“We got to settle our little account, old bird, see?” and the suppressed fury of Meads’ voice denoted some physical climax. “Why the Hell don’t you answer?” he suddenly shrieked; and springing forward he lashed “Old Fags” across the cheek.
A terrible horror came over him. The cheek he had struck was as cold as marble and the head fell a little impotently to one side.
Trembling as though struck with an ague the groom picked up the guttering lamp and held it close to the face of “Old Fags.” It was set in an impenetrable repose, the significance of which even the groom could not misunderstand. The features were calm and childlike, lit by a half-smile of splendid tolerance, that seemed to have over-ridden the temporary buffets of a queer world.
Meads had no idea how long he stood there gazing horror-struck at the face of his enemy. He only knew that he was presently conscious that Minnie Birdle was standing by his side; and as he looked at her, her gaze was fixed on “Old Fags,” and a tear was trickling down either cheek.
“’E’s dead,” she said, “‘Old Fags’ is dead. ’E died this morning of noomonyer.”
She said this quite simply, as though it was a statement that explained the wonder of her presence. She did not look at Meads, or seem aware of him.
He watched the flickering light from the lamp illumining the underside of her chin and nostrils and her quivering brows.
“’E’s dead,” she said again, and the statement seemed to come as an edict of dismissal, as though love and hatred and revenge had no place in these fundamental things.
Meads looked from her to the tousled head, leaning slightly to one side on the mattress, and he felt himself in the presence of forces he could not comprehend. He put the lamp back quietly on the box and tiptoed from the room.
THE SEPARATE ROOM
Ethel Colburn Mayne
(1865–1941)
Ethel Colburn Mayne was of Irish descent. She grew up in Cork and attended private schools in Ireland and only began writing when she was thirty, sending “A Pen-and-Ink Effect” to The Yellow Book in 1895. The magazine’s editor, Henry Harland, invited her to become the magazine’s sub-editor in 1896, a role she accepted but was forced out of later that year. She continued writing, however, and two years later published her first collection of short stories, beginning a thirty-one-year-long career as novelist, author of short stories, literary biographer (her two-volume biography of Lord Byron is her best-known work), translator of foreign novels (her 1907 translation of German writer Margarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost Girl was a minor sensation), journalist, and critic.
“The Separate Room” first appeared in her 1917 collection Come In and was later selected by Dorothy Sayers for her Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928). As Sayers wrote, “In the purely human sphere of horror, spiritual cruelty now holds its place alongside with bodily cruelty, and we can place Ethel Colburn Mayne’s ‘The Separate Room’ next door to H. G. Wells’ ‘The Cone’ as examples of man’s inhumanity to man.”
IT WAS CLEAR that Bergsma was pleased, and Marion Cameron held her breath in thrilled alarm.
“You’ve done it—why! you’ve done it rippingly,” said Bergsma, in his intermittent foreign accent, which now made a w and y precede the r in “rippingly.” He did not look up, but read on eagerly from the sheet that Marion had typed for him, this morning, before he came into the study. She had felt tired, on waking, after the late evening with its difficult job, and then the exciting sense of having done it not so badly; she had hardly slept a wink, but she was at Bergsma’s house much earlier than usual, so that all should be in best array when Bergsma came, and she herself in something that might figure as composure.
“So it was interesting,” Bergsma said, still reading. “Miss Grey was in good voice, and Woolley not too—woolly?” He grinned at his mild joke, but still did not look up.
“Miss Grey was splendid,” Marion said, in her clear solemn tones; “and Mr. Woolley was . . .”
She stopped. She wanted to acknowledge the joke, to say that Mr. Woolley had been something textile, but the word would not present itself, and Marion gave it up. “Mr. Woolley was quite good.”
“Loose?” asked Bergsma, with another grin.
“Loose—Mr. Woolley?”
He glanced at her. “The part—it’s quelque peu! I thought he might have ‘given’ a bit for once, pulled his voice out . . . ah, peste, no more of it!” He frowned.
Marion blushed. She knew she had been slow, and knew that Bergsma hated slowness.
