Helen with the High Hand by Arnold Bennett (free ebook reader .txt) 📖

eighteen pounds a year."

Her tone was faultless, in its innocent, sympathetic common sense. The truth was, it was too faultless; it rendered James furious with a fury that was dangerous, because it had to be suppressed.

Then suddenly she left the table.

"The Kiel butter at a shilling a pound is quite good enough, Georgiana," he heard her exhorting the servant in the scullery.

Ten minutes later, she put ten sovereigns in front of him.

"There's that ten-pound note," she said, politely (but not quite accurately). "I've got enough of my own to get on with."

She fled ere he could reply.

And not a word had he contrived to say to her concerning Emanuel.


CHAPTER XIII


THE WORLD

A few days later James Ollerenshaw was alone in the front room, checking various accounts for repairs of property in Turnhill, when twin letters fell into the quietude of the apartment. The postman--the famous old postman of Bursley, who on fine summer days surmounted the acute difficulty of tender feet by delivering mails in worsted slippers--had swiftly pushed the letters, as usual, through the slit in the door; but, nevertheless, their advent had somehow the air of magic, as, indeed, the advent of letters always had. Mr. Ollerenshaw glanced curiously from his chair, over his spectacles, at the letters as they lay dead on the floor. Their singular appearance caused him to rise at once and pick them up. They were sealed with a green seal, and addressed in a large and haughty hand--one to Helen and the other to himself. Obviously they came from the world which referred to him as "Jimmy." He was not used to being thrilled by mere envelopes, but now he became conscious of a slight quickening of pulsation. He opened his own envelope--the paper was more like a blanket than paper, and might have been made from the material of a child's untearable picture-book. He had to use a stout paper-knife, and when he did get into the envelope he felt like a burglar.

The discerning and shrewd ancient had guessed the contents. He had feared, and he had also hoped, that the contents would comprise an invitation to Mrs. Prockter's house at Hillport. They did; and more than that. The signature was Mrs. Prockter's, and she had written him a four-page letter. "My dear Mr. Ollerenshaw." "Believe me, yours most cordially and sincerely, Flora Prockter."

Flora!

The strangest thing, perhaps, in all this strange history is that he thought the name suited her.

He had no intention of accepting the invitation. Not exactly! But he enjoyed receiving it. It constituted a unique event in his career. And the wording of it was very agreeable. Mrs. Prockter proceeded thus: "In pursuance of our plan"--our plan!--"I am also inviting your niece. Indeed, I have gathered from Emanuel that he considers her as the prime justification of the party. We will throw them together. She will hear him sing. She has never heard him sing. If this does not cure her, nothing will, though he has a nice voice. I hope it will be a fine night, so that we may take the garden. I did not thank you half enough for the exceedingly kind way in which you received my really unpardonable visit the other evening," etc.

James had once heard Emanuel Prockter sing, at a concert given in aid of something which deserved every discouragement, and he agreed with Mrs. Prockter; not that he pretended to know anything about singing.

He sat down again, to compose a refusal to the invitation; but before he had written more than a few words it had transformed itself into an acceptance. He was aware of the entire ridiculousness of his going to an evening party at Mrs. Prockter's; still an instinct, powerful but obscure (it was the will-to-live and naught else), persuaded him by force to say that he would go.

"Have you had an invitation from Mrs. Prockter?" Helen asked him at tea.

"Yes," said he. "Have you?"

"Yes," said she. "Shall you go?"

"Ay, lass, I shall go."

She seemed greatly surprised.

"Us'll go together," he said.

"I don't think that I shall go," said she, hesitatingly.

"Have ye written to refuse?"

"No."

"Then I should advise ye to go, my lass."

"Why?"

"Unless ye want to have trouble with me," said he, grimly.

"But, uncle----"

"It's no good butting uncle," he replied. "If ye didna' mean to go, why did ye give young Prockter to understand as ye would go? I'll tell ye why ye changed your mind, lass. It's because you're ashamed o' being seen there with yer old uncle, and I'm sorry for it."

"Uncle!" she protested. "How can you say such a thing? You ought to know that no such idea ever entered my head."

He did know that no such idea had ever entered her head, and he was secretly puzzling for the real reason of her projected refusal. But, being determined that she should go, he had employed the surest and the least scrupulous means of achieving his end.

He tapped nervously on the table, and maintained the silence of the wounded and the proud.

"Of course, if you take it in that way," she said, after a pause, "I will go."

And he went through the comedy of gradually recovering from a wound.

His boldness in accepting the invitation and in compelling Helen to accompany him was the audacity of sheer ignorance. He had not surmised the experiences which lay before him. She told him to order a cab. She did not suggest the advisability of a cab. She stated, as a platitude, the absolute indispensability of a cab. He had meant to ride to Hillport in the tramcar, which ran past Mrs. Prockter's gates. However, he reluctantly agreed to order a cab, being fearful lest she might, after all, refuse to go. It was remarkable that, after having been opposed to the policy of throwing Helen and Emanuel together, he was now in favour of it.

