Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  XIX. THE COMPLICATION OF OLIVIA

  HE TOLD HER the story from the beginning. Olivia interrupted him with a smile of dry good-humour when he described the month’s cruise of the Sea Flower.

  “I hope you had good weather, Mark,” she said.

  “Gorgeous,” he replied with a chuckle of relief at the spirit in which she took the disclosure of the gay adventure of his youth. But it was all over and done with long before he had ever set eyes on her at Gissens, and there was nothing in so hoary an affair to cause her a second of inquietude.

  But her face changed as the story was continued; and when she understood the purpose on which he had set his heart, such a look of revolt and consternation came into her eyes and convulsed her features as Mark had never seen in her before.

  “Your daughter?” she said in a low incredulous voice. “You are going to bring her into our house between you and me? She’s to have her room in your offices in London, she’s to live with us here. She’s to share your confidence, to know all your secrets? To push me out?”

  “No,” Mark exclaimed. “She couldn’t do that!”

  “Couldn’t she? You’ll see, my dear. She has youth, ability you say, and I don’t doubt it. Good looks and good manners?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, indeed. You would have been quick to mention it, if she had been plain. And your daughter, besides. What you have longed for until even in your sleep you have prayed aloud for her coming. What arms have I against her?”

  Already it was a war, and the terms of war came naturally to Olivia’s lips.

  “You need no arms,” cried Mark in a quick protest but she took him up.

  “Oh, the fine words! She’ll dance about this house, she’ll work, and she’ll laugh, she’ll manage you and hector you prettily and you’ll love every minute of it. You are looking forward to every minute of it. And the fresh young face and the fresh young voice will just mean a perpetual shame for me.”

  The words dropped to a whisper; she made a little despairing gesture with her hands and sat silent. She spread about her an aura of desolation. She saw the peace and the pleasant security of the lovely house broken up, the house itself toppling about her ears. She was exaggerating, thought Mark, she was prophesying woes, the Cassandra of a tea-party; but none the less the woes, imaginary though he believed them to be, were real enough to her.

  He turned away and stood disconsolately staring out of the window. The view it commanded was different from that of his study. He overlooked an empty space of grassland and trees. There was no river bank, no gracious couple strolling absorbed in the momentous affairs of youth. He missed them and must continue to miss them.

  “Of course, Olivia, I shall take back my promise,” he said gently and then his voice shook. “And I had so built upon it — even within these few minutes since I have known! But it can’t be helped. I must find some other way of giving a start to that poor little girl.”

  The misery of his voice melted Olivia.

  “Poor little girl,” she repeated, and added with a poignant sadness: “But poor Mark too! And poor Olivia! And poor all of us! She must come, my dear. You’ld grieve too much if she didn’t. You’ld blame me — you couldn’t help blaming me.”

  “No.”

  “And you’ld be just in blaming me. God knows, it mightn’t be very long before you came to loathe the sight of me. It’s I who would be the interloper.”

  Mark began some sort of protest but she would not hear him. She gave him her hand with a smile and a sigh:

  “It’s settled, Mark. I’ll join you in the library. Just give me a minute or two;” and she could not forbear from a little stinging phrase to end the debate. “It needs a little study to take in a moment gracefully the second place.”

  “That’s all nonsense, Olivia,” said Mark, and he drifted uncomfortably out of the room, with a regret in his mind that women should build such enormous mountains out of such small molehills. They would talk in superlatives. First Mona must start the exaggeration with her talk about rattlesnakes and venom. Now Olivia must tread upon her heels with lamentations that she was dethroned.

  Certainly Olivia was right in this. A revolution had taken place in the small society of Upper Theign and its economy was quite upset. Olivia rose from her chair and planted herself in front of a long mirror, and shook her head dolefully over the image of herself which she saw reflected there. The charm of delicate colours was lost from her face. Perhaps Mark had never noticed the loss, so gradually they had faded. But he would now that she was to stand side by side with youth in all its fine bravery. He would realise it incredulously, so startling must be the contrast. Olivia was a handsome woman in the early forties who had not been troubled by jealousies and had watched the passing of the years with equanimity. But she took the blackest view of herself this morning, finding merit neither in her appearance nor her record.

