Читать книгу Kitty - Warwick Deeping - Страница 40

Table of Contents

Mr Furnival smiled.

“O, very well, Carter; I’ll see her at two-thirty.”

For a man who had spent a great part of his life trying to save people from making fools of themselves, or in preventing them from quarrelling, he had retained a surprisingly sanguine outlook upon men and things. He knew that it was not the law that many of his clients needed, but logic with a flavour of human kindness. People were so quick at getting up on their hind-legs, and a great part of Mr Furnival’s time had gone in getting them down again—with dignity.

He sat down at his untidy desk. He filled a pipe; he dared to and did smoke in his office. He had to smoke, otherwise the business of life would overwhelm him; he made himself smoke and go slow. He was one of those city fathers of 1918, with two junior partners and three clerks away at the war, and his rooms full of eager but haphazard women, and his wife still weeping her eyes out for a boy who had been killed three months ago. Like Mr Britling—John Furnival was seeing it through. His hair was a little greyer, his pink face a shade more blue, his finger-nails not quite so meticulously cared for. There were times when he had tobacco ash on his waistcoat.

“O, damn the woman—!”

Why did she want to bother him when he was up to the eyes in worries, his own and other people’s? He was very familiar with Mrs St. George and her affairs. A woman who was always in trouble about nothing, she came and demanded advice and then went home and did the very thing you had advised her not to do, generally because it was the thing that she wanted to do.

“Another squabble with that fellow down at Melfont.”

Yes, he supposed it was that, and he left it at that. He grabbed some papers, and rang a bell, and began dictating letters to a girl clerk, puffing at his pipe, and thinking—behind it all—that he did wish poor Mary could get to sleep without tears. Yet there were occasions when his own blue eyes would look a little blurred and heavy. Poor lad! Blown to bits at nineteen! Well, anyway, the boy could not have known much about it. And yet the fact that Dick had not suffered seemed to be no consolation to his mother.

But—how—could it be? What a lot of kind and self-humbugging rot one talked!

At twenty minutes past two he put out his pipe, and asked the girl clerk to open the window.

“For my sins—I must smoke, Miss Jones.”

“Why shouldn’t you, sir?” said she.

He knew that Clara St. George would be punctual. She was. Personally he preferred the sort of woman who was not so heartlessly true to time. She came into his private room like a still, white squall that would not allow itself to break. As usual, she glanced a little despairingly at his untidy desk. Could a man with so poor a love of order be considered wholly efficient? He guessed that she could smell stale tobacco smoke. She was not a woman to be propitiated by an open window.

He had risen from his chair. His freshness had a slightly shrunken look, like that of a ruddy apple that has been stored in a dry place, but Mrs St. George did not observe it.

She sat down.

“I shall keep you an hour.”

“My dear lady—!”

“An hour.”

He glanced half-whimsically towards the door.

“No disturbance until I ring, Carter.”

“Very well, sir.”

He sank slowly into his chair, turning up his coat-tails.

“Well,—nothing very serious—I hope?”

She flung the news—so to speak—on his desk.

“Alex has married a shopgirl.”

By Jove, so it was as serious as that! Knowing Clara St. George as he did he realized how mercilessly serious it must be to her. He could find her both freezing and raging on the other side of his desk. She was dignity—the supreme maternal ego—outraged.

He said—“My dear lady, these things will happen. Tell me about it.”

She told him. She was both cynical and ruthless. She painted it all in black and white, with a touch of red splashed in when she spoke of Mrs Sarah. Impossible people, adventuresses—and worse. A tobacco shop that was probably a war-brothel. Full of red cushions and young animals in khaki. And two flashy girls, and an old fat, smirking procuress of a mother. Alex had been trapped. There had been concealment, collusion. He had not told her, no—not till he had reached France. He had been ashamed to tell her. Obviously. And now he was trying to pretend—.

Mr Furnival listened, and watched her, and jotted down a few notes, and examined his finger-nails.

