The Roll-Call - The Roll-Call Part 23
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The Roll-Call Part 23

"Well, if you ask me," he answered, it was. After a little pause he went on:

"Especially seeing that she practically asked me to ask them to dinner."

His nice features loosened to dissatisfaction. "The deuce she did!"

"Yes! Practically asked me! Anyhow, gave me the tip What can you do?" He implied that, far from deriving unique and unhoped-for glory from the condescension of Irene Wheeler in consenting to dine with him, he had conferred a favour on her by his invitation. He implied that brilliant women all over London competed for his invitations. His manner was entirely serious; it probably deceived even himself. George's manner corresponded, instinctively, chivalrously; but George was not deceived--at any rate in the subconscious depth of his mind.

"Exactly!" murmured George.

"Yes" said Lucas. "She said: 'I could bring Laurencine with me, if you can get another man. That would make a four.' She said she wanted to wake Laurencine up."

"Did you tell her you should ask me?" George questioned.

"Oh! She seemed to know all about you, my boy."

"Well, but she couldn't know all about me," said George insincerely.

"Well, if you want to know then, she suggested I should ask you."

"But she'd never seen me!"

"She's heard of you. Mrs. Orgreave, I expect."

"Odd!... Odd!" George now pretended to be academically assessing an announcement that had no intrinsic interest for him. In reality he was greatly excited.

"Well you know what those sort of women are!" Lucas summed up wisely, as if referring to truths of knowledge common among men of their kidney.

"Oh, of course!"

The magazine slid from the knees of the sleeper. The sleeper snorted and woke up. The spell was broken. Lucas rose suddenly. "Bye-bye!" He was giving an ultimatum as to his departure.

George rose also, but slowly.

"All that doesn't explain why she didn't ask us up," said he.

But in his heart he thought he knew why Miss Wheeler hadn't asked them up. The reason was that she maliciously wanted to tantalize him, George.

She had roused his curiosity about Lois, and then she had said to herself: "You think you're going to see her to-night, but you just aren't." Such, according to George, was Irene Wheeler the illustrious.

He reflected on the exasperating affair until he had undressed and got into bed. But as soon as he had put out the light Marguerite appeared before him, and at the back of her were the examiners for the Final. He slept ill.

CHAPTER VII

THE RUPTURE

I

During the whole of the next day George waited for a letter from Marguerite. There was nothing at the club by the first post; he went to the office, hoping that as he had addressed his telegram from Russell Square she might have written to Russell Square; there was nothing at Russell Square. At lunch-time no word had arrived at the club; when the office closed no word had arrived at the office; the last post brought nothing to the club. He might have sent another telegram to Alexandra Grove, but he was too proud to do so. He dined alone and most miserably at the club. Inspired by unhappiness and resentment, he resolved to go to bed; in bed he might read himself to sleep. But in the hall of the club his feet faltered. Perhaps it was the sight of hats and sticks that made him vacillate, or a glimpse of reluctantly dying silver in the firmament over Candle Court. He wavered; he stood still at the foot of the stairs. The next moment he was in the street. He had decided to call on Agg at the studio. Agg might have the clue to Marguerite's astounding conduct, though he had it not. He took a hansom, after saying he would walk; he was too impatient for walking. Possibly Marguerite would be at the studio; possibly a letter of hers had miscarried; letters did miscarry. He was in a state of peculiar excitement as he paid the cabman--an enigma to himself.

The studio was quite dark. Other studios showed lights, but not Agg's.

From one studio came the sound of a mandolin--he thought it was a mandolin--and the sound seemed pathetic, tragic, to his ears. Agg was perhaps in bed; he might safely arouse her; she would not object. But no! He would not do that. Pride again! It would be too humiliating for him, the affianced, to have to ask Agg: "I say, do you know anything about Marguerite?" The affianced ought to be the leading authority as to the doings of Marguerite. He turned away, walked a little, and perceived the cabman swinging himself cautiously down from his perch in order to enter a public-house. He turned back. Marguerite too might be in bed at the studio. Or the girls might be sitting in the dark, talking--a habit of theirs.... Fanciful suppositions! At any rate he would not knock at the door of the studio, would not even enter the alley again. What carried him into the Fulham Road and westwards as far as the Workhouse tower and the corner of Alexandra Grove? Feet! But surely the feet of another person, over which he had no control! He went in the lamplit dimness of Alexandra Grove like a thief; he crept into it. The silver had not yet died out of the sky; he could see it across the spaces between the dark houses; it was sad in exactly the same way as the sound of the mandolin had been sad.

What did he mean to do in the Grove? Nothing! He was just walking in it by chance. He could indeed do nothing. For if he rang at No. 8 old Haim would again confront him in the portico. He passed by No. 8 on the opposite side of the road. No light showed, except a very dim glow through the blind of the basement window to the left of the front door.

