The Roll-Call - Arnold Bennett (top ten books to read TXT) 📗

beauty of the custom-house at last humbled George, and for an instant made him think that he could never do anything worth doing. His pride leapt up, unconquerable. The ocean-going steamers, as they multiplied on the river, roused in him wild and painful longings to rush to the ends of the earth and gorge himself on the immense feast which the great romantic earth had to offer.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed passionately. "I'd give something to go to Japan."

"Would you?" Marguerite answered with mildness. She had not the least notion of what he was feeling. Her voice responded to him, but her imagination did not respond. True, as he had always known, she had no ambition! The critical quality of his mood developed. The imperious impulse came to take her to task.

"What's the latest about your father?" he asked, with a touch of impatient, aggrieved disdain. Both were aware that the words had opened a crucial interview between them. She moved nervously on the seat. The benches that ran along the deck-rails met in an acute angle at the stem of the steamer, so that the pair sat opposite each other with their knees almost touching. He went on: "I hear he hasn't gone back to the office yet."

"No," said Marguerite. "But he'll start again on Monday, I think."

"But is he fit to go back? I thought he looked awful."

She flushed slightly--at the indirect reference to the episode in the basement on the night of the death.

"It will do him good to go back," said Marguerite. "I'm sure he misses the office dreadfully."

George gazed at her person. Under the thin glove he suddenly detected the form of her ring. She was wearing it again, then. (He could not remember whether she had worn it at their last meeting, in Agg's studio. The very curious fact was that at their last meeting he had forgotten to look for the ring.) Not only was she wearing the ring, but she carried a stylish little handbag which he had given her. When he bought that bag, in the Burlington Arcade, it had been a bag like any other bag. But now it had become part of her, individualized by her personality, a mysterious and provocative bag. Everything she wore, down to her boots and even her bootlaces so neatly threaded and knotted, was mysterious and provocative. He examined her face. It was marvellously beautiful; it was ordinary; it was marvellously beautiful. He knew her to the depths; he did not know her at all; she was a chance acquaintance; she was a complete stranger.

"How are you getting on with him? You know you really ought to tell me."

"Oh, George!" she said, earnestly vivacious. "You're wrong in thinking he's not nice to me. He is He's quite forgiven me."

"Forgiven you!" George took her up. "I should like to know what he had to forgive."

"Well," she murmured timorously. "You understand what I mean."

He drummed his elegant feet on the striated deck. Out of the corner of his left eye he saw the mediaeval shape of the Tower rapidly disappearing. In front were the variegated funnels and masts of fleets gathered together in St. Katherine's Dock and London Dock. The steamer gained speed as she headed from Cherry Gardens Pier towards the middle of the river. She was a frail trifle compared with the big boats that lined the wharves; but in herself she had size and irresistible force, travelling quite smoothly over the short, riotous, sparkling waves which her cut-water divided and spurned away on either side. Only a tremor faintly vibrated throughout her being.

"Has he forgiven you for being engaged?" George demanded, with rough sarcasm.

She showed no resentment of his tone, but replied gently:

"I did try to mention it once, but it was no use--he wasn't in a condition. He made me quite afraid--not for me of course, but for him."

"Well, I give it up!" said George. "I simply give it up! It's past me. How soon's he going to _be_ in condition? He can't keep us walking about the streets for ever."

"No, of course not!" She smiled to placate him.

There was a pause, and then George, his eyes fixed on her hand, remarked:

"I see you've got your ring on."

She too looked at her hand.

"My ring? Naturally. What do you mean?"

He proceeded cruelly:

"I suppose you don't wear it in the house, so that the sight of it shan't annoy him."

She flushed once more.

"Oh, George, dear!" Her glance asked for mercy, for magnanimity.

"Do you wear it when you're in the house, or don't you?"

Her eyes fell.

"I daren't excite him. Truly, I daren't. It wouldn't do. It wouldn't be right."

She was admitting George's haphazard charge against her. He was astounded. But he merely flung back his head and raised his eyebrows. He thought:

"And yet she sticks to it he's nice to her! My God!"

