Short Fiction Arthur Machen (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📖

the room at all. I mean it isn’t necessary. And if we did so it might lead to no end of expense. People would hear of it and be sure to fish for invitations. You know we have relatives in the country, and they would be almost certain, the Mallings, at any rate, to give hints.”

Darnell saw the force of the argument and gave way. But he was bitterly disappointed.

“It would have been very nice, wouldn’t it?” he said with a sigh.

“Never mind, dear,” said Mary, who saw that he was a good deal cast down. “We must think of some other plan that will be nice and useful too.”

She often spoke to him in that tone of a kind mother, though she was by three years the younger.

“And now,” she said, “I must get ready for church. Are you coming?”

Darnell said that he thought not. He usually accompanied his wife to morning service, but that day he felt some bitterness in his heart, and preferred to lounge under the shade of the big mulberry tree that stood in the middle of their patch of garden⁠—relic of the spacious lawns that had once lain smooth and green and sweet, where the dismal streets now swarmed in a hopeless labyrinth.

So Mary went quietly and alone to church. St. Paul’s stood in a neighbouring street, and its Gothic design would have interested a curious inquirer into the history of a strange revival. Obviously, mechanically, there was nothing amiss. The style chosen was “geometrical decorated,” and the tracery of the windows seemed correct. The nave, the aisles, the spacious chancel, were reasonably proportioned; and, to be quite serious, the only feature obviously wrong was the substitution of a low “chancel wall” with iron gates for the rood screen with the loft and rood. But this, it might plausibly be contended, was merely an adaptation of the old idea to modern requirements, and it would have been quite difficult to explain why the whole building, from the mere mortar setting between the stones to the Gothic gas standards, was a mysterious and elaborate blasphemy. The canticles were sung to Joll in B flat, the chants were “Anglican,” and the sermon was the gospel for the day, amplified and rendered into the more modern and graceful English of the preacher. And Mary came away.

After their dinner (an excellent piece of Australian mutton, bought in the World Wide Stores, in Hammersmith), they sat for some time in the garden, partly sheltered by the big mulberry tree from the observation of their neighbours. Edward smoked his honeydew, and Mary looked at him with placid affection.

“You never tell me about the men in your office,” she said at length. “Some of them are nice fellows, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes, they’re very decent. I must bring some of them round, one of these days.”

He remembered with a pang that it would be necessary to provide whisky. One couldn’t ask the guest to drink table beer at tenpence the gallon.

“Who are they, though?” said Mary. “I think they might have given you a wedding present.”

“Well, I don’t know. We never have gone in for that sort of thing. But they’re very decent chaps. Well, there’s Harvey; ‘Sauce’ they call him behind his back. He’s mad on bicycling. He went in last year for the Two Miles Amateur Record. He’d have made it, too, if he could have got into better training.

“Then there’s James, a sporting man. You wouldn’t care for him. I always think he smells of the stable.”

“How horrid!” said Mrs. Darnell, finding her husband a little frank, lowering her eyes as she spoke.

“Dickenson might amuse you,” Darnell went on. “He’s always got a joke. A terrible liar, though. When he tells a tale we never know how much to believe. He swore the other day he’d seen one of the governors buying cockles off a barrow near London Bridge, and Jones, who’s just come, believed every word of it.”

Darnell laughed at the humorous recollection of the jest.

“And that wasn’t a bad yarn about Salter’s wife,” he went on. “Salter is the manager, you know. Dickenson lives close by, in Notting Hill, and he said one morning that he had seen Mrs. Salter, in the Portobello Road, in red stockings, dancing to a piano organ.”

“He’s a little coarse, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Darnell. “I don’t see much fun in that.”

“Well, you know, amongst men it’s different. You might like Wallis; he’s a tremendous photographer. He often shows us photos he’s taken of his children⁠—one, a little girl of three, in her bath. I asked him how he thought she’d like it when she was twenty-three.”

Mrs. Darnell looked down and made no answer.

There was silence for some minutes while Darnell smoked his pipe. “I say, Mary,” he said at length, “what do you say to our taking a paying guest?”

“A paying guest! I never thought of it. Where should we put him?”

“Why, I was thinking of the spare room. The plan would obviate your objection, wouldn’t it? Lots of men in the City take them, and make money of it too. I dare say it would add ten pounds a year to our income. Redgrave, the cashier, finds it worth his while to take a large house on purpose. They have a regular lawn for tennis and a billiard-room.”

Mary considered gravely, always with the dream in her eyes. “I don’t think we could manage it, Edward,” she said; “it would be inconvenient in many ways.” She hesitated for a moment. “And I don’t think I should care to have a young man in the house. It is so very small, and our accommodation, as you know, is so limited.”

She blushed slightly, and Edward, a little disappointed as he was, looked at her with a singular longing, as if he were a scholar confronted with a doubtful hieroglyph, either wholly wonderful or altogether commonplace. Next door children were playing in the garden, playing shrilly, laughing, crying, quarrelling, racing to and fro. Suddenly a clear, pleasant voice sounded