May Sinclair - The Helpmate

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Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes. Having
annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he
was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.

He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence,
his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the
back of the seat in front of him. His right arm embraced, unconsciously,
Anne's muff. Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him. Over the crook of
his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable
affection. His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something
between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible. She felt his gaze as a
gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer.
She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood
tingled.

The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed. It gave him
iniquitous opportunity. He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under
half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of
their lashes. He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb
but expressive adoration of his mouth. Anne, who felt that her soul had
been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a
yard's length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she
could not withhold. The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.

"Christian, doth thou see them,
On the holy ground,
How the troops of Midian
Prowl and prowl around?"

sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.

Profound abstraction veiled him, a treacherous unspiritual calm. Majendie
was a man with a baritone voice, which at times possessed him like a
furious devil. It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she
knew, to be roused by the first touch of a _crescendo_. The _crescendo_
came.

"Christian! Up and fight them!"

The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne's terrified nerves it
seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it. It dropped on
the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of
an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.

Anne's heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant
repudiation. Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was
intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power
to shake it so.

She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.

"Did you like it?" he asked as they emerged together into the open air.

He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be. They had been
playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the
Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game. He
nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by
playing too.

"Of course I liked it."

"So did I," he answered joyously, "I quite enjoyed it. We'll do it again
some other night."

"What made you come, like that?" said she, appeased by his innocence.

"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It
seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."

She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to
the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay
there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave
her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that
she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was
liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There
was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in
Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance
with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that
he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another
woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led
by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it
she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted
by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted
with a magnificent irrelevance.

"You must know her. You would like her."

He didn't in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn't think that he
would like her. But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with
Anne's assumption that he would. It was as if in her thoughts she were
drawing him towards her. He felt that she was softening, yielding. His
approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.

"I would like her, because you like her, is that it?"

"It wouldn't follow."

"Oh, how you spoil it!"

"Spoil what?"

"My inference. It pleased me. But, as you say, the logic wasn't sound."

Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was
silent. Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter's smile
suggested that he might have it. She was not going to minister to his
male delight. Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.

"Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you."

"You will like her for herself when you know her."

"Will she like me for myself when she knows me? It's extremely doubtful.
You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign."

"My dear, she says you've never been near her. You've never come to one
of her Thursdays."

"Oh, her Thursdays--no, I haven't."

"Well, how can you expect--but you'll go sometimes, now, to please me?"

"Won't Wednesdays do?"

"Wednesdays?"

"Yes. It wasn't half bad to-night. I'll go to every blessed Wednesday, as
long as they last, if you'll only let me off Thursdays."

"Please don't talk about being 'let off.' I thought you might like to
know my friends, that's all."

"So I would. I'd like it awfully. By the way, that reminds me. I met
Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you.
Would you mind very much?"

"Why should I mind, if she's a friend of yours and Edith's?"

"Oh well, you see, she isn't exactly--"

"Isn't exactly what?"

"A friend of Edith's."

CHAPTER VI

There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston
Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century,
when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the
aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its
solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston
Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either
Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could
live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from
the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide
invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after
their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the
suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street
and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre
symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its
atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on
the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved
with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and
of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed
breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this
immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of
their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified
attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a
religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the
Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They
utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation,
punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is
Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of
trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries
met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the
place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled
by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian
furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were
great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and
cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid
profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years
of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent
culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few
diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome
and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych
with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met,
Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of
aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been
conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.
That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept
it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear Fanny only knew
it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley
was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be
what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's
preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever
conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down
from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs.
Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."

"If you wait, you may get it from herself."

"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"

"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."

"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this
time, she _knows_."

"You can't ask her."

"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."

"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny
Eliott's help.

"Poor dear Anne."

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor
dear Anne.

Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant
with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her
marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in
Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have
penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an
awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr.
Majendie's domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared
as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr. Majendie
had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne. But Mr.
Majendie hadn't a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having
nobody at all. And then, besides, there was his history.

Mrs. Eliott looked distressed. Mr. Majendie's history could not
be explained away as too ancient to be interesting. In Scale a
seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern. Anne's
marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the
justification of Anne for that astounding step.

Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had
nothing to do with it. They went away baffled, but confirmed in their
impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.

It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne's friends.
They came to-day in quantities, attracted by the news of the Majendies'
premature return from their honeymoon. Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor
and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.

Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne's husband, that she might
retain Anne's affection. In this she did violence to her feelings, which
were sore on the subject of the marriage. It was not only on account of
the inglorious clouds he trailed. In any case she would have felt it as a
slight that her friend should have married without her assistance, and so
far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square. She herself was for
the moment disappointed with Anne. Anne had once taken them all so
seriously. It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had
enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial
hospitalities of Scale on Humber. They, the slender aristocracy of
Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had
given her of their best. Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior
Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was
a decline, and morally (to those who knew Fanny Eliott and to Fanny
Eliott who _knew_) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss. Fanny
Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square. She had satisfied even the
fastidiousness of Anne.

She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too. It was not that quality
in Anne that made her choice so--well, so incomprehensible.

It was Dr. Gardner's word. Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale
Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the
incomprehensible his word had weight. Vagueness was his foible, the
relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen. The spirit that looked
at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous glasses)
seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream. In
that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.

Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie's. They
had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than
Thurston Square. That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing
herself a little ostentatiously.

Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature
of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on
taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given
herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the
brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home
for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?

"My dear," said Mrs. Eliott, "he's a saint, if you're to believe Anne."

Even Dr. Gardner smiled. "I can't say that's exactly what I should call
him."

"Need we," said Mr. Eliott, "call him anything? So long as she thinks him
a saint--"

Mr. Eliott--Mr. Johnson Eliott--hovered on the borderland of culture,
with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic passion for the exact
sciences. He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as
well as his wife's merits. He too had his little weaknesses. Almost
savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in
a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference. There was no part of
Mr. Eliott's mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the
imputation of conviction. A hunted thing in his wife's drawing-room, Mr.
Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective
colouring of stupidity.

"How can she?" said Miss Proctor. "She's a saint herself, and she ought
to know the difference."

"Perhaps," said Dr. Gardner, "that's why she doesn't."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Eliott, "it was the original attraction. There
could be no other for Anne."

"The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice. Whatever she's
makes of Mr. Majendie, she's bent on making a martyr of herself." Miss
Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance
to all mystery. "It's quite simple. This marriage is a short cut to
canonisation, that's all."

Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke. She had been married for a
year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was
peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy. Her
voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.

"Anne was always certain of herself. And since she cares for Mr. Majendie
enough to accept him and to accept his sister, and the rather _triste_
life which is all he has to offer her, doesn't it look as if, probably,
she knew her own business best?"

"I think," said Mr. Eliott firmly, "we may take it that she does."

Miss Proctor's departure was felt as a great liberation of the intellect.

Mrs. Pooley sat up in her corner and revived the conversation interrupted
by Miss Proctor. Mrs. Pooley had felt that to talk about Mrs. Majendie
was to waste Mrs. Eliott. Mrs. Majendie apart, Mrs. Pooley had many ideas
in common with her friend; but, whereas Mrs. Eliott would spend superbly
on one idea at a time, Mrs. Pooley's intellect entertained promiscuously
and beyond its means. It was inclined to be hospitable to ideas that had
never met outside it, whose encounter was a little distressing to
everybody concerned. Whenever this happened Mrs. Pooley would appeal to
Mr. Eliott, and Mr. Eliott would say, "Don't ask me. I'm a stupid fellow.
Don't ask me to decide anything."

Thus did Mr. Eliott wilfully obscure himself.

To-day he was more impregnably concealed than ever. He hadn't any
opinions of his own. They were too expensive. He borrowed other people's
when he wanted them. "But," said Mr. Eliott, "it is very seldom that I
do want an opinion. If you have any facts to give me--well and good." For
he knew that, at the mention of facts, Mrs. Pooley's intellect would
retreat behind a cloud and that his wife would pursue it there.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Eliott, "there's such a thing as realising your
ideals."

Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner
had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of
displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it
years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it.
Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and
untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs.
Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs.
Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence
as a challenge.

"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals
when we've realised them."

The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have
to get some more."

Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have
them."

"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the
cloud.

"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for
tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter
profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies,
while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the
innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they
understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved
in secret and unsuspected harmony with his.

He had a certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition
mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her
brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated
votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His
social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner
accounted for them compassionately. It was no wonder, he considered, that
poor Mrs. Eliott wondered. She had so little else to do. Her nursery
upstairs was empty, it always had been, always would be empty. Did she
wonder at that too, at the transcendental carelessness that had left her
thus frustrated, thus incomplete? Mrs. Eliott would have been scandalised
if she had known the real Dr. Gardner's opinion of her.

