The Price of Love by Arnold Bennett (best books to read non fiction TXT) 📖

should be disturbed. And was not this, too, highly proper?

She gave him the news of the house and said that Mrs. Tams was taking duty in the sick-room till four o'clock in the morning, and herself thenceforward, but that the invalid gave no apparent cause for apprehension.

"Old Batch been again?" asked Louis, with a complete absence of any constraint.

She shook her head.

"You'll find that money yet--somewhere, when you're least expecting it," said he, almost gaily.

"I'm sure we shall," she agreed with conviction.

"And how are _you_?" His tone became anxious and particular. She blushed deeply, for the outbreak of which she had been guilty and which he had witnessed, then smiled diffidently.

"Oh, I'm all right."

"You look as if you wanted some fresh air--if you'll excuse me saying so."

"I haven't been out to-day, of course," she said.

"Don't you think a walk--just a breath--would do you good!"

Without allowing herself to reflect, she answered--

"Well, I ought to have gone out long ago to get some food for to-morrow, as it's Sunday. Everything's been so neglected to-day. If the doctor happened to order a cutlet or anything for Mrs. Maldon, I don't know what I should do. Truly I ought to have thought of it earlier."

She seemed to be blaming herself for neglectfulness, and thus the enterprise of going out had the look of an act of duty. Her sensations bewildered her.

"Perhaps I could walk down with you and carry parcels. It's a good thing it's Saturday night, or the shops might have been closed."

She made no answer to this, but stood up, breathing quickly.

"I'll just speak to Mrs. Tams."

Creeping upstairs, she silently pushed open the door of Mrs. Maldon's bedroom. The invalid was asleep. Mrs. Tams, her hands crossed in her comfortable lap, and her mouth widely open, was also asleep. But Mrs. Tams was used to waking with the ease of a dog. Rachel beckoned her to the door. Without a sound the fat woman crossed the room.

"I'm just going out to buy a few things we want," said Rachel in her ear, adding no word as to Louis Fores.

Mrs. Tams nodded.

Rachel went to her bedroom, turned up the gas, straightened her hair, and put on her black hat, and her blue jacket trimmed with a nameless fur, and picked up some gloves and her purse. Before descending she gazed at herself for many seconds in the small, slanting glass. Coming downstairs, she took the marketing reticule from its hook in the kitchen passage. Then she went back to the parlour and stood in the doorway, speechless, putting on her gloves rapidly.

"Ready?"

She nodded.

"Shall I?" Louis questioned, indicating the gas.

She nodded again, and, stretching to his full height, he managed to turn the gas down without employing a footstool as Rachel was compelled to do.

"Wait a moment," she whispered in the hall, when he had opened the front door. These were the first words she had been able to utter. She went to the kitchen for a latch-key. Inserting this latch-key in the keyhole on the outside, and letting Louis pass in front of her, she closed the front door with very careful precautions against noise, and withdrew the key.

"I'll take charge of that if you like," said Louis, noticing that she was hesitating where to bestow it.

She gave it up to him with a violent thrill. She was intensely happy and intensely fearful. She was only going out to do some shopping; but the door was shut behind her, and at her side was this magic, mysterious being, and the nocturnal universe lay around. Only twenty-four hours earlier she had shut the door behind her and gone forth to find Louis. And now, having found him, he and she were going forth together like close friends. So much had happened in twenty-four hours that the previous night seemed to be months away.


II


Instead of turning down Friendly Street, they kept straight along the lane till, becoming suddenly urban, it led them across tram-lines and Turnhill Road, and so through a gulf or inlet of the market-place behind the Shambles, the Police Office, and the Town Hall, into the market-place itself, which in these latter years was recovering a little of the commercial prestige snatched from it half a century earlier by St. Luke's Square. Rats now marauded in the empty shops of St. Luke's Square, while the market-place glittered with custom, and the electric decoy of its facades lit up strangely the lower walls of the black and monstrous Town Hall.

Innumerable organized activities were going forward at that moment in the serried buildings of the endless confused streets that stretched up hill and down dale from one end of the Five Towns to the other--theatres, Empire music-halls, Hippodrome music-halls, picture-palaces in dozens, concerts, singsongs, spiritualistic propaganda, democratic propaganda, skating-rinks, Wild West exhibitions, Dutch auctions, and the private seances in dubious quarters of "psychologists," "clair-voyants," "scientific palmists," and other rascals who sold a foreknowledge of the future for eighteenpence or even a shilling. Viewed under certain aspects, it seemed indeed that the Five Towns, in the week-end desertion of its sordid factories, was reaching out after the higher life, the subtler life, the more elegant life of greater communities; but the little crowds and the little shops of Bursley market-place were nevertheless a proof that a tolerable number of people were still mainly interested in the primitive elemental enterprise of keeping stomachs filled and skins warm, and had no thought beyond it. In Bursley market-place the week's labour was being translated into food and drink and clothing by experts who could distinguish infallibly between elevenpence-halfpenny and a shilling. Rachel was such an expert. She forced her thoughts down to the familiar, sane, safe subject of shopping, though to-night her errands were of the simplest description, requiring no brains. But she could not hold her thoughts. A voice was continually whispering to her--not Louis Fores' voice, but a voice within herself, that she had never clearly heard before. Alternatively she scorned it and trembled at it.

