Paul Kelver

A lull in the conversation followed, but Hasluck was not thin-skinned, and the next thing I distinguished was his cheery laugh.

“He’s quite right,” was Hasluck’s comment; “that’s what I am undoubtedly. Because I can’t talk about anything but shop myself, I think everybody else is the same sort of fool.”

But he was doing himself an injustice, for on my next arrival in the passage he was again shouting across the table, and this time Teidelmann was evidently interested.

“Well, if you could spare the time, I’d be more obliged than I can tell you,” Hasluck was saying. “I know absolutely nothing about pictures myself, and Pearsall says you are one of the best judges in Europe.”

“He ought to know,” chuckled old Teidelmann. “He’s tried often enough to palm off rubbish onto me.”

“That last purchase of yours must have been a good thing for young – ” Hasluck mentioned the name of a painter since world famous; “been the making of him, I should say.”

“I gave him two thousand for the six,” replied Teidelmann, “and they’ll sell for twenty thousand.”

“But you’ll never sell them?” exclaimed my father.

“No,” grunted old Teidelmann, “but my widow will.” There came a soft, low laugh from a corner of the table I could not see.

“It’s Anderson’s great disappointment,” followed a languid, caressing voice (the musical laugh translated into prose, it seemed), “that he has never been able to educate me to a proper appreciation of art. He’ll pay thousands of pounds for a child in rags or a badly dressed Madonna. Such a waste of money, it appears to me.”

“But you would pay thousands for a diamond to hang upon your neck,” argued my father’s voice.

“It would enhance the beauty of my neck,” replied the musical voice.

“An even more absolute waste of money,” was my father’s answer, spoken low. And I heard again the musical, soft laugh.

“Who is she?” I asked Barbara.

“The second Mrs. Teidelmann,” whispered Barbara. “She is quite a swell. Married him for his money – I don’t like her myself, but she’s very beautiful.”

“As beautiful as you?” I asked incredulously. We were sitting on the stairs, sharing a jelly.

“Oh, me!” answered Barbara. “I’m only a child. Nobody takes any notice of me – except other kids, like you.” For some reason she appeared out of conceit with herself, which was not her usual state of mind.

“But everybody thinks you beautiful,” I maintained.

“Who?” she asked quickly.

“Dr. Hal,” I answered.

We were with our backs to the light, so that I could not see her face.

“What did he say?” she asked, and her voice had more of contentment in it.

I could not remember his exact words, but about the sense of them I was positive.

“Ask him what he thinks of me, as if you wanted to know yourself,” Barbara instructed me, “and don’t forget what he says this time. I’m curious.” And though it seemed to me a foolish command – for what could he say of her more than I myself could tell her – I never questioned Barbara’s wishes.

Yet if I am right in thinking that jealousy of Mrs. Teidelmann may have clouded for a moment Barbara’s sunny nature, surely there was no reason for this, seeing that no one attracted greater attention throughout the dinner than the parlour-maid.

“Where ever did you get her from?” asked Mrs. Florret, Barbara having just descended the kitchen stairs.

“A neat-handed Phillis,” commented Dr. Florret with approval.

“I’ll take good care she never waits at my table,” laughed the wife of our minister, the Rev. Cottle, a broad-built, breezy-voiced woman, mother of eleven, eight of them boys.

“To tell the truth,” said my mother, “she’s only here temporarily.”

“As a matter of fact,” said my father, “we have to thank Mrs. Hasluck for her.”

“Don’t leave me out of it,” laughed Hasluck; “can’t let the old girl take all the credit.”

Later my father absent-mindedly addressed her as “My dear,” at which Mrs. Cottle shot a swift glance towards my mother; and before that incident could have been forgotten, Hasluck, when no one was looking, pinched her elbow, which would not have mattered had not the unexpectedness of it drawn from her an involuntary “augh,” upon which, for the reputation of the house, and the dinner being then towards its end; my mother deemed it better to take the whole company into her confidence. Naturally the story gained for Barbara still greater admiration, so that when with the dessert, discarding the apron but still wearing the dainty cap, which showed wisdom, she and the footman took their places among the guests, she was even more than before the centre of attention and remark.

