Roll-Call — Part 1, Chapter 5, part 1
I
"Tea is ready, Mr. Cannon," said Mr. Haim in his most courteous style, coming softly into George's room.
And George looked up at the old man's wrinkled face, and down at his crimson slippers, with the benevolent air of a bookworm permitting himself to be drawn away from an ideal world into the actual.
Glasses on the end of George's nose would have set off the tableau, but George had outgrown the spectacles which had disfigured his boyhood.
As a fact, since his return that afternoon from Mrs. John's, he had, to the detriment of modesty and the fostering of conceit, accomplished some further study for the Final, although most of the time had been spent in dreaming of women and luxury.
"All right," said he.
"I'll come."
"I don't think that lamp's been very well trimmed to-day," said Mr. Haim apologetically, sniffing.
"Does it smell?"
"Well, I do notice a slight odour."
"I'll open the window," said George heartily.
He rose, pulled the curtains, and opened the front French window with a large gesture.
The wild, raw, damp air of Sunday night rushed in from the nocturnal Grove, and instantly extinguished the lamp.
"Oh!"
exclaimed Mr. Haim, rather nervously.
"Saved me the trouble," said George.
As he emerged after Mr. Haim from the dark room, he was thinking that it was ridiculous not to have electricity, and that he must try to come to some arrangement with Mr. Haim for the installation of electricity.
Fancy oil-lamps in the middle of London in the twentieth century!
Shocks were waiting in George's mind for Mr. Haim.
He intended, if he could, to get the room on the first floor, empty since the departure of Marguerite, and to use it for a bedroom, while keeping the ground-floor room exclusively for work and society.
His project would involve shocks also for Mr. Edwin Clayhanger in the Five Towns, who would be called upon to pay; but George had an airy confidence in the ability of his stepfather to meet such shocks in a satisfactory manner.
To George's surprise, Mr. Alfred Prince was in the sitting-room.
Shabby and creased as usual, he looked far more like a clerk in some establishment where clerks were not morally compelled to imitate dandies than like an etcher of European renown.
But, also as usual, he was quietly at ease and conversational; and George at once divined that he had been invited with the object of relieving the social situation created by the presence of the brilliant young lodger at tea.
This tea was the first meal to be taken by George with Mr. and Mrs. Haim, for he was almost never at home on Sunday afternoons, and he was not expected to be at home.
The table showed, as Mr. Haim's nervousness had shown, that the importance of the occasion had been realized.
It was an obviously elaborate table.
The repast was ready in every detail; the teapot was under the cosy; the cover was over the hot crumpets; Mrs. Haim alone lacked.
"Where's missus?"
asked George lightly.
Mr. Haim had not come into the room.
"I don't know," said Mr. Prince.
"She brought the tea in a minute ago.
You been working this afternoon?"
At that moment Mr. Haim entered.
He said: "Mrs. Haim isn't feeling very well.
She's upstairs.
She says she's sure she'll be all right in a little while.
In the meantime she prefers us to go on with our tea."
Mr. Prince and Mr. Haim looked at each other, and George looked at Mr. Haim.
The older men showed apprehension.
The strange idea of unconquerable destiny crossed George's mind--destiny clashing ruthlessly with ambition and desire.
The three males sat down in obedience to the wish of the woman who had hidden herself in the room above.
All of them were dominated by the thought of her.
They did not want to sit down and eat and drink, and they were obliged to do so by the invisible volitional force of which Mr. Haim was the unwilling channel.
Mr. Haim, highly self-conscious, began to pour out the tea.
Mr. Prince, highly self-conscious, suggested that he should make himself useful by distributing the crumpets while they were hot.
George, highly selfconscious, accepted a crumpet.
Mr. Prince chatted; George responded in a brave worldly fashion; Mr. Haim said 'Yes,' 'Ye-es,' very absently.
And then Mrs. Haim appeared smiling in the doorway.
"Ah!"
breathed everybody, assuaged.
"Ah!"
Mr. Haim moved from in front of the tea-tray to the next seat.
Mrs. Haim was perhaps somewhat pale, but she gave a sincere, positive assurance that she was perfectly well again.
Reassurance spread throughout the company.
Forebodings vanished; hearts lightened; gladness reigned; the excellence of crumpets became apparent.
And all this swift, wonderful change was brought about by the simple entry of the woman.
But beneath the genuine relief and satisfaction of the men there stirred vaguely the thought of the mysteriousness of women, of the entire female sex.
Mrs. Haim, charwoman, was just as mysterious as any other woman.
As for George, despite the exhilaration which he could feel rising in him effortless and unsought, he was preoccupied by more than women's mysteriousness; the conception of destiny lingered and faintly troubled him.
It was as though he had been walking on a clear path through a vast and empty and safe forest, and the eyes of a tiger had gleamed for an instant in the bush and gone.