He laid the sheet aside. “It’s all right. Send it off.” Now he looked up, and at her. “You enjoyed it—the job, I mean?”
“Indeed I did,” she answered with the full force of her earnestness.
He turned his thick blue eyes away.
“Like to do it again?”
“If you think I’m worthy . . .” Marion said, a shade more solemnly still. All at once a different mood seized Bergsma. “Oh, any intelligent person can turn out a notice like that. It wasn’t an important production . . . You’ve done it very nicely.” He took the morning paper; Marion knew she was dismissed to her own table in the corner.
This kind of thing had happened before—the disconcerting change of tone, when she had thought that he was really pleased beyond the ordinary limits of a secretary’s “giving-of-satisfaction.”
Marion did not resent, but she would have liked to understand it. Was it something in him, or in herself, that brought the quick reaction? For she knew, as she had known before, that this was not the mere return to business-manner when the moment for expansion is over. No; he was cross, and about something that was definite, to him.
She put up her article for post—the first words she had ever written for print, and they were to appear, in the foremost musical weekly, not as hers but his. She was Bergsma’s “ghost!” Marion, when first she had realized that this was what she was to be, had smiled to herself with the humour of which, for all her lack of wit, she was capable. Bergsma’s ghost—a ludicrously dissimilar one! He was short and squat, with a flat, smooth, white face, and thick, prominent, most heavy-lidded eyes that deadened into boredom frankly and alarmingly: “the eyes of genius,” somebody had said of them to Marion. Certainly, if that power of extinguishing his eyes were proof of genius, Bergsma had it; and if the other power of lighting so excitedly that they lit up his whole face were further proof, the eyes doubly marked him. That was what made it comic that she should be his ghost. Marion’s eyes were large, but that was the most they were. They always looked the same; their brightness was constant—not a luminous brightness, but a mere surface glitter, just enough to rescue them from dulness. They bored her; she despised them heartily. Other things about herself she did not so much mind. She was glad to have her strong white teeth, to be so very tall and not an atom weedy; she could not help thinking, too, that she looked more like “a lady” than most working-girls. (Marion liked to call herself a working-girl, but it annoyed her mother.) She carried herself gallantly, and had adopted the right manner of dress for an impoverished but undeniable gentlewoman, glad and proud to be the hard-working secretary to a leading critic of music—the musical drama, especially. She wore dark, well-cut coats and skirts, and broad, low stiff white collars, and sober hats that had not “too much surface,” as her friend, Mrs. Wynne, was fond of saying. Marion didn’t know what her friend meant, yet she always contrived to get the kind of hat. It was worn one-sidedly, “crammed” a little; that suited the frank, earnest face with its wide brows and mouth, for it toned down what might have been too much of earnestness. “You look almost piquante,” Mrs. Wynne had said.
“Not quite—I shouldn’t countenance that; it would spoil you.”
Marion laughed. “You wouldn’t countenance my countenance!”
But Mrs. Wynne did not laugh, and Marion flushed, as she often did when people didn’t laugh, as they often didn’t. It wasn’t a good joke; one saw that when one heard it . . . She thoug
ht of saying that; it sounded funny; but perhaps it wouldn’t be a good joke, either? At all events, it was a good joke that she should be Bergsma’s ghost. His public, this week, would read her devoutly, thinking she was he! And he had known that this was to be so, and yet had ordered her to send it off . . . She had not believed that she could do it, when Bergsma, harried by a crisis at the theatre where the opera in rehearsal was of his discovery—when he had said:
“Look here, Miss Cameron, they want a notice of that Russian operetta at the Yellow on Wednesday night: the International Amateurs, you know. Do you think you could do it? I’m so bothered! It’s interesting, though not important. I’d like to give them a word or two this week, but I can’t spare the time just now.”
Marion had trembled. “Would they take a notice—from me?”
“They’ll take what I send them,” Bergsma said. “How are they to know who wrote it? Do you feel inclined to try?”
His eyes were beginning to deaden . . . Marion hastened to say something that would show she was not thinking of the sudden evolution of her duties, or was thinking of it as an honour.