  “A barren, middle-aged good-for-nothing,” she said, with many nods of the head, reprimanding her reflection in the mirror. And catching a trick of speech from her husband: “Your name’s Mrs. Fiddle-Faddle.”

  She tore herself away from her mirror. The glass door of her room stood open. She stepped out into the garden. A few minutes in the fresh air and she would subdue herself to meeting the interloper with a smiling welcome and a frank clasp of the hand. But she shrank from the meeting the more she rehearsed it, and the minutes heaped themselves up. She thought that she might be the better composed if she approached the library from the garden. She would thus have the opportunity of seeing the interloper a little while before the actual moment of speaking to her. She walked therefore round the angle of the house and stopped in front of the library windows. She had a clear view of the room and no one within the room noticed her at all.

  Yet there were three people within the room. Mark, Derek Crayle and Lois herself. Derek was a new complication in the tangle of the affair. Olivia had not thought of Derek in her confusion, but she made up for it now. She had views for Derek — a marriage suitable to his fine record and his high future. Derek was to her a younger brother. No, she wouldn’t allow any foxiness of Mark’s to make a sacrifice of Derek. Certainly not! She was quite convinced that it was no wounded feeling of her own which made her so determined that Derek should not be entrapped to make glories for Mark’s daughter. Certainly not.

  “I am thinking coolly and impartially of Derek’s happiness,” she assured herself; and she repeated her assertion several times upon the principle of Doctor Coué.

  She watched them. It increased her indignation — for she was indignant now — that she could not find fault with Lois. She was rather lovely with her big dark eyes, her clear oval of a face, and her long, slim legs. Also she was well dressed. At the bottom of her heart Olivia had wished for a distressing incurable flashiness. But from the girl’s plain brown court shoes to her little hat she was as trim and spruce as if she had just been unpacked from a band-box. Not a bunch of ribbons fluttered, nothing flopped. And she was making the men look silly. She certainly was. They were arranging her end of the big writing-table, both of them, laughing, setting her blotting-pad straight and her chair in position, courting her “gambolling,” said Olivia disdainfully.

  Inside the room, indeed, Mark was saying:

  “Yes, that’ll be your place, Miss Perriton, when you’re at work, straight opposite to me.”

  “Not when I use a typewriter,” said Lois.

  “Oh, I don’t mind a typewriter,” Mark explained airily. “It never distracts my attention.”

  “Indeed, it helps me to concentrate,” said Derek. “I shall sit here.”

  He drew up a chair at the side of the table midway between the two ends.

  “Nothing of the kind, Derek,” Mark exclaimed. “This isn’t your room. Besides, the table’s solid. There’s no place for your legs.”

  Olivia could not hear the ridiculous conversation, but she had no need to. It was all very evident through the glass of the windows. And
the girl stood aloof, pleasantly grave and well-mannered and attentive.

  “Making my men look silly,” said Lady Thewliss. “I’m not going to have it.”

  Her indignation was now unendurable. She advanced towards the window, no longer shy of the meeting, on the contrary eager for it. She pushed the long panel of the window which should have opened inwards. But on this occasion it did not open at all. There was a knob on the outside, but it was only a knob. The bolt worked within the room, and, as it has been recorded, Mark had shot it. Olivia found herself shut out.

  “This is what I said would happen,” she reflected. “It’s a sign! I am pushed out,” and she rapped upon the glass.

  But so engrossed were the two men in the new secretary, and so attentively was the new secretary watching them, weighing them, that the rapping was unheard. She knocked a second time, more loudly, with exasperation tingling in her finger-tips. This second time Mark Thewliss heard. He looked up and saw Olivia’s face beyond the window-pane. He barely suppressed a cry of dismay as he hurried forward and flung it open.

  “I bolted it by accident,” he said, excusing himself.