Not a real tiger!
And if a real tiger, then a tiger that would never recur, and the only tiger in the forest!...
Yet the entire forest was transformed.
Mrs. Haim was wearing the blue sateen.
It was a dress unsuited to her because it emphasized her large bulk; but it was her best dress; it shone and glittered; it imposed.
Her duty was to wear it on that Sunday afternoon.
She was shy, without being self-conscious.
To preside over a society consisting of young bloods, etchers of European renown, and pillars of the architectural profession was an ordeal for her.
She did not pretend that it was not an ordeal.
She did not pretend that the occasion was not extraordinary.
She was quite natural in her calm confusion.
She was not even proud, being perhaps utterly incapable of social pride.
Her husband was proud for her.
He looked at her earnestly, wistfully.
He could not disguise his anxiety for her success.
Was she equal to the rôle?
She was.
Of course she was.
He had never doubted that she would be (he said to himself).
His pride increased, scarcely escaped being fatuous.
"I must congratulate you on the new front doormat, Mrs. Haim," said Mr. Prince, with notable conversational tact.
"I felt it at once in the dark."
Mrs. Haim smiled.
"I do like a good doormat," she said.
"It saves so much work, I always think.
I told Mr. Haim I thought we needed a new one, and bless me if he didn't take me straight out to buy one."
The new doormat expressed Mrs. Haim's sole and characteristic criticism of the organism into which she had so unassumingly entered.
Secure in the adoration of Mr. Haim, she might safely have turned the place upside-down and proved to the Grove that she could act the mistress with the best of them; but she changed nothing except the doormat.
The kitchen and scullery had already been hers before the eye of Mr. Haim had fallen upon her; she was accustomed to them and had largely fashioned their arrangements.
Her own furniture, such of it as was retained, had been put into the spare bedroom and the kitchen, and was hardly noticeable there.
The dramatic thing for her to do would have been to engage another charwoman.
But Mrs. Haim was not dramatic; she was accommodating.
She fitted herself in.
The answer to people who asked what Mr. Haim could see in her, was that what Mr. Haim first saw was her mere way of existing, and that in the same way she loved.
At her tea-table, as elsewhere, she exhibited no special quality; she said little; she certainly did not shine.
Nevertheless the three men were quite happy and at ease, because her way of existing soothed and reinspired them.
George especially got gay; and he narrated the automobile adventure of the afternoon with amusing gusto.
He was thereby a sort of hero, and he liked that.
He was bound by his position in the world and by his clothes and his style to pretend to some extent that the adventure was much less extraordinary to him than it seemed to them.
The others made no pretence.
They were open-mouthed.
Their attitude admitted frankly that above them was a world to which they could not climb, that they were not familiar with it and knew nothing about it.
They admired George; they put it to his credit that he was acquainted with these lofty matters and moved carelessly and freely among them; and George too somehow thought that credit was due to him and that his superiority was genuine.
"And do you mean to say she'd never met you before?"
exclaimed Mr. Haim.
"Never in this world!"
Mr. Prince remarked calmly: "You must have had a very considerable effect on her then."
His eyes twinkled.
George flushed slightly.
The idea had already presented itself to him with great force.
"Oh no!"
He negligently pooh-poohed it.
"Well, does she go about asking every man she meets what his Christian name is?"
"I expect she just does."
There was silence for a moment.
Mrs. Haim refilled a cup.
"Something will have to be done soon about these motor-cars," observed Mr. Haim at length, sententiously, in the vein of 'Mustard and Cress.'
"That's very evident."
"They cost so much," said Mr. Prince.
"Why!
They cost as much as a house, some of them."
"More!"
said George.
"Nay, nay!"
Mr. Haim protested.
The point had come at which his imagination halted.
"Anyhow, you had a lucky escape," said Mr. Prince.
"You might have been lamed for life--or anything."
George laughed.
"I am always lucky," said he.
He thought: "I wonder whether I _am_!"
He was afraid.
Mrs. Haim was half-way towards the door before any of the men noticed what she was about.
She had risen silently and quickly; she could manoeuvre that stout frame of hers with surprising facility.
There was a strange, silly look on her face as she disappeared, and the face was extremely pale.
Mr. Haim showed alarm, and Mr. Prince concern.
Mr. Haim's hands clasped the arms of his chair; he bent forward hesitatingly.
"What----?"
Then was heard the noise of a heavy subsidence, apparently on the stairs.
George was out of the room first.
But the other two were instantly upon him.
Mrs. Haim had fallen at the turn of the stairs; her body was distributed along the little half-landing there.
"My God!
She's fainted!"
muttered Mr. Haim.
"We'd better get her into the bedroom," said Mr. Prince, with awe.
The trouble had come back, but in a far more acute form.