“It was very nice of you,” said Mrs. Cottle, thus completing the circle of compliments, “and, as I always tell my girls, that is better than being beautiful.”

“Kind hearts,” added Dr. Florret, summing up the case, “are more than coronets.” Dr. Florret had ever ready for the occasion the correct quotation, but from him, somehow, it never irritated; rather it fell upon the ear as a necessary rounding and completing of the theme; like the Amen in church.

Only to my aunt would further observations have occurred.

“When I was a girl,” said my aunt, breaking suddenly upon the passing silence, “I used to look into the glass and say to myself: ‘Fanny, you’ve got to be amiable,’ and I was amiable,” added my aunt, challenging contradiction with a look; “nobody can say that I wasn’t, for years.”

“It didn’t pay?” suggested Hasluck.

“It attracted,” replied my aunt, “no attention whatever.”

Hasluck had changed places with my mother, and having after many experiments learned the correct pitch for conversation with old Teidelmann, talked with him as much aside as the circumstances of the case would permit. Hasluck never wasted time on anything else than business. It was in his opera box on the first night of Verdi’s Aida (I am speaking of course of days then to come) that he arranged the details of his celebrated deal in guano; and even his very religion, so I have been told and can believe, he varied to suit the enterprise of the moment, once during the protracted preliminaries of a cocoa scheme becoming converted to Quakerism.

But for the most of us interest lay in a discussion between Washburn and Florret concerning the superior advantages attaching to residence in the East End.

As a rule, incorrect opinion found itself unable to exist in Dr. Florret’s presence. As no bird, it is said, can continue its song once looked at by an owl, so all originality grew silent under the cold stare of his disapproving eye. But Dr. “Fighting Hal” was no gentle warbler of thought. Vehement, direct, indifferent, he swept through all polite argument as a strong wind through a murmuring wood, carrying his partisans with him further than they meant to go, and quite unable to turn back; leaving his opponents clinging desperately – upside down, anyhow – to their perches, angry, their feathers much ruffled.

“Life!” flung out Washburn – Dr. Florret had just laid down unimpeachable rules for the conduct of all mankind on all occasions – “what do you respectable folk know of life? You are not men and women, you are marionettes. You don’t move to your natural emotions implanted by God; you dance according to the latest book of etiquette. You live and love, laugh and weep and sin by rule. Only one moment do you come face to face with life; that is in the moment when you die, leaving the other puppets to be dressed in black and make believe to cry.”

It was a favourite subject of denunciation with him, the artificiality of us all.

“Little doll,” he had once called me, and I had resented the term.

“That’s all you are, little Paul,” he had persisted, “a good little hard-working doll, that does what it’s made to do, and thinks what it’s made to think. We are all dolls. Your father is a gallant-hearted, soft-headed little doll; your mother the sweetest and primmest of dolls. And I’m a silly, dissatisfied doll that longs to be a man, but hasn’t the pluck. We are only dolls, little Paul.”

“He’s a trifle – a trifle whimsical on some subjects,” explained my father, on my repeating this conversation.

“There are a certain class of men,” explained my mother – “you will meet with them more as you grow up – who talk for talking’s sake. They don’t know what they mean. And nobody else does either.”

“But what would you have?” argued Dr. Florret, “that every man should do that which is right in his own eyes?”

“Far better than, like the old man in the fable, he should do what every other fool thinks right,” retorted Washburn. “The other day I called to see whether a patient of mine was still alive or not. His wife was washing clothes in the front room. ‘How’s your husband?’ I asked. ‘I think he’s dead,’ replied the woman. Then, without leaving off her work, ‘Jim,’ she shouted, ‘are you there?’ No answer came from the inner room. ‘He’s a goner,’ she said, wringing out a stocking.”

“But surely,” said Dr. Florret, “you don’t admire a woman for being indifferent to the death of her husband?”

“I don’t admire her for that,” replied Washburn, “and I don’t blame her. I didn’t make the world and I’m not responsible for it. What I do admire her for is not pretending a grief she didn’t feel. In Berkeley Square she’d have met me at the door with an agonised face and a handkerchief to her eyes.

“Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” murmured Dr. Florret.