“If I only felt sure I could do it,” she faltered.
“You know my point of view by this time, and it’s only a short notice—anything long would be absurd . . . It’s very good of you, Miss Cameron; we’ll regard it as settled that you go and try your hand.” He had glanced at her again, a little suspiciously, she thought; so Marion said, “I feel honoured,” in her most earnest manner.
He had a shrug and a grunted word for it; she felt again that haunting sense of error . . . It made her the more ardent when the evening at the Yellow Theatre arrived. Her mind was stretched to fullest tension; the little opera was Russian of the subtlest, all accumulation and intention, expressed in a new, disconcerting scale, “that beats Schônberg,” said one of the appalling experts among whom she sat, “into an egg-flip.” Though she did know Bergsma’s point of view, it was not an easy task for Marion, writing her first article, to utter it, and so that it would be accepted as his work. For Bergsma had a very special manner. It seemed almost impious to ape it, but what else could he expect of her? and Marion, blushing while she wrote, did ape it: the quivering, suffused attack, the adjectives and adverbs, the conviction and conversion, as in a revivalist campaign—Bergsma’s patent, making each experience of the higher musical drama into a vicarious public change of heart; his heart, of course, had never been anywhere but in the right scale.
Marion, though elated, was alarmed to find that she could “do” it. Suppose he was angry? That opening—it was like . . . —But if Bergsma had noticed the mimicry, he had said nothing about it, the crossness did not refer to that, she knew. And now she had sent it off—it would appear! Even though he had said it wasn’t important, she couldn’t help regarding next Saturday as an epoch—she and her mother, who had sat up for her, that “Yellow” night, with cocoa and biscuits in their bedroom, and at one o’clock in the morning had heard the article, and thought it exactly like Mr. Bergsma’s own.
Soon Marion was writing all the minor notices, yet the weekly did not lose prestige. It was an astonishing development. All she had had to offer, in the beginning, was her wide acquaintance (it was hardly knowledge, in the deepest sense) with some new developments in foreign music.
She had travelled, and (most useful, too) was polyglot in a degree that rivalled even Bergsma, who never used his native language—probably the one he now knew least, for it was Dutch, and Holland has added little to the musical drama. Marion knew Dutch, but that seemed to be one of the things in her that did not please him.
“Ah, Dutch I now speak never,” he had said hurriedly, when she told him, and she had noticed with what an unusually foreign idiom he then spoke. Normally he used quite normal English.
However, this had not deterred him from engaging her, and she had not again mentioned her acquaintance with Dutch. His vexation was put away among the rest of the puzzlements, once she had thoroughly discussed it with her mother.
Marion discussed everything with her mother. Both were younger than their ages, but while Marion, at twenty-eight, showed merely a retarded maturity, Mrs. Cameron was of the type that never does grow up. She was not “well-preserved”; her hair was grey, her small pink face was frankly though quite prettily wrinkled and withered; she was, in short, the confessed old lady who is a little self-consciously a child. True to her type, she held herself to be a deep diplomatist; Marion believed this of her too—she had been nurtured in the faith. Thus they could, with zest and a tinge of vanity on Mrs. Cameron’s part, sit arguing for hours and hours about other people’s reasons for being or doing this or that. They would turn an incident round and round, and up and down; then Mrs. Cameron would bring forth an explanation which lately, now and then, had seemed to Marion a little superannuated. She would laugh her big, whole-hearted laugh. “Oh, mother, that’s your generation!”—and Mrs. Cameron, though offended, would laugh too, and declare that Marion was now leading such a free life that no doubt she must know better, but “that would have been the reason when I was a girl.”
In this way the repulse of Dutch had been explained. “He must have been dissatisfied with a former secretary who spoke it. That was it, you may be sure.”
“Or perhaps,” cried Marion the emancipate, “he was in love with a secretary who spoke it. That could account for his nervousness, too.”
“But, Marion, Mr. Bergsma is married.”
“Ça n’empêche pas,” Marion smiled.