The prostrate and unconscious body, all crooked and heaped in the shadow, intimidated the three men, convicting them of helplessness and lack of ready wit.
George stood aside and let the elder pair pass him.
Mr. Haim hurried up the stairs, bent over his wife, and seized her under the arms.
Mr. Prince took her by the legs.
They could not lift her.
They were both thin little men, quite unaccustomed to physical exertion.
Mrs. Haim lay like a giantess, immovably recumbent between their puny, straining figures.
"Here, let me try," said George eagerly, springing towards the group.
With natural reluctance Mr. Haim gave way to him.
George stooped and braced himself to the effort.
His face was close to the blanched, blind face of Mrs. Haim.
He thought she looked very young, astonishingly young in comparison with either Haim or Prince.
Her complexion was damaged but not destroyed.
Little fluffy portions of her hair seemed absolutely girlish.
Her body was full of nice curves, which struck George as most enigmatically pathetic.
But indeed the whole of her was pathetic, very touching, very precious and fragile.
Even her large, shiny, shapeless boots and the coarse sateen stuff of her dress affected him.
A lump embarrassed his throat.
He suddenly understood the feelings of Mr. Haim towards her.
She was inexpressibly romantic....
He lifted her torso easily; and pride filled him because he could do easily what others could not do at all.
Her arms trailed limp.
Mr. Haim and Mr. Prince jointly raised her lower limbs.
George staggered backwards up the remainder of the stairs.
As they steered the burden into the bedroom, where a candle was burning, Mrs. Haim opened her eyes and, gazing vacantly at the ceiling, murmured in a weak, tired voice: "I'm all right.
It's nothing.
Please put me down."
"Yes, yes, my love!"
said Mr. Haim, agitated.
They deposited her on the bed.
She sighed; then smiled.
A slight flush showed on her cheek under the light of the candle which Mr. Prince was holding aloft.
Mysterious creature, with the mysterious forces of life flowing and ebbing incomprehensibly within her!
To George she was marvellous, she was beautiful, as she lay defenceless and silently appealing.
"Thank you, Mr. Cannon.
Thank you very much," said Mr. Haim, turning to the strong man.
It was a dismissal.
George modestly departed from the bedroom, which was no place for him.
After a few minutes Mr. Prince also descended.
They stood together at the foot of the stairs in the draught from the open window of George's room.
"Hadn't I better go for a doctor?"
George suggested.
"That's what I said," replied Mr. Prince.
"But she won't have one."
"But----" "Well, she won't." The accommodating, acquiescent dame, with scarcely strength to speak, was defeating all three of them on that one point.
"What is it?"
asked George confidentially.
"Oh!
I don't suppose it's anything, really."
II
That George should collect the tea-things together on the tray, and brush and fold the cloth, and carry the loaded tray downstairs into the scullery, was sufficiently strange.
But it was very much more strange that he should have actually had the idea of washing-up the tea-things himself.
In his time, in the domestic crises of Bursley, he had boyishly helped ladies to wash-up, and he reckoned that he knew all about the operation.
There he stood, between the kitchen and the scullery, elegantly attired, with an inquiring eye upon the kettle of warm water on the stove, debating whether he should make the decisive gesture of emptying the kettle into the large tin receptacle that lay on the slop-stone.
Such was the miraculous effect on him of Mrs. Haim's simplicity, her weakness, and her predicament.
Mrs. Haim was a different woman for him now that he had carried her upstairs and laid her all limp and girlish on the solemn conjugal bed!
He felt quite sure that old Haim was incapable of washing-up.
He assuredly did not want to be caught in the act of washing-up, but he did want to be able to say in his elaborately nonchalant manner, answering a question about the disappearance of the tea-things: "I thought I might as well wash-up while I was about it."
And he did want Mrs. Haim to be put in a flutter by the news that Mr. George Cannon had washed-up for her.
The affair would positively cause a sensation.
He was about to begin, taking the risks of premature discovery, when he heard a noise above.
It was Mr. Haim at last descending the stairs to the ground floor.
George started.
He had been alone in the lower parts of the house for a period which seemed long.
(Mr. Prince had gone to the studio, promising to return later.
) The bedroom containing Mr. and Mrs. Haim had become for him the abode of mystery.
The entity of the enchanted house had laid hold of his imagination.
He had thought of Marguerite as she used to pervade the house, and of his approaching interview with her at the Manresa Road studio.
He had thought very benevolently of Marguerite and also of, Mr. and Mrs. Haim.
He had involved them all three, in his mind, in a net of peace and goodwill.
He saw the family quarrel as something inevitable, touching, absurd--the work of a maleficent destiny which he might somehow undo and exorcise by the magic act of washing-up, to be followed by other acts of a more diplomatic and ingenious nature.
And now the dull, distant symptoms of Mr. Haim on the stairs suddenly halted him at the very outset of his benignant machinations.