She stopped in front of the huge window of Wason's Provision Emporium.

"Is this the first house of call?" asked Louis airily, swinging the reticule and his stick together.

"Well--" she hesitated. "Mrs. Tams told me they were selling Singapore pineapple at sevenpence-halfpenny. Mas. Maldon fancies pineapple. I've known her fancy a bit of pineapple when she wouldn't touch anything else.... Yes, there it is!"

In fact, the whole of the upper half of Wason's window was yellow with tins of preserved pineapple. And great tickets said: "Delicious chunks, 7 1/2d. per large tin. Chunks, 6 1/2d. per large tin."

Customers in ones and twos kept entering and leaving the shop. Rachel moved on towards the door, which was at the corner of the Cock yard, and looked within. The long double counters were being assailed by a surging multitude who fought for the attention of prestidigitatory salesmen.

"Hm!" murmured Rachel. "That may be all very well for Mrs. Tams...."

A moment later she said--

"It's always like that with Wason's shops for the first week or two!"

And her faintly sarcastic tone of a shrewd housewife immediately set Wason in his place--Wason with his two hundred and sixty-five shops, and his racing-cars, and his visits to kings and princes. Wason had emporia all over the kingdom, and in particular at Knype, Hanbridge, and Longshaw. And now he had penetrated to Bursley, sleepiest of the Five. His method was to storm a place by means of electricity, full-page advertisements in news-papers, the power of his mere name, and a leading line or so. At Bursley his leading line was apparently "Singapore delicious chunks at 7-1/2d. per large tin." Rachel knew Wason; she had known him at Knype. And she was well aware that his speciality was second-rate. She despised him. She despised that multitude of simpletons who, full of the ancient illusion that somewhere something can regularly be had for nothing, imagined that Wason's bacon and cheese were cheap because he sold preserved pineapple at a penny less than anybody else in the town. And she despised the roaring, vulgar success of advertising and electricity. She had in her some tincture of the old nineteenth century, which loved the decency of small, quiet things. And in the prim sanity of her judgment upon Wason she forgot for a few instants that she was in a dream, and that the streets and the whole town appeared strange and troubling to her, and that she scarcely knew what she was doing, and that the most seductive and enchanting of created men was at her side and very content to be at her side. And also the voice within her was hushed.

She said--

"I don't see the fun of having the clothes torn off my back to save a penny. I think I shall go to Malkin's. I'll get some cocoa there, too. Mrs. Tams simply lives for cocoa."

And Louis archly answered--

"I've always wondered what Mrs. Tams reminds me of. Now I know. She's exactly like a cocoa-tin dented in the middle."

She laughed with pleasure, not because she considered the remark in the least witty, but because it was so characteristic of Louis Fores. She wished humbly that she could say things just like that, and with caution she glanced up at him.

They went into Ted Malkin's sober shop, where there was a nice handful of customers, in despite of Wason only five doors away. And no sooner had Rachel got inside than she was in the dream again, and the voice resumed its monotonous phrase, and she blushed. The swift change took her by surprise and frightened her. She was not in Bursley, but in some forbidden city without a name, pursuing some adventure at once shameful and delicious. A distinct fear seized her. Her self-consciousness was intense.

And there was young Ted Malkin in his starched white shirt-sleeves and white apron and black waistcoat and tie, among his cheeses and flitches, every one of which he had personally selected and judged, weighing a piece of cheddar in his honourable copper-and-brass scales. He was attending to two little girls. He nodded with calm benevolence to Rachel and then to Louis Fores. It is true that he lifted his eyebrows--a habit of his--at sight of Fores, but he did so in a quite simple, friendly, and justifiable manner, with no insinuations.

"In one moment, Miss Fleckring," said he.

And as he rapidly tied up the parcel of cheese and snapped off the stout string with a skilled jerk of the hand, he demanded calmly--

"How's Mrs. Maldon to-night?"

"Much better," said Rachel, "thank you."

And Louis Fores joined easily in--

"You may say, very much better."

"That's rare good news! Rare good news!" said Malkin. "I heard you had an anxious night of it.... Go across and pay at the other counter, my dears." Then he called out loudly--"One and seven, please."

The little girls tripped importantly away.

"Yes, indeed," Rachel agreed. The tale of the illness, then, was spread over the town! She was glad, and her self-consciousness somehow decreased. She now fully understood the wisdom of Mrs. Maldon in refusing to let the police be informed of the disappearance of the money. What a fever in the shops of Bursley--even in the quiet shop of Ted Malkin--if the full story got abroad!

"And what is it to be to-night, Miss Fleckring? These aren't quite your hours, are they?