Dance of the Years (34 page)

William was always criticising her dresses, urging her to keep her curls in place, and once he bought her a packet of rice powder and told her to dust her face with it. Debby had been scandalized by this, for Miss Malagrowther had made several pronouncements about “unfortunates” who “painted their faces,” and she had come to regard the act as something comparable with the tattooing of the word “whore” on a girl's forehead. She indicated this to William, and he told her not to be an almighty fool, and was so savagely contemptuous that poor Debby accepted the tattooing, as it were, and flowered herself gingerly whenever she thought he might be coming.

Debby was present when William read Lucius's letter; she leant over the high back of her father's chair and watched her brother as he sat on the other side of the fireplace, turning the sheets over casually. He folded it up when he had finished and put it back on the mantelpiece. Then he looked at James and smiled ruefully.

James was surprised and a little put out.

“A very cordial letter, don't you think?” he said.

William's smile changed hurriedly.

“Why, yes,” he said. “Very nice. The boy wants a publisher for his poems, I suppose.”

This was an interpretation which had never occurred to James, but at once it implanted a suspicion in his mind, and as he remembered Lucius more vividly he wondered if there might be something in it. Debby, thinking of Septimus, was not so easily misled.

“Oh, no, dear William,” she said. “Oh no. He doesn't want to come again because of that.”

William's cold eyes rested on her face enquiringly.

“And why does he, Debby?”

Debby blushed, and did not look up.

“Well?” said William.

Debby laughed with more than coquetry; her little black eyes danced and she looked both naughty and triumphant.

“I think my cousin is interested in—me, dear William,” she said.

William looked as if he had been confronted by an unexpected vulgarity.

“I hope you are not getting foolish ideas, living here so much alone, Deborah,” he said. “Julia must invite you over to Laurel Lodge more often. I must find you some new friends. By the way, there's a great friend of mine whom I want you to meet. He is a widower and I'd like you to make friends with him. His name is Walter Raven; he's a very wealthy man and very distinguished.”

Debby looked panic-stricken. “Oh no,” she said. “Please, dear William. Please. I'm such a muff. I'd much rather stay with dear Papa.”

James felt her hand clutching his shoulder, and he put his own over it protectingly.

“Of course she would,” he said, smiling at William.

William smiled back, and got up.

“Well,” he said, “I'm afraid I must go back now. My time is no longer my own. Don't worry about this young kinsman of yours, sir. I'll drop him a line and see him at the office. If he's a reasonable person we must take him up, mustn't we? How will that do?”

Debby's hand trembled, and James hesitated.

He was unnaturally tired in these days and he had no inclination to make any social effort. He felt William was so very capable and could attend to the matter so easily. It was so much simpler to leave everything to William.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, if you would. I'll write to Lucius myself I think, though. Don't you?”

William jotted down the address in his notebook.

“Just as you like, of course,” he said. “But don't overtire yourself. Putney's an extraordinary place to live, don't you think?”

“Is it?” said James, on the defensive.

William shrugged his shoulders. “It's probably very pretty,” he conceded, “and a lot of small property has gone up there in the last few years. I'll see the young man.”

When he had gone, Debby threw herself on her knees before her father's chair. She looked alarmingly like Shulie as she peered up at him.

“What is it, my girl?” said James, who was irritated. “What is it? What's the matter?”

“O Papa,” said Debby, as if to the Deity. “O Papa, please, please, don't let my cousin go to see dear William.”

“Good God! Why not?”

James was startled. The force of her emotion made him uncomfortable. He felt it was so very overdone and yet he understood it. He, too, was experiencing a strong premonition; he, too, felt that it would be unlucky to let William handle this unexpected overture. Yet his common sense told him not to be silly. In a voice like Dorothy's his common sense pointed out that William's was the only reliable brain the family possessed, while Lucius always had been a self-seeker.

James had listened to Dorothy all his life, and he listened to her now.

“Get up, girl, do,” he said to Debby. “Don't be a dunderhead. Why are you getting so fluttered about this silly fellow? He took your fancy, did he?”

Deborah's eyes grew wet, and when she spoke her desperate sincerity gave her words a literalness.

“He did not mind me being a muff, Papa. I think he liked me better for it.”

“He sounds an idiot,” said James.

“No, Papa. He was not. That's just what he was not. That was why he didn't mind.”

To his extreme annoyance, James followed her perfectly. He saw old Will Galantry in his memory's eye. There had been a man who could afford to love a fool.

“I shall write to Lucius myself,” he said.

“Oh yes, Papa! Do, Papa! But Papa…”

“What?” James was exasperated. “Speak up and get to your feet, for heaven's sake. What do you imagine you are; a Siddons?”

“No, Papa, but don't let my cousin go to see dear William.”

James fidgeted. Any more nonsense of this sort and his heart would begin to hurt him again, he felt certain.

“Enough of this,” he said imperiously. “My arrangements have been made. You are hysterical. Be off! Go and walk three times round the garden. (Put on a coat.) And then bring me a glass of brandy and water. Go along! Go along!”

“Yes, Papa.”

Obedience was one of the tricks the Shulie flesh had learned. Debby
got up and went towards the door. She was pale, and her little black eyes were tragic.

“I am a fool, Papa,” she said, and sounded as if she were pronouncing a doom. “The kind of friends dear William has might be very angry with me for that. My cousin did not mind. But oh, Papa, I'm so afraid he may be very rare.”

There was much of Jinny in her reasoning, and James laughed affectionately as he always had at Jinny.

“If there's anything as remarkable as that about him, William will appreciate it,” he said. “You are a poor idiot, Deb. God Almighty knows who's going to look after you when I'm gone.”

“Dear William will,” said Debby, and her voice broke as she ran out of the doorway.