Mrs. Cameron pondered the smile. Marion was growing; her mother must grow with her.
“Will he fall in love with you, I wonder?” she said, archly.
Marion rose up from her chair. They were in their private hotel’s drawing-room, quite alone together; everybody else preferred the lounge.
“Mother! If you ever say that again . . .”
Mrs. Cameron’s little face at once took on a rosy obstinacy.
“I don’t see why you fly at me, Marion. You said it first.”
“I! Say such a thing about myself and . . . and Mr. Bergsma! I’m a useful servant to him, that’s all.”
“So would the other one have been.”
Marion gasped. “The ‘other one!’” For a moment she could not say any more.
Her mother became injured. “I see nothing dreadful in calling another secretary ‘the other one.’ And please don’t speak of yourself as a servant, Marion; there’s no need to do that, if you are working for a salary.”
Marion sat down again. “I am a servant, and I’m not ashamed of it.”
“You are an accomplished lady, who makes use of her talent to help a busy man—not of course a gentleman, but. . .”
“Not a gentleman,” Marion gasped again.
“Do not repeat every word I say.” Mrs. Cameron was calm, but her little fallen-in, pink mouth was closely set. “Mr. Bergsma is very clever, but you must know as well as I do that he is not a gentleman, in the way your father was, and Neil is.”
“He’s foreign,” Marion panted. She had only just saved herself from echoing “Neil!” Neil liked Bergsma; he had said so when he met him before going out again to India.
“You are used to foreigners,” continued Mrs. Cameron. “You know that the Count and M. de la Vigne and Herr von Adelbert were not a bit like Mr. Bergsma. He may be very courteous to you; I have no doubt he is, but his manners to me . . .”
And all this because Bergsma had omitted to open a door, the other day, for Mrs. Cameron! He had been talking so eagerly that he hadn’t seen her get up. Marion did not speak; she could do nothing but echo if she spoke. “The Count—horrid old M. de la Vigne—manners . . .”
“It is time to go to bed,” said Mrs. Cameron, cheerfully, as if nothing had happened. That was her tact, the famous tact which had carried her—and Neil and Marion—through so many difficulties. Marion wondered why she hated it, now that it was being exercised upon herself. But mother had forgotten it when she spoke of
Mr. Bergsma as not being a gentleman. A cloud obscured the earnest face, as she followed Mrs. Cameron upstairs, and wished, for the first time in all her life, that they could afford to have separate bedrooms.
She said much less about her work from that time forward. It grew more and more exacting; there were few nights now on which she was not out at concerts, for Bergsma was devoting himself to musical drama: he found it more inspiring for his gifts of exposition. It was clear that Marion’s efforts pleased him; and yet his crossness grew more pronounced, more constant—not rudeness, but a curious coolness and aloofness, as if it were a watchfulness. And since now she did not talk about it with her mother, it seemed the more oppressive, even sinister. Her mother did not ask the questions Marion had expected, and would perhaps have welcomed; they might have eased the dual strain. The strain was dual because Mrs. Cameron, too, was often cool now about little things—the cocoa, for example. It was always there when Marion came in late, but there with an effect of duty, not of glad excited revel, as on that first night. Marion sometimes felt a strange depression. Life seemed altered; though outwardly more exhilarating, it was inwardly less happy. Her toil was not the cause—that grew more dear and glorious every day. No one could have told her articles from Bergsma’s now, and still he didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he liked it, to judge by the opportunities he gave her.
One day, Mrs. Wynne said something which infuriated Marion. “What’s your salary now? I suppose it’s a good deal bigger.”
There fell an almost tangible silence. It was as if something they had waited for had happened.
Marion looked at her friend. Mrs. Wynne was not looking at Marion, but her eyes had just met Mrs. Cameron’s, and Marion caught the gleam. She felt her own eyes flash.
“My salary remains the same.”
There was another little silence; then Mrs. Wynne said, “Well done, Bergsma!”
“What do you mean?” cried Marion, choking.
Mrs. Cameron intervened at that point; she said something about “on probation.”
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