He listened.
If the peace of the world had depended upon his washing-up he could not have permitted himself to be actually seen in the rôle of kitchen-girl by Mr. Haim--so extreme was his lack of logic and right reason.
There was a silence, a protracted silence, and then Mr. Haim unmistakably came down the basement stairs, and George thanked God that he had not allowed his impulse to wash-up run away with his discretion, to the ruin of his dignity.
Mr. Haim, hesitating in the kitchen doorway, peered in front of him as if at a loss.
George had shifted the kitchen lamp from its accustomed place.
"I'm here," said George, moving slightly in the dim light.
"I thought I might as well make myself useful and clear the table for you.
How is she going on?"
He spoke cheerfully, even gaily, and he expected Mr. Haim to be courteously appreciative--perhaps enthusiastic in gratitude.
"Mrs. Haim is quite recovered, thank you.
It was only a passing indisposition," said Mr. Haim, using one of his ridiculously stilted phrases.
His tone was strange; it was very strange.
"Good!"
exclaimed George, with a gaiety that was now forced, a bravado of gaiety.
He thought: "The old chump evidently doesn't like me interfering.
Silly old pompous ass!"
Nevertheless his attitude towards the huffy landlord, if scornful, was good-humoured and indulgent.
Then he noticed that Mr. Haim held in his hand a half-sheet of note-paper which disturbingly seemed familiar.
"What is the meaning of this, Mr. Cannon?"
Mr. Haim demanded, advancing towards the brightness of the lamp and extending the paper.
He was excessively excited.
Excitement always intensified his age.
The offered document was the letter which George had that morning received from Marguerite.
The missive was short, a mere note, but its terms could leave no doubt as to the relations between the writer and the recipient.
Moreover, it ended with a hieroglyphic sign, several times repeated, whose significance is notorious throughout the civilized world.
"Where did you get that?"
muttered George, with a defensive menace half formed in his voice.
He faltered.
His mood had not yet become definitive.
Mr. Haim answered: "I have just picked it up in the hall, sir.
The wind must have blown it off the table in your room, and the door was left open.
I presume that I have the right to read papers I find lying about in my own house."
George was dashed.
On returning home from Mrs. John's lunch he had changed his suit for another one almost equally smart, but of Angora and therefore more comfortable.
He liked to change.
He had taken the letter out of a side-pocket of the jacket and put it with his watch, money, and other kit on the table while he changed, and he had placed everything back into the proper pockets, everything except the letter.
Carelessness!
A moment of negligence had brought about the irremediable.
The lovely secret was violated.
The whole of his future life and of Marguerite's future life seemed to have been undermined and contaminated by that single act of omission.
Marguerite wrote seldom to him because of the risks.
But precautions had been arranged for the occasions when she had need to write, and she possessed a small stock of envelopes addressed by himself, so that Mr. Haim might never by chance, picking up an envelope from the hall floor, see George's name in his daughter's hand.
And now Mr. Haim had picked up an actual letter from the hall floor.
And the fault for the disaster was George's own.
"May I ask, sir, are you engaged to my daughter?"
demanded Mr. Haim, getting every instant still more excited.
George had once before seen him agitated about Marguerite, but by no means to the same degree.
He trembled.
He shook.
His dignity had a touch of the grotesque; yet it remained dignity, and it enforced respect.
For George, destiny seemed to dominate the kitchen and the scullery like a presence.
He and the old man were alone together in that presence, and he was abashed.
He was conscious of awe.
The old man's mien accused him of an odious crime, of something base and shameful.
Useless to argue with himself that he was entirely guiltless, that he had the right to be the betrothed of either Mr. Haim's daughter or any other girl, and to publish or conceal the betrothal as he chose and as she chose.
Yes, useless!
He felt, inexplicably, a criminal.
He felt that he had committed an enormity.
It was not a matter of argument; it was a matter of instinct.
The old man's frightful and irrational resentment was his condemnation.
He could not face the old man.
He thought grievously: "I am up against this man.
All politeness and conventions have vanished.
It's the real, inmost me, and the real, inmost him."
Nobody else could take a part in the encounter.
And he was sad, because he could not blame the old man.
Could he blame the old man for marrying a charwoman?
Why, he could only admire him for marrying the charwoman.
In marrying the charwoman the old man had done a most marvellous thing.
Could he blame Marguerite?
Impossible.
Marguerite's behaviour was perfectly comprehensible.
He understood Marguerite and he understood her father; he sympathized with both of them.
But Marguerite could not understand her father, and her father could not understand either his daughter or George.
Never could they understand!
He alone understood.
And his understanding gave him a melancholy, hopeless feeling of superiority, without at all lessening the strange conviction of guilt.
He had got himself gripped by destiny.
Destiny had captured all three of them.
