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

resuming his normal demeanour of an experienced and well-balanced man of the world. He felt relieved that she had gone, and yet he regretted her departure extremely, and hoped against fear that she would soon return.

"Yes!" said Mr. Haim, as it were triumphantly, like one who had whispered to himself during long years: "The hour will come." The hour had come.

Mr. Haim was surprising to George. The man seemed much older in his own parlour than at the office--his hair thinner and greyer, and his face more wrinkled. But the surprising part of him was that he had a home and was master in it, and possessed interests other than those of the firm of Lucas & Enwright. George had never until that day conceived the man apart from Russell Square. And here he was smoking a cigarette in an easy-chair and wearing red morocco slippers, and being called 'father' by a really stunning creature in a thin white blouse and a blue skirt.

The young girl, opening the front door, had said: "Do you want to see father?" And instantly the words were out George had realized that she might have said: "_Did_ you want to see father?" ... in the idiom of the shop-girl or clerk, and that if she had said 'did' he would have been gravely disappointed and hurt. But she had not. Of course she had not! Of course she was incapable of such a locution, and it was silly of him to have thought otherwise, even momentarily. She was an artist. Entirely different from the blonde and fluffy Mrs. John Orgreave--(and a good thing too, for Mrs. John with her eternal womanishness had got on his nerves)--Miss Haim was without doubt just as much a lady, and probably a jolly sight more cultured, in the true sense. Yet Miss Haim had not in the least revealed herself to him in the hall as she indicated the depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her--rampant enough even before he entered the house!

The house--what he saw of it--suited her and set her off, and, as she was different from Mrs. John, so was the house different from the polished, conventional abode of Mrs. John at Bedford Park. To George's taste it knocked Bedford Park to smithereens. In the parlour, for instance, an oak chest, an oak settee, an oak gate-table, one tapestried easy chair, several rush-bottomed chairs, a very small brass fender, a self-coloured wall-paper of warm green, two or three old engravings in maple-wood or tarnished gilt frames, several small portraits in maple-wood frames, brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece and no clock, self-coloured brown curtains across the windows (two windows opposite each other at either end of the long room), sundry rugs on the dark-stained floor, and so on! Not too much furniture, and not too much symmetry either. An agreeable and original higgledy-piggledyness! The room was lighted by a fairly large oil-lamp, with a paper shade hand-painted in a design of cupids--delightful personal design, rough, sketchy, adorable! She had certainly done it.

George sat on the oak settle, fronting the old man in the easy chair. It was a hard, smooth oak settle; it had no upholstering nor cushion; but George liked it.

"May I smoke?" asked George.

"Please do. Please do," said Mr. Haim, who was smoking a cigarette himself, with courteous hospitality. However, it was a match and not a cigarette that he offered to George, who opened his own dandiacal case.

"I stayed rather late at the office to-night," said George, as he blew out those great clouds with which young men demonstrate to the world that the cigarette is actually lighted. And as Mr. Haim, who was accustomed to the boastings of articled pupils, made no comment, George proceeded, lolling on the settle and showing his socks: "You know, I like Chelsea. I've always had a fancy for it." He was just about to continue cosmopolitanly: "It's the only part of London that's like Paris. The people in the King's Road," etc., when fortunately he remembered that Mr. Haim must have overheard these remarks of Mr. Enwright, and ceased, rather awkwardly. Whereupon Mr. Haim suggested that he should see the house, and George said eagerly that he should like to see the house.

"We've got one bedroom more than we want," Mr. Haim remarked as he led George to the hall.

"Oh yes!" said George politely.

The hall had a small bracket-lamp, which Mr. Haim unhooked, and then he opened a door opposite to the door of the room which they had quitted.

"Now this is a bedroom," said he, holding the lamp high.

George was startled. A ground-floor bedroom would have been unthinkable at Bedford Park. Still, in a flat.... Moreover, the idea had piquancy. The bedroom was sparsely furnished. Instead of a wardrobe it had a corner curtained off with cretonne.

"A good-sized room," said Mr. Haim.

"Very," said George. "Two windows, too, like the drawing-room." Then they went upstairs to the first floor, and saw two more bedrooms, each with two windows. One of them was Miss Haim's; there was a hat hung on the looking-glass, and a table with a few books on it. They did not go to the second floor. The staircase to the second floor was boarded up at the point where it turned.

"That's all there is," said Mr. Haim on the landing. "The studio people have the second floor, but they don't use my front door." He spoke the last words rather defiantly.

"I see," said George untruthfully, for he was mystified. But the mystery did not trouble him.

There was no bathroom, and this did not trouble him either, though at Bedford Park he could never have seriously considered a house without a bathroom.

