"I did," said I.
She lit a cigarette and seated herself on the fender-stool. She has an unconscious knack of getting into easy, loose-limbed attitudes. I said admiringly:
"Do you know you're a remarkably well-favoured young person?"
And as soon as I said it, I realised what a tremendous factor Betty was in my circumscribed life. What could I do without her sweet intimacy?
If Willie Connor's Territorial regiment, like so many others, had been ordered out to India, and she had gone with him, how blank would be the days and weeks and months! I thanked God for granting me her graciousness.
She smiled and blew me a kiss. "That's very gratifying to know," she said. "But it has nothing to do with Phyllis."
"Well, what about Phyllis?"
"I'll tell you," she replied.
And she told me. Her story was not of world-shaking moment, but it interested me. I have since learned its substantial correctness and am able to add some supplementary details.
You see, things were like this.... In order to start I must go back some years.... I have always had a warm corner in my heart for little Phyllis Gedge, ever since she was a blue-eyed child. My wife had a great deal to do with it. She was a woman of dauntless courage and clear vision into the heart of things. I find many a reflection of her in Betty. Perhaps that is why I love Betty so dearly.
Some strange, sweet fool feminine of gentle birth and deplorable upbringing fell in love with a vehemently socialistic young artisan by the name of Gedge and married him. Her casual but proud-minded family wiped her off the proud family slate. She brought Phyllis into the world and five years afterwards found herself be-Gedged out of existence. They were struggling people in those days, and before her death my wife used to employ her, when she could, for household sewing and whatnot. And tiny Phyllis, in a childless home, became a petted darling. When my great loneliness came upon me, it was a solace to have the little dainty prattling thing to spend an occasional hour in my company. Gedge, an excellent workman, set up as a contractor. He took my modest home under his charge. A leaky tap, a broken pane, a new set of bookshelves, a faulty drainpipe--all were matters for Gedge. I abhorred his politics but I admired his work, and I continued, with Mrs. Marigold's motherly aid, to make much of Phyllis.
Gedge, for queer motives of his own, sent her to as good a school as he could afford, as a matter of fact an excellent school, one where she met girls of a superior social class and learned educated speech and graceful manners. Her holidays, poor child, were somewhat dreary, for her father, an anti-social creature, had scarce a friend in the town.
Save for here and there an invitation to tea from Betty or myself, she did not cross the threshold of a house in Wellingsford. But to my house, all through her schooldays and afterwards, Phyllis came, and on such occasions Mrs. Marigold prepared teas of the organic lusciousness dear to the heart of a healthy girl.
Now, here comes the point of all this palaver. Young Master Randall used also to come to my house. Now and then by chance they met there.
They were good boy and girl friends.
I want to make it absolutely clear that her acquaintance with Randall was not any vulgar picking-up-in-the-street affair.
When she left school, her father made her his book-keeper, secretary, confidential clerk. Anybody turning into the office to summon Gedge to repair a roof or a burst boiler had a preliminary interview with Phyllis. Young Randall, taking over the business of the upkeep of his mother's house, gradually acquired the habit of such preliminary interviews. The whole imbroglio was very simple, very natural. They had first met at my own rich cake and jam-puff bespread tea-table. When Randall went into the office to speak, presumably, about a defective draught in the kitchen range, and really about things quite different, the ethics of the matter depended entirely on Randall's point of view.
Their meetings had been contrived by no unmaidenly subterfuge on the part of Phyllis. She knew him to be above her in social station. She kept him off as long as she could. But que voulez-vous? Randall was a very good-looking, brilliant, and fascinating fellow; Phyllis was a dear little human girl. And it is the human way of such girls to fall in love with such fascinating, brilliant fellows. I not only hold a brief for Phyllis, but I am the judge, too, and having heard all the evidence, I deliver a verdict overwhelmingly in her favour. Given the circumstances as I have stated them, she was bound to fall in love with Randall, and in doing so committed not the little tiniest speck of a peccadillo.
My first intimation of tender relations between them came from my sight of them in February in Wellings Park. Since then, of course, I have much which I will tell you as best I may.
So now for Betty's story, confirmed and supplemented by what I have learned later. But before plunging into the matter, I must say that when Betty had ended I took up my little parable and told her of all that Randall had told me concerning his repudiation of Gedge. And Betty listened with a curiously stony face and said nothing.
When Betty puts on that face of granite I am quite unhappy. That is why I have always hated the statues of Egypt. There is something beneath their cold faces that you can't get at.
CHAPTER XI
Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of his business and her criminal folly in abandoning it so as to help mend the shattered bodies of fools and knaves who, by joining the forces of militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the International Solidarity of Labour. His first ground for complaint was scarcely tenable; with his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled into a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being. Still, from Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance; but that she could throw in her lot openly with the powers of darkness was nothing less than an outrage.