Walter Raven sat in the kitchen of his fine house in Westbourne Terrace West, and drank his spirits nervously. He was in the grip of one of his periodical fits of disproportionate terror. Later on, doctors invented reasonable names for this kind of malady, but whatever it is called there was no explaining it away.

It was a fear which had its seat in his belly, and it rose up over him in physical, mental and spiritual nausea. It was not a cold fear, but hot, and it flowed all over him burning and wracking. There was sweat on his forehead and a singing in his ears. Yet inside it all he was quite sane, intelligent, sufficiently informed to know that he had done nothing for which anyone could hang, or even imprison him. He knew, too, that the things he was afraid of were not yet, at any rate, anywhere near reality.

When Walter Raven worried he suffered the agonies of the damned. They showed in his face and dried and shrivelled his body.

His sister was bigger than he was, and in some ways, in spite of her flashing beauty, very much more the man. At the moment she was cooking, working at the table under the shelf where the lamp stood, and the basement window was shuttered so that no inquisitive eye from the street could spy out the lady of the house doing her own work.

After a while she carried the pie she had been making over to the oven, and after it was safely in the dark, glanced at her brother.

“It may never happen, Walter,” she said.

He banged his glass down, but he was not drunk yet by any means. The alcohol had scarcely loosened the muscles round his mouth and with him that was always the first sign.

“It must happen sooner or later,” he said. “I did not foresee it, but it must have been obvious from the beginning. All these big firms are like that to-day. As soon as they see a small concern succeeding in a branch of their own line, they imitate the product and cut the price until the little people are squeezed out. That's what Croucher Brothers are going to do to Galantry and me in our cardboard mount business, unless we stop them. I can see it coming.”

Mildred Raven did not answer immediately, but she put her floury hands on her hips as she turned, and white marks appeared on her dark dress where her apron did not quite cover it.

Her brother began to rave at her. “Oh, for God's sake don't mess yourself up like that!” he burst out with unreasonable fury. “I can't stand sluttishness. You've got flour all over yourself.… It makes me vomit! I vomit, d'you understand?”

Mildred glanced at his hate-filled eyes and shrugged her shoulders. She wiped her hands on a baking cloth and dusted her gown but made no attempt to reproach him. Long ago she had discovered that reproaches took little effect on Walter. Her face was expressionless as she waited for his mood to change.

“I'm nervy!” he said.

She neither agreed nor disagreed, but after a pause enquired casually: “The little factory's doing very well now, though, isn't it?”

“Of course it is,” he agreed. “All these new photographers buy their mounts from us, but Croucher Brothers are big cardboard people, and they've started turning out the things now. As it is they are giving slightly better value and as time goes on they'll cut the price right down. We can't compete; you'd never understand.”

“I understand perfectly,” said Mildred. “What are you going to do?”

Walter drank up the contents of his glass.

“In eighteen months or so, we must either expand and fight them, or get out,” he said.

“Well, can you expand?”

“Oh, don't be a hopeless fool.” He was querulous again at once. “I haven't any money. You know that. Would you be grovelling about down here in the kitchen with only a couple of charwomen to look after us if I had any real money? Be reasonable!”

The woman eyed him uneasily. “You would take this enormous house,” she ventured at last. “All your money seems to go on rent. You will entertain. You will look big.”

He raved at her, and when he had relieved his feelings a little he began to explain for the hundredth time.

“I've told you I have to,” he insisted. “How do you think I get along at all? How do you think I turn any of these fine ideas of mine into money? How do you think I got William Galantry to come into business with me?”

“Has he got any money?” she said.

“Of course he has. He's made of money. He may not live in a particularly big way—he can afford not to—but he finances a silly religious paper, doesn't he? And he's as full of good works and other expensive nonsense as an egg is full of meat. He's got money.”

“I see,” she said meekly. “Then why do you have to worry? Can't he put up the money for you to branch out? After all, it's his business as much as yours.”

“No doubt he can, and no doubt he will!” Walter was shouting now with no idea of the noise he was making. “He's invested a lot of money already and he won't care to lose it. If he wants to save his own skin he'll have to put up the extra capital, and it'll mean something very considerable. But in that case, where do I come in?”

Mildred Raven saw the situation at last. “Let me see, it's your idea and your invention,” she said. “But you couldn't patent it, could you? I remember that. You said it was risky at the time. Walter, why don't you go to him now. Couldn't you make some arrangement with him at once? Now, when everything looks so sound and safe? Suppose you put your cards on the table.…

“No!”

“You don't want to, do you? You just don't want to look small.”

“Why should I?” he said defensively. “Besides if I did, he wouldn't believe me. He'd think I was trying to twist him. Be intelligent. Haven't we been carefully building up just the opposite impression for years? He's been here, seen the house, seen us live. He doesn't know that you've got a genius for keeping up appearances,”

Mildred was only partially mollified.

“He might not. But Walter, what are you going to do?”

He hesitated. In his own peculiarly feminine way he had been manœuvring her into this position.

“I could tie myself up with him,” he said slowly, feeling for each
word and keeping his eyes on her. “I could get myself so close to him that he would not be in a position to shelve me. He's very fond of me, you know; he has an enormous admiration for me. He thinks I can make money.”

Mildred knew her brother very well, so well that neither his frankness nor his vanity astonished her. Also, she recognized his methods.

“Are you thinking of that sister of his?” she asked abruptly.

“Well, he talks a lot about her, doesn't he?” he said. “I think he has it in mind, don't you?”

“You see more of him than I do.” Walter nodded, and continued to watch her carefully.

“I rather think he's thought of it. He's childishly transparent, you know. All these Holy Joe people are.”

The woman suddenly became very angry. “I don't think he's at all transparent. I think he's acting. I think he's more clever than you realize. Have you seen this girl?”