“Go on,” said Washburn. “How does it run? ‘That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, of devil’s habit, is angel yet in this, that to the use of actions fair and good he gives a frock that aptly is put on.’ So was the lion’s skin by the ass, but it showed him only the more an ass. Here asses go about as asses, but there are lions also. I had a woman under my hands only a little while ago. I could have cured her easily. Why she got worse every day instead of better I could not understand. Then by accident learned the truth: instead of helping me she was doing all she could to kill herself. ‘I must, Doctor,’ she cried. ‘I must. I have promised. If I get well he will only leave me, and if I die now he has sworn to be good to the children.’ Here, I tell you, they live – think their thoughts, work their will, kill those they hate, die for those they love; savages if you like, but savage men and women, not bloodless dolls.”

“I prefer the dolls,” concluded Dr. Florret.

“I admit they are pretty,” answered Washburn.

“I remember,” said my father, “the first masked ball I ever went to when I was a student in Paris. It struck me just as you say, Hal; everybody was so exactly alike. I was glad to get out into the street and see faces.”

“But I thought they always unmasked at midnight,” said the second Mrs. Teidelmann in her soft, languid tones.

“I did not wait,” explained my father.

“That was a pity,” she replied. “I should have been interested to see what they were like, underneath.”

“I might have been disappointed,” answered my father. “I agree with Dr. Florret that sometimes the mask is an improvement.”

Barbara was right. She was a beautiful woman, with a face that would have been singularly winning if one could have avoided the hard cold eyes ever restless behind the half-closed lids.

Always she was very kind to me. Moreover, since the disappearance of Cissy she was the first to bestow again upon me a good opinion of my small self. My mother praised me when I was good, which to her was the one thing needful; but few of us, I fear, child or grown-up, take much pride in our solid virtues, finding them generally hindrances to our desires: like the oyster’s pearl, of more comfort to the world than to ourselves. If others there were who admired me, very guardedly must they have kept the secret I would so gladly have shared with them. But this new friend of ours – or had I not better at once say enemy – made me feel when in her presence a person of importance. How it was accomplished I cannot explain. No word of flattery nor even of mere approval ever passed her lips. Her charm to me was not that she admired me, but that she led me by some mysterious process to admire myself.

And yet in spite of this and many lesser kindnesses she showed to me, I never really liked her; but rather feared her, dreading always the sudden raising of those ever half-closed eyelids.

She sat next to my father at the corner of the table, her chin resting on her long white hands, her sweet lips parted, and as often as his eyes were turned away from her, her soft low voice would draw them back again. Once she laid her hand on his, laughing the while at some light jest of his, and I saw that he flushed; and following his quick glance, saw that my mother’s eyes were watching also.

I have spoken of my father only as he then appeared to me, a child – an older chum with many lines about his mobile mouth, the tumbled hair edged round with grey; but looking back with older eyes, I see him a slightly stooping, yet still tall and graceful man, with the face of a poet – the face I mean a poet ought to possess but rarely does, nature apparently abhorring the obvious – with the shy eyes of a boy, and a voice tender as a woman’s. Never the dingiest little drab that entered the kitchen but adored him, speaking always of “the master” in tones of fond proprietorship, for to the most slatternly his “orders” had ever the air of requests for favours. Women, I so often read, can care for only masterful men. But may there not be variety in women as in other species? Or perhaps – if the suggestion be not over-daring – the many writers, deeming themselves authorities upon this subject of woman, may in this one particular have erred? I only know my father spoke to few women whose eyes did not brighten. Yet hardly should I call him a masterful man.

“I think it’s all right,” whispered Hasluck to my father in the passage – they were the last to go. “What does she think of it, eh?”

“I think she’ll be with us,” answered my father.

“Nothing like food for bringing people together,” said Hasluck. “Good-night.”

The door closed, but Something had crept into the house. It stood between my father and mother. It followed them silently up the narrow creaking stairs.

CHAPTER VII.

