ever seen—even his mother did not know all that was in him.

Perrin No. 1 filled the dingy room with his radiance. There was a knock on the door. Clinton came in, a pipe in his mouth, a book in his hand.

“Oh! here’s your Algebra that you lent me. I meant to have returned it before.”

“Oh, thanks!” Perrin was always rather short with Clinton. “Won’t you sit down?”

“No thanks, I’m taking prep.” Nevertheless, Clinton lingered a little, talking about nothing in particular; he stood by the mantelpiece, fingering things—a practice that always annoyed Perrin intensely,—then he took up the little china man and looked at him. “Rum chap that,” he said. “Well, chin-chin—” He moved off; he stood for a moment by the door. “Oh, I say!” he said, half turning round, his hand on the handle; “have you heard the news? Traill’s engaged to Miss Desart. He’s just told me.” He looked at Perrin for a moment, and then went out, banging the door behind him.

Perrin did not move; his hands began to shake; then suddenly his head fell between his shoulders, and his body heaved with sobs. He sat there for a long time, then he began to pace his room; his steps were faster and faster—he was like a wild animal in a cage.

Suddenly he stopped in front of the little china man. His face was white, his eyes were large and staring; with a wild gesture he picked the thing up and flung it to the ground, where it lay at his feet, smashed into atoms....

CHAPTER IX—THE BATTLE OP THE UMBRELLA; WITH THE LADIES

I

ISABEL told Mrs. Comber on that same afternoon at tea-time; but that good lady, owing to the interruption of the other good ladies and her own Mr. Comber, was unable to say anything really about it until just before going to bed. Mrs. Comber would not have been able to say very much about it in any case quite at first, because her breath was so entirely taken away by surprise, and then afterwards by delight and excitement. For herself this term had, so far, been rather a difficult affair: money had been hard, and Freddie had been even harder—and hard, as she complained, in such strange, tricky comers—never when you would expect him to be and always when you wouldn’t. This Mrs. Comber considered terribly unfair, because if one knew what he was going to mind, one would look out for it and be especially careful; but when he let irritating things pass without a word and then “flew out” when there was nothing for anyone to be distressed about, life became a hideous series of nightmares with the enemy behind every hedge.

Mrs. Comber knew that this term had been worse than usual, because she had arrived already, although it was only just past halfterm, at the condition of saying nothing to Freddie when he spoke to her—she called it submission, but she never arrived at it until she was nearly at the limits of her endurance. And now this news of Isabel suddenly made the world bright again; she loved Isabel better than anyone in the world except Freddie and the children; and her love was of the purely unselfish kind, so that joy at Isabel’s happiness far outweighed her own discomforts. She was really most tremendously glad, glad with all her size and volubility and color.

Isabel talked to her in her bedroom—it was of course also Freddie’s, but he had left no impression on it whatever, whereas she, by a series of touches—the light green wall-paper and the hard black of the shining looking-glass, the silver things, and the china things (not very many, but all made the most of),—had made it her own unmistakably, so that everything shouted Mrs. Comber with a war of welcome. It was indeed, in spite of the light green paper, a noisy impression, and one had always the feeling that things—the china, the silver, and the chairs—jumped when one wasn’t in, charged, as it were, with the electricity of Mrs. Comber’s temperament and the color of her dresses.

But of course Isabel knew it all well enough, and she didn’t in the least mind the stridency of it—in fact it all rather suited the sense of battle that there was in the air, so that the things seemed to say that they knew that there was a row on, and that they jolly well liked it. Freddie had been cross at dinner, and so, in so far as it was at all his room, the impression would not have been pleasant; but he just, one felt, slipped into bed and out of it, and there was an end of his being there.

Mrs. Comber, taking a few things off, putting a bright new dressing-gown on, and smiling from ear to ear, watched Isabel with burning eyes.

“Oh! my dear!… No, just come and sit on the bed beside me and have these things off, and I’ve been much too busy to write about that skirt of mine that I told you I would, and there it is hanging up to shame me! Well! I’m just too glad, you dear!” Here she hugged and kissed and patted her hand. “And he is such a nice young man, although Freddie doesn’t like him, you know, over the football or something, although I’m sure I never know what men’s reasons are for disliking one another, and Freddie’s especially; but I liked him ever since he dined here that night, although I didn’t really see much of him because, you know, he played Bridge at the other table and I was much too worried!” She drew a breath, and then added quite simply, like a child, and in that way of hers that was so perfectly fascinating: “My dear, I love you, and I want you to be happy, and I think you will—and I want you to love me.”

Isabel could only, for answer, fling her arms about her and hold her very tight indeed, and she felt in that little confession that there was more pathos than any one human being could realize and that life was terribly hard for some people.