I suppose, in a kind of crabbed way, the crabbed fellow was fond of Phyllis. She was pretty. She had dainty tricks of dress. She flitted, an agreeable vision, about his house. He liked to hear her play the piano, not because he had any ear for music, but because it tickled his vanity to reflect that he, the agricultural labourer's son and apprentice to a village carpenter, was the possessor both of a Broadway Grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned to play on it. Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political intelligence. Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her sentimental fool of a mother, had none, Oh! she had a vast fund of ordinary commonsense. Of that I can assure you. A bit of hard brain fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental folly in the maternal heritage. And she came back from school a very ladylike little person. If pressed, she could reel off all kinds of artificial scraps of knowledge, like a dear little parrot. But she had never heard of Karl Marx and didn't want to hear. She had a vague notion that International Socialism was a movement in favour of throwing bombs at monarchs and of seizing the wealth of the rich in order to divide it among the poor--and she regarded it as abominable. When her father gave her Fabian Society tracts to read, he might just as well, for all her understanding of the argument, set her down to a Treatise on the Infinitesimal Calculus. Her brain stood blank before such abstract disquisitions. She loved easily comprehended poetry and novels that made her laugh or cry and set her mind dancing round the glowing possibilities of life; all disastrous stuff abhorred by the International Socialist, to whom the essential problems of existence are of no interest whatever. So, after a few futile attempts to darken her mind, Gedge put her down as a mere fool woman, and ceased to bother his head about her intellectual development. That came to him quite naturally. There is no Turk more contemptuous of his womankind's political ideas than the Gedges of our enlightened England. But on other counts she was a distinct asset. He regarded her with immense pride, as a more ornamental adjunct to his house than any other county builder and contractor could display, and, recognising that she was possessed of some low feminine cunning in the way of adding up figures and writing letters, made use of her in his office as general clerical factotum.
When the war broke out, he discovered, to his horror, that Phyllis actually had political ideas--unshakable, obstinate ideas opposed to his own--and that he had been nourishing in his bosom a viperous patriot. Phyllis, for her part, realised with equal horror the practical significance of her father's windy theories. When Randall, who had stolen her heart, took to visiting the house, in order, as far as she could make out, to talk treason with her father, the strain of the situation grew more than she could bear. She fled to Betty for advice. Betty promptly stepped in and whisked her off to the hospital.
It was on the morning on which Randall interviewed me in the garden, the morning after he had broken with Gedge that Phyllis, having a little off-time, went home. She found her father in the office making out a few bills. He thrust forward his long chin and aggressive beard and scowled at her.
"Oh, it's you, is it? Come at last where your duty calls you, eh?"
"I always come when I can, father," she replied.
She bent down and kissed his cheek. He caught her roughly round the waist and, leaning back in his chair, looked up at her sourly.
"How long are you going on defying me like this?"
She tried to disengage herself, but his arm was too strong. "Oh, father," she said, rather wearily, "don't let us go over this old argument again."
"But suppose I find some new argument? Suppose I send you packing altogether, refuse to contribute further to your support. What then?"
She started at the threat but replied valiantly: "I should have to earn my own living."
"How are you going to do it?"
"There are heaps of ways."
He laughed. "There ain't; as you'd soon find out. They don't even pay you for being scullery-maid to a lot of common soldiers."
She protested against that view of her avocation. In the perfectly appointed Wellingsford Hospital she had no scullery work. She was a probationer, in training as a nurse. He still gripped her.
"The particular kind of tomfoolery you are up to doesn't matter. We needn't quarrel. I've another proposition to put before you--much more to your fancy, I think. You like this Mr. Randall Holmes, don't you?"
She shivered a little and flushed deep red. Her father had never touched on the matter before. She said, straining away:
"I don't want to talk about Mr. Holmes."
"But I do. Come, my dear. In this life there must be always a certain amount of give and take. I'm not the man to drive a one-sided bargain.
I'll make you a fair offer--as between father and daughter. I'll wipe out all that's past. In leaving me like this, when misfortune has come upon me, you've been guilty of unfilial conduct--no one can deny it But I'll overlook everything, forgive you fully and take you to my heart again and leave you free to do whatever you like without interfering with your opinions, if you'll promise me one thing--"
"I know what you're going to say." She twisted round on him swiftly. "I 'll promise at once. I'll never marry Mr. Holmes. I've already told him I won't marry him."
Surprise relaxed his grip. She took swift advantage and sheered away to the other side of the table. He rose and brought down his hand with a thump.
"You refused him? Why, you silly little baggage, my condition is that you should marry him. You're sweet on him aren't you?"
"I detest him," cried Phyllis. "Why should I marry him?"
Her eyes, young and pure, divined some sordid horror behind eyes crafty and ignoble. Once before she had had such a fleeting, uncomprehended vision into the murky depths of the man's soul. This was some time ago.
In the routine of her secretarial duties she had, one morning, opened and read a letter, not marked "Private" or "Personal," whose tenor she could scarcely understand. When she handed it to her father, he smiled, vouchsafed a specious explanation, and looked at her in just the same crafty and ignoble fashion, and she shrank away frightened. The matter kept her awake for a couple of nights. Then, for sheer easing of her heart, she went to her adored Betty Fairfax, her Lady Patroness and Mother Confessor, who, being wise and strong, and possessing the power of making her kind eyes unfathomable, laughed, bade her believe her father's explanation, and sent her away comforted. The incident passed out of her mind. But now memory smote her, as she shrank from her father's gaze and the insincere smile on his thin lips.
"For one thing," he replied after a pause, pulling his straggly beard, "your poor dear mother was a lady, and if she had lived she would have wanted you to marry a gentleman. It's for her sake I've given you an education that fits you to consort with gentlefolk--just for her sake--don't make any mistake about it, for I've always hated the breed.
If I've violated my principles in order to meet her wishes, I think you ought to meet them too. You wouldn't like to marry a small tradesman or a working man, would you?"
"I'm not going to marry anybody," cried Phyllis. She was only a pink and white, very ordinary little girl. I have no idealisations or illusions concerning Phyllis. But she had a little fine steel of character running through her. It flashed on Gedge.