“Trying to make the best of it—is he.”

He had to break in somewhere, make head against the north-east wind of her declaiming.

“The best of it—!”

She drew herself up.

“Well—one has to sometimes.”

He was finding her a little more exasperating than usual, and life was not quite so mellow as it had been before the war. He was overworked and inclined to be irritable. He found himself thinking of her as a woman who had a live son, while poor Mary—his wife—. But this would not do. He had a duty even to the most exacting of clients.

“Something must be done—.”

“But if the marriage is legal—.”

“I don’t question its legality. Those women are sufficiently clever.”

Not for a moment did Mr Furnival believe that these Greenwood people were all that she declared them to be, for when a woman is in a rage—especially a woman like Mrs St. George, you halve her statements and still discover exaggeration.

“I want this marriage annulled.”

“But, my dear lady, it can’t be done. Besides, there are other points of view,—Alex’s.”

“His present point of view. O, no doubt. But, you see, one can alter that.”

She smiled like a frosty morning, and Mr Furnival felt that he ought to turn up his collar.

“Tell me exactly what you mean.”

“I can cut off his allowance.”

“O, I shouldn’t do that,” and there was feeling in his voice.—“Besides—would it be fair—?”

“I can alter his point of view—with regard to this girl. At present—he thinks—her—. Isn’t it obvious—that when he realizes that she is shop—soiled—.”

Mr Furnival sat up in his chair.

“You are going to suggest that to him?”

“Certainly.”

“But—my dear lady,—consider—.”

“I shall do what is right. I have seen these people. I shall have the house watched.”

She had drawn off her gloves and laid them neatly folded in her lap, and at this point it occurred to Mr Furnival to ask her why—exactly—she had come to him, and what she expected him to do.

She replied at once—“I want it arranged.

“By me?”

She stared.

“Don’t lawyers do such things,—or arrange for them to be done?”

He answered her with some sharpness.

“No doubt. But I won’t. I will go and see these people if you like—with a perfectly open mind.”

She gave him a glare of scorn. Of what use was a lawyer with an open mind? He did not seem to appreciate her point of view, the mother’s point of view. She laid great emphasis upon the mother’s point of view.

“As a man of the world—do you not realize—how impossible this marriage is—?”

“It may seem impossible, but it appears to be a fact.”

She talked on and over him. She drew a picture of Alex two years hence, a disillusioned Alex, bored with this little dumpty creature, an Alex who would, in fact, be Alexander St. George, Esq., of Melfont St. George in the county of Dorset. The St. Georges were “county”. How could you expect a tobacconist’s daughter to share such a position, and to rise to it?

Patiently, he put before her a view of the situation as it was or appeared to be, and not as she wished it to be. Why not try and make the best of it?—for by making the best of it you might avoid the worst. Though he was shrewd enough to realize—before the hour had passed—that Clara St. George did not want to make the best of it. She wanted her son.

He descended to platitudes, conscious of all the business that he had to get through before dinner-time. “Think it over. Don’t be in a hurry. One regrets haste. If you like—I will go and see these people.” No, she did not think that was necessary. She had not much use for a man with an open mind. Moreover, he had become aware of a gradual silence, and a reflecting look upon her face, as though she had emptied herself of words. He knew quite well that he had not convinced her, and that she would go away and do the thing she intended to do.

He pushed back his chair, and she rose.

“This has been a very great shock to me.”

“Of course.”

In the lift she repeated to herself those last words of his. “Of course!” She stepped out of the lift and walked quickly away, down the steps, and out into a crowded street. Her face and eyes had an icy sheen. “Of course.” Why had she not seen it before in that way? She had been too-much upset. It was not the marriage that she must attack, but her son’s faith in the girl he had married. The marriage could remain provided that Alex was brought to feel that he could not and would not live with his wife.

“Of course!”

He would be both married and not married. He would be hers. No other woman could interfere. All that she had to do was to destroy his affection for and his faith in Kitty.