“Of course, it is wonderful,” she said at last, looking with her clear, beautiful eyes straight in front of her. “One never knew how wonderful until it actually came. Love is more than the finest writer has ever said and not, I suspect, quite so much as the humblest lover has ever thought it—and that’s pessimistic of me, I suppose,” she added laughing; “but it only means that I’m up to all the surprises and ready for them.”

“You ‘ll find it exactly whatever you make it,” Mrs. Comber said slowly. “I don’t think the other party has really very much to do with it. You never lose what you give, my dear; but, as a matter of fact he’s the very nicest and trustiest young man, and no one could ever be a brute to you, whatever kind of brutes they were to anyone else—and I wish I’d remembered about that skirt.”

The silence of the room and house, the peace of the night outside, came about Isabel like a comfortable cloak, so that she believed that everything was most splendidly right.

“And now, my dear,” said Mrs. Comber, “tell me what this is that I hear about your young man and Mr. Perrin, because I only heard the veriest words from Freddie, and I was just talking to Jane at the time about not breathing when she’s handing round the things, because she’s always doing it, and she ‘ll have to go if she doesn’t learn.”

Isabel looked grave.

“It seems the silliest affair,” she said; “and yet it’s a great pity, because it may make a lot of trouble, I’m afraid. But that’s why we announced our engagement to-day, because it ‘ll be, it appears, a case of taking sides.”

“It always is here,” said Mrs. Comber, “when there’s the slightest opportunity of it.”

“Well, it looks as though there was going to be plenty of opportunity this time,” Isabel said sighing. “It really is too silly. Apparently Archie took Mr. Perrin’s umbrella to preparation in Upper School this morning without asking. They hadn’t been getting on very well before, and when Mr. Perrin asked for his umbrella and Archie said that he’d taken it, there was a regular fight. The worst of it is that there were lots of people there; and now, of course, it is all over the school, and it will never be left alone as it ought to be.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Comber, solemnly, “it will be the opportunity for all sorts of things. We ‘re all just ripe for it. How perfectly absurd of Mr. Perrin! But then he’s an ass, and I always said so, and now it only proves it, and I wish he’d never come here. Of course you know that I’m with you, my dear; but I’m afraid that Freddie won’t be, because he doesn’t like your Archie, and there’s no getting over it—and on whose side all the others will be there’s no knowing whatever—and indeed I don’t like to think of it all.”

She was so serious about it that Isabel at once became serious too. Her worst suspicions about it all were suddenly confirmed, so that the room, instead of its quiet and peace, was filled with a thousand sharp terrors and crawling fears. She was afraid of Mr. Perrin, she was afraid of the crowd of people, she was afraid of all the ill-feeling that promised soon to overwhelm her. She clutched Mrs. Comber’s arm.

“Oh!” she cried, “will they hate us?”

“They ‘ll do their best, my dear,” said that lady solemnly, “to hate somebody.”

II

And they came, comparatively in their multitudes, to tea on the next afternoon.

Tuesday was, as it happened, Mrs. Comber’s day, and the hour’s relief that followed its ending scarcely outweighed the six days’ terror at its horrible approach. Its disagreeable qualities were, of course, in the first place those of any “at home” whatever—the stilted and sterile fact of being there sacrificially for anyone to trample on in the presence of a delighted audience and a glittering tea-table. But in Mrs. Comber’s case there was the additional trouble of “town” and “school” never in the least suiting, although “town” was only a question of local houses like the squire and the clergyman, and they ought to have combined, one would have thought, easily enough.

The society of small provincial towns has been made again and again the jest and mockery of satiric fiction, having, it is considered, in the quality of its conversation a certain tinkling and malicious chatter that is unequaled elsewhere. Far be it from me to describe the conversation of the ladies of Moffatt’s in this way—it was a thing of far deeper and graver import.

The impossibility of escape until the term’s triumphant conclusion made what might, in a wider and finer hemisphere, have been simply malicious conversation that sprang up and disappeared without result, a perpetual battle of death and disaster. No slightest word but had its weightiest result, because everyone was so close upon everyone else that things said rebounded like peas flung against a board.

Mrs. Comber, at her tea-parties, had long ago ceased to consider the safety or danger of anything that she might say. It seemed to her that whatever she said always went wrong, and did the greatest damage that it was possible for any one thing to do; and now she counted her Tuesdays as days of certain disaster, allowing a dozen blunders to a Tuesday and hoping that she would “get off,” so to speak, on that. But on occasions like the present, when there was really something to talk about, she shuddered at the possible horrors; her line, of course, was strong enough, because it was Isabel first and Isabel last; and if that brought her into conflict with all the other ladies of the establishment, then she couldn’t help it. Had it been merely a question of the Umbrella Riot, as some wit had already phrased it, she knew clearly enough where they were all likely to be; but now that there was Isabel’s engagement as well, she felt that their anger would be stirred by that bright, young lady having made a step forward and having been, in some odd, obscure, feminine way, impertinently pushing.