"You could have your choice of ground floor or first floor," said Mr. Haim confidentially, still on the landing. He moved the lamp about, and the shadows moved accordingly on the stairs.

"Oh, I don't mind in the least," George answered. "Whichever would suit you best."

"We could give you breakfast, and use of sitting-room," Mr. Haim proceeded in a low tone. "But no other meals."

"That would be all right," said George cheerfully. "I often dine in town. Like that I can get in a bit of extra work at the office, you see."

"Except on Sundays," Mr. Haim corrected himself. "You'd want your meals on Sundays, of course. But I expect you're out a good deal, what with one thing or another."

"Oh, I am!" George concurred.

The place was perfect, and he was determined to establish himself in it. Nothing could baulk him. A hitch would have desolated him completely.

"I may as well show you the basement while I'm about it," said Mr. Haim.

"Do!" said George ardently.

They descended. The host was very dignified, as invariably at the office, and his accent never lapsed from the absolute correctness of an educated Londoner. His deportment gave distinction and safety even to the precipitous and mean basement stairs, which were of stone worn as by the knees of pilgrims in a crypt. All kinds of irregular pipes ran about along the ceiling of the basement; some were covered by ancient layers of wall-paper and some were not; some were painted yellow, and some were painted grey, and some were not painted. Mr. Haim exhibited first the kitchen. George saw a morsel of red amber behind black bars, a white deal table and a black cat crouched on a corner of the table, a chair, and a tea-cloth drying over the back thereof. He liked the scene; it reminded him of the Five Towns, and showed reassuringly--if he needed reassurance, which he did not--that all houses are the same at heart. Then Mr. Haim, flashing a lamp-ray on the coal-hole and the area door as he turned, crossed the stone passage into the other basement room.

"This is our second sitting-room," said Mr. Haim, entering.

There she was at work, rapt, exactly as George had seen her from the outside. But now he saw the right side of her face instead of the left. It was wonderful to him that within the space of a few minutes he should have developed from an absolute stranger to her into an acquaintance of the house, walking about in it, peering into its recesses, disturbing its secrets, which were hers. But she remained as mysterious, as withdrawn and intangible, as ever. And then she shifted round suddenly on the chair, and her absorbed, intent face softened into a most beautiful, simple smile--a smile of welcome. An astonishing and celestial change!... She was not one of those queer girls, as perhaps she might have been. She was a girl of natural impulses. He smiled back, uplifted.

"My daughter designs bookbindings," said Mr. Haim. "Happens to be very busy to-night on something urgent."

He advanced towards her, George following.

"Awfully good!" George murmured enthusiastically, and quite sincerely, though he was not at all in a condition to judge the design. Strange, that he should come to the basement of an ordinary stock-size house in Alexandra Grove to see bookbindings in the making! This was a design for a boy's book. He had possessed many such books. But it had never occurred to him that the gay bindings of them were each the result of individual human thought and labour. He pulled at his cigarette.

There was a sound of pushing and rattling outside.

"What's that?" exclaimed Mr. Haim.

"It's the area door. I bolted it. I dare say it's Mrs. Lobley," said the girl indifferently.

Mr. Haim moved sharply.

"Why did you bolt it, Marguerite? No, I'll go myself."

He picked up the lamp, which he had put down, and shuffled quickly out in his red morocco slippers, closing the door.

Marguerite? Yes, it suited her; and it was among the most romantic of names. It completed the picture. She now seemed to be listening and waiting, her attention on the unseen area door. He felt shy and yet very happy alone with her. Voices were distinctly heard. Who was Mrs. Lobley? Was Mr. Haim a little annoyed with his daughter, and was Marguerite exquisitely defiant? Time hung. The situation was slightly awkward, he thought. And it was obscure, alluring.... He stood there, below the level of the street, shut in with those beings unknown, provocative, and full of half-divined implications. And all Chelsea was around him and all London around Chelsea.

"Father won't be a moment," said the girl. "It's only the charwoman."

"Oh! That's quite all right," he answered effusively, and turning to the design: "The outlining of that lettering fairly beats me, you know."

"Not really!... I get that from father, of course."

Mr. Haim was famous in the office as a letterer.

She sat idly glancing at her own design, her plump, small hands lying in the blue lap. George compared her, unspeakably to her advantage, with the kind, coarse young woman at the chop-house, whom he had asked to telephone to the Orgreaves for him, and for whom he had been conscious of a faint penchant.

"I can't colour it by gaslight," said Marguerite Haim. "I shall have to do that in the morning."

He imagined her at work again early in the morning. Within a week or so he might be