"What a gossip you two have been having!" Basil said, and, seeing the laughter in Hal's eyes, he added, "has G been tel ing you some of her amazing theories, or tearing the existing order of the universe to shreds?"
"Oh, I don't know, but she's simply immense. Have you heard about the tin-pot organ that will play its own way, and the choir that gets convulsed, and the underdone young parson? She's simply got to know Dick. He wouldn't miss it for the world."
"Yes; I've heard most of it. She plays an organ of laughter for me nowadays, that makes me bless the day she was born."
The gaunt spinster positively blushed.
"Oh, that's just your way," she snapped, bashful y trying to hide her pleasure. "If I hadn't been G, a pretty, charming young woman with real music in her might have been, and you'd have liked that much better."
"No, I shouldn't. She'd have played 'Home, Sweet Home,' with variations, and 'The Maiden's Prayer ' - I know her at a glance. If you do only play scales and exercises I'm sure you manage to put a lot of character into them."
"That's only thumping; and who wants thumping ?"
"I do, when it's the universe. I'm just as much askew with it as you are, only I haven't got the wit to thump it so satisfactorily. You are going it for the two of us now."
"Stil , you're not a gargoyle..." with a queer twist of her face that delighted Hal.
"I shal positively take you to Dick myself," she said, "or bring him here to you. He'll talk to you about a mother's patience, and babies; and you'll talk to him about gargoyles and organs, and Heaven only knows where you'll both get to ; but I wouldn't miss it for anything."
"I don't know who Dick may be, but if he talks to me about mothers and babies " - grimly - " I shall groan like that organ did at christenings. They may be useful in the general scheme, but beyond that I don't know how
any one can put up with them at al ; with their potsy-wotsy, and pucksie-ducksie, and general stickiness. It's quite enough for me that I have to knit stupid little socks for their sil y little feet, for bread-and-butter. The most I can say for it is, that it's a more satisfactory plan than
casting your bread on the waters, on the off-chance some kindly Elijah wil butter it."
"Where are the socks, G ?" Basil asked, looking round. "I should like Hal to enjoy the edifying spectacle of your knitting babies' socks."
"You don't mean that," interrupted Hal comical y. "I can't believe it."
"It's the horrible truth," asserted the spinster, calmly going on with her tea -" most of them go to little black whelps in the Antipodes.
After all, it isn't any more incongruous than the music - is it ?"
"But you don't do it for the under-done young parson, surely ?"
"Goodness gracious, no. What an idea! He wiped his hands of me long ago. The wildest stretch of imagination, you see, could not picture me ever looking like an angel; so he left me to my fate!" And again the humorous
twisted smile delighted her small audience.
"Have you seen Splodgkins lately ?" Basil asked.
"You say all babies are sticky and objectionable; but you must admit that sticky imp down below is better than two-thirds of the other babies in the world shining with soap polish."
"So he is"; and the grim face relaxed stil further. "He was sitting in my way on the stairs this morning, and as I could not get by, I said, 'Make room, please, Master Splodgkins; you don't own the universe.' 'Eth oi doth,' he lisped. 'Noime ain't thplodums. Damn th'
ooniverth.'"
It was good to hear Basil's whole-hearted laughter.
"We ought to have had him to tea," he said regretful y. "He would have delighted Hal. He's two-and-a-halfyears old" - turning to her - "this remarkable person-age; and, like most gutter snipes, has developed as an ordinary child of four. He and G have debates occasionally. He wishes to be cal ed D, because that is the letter on his front door, and
'Splodgkins ' hurts his dignity but he's so funny when he is indignant we can't resist
teasing him."
A little wistful smile crept into the invalid's eyes.
"We have lots of fun in this dingy old barrack between us," he told Hal. "We are rarely sil y enough to be dull, with so many queer, interesting folks under the same roof."
Hal felt something like a sudden lump in her throat, but she smiled brightly as she looked from one to the other, feeling somehow the better for knowing such waifs of life and circumstance, who could yet baffle Fate's pitilessness with genuine laughter.
"Dick is writing a most weird and incomprehensible book on vegetables and babies. I'm quite certain you could give him lots of ideas," she remarked to G.
"He'd better put Splodgkins in if he wants to make it sel ," said she.
"Only they mightn't allow it at the libraries. Splodgkins's vocabulary is fortunately sometimes indistinguishable for his lisp."
"Splodgkins couldn't be translated," put in Basil. "He sometimes comes to tea with me and G; but he is almost too exhausting. I think he knows every bad word in the English language; but one has to forgive him because he always saves half his cake for his baby sister, and hurls violent abuse at any one who dares to disparage her.
"Are you going?..." as G got up. "I'm sure Miss Pritchard doesn't want you to leave us."
"Miss Pritchard!..." In a horrified voice.
"Never mind," said Hal quickly. "It didn't matter." Then to Basil, in explanation: "G said something about Doris's fiancé, not knowing I was his sister, but I quite forget what it was. Good-bye, G," holding out a frank hand. "I think you're a delightful person, and I'm just as glad as Basil that you weren't left out of the alphabet."
A few minutes later Doris came in, looking flushed and stealthy, and the first thing Hal noticed was a loverly little diamon brooch she had not seen before.