She wished passionately, as she sat in glorious purple before her silver, tea-things, her little pink cakes, and her vanishingly thin pieces of bread-and-butter, that the “town” would, on this occasion at any rate, put in an appearance, because that would prevent anyone really “getting at” things; but, of course, as it happened, the “town” for once wasn’t there at all, and the battle raged quite splendidly.

The combatants were the two Misses Madder, Mrs. Dormer, and Mrs. Moy-Thompson, and it might seem that these ladies were not numerically enough to do any lastingly serious damage; but it was the bodies that they represented rather than the individuals that they actually were; and poor Mrs. Comber, as she smiled at them and talked at them and wished that the little pink cakes might poison them all, knew exactly the reason of their separate appearances and the danger that they were, severally and individually.

The Misses Madder represented the matrons, and they represented them as securely and confidently as though they had sat in conclave already and drawn up a list of questions to be asked and answers to be given. Mrs. Dormer represented the wives and also, separately, Mrs. Dormer, in so far as her own especial dislike of Mrs. Comber went for everything; Mrs. Moy-Thompson, above all, faded, black, thin, and miserable, represented her lord and master, and was regarded by the other ladies as a spy whose accurate report of the afternoon’s proceedings would send threads spinning from that dark little study for the rest of the term.

The eldest Miss Madder, stout, good-natured, comfortable, had not of herself any malice at all; but her thin, bony sister, exact in her chair, and with eyes looking straight down her nose, influenced her stouter sister to a wonderful extent.

The thin Miss Madder’s remark on receiving her tea, “Well, so Miss Desart’s engaged to Mr. Traill!” showed immediately which of the two pieces of news was considered the most important.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Comber, “and I’m sure it’s delightful. Do have one of those little pink cakes, Mrs. Thompson; they ‘re quite fresh; and I want you especially to notice that little water-color over there by the screen, because I bought it in Truro last week for simply nothing at Pinner’s, and I believe it’s quite a good one—I’m sure we ‘re all delighted.”

Mrs. Dormer wasn’t so certain. “They ‘re a little young,” she said in so chilly a voice that she might have been suddenly transferred, against her will, in the dead of night in the thinnest attire, into the heart of Siberia. “And what’s this I hear from my husband about Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill tumbling about on the floor together this morning—something about an umbrella?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Thompson, moving her chair a little closer, “I heard something this morning about it.”

Mrs. Comber had never before disliked this thin, faded lady so intensely as she did on this afternoon—she seemed to chill the room with her presence; and the consciousness of the trouble that she would bring to various innocent persons in that place by the report of the things that they had said, made of her something inhuman and detached. Mrs. Comber’s only way of easing the situation, “Do have another little pink cake, Mrs. Thompson,” failed altogether on this occasion, and she could only stare at her in a fascinated kind of horror until she realized with a start that she was intended as hostess to give an account of the morning’s proceedings. But she turned to Miss Madder. “You were down there, Miss Madder; tell us all about it.”

Miss Madder was only too ready, having been in the hall at the time and having heard what she called “the first struggle,” and having yielded eventually, rather against her better instincts, to her feminine curiosity—having in fact looked past the shoulders of Mr. Comber and Mr. Birkland and seen the gentlemen struggling on the floor.

“Actually on the floor!” said Mrs. Dormer, still in Siberia.

“Yes, actually on the floor—also all the breakfast things and coffee all over the tablecloth.”

Miss Madder was checked in her enthusiasm by her consciousness of the cold eye of Mrs. Thompson, and the possibility of being dismissed from her position at the end of the term if she said anything she oughtn’t to—also the possibility of an unpleasant conversation with her clever sister afterwards. However, she considered it safe enough to offer it as her opinion that both gentlemen had forgotten themselves, and that Mr. Traill was very much younger than Mr. Perrin, although Mr. Perrin was the harder one to live with—and that it had been a clean tablecloth that morning.

“I call it disgraceful,” was the only light that the younger Miss Madder would throw upon the question.

For a moment there was silence, and then Mrs. Dormer said, “And really about an umbrella?”

“I understand,” said Miss Madder, who was warming to her work and beginning to forget Mrs. Thompson’s eye, “that Mr. Traill borrowed Mr. Perrin’s umbrella without asking permission, and that there was a dispute.”