He said nothing aloud. The Royal Hospital, Greenwich, showed itself in the distance like a domed island rising fabulously out of the blue-green water. Even far off, before he could decipher the main contours of the gigantic quadruple pile, the vision excited him. His mind, darkened by the most dreadful apprehensions concerning Marguerite, dwelt on it darkly, sardonically, and yet with pleasure. And he proudly compared his own disillusions with those of his greatest forerunners. His studies, and the example of Mr. Enwright, had inspired him with an extremely enthusiastic worship of Inigo Jones, whom he classed, not without reason, among the great creative artists of Europe. He snorted when he heard the Royal Hospital referred to as the largest and finest charitable institution in the world. For him it was the supreme English architectural work. He snorted at the thought of that pompous and absurd monarch James I ordering Inigo Jones to design him a palace surpassing all palaces and choosing a sublime site therefor, and then doing nothing. He snorted at the thought of that deluded monarch Charles I ordering Inigo Jones to design him a palace surpassing all palaces, and receiving from Inigo Jones the plans of a structure which would have equalled in beauty and eclipsed in grandeur any European structure of the Christian era--even Chambord, even the Escurial, even Versailles--and then accomplishing nothing beyond a tiny fragment of the sublime dream. He snorted at the thought that Inigo Jones had died at the age of nearly eighty ere the foundations of the Greenwich palace had begun to be dug, and without having seen more than the fragment of his unique Whitehall--after a youth spent in arranging masques for a stupid court, and an old age spent in disappointment. But then no English monarch had ever begun and finished a palace. George wished, rather venturesomely, that he had lived under Francis I!...

The largest and finest charitable institution! The ineffable William and Mary had merely turned it into a charitable institution because they did not know what else to do with it. The mighty halls which ought to have resounded to the laughter of the mistresses of Charles II were diverted to the inevitable squalor of almsgiving. The mutilated victims of the egotism and the fatuity of kings were imprisoned there together under the rules and regulations of charity, the cruellest of all rules and regulations. And all was done meanly--that is, all that interested George. Christopher Wren, who was building St. Paul's and fighting libels and slanders at a salary of two hundred a year, came down to Greenwich and for years worked immortally for nothing amid material difficulties that never ceased to multiply; and he too was beaten by the huge monster. Then Vanbrugh arrived and blithely finished in corrupt brick and flaming manifestations of decadence that which the pure and monumental genius of Inigo Jones had first conceived. The north frontages were marvels of beauty; the final erections to the south amounted to an outrage upon Jones and Wren. Still, the affair was the largest and finest charitable institution on earth! What a country, thought George, hugging injustice! So it had treated Jones and Wren and many another. So it had treated Enwright. And so it would treat, was already treating, him, George. He did not care. As the steamer approached Greenwich, and the details of the aborted palace grew clearer, and he could distinguish between the genius of Jones and the genius of Wren, he felt grimly and victoriously sure that both Jones and Wren had had the best of the struggle against indifference and philistinism--as he too would have the best of the struggle, though he should die obscure and in penury. He was miserable and resentful, and yet he was triumphant. The steamer stopped at the town-pier.

"Are we there?" said Marguerite. "Already?"

"Yes," said he. "And I think we may as well go back by the same steamer."

She concurred. However, an official insisted on them disembarking, even if they meant to re-embark at once. They, went ashore. The facade of the palace-hospital stretched majestically to the left of them, in sharp perspective, a sensational spectacle.

"It's very large," Marguerite commented. Her voice was nervous.

"Yes, it's rather more than large," he said dryly.

He would not share his thoughts with her. He knew that she had some inklings of taste, but in that moment he preferred to pretend that her artistic perception was on a level with that of William and Mary. They boarded the steamer again, and took their old places; and the menacing problem of their predicament was still between them.

"We can have some tea downstairs if you like," he said, after the steamer had turned round and started upstream.

She answered in tones imperfectly controlled:

"No, thank you. I feel as if I couldn't swallow anything." And she looked up at him very quickly; with the embryo of a smile, and then looked down again very quickly, because she could not bring the smile to maturity.

George thought:

"Am I going to have a scene with her--on the steamer?" It would not matter much if a scene did occur. There was nobody else on deck forward of the bridge. They were alone--they were more solitary than they might have been in the studio, or in any room at No. 8. The steamer was now nearly heading the wind, but she travelled more smoothly, for she had the last of the flood-tide under her.

George said kindly and persuasively:

"Upon my soul, I don't know what the old gentleman's got against me."

She eagerly accepted his advance, which seemed to give her courage.

"But there's nothing to know, dear. We both know that. There's nothing at all. And yet of course I can understand it. So can you. In fact it was you who first explained it to me. If you'd left No. 8 when I did and he'd heard of our engagement afterwards, he wouldn't have thought anything of it. But it was you staying on in the house that did it, and him not knowing of the engagement. He thought you used to come to see me at nights at the studio, me and Agg, and make fun of everything at No. 8--especially of his wife. He's evidently got some such idea in his head, and there's no getting it out again."

"But it's childish."

"I know. However, we've said all this before, haven't we?"

"But the idea's _got_ to be got out of his head again!" said George vigorously--more dictatorially and less persuasively than before.

Marguerite offered no remark.

"And after