  “No doubt, my dear.”

  “A long time ago, Olivia. I wasn’t thinking. It was before I came to see you in your room.”

  “That’s all right, Mark,” Olivia answered. “It’s what you would call according to plan, isn’t it?” She stepped forward. “And this young lady is your new secretary, Mark?”

  “Yes. This is Miss Perriton. Lady Thewliss.” The shrewd young eyes rested quietly on the agitated face of her elder. Lois bowed respectfully.

  “You will make yourself at home here,” said Olivia. “It is quiet, but, of course, we are often in London, too, and no doubt your presence will bring about a change even here.”

  The words might have been cordially meant, but they were tipped with irony.

  “You’ll stay for lunch, Miss Perriton, won’t you?” Olivia added.

  “Thank you very much, but my mother is waiting for me. We kept our taxi, and have a train to catch.”

  “Miss Perriton will be taking up her duties in a week’s time,” said Mark, and as Lois, with another inclination of the head, moved to the door, Derek followed her. There was an awkward moment of silence when Mark and Olivia were left alone. Then she said:

  “She is very pretty. I congratulate you, Mark. I am sure that she will be a great help. Luncheon will be ready in five minutes.”

  She went into her own room, whilst Mark plumped himself down in a chair.

  “The scientists say that sometime or another the glacial period will return to England,” he reflected. “By George, they’re right, and it’s already begun.”

  He raised his head when Derek returned into the room and said:

  “Derek, I was warned that I was going to do a damned silly thing. But I wouldn’t listen. I went ‘wow-wow’ and did it. And after I had done it I knew it was a damned silly thing. Does that ever happen to you?”

  “It’s normal,” said Derek Crayle.

  The gong was sounded in the hall. Derek went out of the room to wash for luncheon. Mark Thewliss sat on, very disheartened. He heard Olivia saying again:

  “Poor Mark! Poor Olivia! Poor all of us!”

  He wondered uneasily.

  XX. MR. HOYLE TALKS A GOOD DEAL

  HALF-WAY THROUGH THE month of October of that year four men dined together in a private room of a great railway hotel in Manchester. Arthur Hoyle, who had kept the keys of the laboratory at Upper Theign whilst Thewliss was demonstrating his new formula, had convoked the other three to this city as to a convenient centre. They were all engaged in the manufacture of fabrics: Sir James Copeland, of Bradford, Wisberry of Somersetshire, and Benfield, who was striving desperately to maintain a small industry of pure silk on the border of Cheshire. During the service of dinner they talked flat racing and golf and musical comedy; and it was not until the coffee and the liqueurs were on the table and the door shut upon the waiter that the business of the evening was approached.

  Benfield, an old, thin, tall man with a bald head and an untidy beard, leaned forward, anxiously rolling between his lips, with long, tobacco-stained fingers, a small cigarette.

  “Well, Hoyle! Let us hear!”

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Hoyle answered.

  He got up from his chair and took from an attaché-case, which was laid upon a plush couch against the wall, a parcel wrapped in tissue-paper. He carried the parcel back to the table and, unfolding it, displayed the dyed strips of different materials which he had carried away with him from Upper Theign.

  “It has been a hot summer, as you know,” he said. “During the last four months these samples have all been exposed continually to the fiercest sunlight. Now look at them! The colours are as fresh as they were on the day when I took them away from Thewliss’ laboratory.”

  The strips were passed from hand to hand and examined with a meticulous scrutiny.

  “So, you see! Thewliss has brought it off.”

  The samples reached the mournful Benfield last of all, and as he laid them again upon the table Copeland, of Bradford, a small, round, comfortable man, looked up faintly hopeful and asked:

  “There was no trickery, I suppose?”

  “Yes. What about that?” exclaimed Wisberry. “I put it up to Thewliss myself that I shouldn’t be easily satisfied.”

  “Not a bit.”

  Hoyle was the only man of the party who was not sunk fathoms deep in gloom. By contrast with the others his voice sounded brisk and even cheerful.