OF THE PASSING OF THE SHADOW

Better is little, than treasure and trouble therewith. Better a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. None but a great man would have dared to utter such a glaring commonplace as that. Not only on Sundays now, but all the week, came the hot joint to table, and on every day there was pudding, till a body grew indifferent to pudding; thus a joy-giving luxury of life being lost and but another item added to the long list of uninteresting needs. Now we could eat and drink without stint. No need now to organise for the morrow’s hash. No need now to cut one’s bread instead of breaking it, thinking of Saturday’s bread pudding. But there the saying fails, for never now were we merry. A silent unseen guest sat with us at the board, so that no longer we laughed and teased as over the half pound of sausages or the two sweet-scented herrings; but talked constrainedly of empty things that lay outside us.

Easy enough would it have been for us to move to Guilford Street. Occasionally in the spiritless tones in which they now spoke on all subjects save the one, my mother and father would discuss the project; but always into the conversation would fall, sooner or later, some loosened thought to stir it to anger, and so the aching months went by, and the cloud grew.

Then one day the news came that old Teidelmann had died suddenly in his counting house.

“You are going to her?” said my mother.

“I have been sent for,” said my father; “I must – it may mean business.”

My mother laughed bitterly; why, at the time, I could not understand; and my father flung out of the house. During the many hours that he was away my mother remained locked in her room, and, stealing sometimes to the door, I was sure I heard her crying; and that she should grieve so at old Teidelmann’s death puzzled me.

She came oftener to our house after that. Her mourning added, I think, to her beauty, softening – or seeming to soften – the hardness of her eyes. Always she was very sweet to my mother, who by contrast beside her appeared witless and ungracious; and to me, whatever her motive, she was kindness itself; hardly ever arriving without some trifling gift or plan for affording me some childish treat. By instinct she understood exactly what I desired and liked, the books that would appeal to me as those my mother gave me never did, the pleasures that did please me as opposed to the pleasures that should have pleased me. Often my mother, talking to me, would chill me with the vista of the life that lay before me: a narrow, viewless way between twin endless walls of “Must” and “Must not.” This soft-voiced lady set me dreaming of life as of sunny fields through which one wandered laughing, along the winding path of Will; so that, although as I have said, there lurked at the bottom of my thoughts a fear of her; yet something within me I seemed unable to control went out to her, drawn by her subtle sympathy and understanding of it.

“Has he ever seen a pantomime?” she asked of my father one morning, looking at me the while with a whimsical screwing of her mouth.

My heart leaped within me. My father raised his eyebrows: “What would your mother say, do you think?” he asked. My heart sank.

“She thinks,” I replied, “that theatres are very wicked places.” It was the first time that any doubt as to the correctness of my mother’s judgments had ever crossed my mind.

Mrs. Teidelmann’s smile strengthened my doubt. “Dear me,” she said, “I am afraid I must be very wicked. I have always regarded a pantomime as quite a moral entertainment. All the bad people go down so very straight to – well, to the fit and proper place for them. And we could promise to leave before the Clown stole the sausages, couldn’t we, Paul?”

My mother was called and came; and I could not help thinking how insignificant she looked with her pale face and plain dark frock, standing stiffly beside this shining lady in her rustling clothes.

“You will let him come, Mrs. Kelver,” she pleaded in her soft caressing tones; “it’s Dick Whittington, you know – such an excellent moral.”

My mother had stood silent, clasping and unclasping her hands, a childish trick she had when troubled; and her lips were trembling. Important as the matter loomed before my own eyes, I wondered at her agitation.

“I am very sorry,” said my mother, “it is very kind of you. But I would rather he did not go.”

“Just this once,” persisted Mrs. Teidelmann. “It is holiday time.”

A ray of sunlight fell into the room, lighting upon her coaxing face, making where my mother stood seem shadow.

“I would rather he did not go,” repeated my mother, and her voice sounded harsh and grating. “When he is older others must judge for him, but for the present he must be guided by me – alone.”

“I really don’t think there could be any harm, Maggie,” urged my father. “Things have changed since we were young.”

“That may be,” answered my mother, still in the same harsh voice; “it is long ago since then.”

“I didn’t intend it that way,” said my father with a short laugh.

“I merely meant that I may be wrong,” answered my mother. “I seem so old among you all – so out of place. I have tried to change, but I cannot.”

“We will say no more about it,” said Mrs. Teidelmann, sweetly. “I merely thought it would give him pleasure; and he has worked so hard this last term, his father tells me.”