"What a darling brooch," she exclaimed, after their greeting. "Did Dudley give you that? He might have shown it to me."
"No..." stammered Doris, turning red. "I've had it a long time. It's not real."
"Well, it's a wonderful imitation, then" said Hal a little drily -
and remembered the man like a pawnbroker's shop.
Then Ethel joined them, and Hal's quick eyes saw sthe still increasing anxiety, just as surely as she saw the increased furtiveness in Doris's side-long glances. And because of all that she felt for Ethel, she trust her own care into the background resolutely, and made the evening as gay as she could while she was there.
Only afterwards she went home through the lamp-lit darkness, feeling as if some vague shadow had descended silently upon her little world.
What was this insistent, nameless fear at her own heart? Why was Lorraine weeping when she found her yesterday? Why was trouble steadily gathering on Ethel's face? What was this gossip about Doris? -
The gloom of a foggy night added to her depression. Why, in the tube railway, did al these people about her look so white and tired and lifeless? Did they just go on in their niches, in the same way that the grotesque music-teacher had gone on in hers for all those monotonous years; only to become like an uncared-for, unwanted letter of the alphabet pushed in to fil up a blank in a big city at last?
Were they all gargoyles-fixed, rigid, joyless, carved things, fastened in their respective niches, not for ornament, or for use special y, but just because the general machine seemed to require them?
And if so - why? ... why? ... why? -
It was so easy to be joyous if one was made for it. Such a little would make every one gay, if they were fashioned accordingly. What could be the good of disfiguring a beautiful world with all these vacant, expressionless, hopeless masks?
Hal did not read poetry. She was perfectly frank about being utterly bored with it. When she had anything to say, she liked to say it straight out, she explained, without twisting it about to make it rhyme with something just shoved in to fil up the line; and she preferred other people to do the same.
Yet, perhaps, at that particular moment, had she seen the lines: _"Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits - and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?"_
In her present mood she might have recognised also the stateliness and the beauty of a thought transcribed into verse.
Or possibly she would have obstinately asserted there was no occasion to introduce the word Love at al - and it was no one's Heart's Desire she wanted, but just a common-sense, reasonable amount of pleasure for all, and a spring-cleaning of all the gloomy, wooden faces.
In the sitting-room at Bloomsbury she threw her hat down on the sofa, and ran her fingers through her hair with an almost petulant air.
"I just feel to-night as if it was a rotten old world after al ," she said.
Dudley, sitting poring over some plans with a reading-lamp, looked up in mild surprise.
"And what has made you feel all that? - not Basil, I'm sure."
"Well, there's no occasion to be so very sure. I think it's decidedly rotten where Basil is concerned."
She came and half-sat on one of the arms of his chair, and rested her hand on his coat-collar.
"I wonder what G would think of a sane man spending his evening ruling pointless-looking lines on a big sheet of paper?"
"And who may 'G' be?"
"I hardly know - except that she's the quaintest person I've ever struck yet - and I've seen some funny ones."
"Oh, I know who you mean. Yes; she is an oddity. Well, how was every one. How was Doris?"
"I hardly know. She was not there when I arrived, and she did not come in until a few minutes before Ethel."
"I wonder where she was?" thoughtful y. "I asked her to come for tea and a walk in the Park to-day, and she said she could not leave Basil."
Hal looked keenly into his face, and immediately he smiled and said:
"I suppose the tenant opposite was free unexpectedly, and Doris was able to get out after al . Poor little girl. I'm glad. But I wonder she didn't telephone me."
Hal turned away, feeling a little sick at heart.
Were they all then in the maelstrom of this gloomy sense of an engulfing cloud? What could be the meaning of Doris's behaviour? Did Dudley suspect anything? Certainly he had been a good deal preoccupied of late, and spoken very little of the future.
She looked out of her window across the blue of London lights, and her thoughts roved a little pitiful y across the wide reaches of her own small world. From Sir Edwin, with his high post in the nation's councils, and Lorraine with her bril iant atmosphere of success and triumph, to the dingy block of flats in Hol oway, where, in spite of almost tragic circumstances, to quote Basil, they had "lots of fun"
among themselves.
She believed he meant it, too. It was no empty phrase. Rather something in touch with Life's great scheme of compensations, which she manipulates in her own great way, beyond the comprehension of puny humans.
Certainly neither Sir Edwin nor Lorraine could boast of "lots of fun."
Rather, instead, much care and worry and brain-weary grappling with problems of modern succesful conditions.
She wondered, with a stil further sinking at heart, if perhaps the time had come when she would have to grapple too. Was it very likely, after their delightful friendship, and after that confession of his the previous Saturday, Sir Edwin was prepared tamely to give her up? In her heart, she knew him better.
And yet, if the rumour was not false, what else could result? Vaguely she felt it might be one of those problems of modern society, coming across the evenly flowing river of her life, to demand solution. Not the solution of the crowd - to fol ow a beaten track is rarely difficult - but her own individual solution, which might mean much warfare of spirit and weary heartache. The foregoing of an al uring pleasure she deeply longed to take - not for any reward nor any gain, but solely for the sake of the mysterious power abroad in the world which is called Good; and which demands of the Present Hour that it is ready to crucify itself and its deep desires for the sake of the Future.