Those feet beneath him strolled across the road. The basement window was wide open. The blind being narrower than the window-frame, he could see, through the railings, into the room within. He saw Marguerite. She was sitting, in an uncomfortable posture, in the rather high-seated arm-chair in which formerly, when the room was her studio, she used to sit at her work. Her head had dropped, on one shoulder. She was asleep.

On the table a candle burned. His heart behaved strangely. He flushed.

All his flesh tingled. The gate creaked horribly as he tiptoed into the patch of garden. He leaned over the little chasm between the level of the garden and the window, and supported himself with a hand on the lower sash. He pushed the blind sideways with the other hand.

"Marguerite!" in a whisper. Then louder: "Marguerite!"

She did not stir. She was in a deep sleep. Her hands hung limp. Her face was very pale and very fatigued. She liberated the same sadness as the sound of the mandolin and the gleam of silver in the June sky, but it was far more poignant. At the spectacle of those weary and unconscious features and of the soft, bodily form, George's resentment was annihilated. He wondered at his resentment. He was aware of nothing in himself but warm, protective love. Tenderness surged out from the impenetrable secrecy of his heart, filled him, overflowed, and floated in waves towards the sleeper. In the intense sadness, and in the uncertainty of events, he was happy.

An older man might have paused, but without hesitancy George put his foot on the window-sill, pushed down the window farther, and clambered into the room in which he had first seen Marguerite. His hat, pressing backward the blind, fell off and bounced its hard felt on the floor, which at the edges was uncarpeted. The noise of the hat and the general stir of George's infraction disturbed Marguerite, who awoke and looked up. The melancholy which she was exhaling suddenly vanished. Her steady composure in the alarm delighted George.

"Couldn't wake you," he murmured lightly. It was part of his Five Towns upbringing to conceal excitement. "Saw you through the window."

"Oh! George! Was I asleep?"

Pleasure shone on her face. He deposited his stick and sprang to her. He sat on the arm of the chair. He bent her head back and examined her face. He sat on her knee and held her. She did not kiss; she was kissed; he liked that. Her fatigue was adorable.

"I came here for something, and I just sat down for a second because I was so tired, and I must have gone right off.... No! No!"

The admonishing negative was to stop him from getting up off her knee.

She was exhausted, yet she had vast resources of strength to bear him on her knee. She was wearing her oldest frock. It was shabby. But it exquisitely suited her then. It was the frock of her capability, of her great labours, of her vigil, of her fatigue. It covered, but did not hide, her beautiful contours. He thought she was marvellously beautiful--and very young, far younger than himself. As for him, he was the dandy, in striking contrast to her. His dandyism as he sat on her knee pleased both of them. He looked older than his years, his shoulders had broadened, his dark moustache thickened. In his own view he was utterly adult, as she was in hers. But their young faces so close together, so confident, were touchingly immature. As he observed her grave satisfaction at his presence, the comfort which he gave her, he felt sure of her, and the memory of his just resentment came to him, and he was tenderly reproachful.

"I expected to hear from you," he said. The male in him relished the delicate accusation of his tone.

Marguerite answered with a little startled intake of breath:

"She's dead!"

"Dead?"

"She died this afternoon. The layer-out left about half an hour ago."

Death parted them. He rose from her knee, and Marguerite did not try to prevent him. He was profoundly shocked. With desolating vividness he recalled the Sunday afternoon when he had carried upstairs the plump, living woman now dead. He had always liked Mrs. Lob--it was as Mrs. Lob that he thought of her. He had seen not much of her. Only on that Sunday afternoon had he and she reached a sort of intimacy--unspoken but real.

He had liked her. He had even admired her. She was no ordinary being.

And he had sympathized with her for Marguerite's quite explicable defection. He had often wished that those two, the charwoman and his beloved, could somehow have been brought together. The menaces of death had brought them together. Mrs. Lob was laid out in the bedroom which he had once entered. Mrs. Lob had been dying while he dined richly with Miss Wheeler and Laurencine, and while he talked cynically with Everard Lucas. And while he had been resenting Marguerite's neglect Marguerite was watching by the dying bed. Oh! The despicable superficialities of restaurants and clubs! He was ashamed. The mere receding shadow of death shamed him.

"The baby's dead too, of course," Marguerite added. "She ought never to have had a baby. It seems she had had two miscarriages."

There were tears in Marguerite's eyes and in her voice. Nevertheless her tone was rather matter-of-fact as she related these recondite and sinister things. George thought that women were very strange. Imagine Marguerite quietly talking to him in this strain! Then the sense of the formidable secrets that lie hidden in the history of families, and the sense of the continuity of individual destinies, overwhelmed him. There was silence.

"And your exam. begins to-morrow," whispered the astonishing Marguerite.

"Where's the old gentleman?"

"He's sitting in the parlour in the dark."

It was a terrible house: they two intimidated and mournful in the basement; the widower solitary on the ground floor; the dead bodies, the wastage and futility of conception and long bearing, up in the bedroom.