She laid her hand caressingly on my shoulder, drawing me a little closer to her; and it remained there.

“It was very kind of you,” said my mother, “I would do anything to give him pleasure, anything – I could. He knows that. He understands.”

My mother’s hand, I knew, was seeking mine, but I was angry and would not see; and without another word she left the room.

My mother did not allude again to the subject; but the very next afternoon she took me herself to a hall in the neighbourhood, where we saw a magic-lantern, followed by a conjurer. She had dressed herself in a prettier frock than she had worn for many a long day, and was brighter and gayer in herself than had lately been her wont, laughing and talking merrily. But I, nursing my wrongs, remained moody and sulky. At any other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me; but the wonders of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard so much of, that from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for myself, were floating vague and undefined before me in the air; and neither the open-mouthed sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of rats; nor even the live rabbit found in the stout old gentleman’s hat – the last sort of person in whose hat one would have expected to find such a thing – could draw away my mind from the joy I had caught a glimpse of only to lose.

So we walked home through the muddy, darkening streets, speaking but little; and that night, waking – or rather half waking, as children do – I thought I saw a figure in white crouching at the foot of my bed. I must have gone to sleep again; and later, though I cannot say whether the intervening time was short or long, I opened my eyes to see it still there; and frightened, I cried out; and my mother rose from her knees.

She laughed, a curious broken laugh, in answer to my questions. “It was a silly dream I had,” she explained “I must have been thinking of the conjurer we saw. I dreamt that a wicked Magician had spirited you away from me. I could not find you and was all alone in the world.”

She put her arms around me, so tight as almost to hurt me. And thus we remained until again I must have fallen asleep.

It was towards the close of these same holidays that my mother and I called upon Mrs. Teidelmann in her great stone-built house at Clapton. She had sent a note round that morning, saying she was suffering from terrible headaches that quite took her senses away, so that she was unable to come out. She would be leaving England in a few days to travel. Would my mother come and see her, she would like to say good-bye to her before she went. My mother handed the letter across the table to my father.

“Of course you will go,” said my father. “Poor girl, I wonder what the cause can be. She used to be so free from everything of the kind.”

“Do you think it well for me to go?” said my mother. “What can she have to say to me?”

“Oh, just to say good-bye,” answered my father. “It would look so pointed not to go.”

It was a dull, sombre house without, but one entered through its commonplace door as through the weed-grown rock into Aladdin’s cave. Old Teidelmann had been a great collector all his life, and his treasures, now scattered through a dozen galleries, were then heaped there in curious confusion. Pictures filled every inch of wall, stood propped against the wonderful old furniture, were even stretched unframed across the ceilings. Statues gleamed from every corner (a few of the statues were, I remember, the only things out of the entire collection that Mrs. Teidelmann kept for herself), carvings, embroideries, priceless china, miniatures framed in gems, illuminated missals and gorgeously bound books crowded the room. The ugly little thick-lipped man had surrounded himself with the beauty of every age, brought from every land. He himself must have been the only thing cheap and uninteresting to be found within his own walls; and now he lay shrivelled up in his coffin, under a monument by means of which an unknown cemetery became quite famous.

Instructions had been given that my mother was to be shown up into Mrs. Teidelmann’s boudoir. She was lying on a sofa near the fire when we entered, asleep, dressed in a loose lace robe that fell away, showing her thin but snow-white arms, her rich dark hair falling loose about her. In sleep she looked less beautiful: harder and with a suggestion of coarseness about the face, of which at other times it showed no trace. My mother said she would wait, perhaps Mrs. Teidelmann would awake; and the servant, closing the door softly, left us alone with her.

An old French clock standing on the mantelpiece, a heart supported by Cupids, ticked with a muffled, soothing sound. My mother, choosing a chair by the window, sat with her eyes fixed on the sleeping woman’s face, and it seemed to me – though this may have been but my fancy born of after-thought – that a faint smile relaxed for a moment the sleeping woman’s pained, pressed lips. Neither I nor my mother spoke, the only sound in the room being the hushed ticking of the great gilt clock. Until the other woman after a few slight movements of unrest began to talk in her sleep.