"I wonder," said she, "what will become of Anne's ideal."

"It's safe," said the doctor. "She hasn't realised it."

"I wonder, then, what will become of Anne."

Mrs. Pooley retreated altogether before this gross application of
transcendent truth. She had not come to Mrs. Eliott's to talk about
Mrs. Majendie.

Dr. Gardner smiled. "Oh, come," he said, "you _are_ personal."

"I'm not," said Mrs. Eliott, conscious of her lapse and ashamed of it.
"But, after all, Anne's my friend. I know people blamed me because I
never told her. How could I tell her?"

"No," said Mrs. Gardner soothingly, "how could you?"

"Anne," continued Mrs. Eliott, "was so reticent. The thing was all
settled before anybody could say a word."

"Well," said Dr. Gardner, "there's no good worrying about it now."

"Isn't it possible," said the little year-old bride, "that Mr. Majendie
may have told her himself?"

For Dr. Gardner had told her everything the day before he married her,
confessing to the light loves of his youth, the young lady in the Free
Library and all. She looked round with eyes widened by their angelic
candour. Even more beautiful than Mrs. Gardner's intellect were Mrs.
Gardner's eyes, and the love of them that brought the doctor's home from
their wanderings in philosophic dream. Nobody but Dr. Gardner knew that
Mrs. Gardner's intellect had cause to be jealous of her eyes.

"There's one thing," said Mrs. Eliott, suddenly enlightened. "Our not
having said anything at the time makes it easier for us to receive him
now."

"Aren't we all talking," said Mrs. Gardner, "rather as if Anne had
married a monster? After all, have we ever heard anything against
him--except Lady Cayley?"

"Oh no, never a word, have we, Johnson dear?"

"Never. He's not half a bad fellow, Majendie."

Dr. Gardner rose to go.

"Oh, please--don't go before they come."

Mrs. Gardner hesitated, but the doctor, vague in his approaches,
displayed a certain energy in his departure.

They passed Mrs. Walter Majendie on the stairs.

She had come alone. That, Mrs. Eliott felt, was a bad beginning. She
could see that it struck even Johnson's obtuseness as unfavourable, for
he presently effaced himself.

"Fanny," said Anne, holding her friend's evasive eye with the
determination of her query, "tell me, who are the Ransomes?"

"The Ransomes? Have they called?"

"Yes, but I was out. I didn't see them."

"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Eliott, in a tone which implied that when Anne
_did_ see them----

"Are they very dreadful?"

"Well--they're not your sort."

Anne meditated. "Not--my--sort. And the Lawson Hannays, what sort are
they?"

"Well, we don't know them. But there are a great many people in Scale one
doesn't know."

"Are they socially impossible, or what?"

"Oh--socially, they would be considered--in Scale--all right. But he is,
or was, mixed up with some very queer people."

Anne's cold face intimated that the adjective suggested nothing to her.
Mrs. Eliott was compelled to be explicit. The word queer was applied in
Scale to persons of dubious honesty in business; whereas it was not so
much in business as in pleasure that Mr. Lawson Hannay had been queer.

"Mr. Hannay may be very steady now, but I believe he belonged to a very
fast set before he married her."

"And she? Is she nice?"

"She may be very nice for all I know."

"I think," said Anne, "she wouldn't call if she wasn't nice, you know."

She meant that if Mrs. Lawson Hannay hadn't been nice Walter would never
have sanctioned her calling.

"Oh, as for that," said her friend, "you know what Scale is. The less
nice they are the more they keep on calling. But I should think"--she had
suddenly perceived where Anne's argument was tending--"she is probably
all right."

"Do you know anything of Mr. Charlie Gorst?"

"No. But Johnson does. At least I'm sure he's met him."

Mrs. Eliott saw it all. Poor Anne was being besieged, bombarded by her
husband's set.

"Then he isn't impossible?"

"Oh no, the Gorsts are a very old Lincolnshire family. Quite grand. What
a number of people you're going to know, my dear. But, your husband isn't
to take you away from _all_ your old friends."

"He isn't taking me anywhere. I shall stay," said Anne proudly, "exactly
where I was before."

She was determined that her old friends should never know to what a
sorrowful place she had been taken.

"You dear," said Mrs. Eliott, holding out a suddenly caressing hand.

Anne trembled a little under the caress. "Fanny," said she, "I want you
to know him."

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