  “Apart from the fact that Thewliss isn’t a trickster — we’ve all got to allow that his record puts that idea outside practical politics — I held the key of the laboratory all the time he was at work, and I had men besides doing sentinel and regularly relieved. The windows were all shuttered and barred from the outside. Thewliss got his daylight and air through a skylight in the roof. He was incommunicado, believe me I No, his universal formula is O.K.”

  Copeland lit a cigar and compressed the sentiments of the small company into a brief oath.

  “Damn the fellow.”

  Then Mr. Benfield ran his long fingers through his beard and combed out some of his tangles.

  “It means a new plant, I take it, even if Thewliss patents his formula and let us into his secret.”

  Hoyle shrugged his shoulders.

  “New processes mean new installations.”

  “Then I’m through,” said Mr. Benfield. “Down and out.”

  “Thewliss is thinking of the public,” Hoyle replied.

  “The public won’t think of me when I’m being grilled in the Bankruptcy Court,” said Benfield; and the man from Somersetshire beat impotently upon the table with his fist.

  “The public!” he cried. “My eye to the public! I wish I had gone into the wine trade.” And as his companions curiously wondered at this new twist in his thoughts, he continued: “By the Lord, I do. I sit in my house and drink the same sort of wine from the same sort of bottles, stopped with the same sort of corks, as my great-great-grandfather did in his square-skirted coat and his buckled shoes. There’s security for you in the wine trade. But with us it’s all improvements and developments until your brain reels. And nobody asks for ’em, mind you! Not a soul!”

  “The public?” asked Mr. Hoyle dryly.

  “The public doesn’t, because it doesn’t know a thing about ’em until it’s told. And it needn’t be told. But there’s always some damned restless, uncomfortable fellow like Thewliss who can’t leave things alone.”

  “You’re talking like my foreman Brent,” said Hoyle, with a grin. He appeared to take some pleasure in sharpening still more the anger of his friends against Thewliss.

  “Then your foreman Brent’s a damned sensible fellow,” Wisberry hotly retorted. “Just see how I stand. The Wisberrys have always been small, independent men, working their own factory, putting a little bit aside each year, taking a little bit of a part in their
local affairs, small, independent, valuable men and proud of their position. They were never taken into big partnerships, they never stood for Parliament or married into society or got hoisted up into the peerage. They were small, dignified people with hundreds of years of traditions behind them, and contented. Now they’ve got to go. Washed out, amalgamated, one of a string of mills working Thewliss’ universal formula. Sounds like a quack medicine, don’t it? It’s a rotten day for England when the small masters get sucked into the mangle and flattened out into employees.”

  Mr. Wisberry leaned back with an indignant snort, very red in the face, and puffed at his tobacco-pipe. Hoyle turned towards Copeland.

  “Beyond summing up very correctly our opinion of Thewliss, you haven’t contributed to the discussion,” he said, and Copeland agreed.

  “No, I haven’t. And I’ll tell you why. I don’t want to be bothered any more. I’m not a young man. I’ve worked devilish hard in my time, and I’ve now got a bit of money usefully invested. I’d like to go on as I’m going. A morning in the office, a round of golf three or four times a week, a good glass of port after my dinner and a long night’s rest on the top of it. That’s what I want, but if I can’t have it I’m not going to put up with anything else! See? I’ll be sorry to see a business I’ve built up go, but I’ve no children to worry about. I shall sell what I can sell — goodwill, mills, plant and the rest of it for what I can get and slip out.”

  Hoyle looked round the table with a grin.

  “Not much fight in any of your fellows,” he said unpleasantly. “Defeatists — that’s the new word, isn’t it?”

  “You only break your nails when you fight a steamroller,” said the melancholy man of the silkworms.

  “Better lie down, and take the knock, eh?” answered Hoyle. “Well, personally, I’m against lying down.”

  His strong face, with its blunt features, flushed to a dark red, and was very masterful.

  “It’s all very well for you,” Wisberry grumbled. “You can stand the racket.”