On the evening, when at five minutes past nine she came into the front room clad for Mrs. Prockter's party, he perceived that the tramcar would have been unsuitable. A cab might hold her. A hansom would certainly not have held her. She was all in white, and very complicated. No hat; simply a white, silver-spangled bandage round her head, neck, and shoulders!

She glanced at him. He wore his best black clothes. "You look very well," said she, surprisingly. "That old-fashioned black necktie is splendid."

So they went. James had the peculiar illusion that he was going to a belated funeral, for except at funerals he had never in his life ridden in a cab.

When he descended with his fragile charge in Mrs. Prockter's illuminated porch, another cab was just ploughing up the gravel of the drive in departure, and nearly the whole tribe of Swetnams was on the doorstep; some had walked, and were boasting of speed. There were Sarah Swetnam, her brother Ted, the lawyer, her brother Ronald, the borough surveyor, her brother Adams, the bank cashier, and her sister Enid, aged seventeen. This child was always called "Jos" by the family, because they hated the name "Enid," which they considered to be "silly." Lilian, the newly-affianced one, was not in the crowd.

"Where's Lilian?" Helen asked, abruptly.

"Oh, she came earlier with the powerful Andrew," replied the youthful and rather jealous Jos. "She isn't an ordinary girl now."

Sarah rapidly introduced her brothers and sisters to James. They were all very respectful and agreeable; and Adams Swetnam pressed his hand quite sympathetically, and Jos's frank smile was delicious. What surprised him was that nobody seemed surprised at his being there. None of the girls wore hats, he noticed, and he also noticed that the three men (all about thirty in years) wore silk hats, white mufflers, and blue overcoats.

A servant--a sort of special edition of James's Georgiana--appeared, and robbed everybody of every garment that would yield easily to pulling. And then those lovely creatures stood revealed. Yes, Sarah herself was lovely under the rosy shades. The young men were elegantly slim, and looked very much alike, except that Adams had a beard--a feeble beard, but a beard. It is true that in their exact correctness they might have been mistaken for toast-masters, or, with the slight addition of silver neck-chains, for high officials in a costly restaurant. But great-stepuncle James could never have been mistaken for anything but a chip of the early nineteenth century flicked by the hammer of Fate into the twentieth. His wide black necktie was the secret envy of the Swetnam boys.

The Swetnam boys had the air of doing now what they did every night of their lives. With facile ease, they led the way through the long hall to the drawing-room. James followed, and _en route_ he observed at the extremity of a side-hall two young people sitting with their hands together in a dusky corner. "Male and female created He them!" reflected James, with all the tolerant, disdainful wisdom of his years and situation.

A piano was then heard, and as Ronald Swetnam pushed open the drawing-room door for the women to enter, there came the sound of a shocked "S-sh!"

Whereupon the invaders took to the tips of their toes and crept in as sinners. At the farther end a girl was sitting at a grand piano, and in front of the piano, glorious, effulgent, monarchical, stood Emanuel Prockter, holding a piece of music horizontally at the level of his waist. He had a white flower in his buttonhole, and, adhering to a quaint old custom which still lingers in the Five Towns, and possibly elsewhere, he showed a crimson silk handkerchief tucked in between his shirt-front and his white waistcoat. He had broad bands down the sides of his trousers. Not a hair of his head had been touched by the accidental winds of circumstance. He surveyed the couple of dozen people in the large, glowing room with a fixed smile and gesture of benevolent congratulation.

Mrs. Prockter was close to the door. "Emanuel is just going to sing," she whispered, and shook hands silently with James Ollerenshaw first.


CHAPTER XIV


SONG, SCENE AND DANCE

Every head was turned. Emanuel coughed, frowned, and put his left hand between his collar and his neck, as though he had concealed something there. The new arrivals slipped cautiously into chairs. James was between Helen and Jos. And he distinctly saw Jos wink at Helen, and Helen wink back. The winks were without doubt an expression of sentiments aroused by the solemnity of Emanuel's frown.

The piano tinkled on, and then Emanuel's face was observed to change. The frown vanished and a smile of heavenly rapture took its place. His mouth gradually opened till its resemblance to the penultimate vowel was quite realistic, and simultaneously, by a curious muscular co-ordination, he rose on his toes to a considerable height in the air.

The strain was terrible--like waiting for a gun to go off. James was conscious of a strange vibration by his side, and saw that Jos Swetnam had got the whole of a lace handkerchief into her mouth.

The gun went off--not with a loud report, but with a gentle and lofty tenor piping, somewhere in the neighbourhood of F, or it might have been only E (though, indeed, a photograph would have suggested that Emanuel was singing at lowest the upper C), and the performer slowly resumed his normal stature.

"O Love!" he had exclaimed, adagio and