I don’t see why you shouldn’t cherish that illusion, if it pleases you.” He spoke without much vehemence of agreement or disagreement. He seemed chilled.
“Wake up, Ralph! You’re half asleep!” Mary cried, turning and pinching his sleeve. “What have you been doing with yourself? Moping? Working? Despising the world, as usual?”
As he merely shook his head, and filled his pipe, she went on:
“It’s a bit of a pose, isn’t it?”
“Not more than most things,” he said.
“Well,” Mary remarked, “I’ve a great deal to say to you, but I must go on—we have a committee.” She rose, but hesitated, looking down upon him rather gravely. “You don’t look happy, Ralph,” she said. “Is it anything, or is it nothing?”
He did not immediately answer her, but rose, too, and walked with her towards the gate. As usual, he did not speak to her without considering whether what he was about to say was the sort of thing that he could say to her.
“I’ve been bothered,” he said at length. “Partly by work, and partly by family troubles. Charles has been behaving like a fool. He wants to go out to Canada as a farmer—”
“Well, there’s something to be said for that,” said Mary; and they passed the gate, and walked slowly round the Fields again, discussing difficulties which, as a matter of fact, were more or less chronic in the Denham family, and only now brought forward to appease Mary’s sympathy, which, however, soothed Ralph more than he was aware of. She made him at least dwell upon problems which were real in the sense that they were capable of solution; and the true cause of his melancholy, which was not susceptible to such treatment, sank rather more deeply into the shades of his mind.
Mary was attentive; she was helpful. Ralph could not help feeling grateful to her, the more so, perhaps, because he had not told her the truth about his state; and when they reached the gate again he wished to make some affectionate objection to her leaving him. But his affection took the rather uncouth form of expostulating with her about her work.
“What d’you want to sit on a committee for?” he asked. “It’s waste of your time, Mary.”
“I agree with you that a country walk would benefit the world more,” she said. “Look here,” she added suddenly, “why don’t you come to us at Christmas? It’s almost the best time of year.”
“Come to you at Disham?” Ralph repeated.
“Yes. We won’t interfere with you. But you can tell me later,” she said, rather hastily, and then started off in the direction of Russell Square. She had invited him on the impulse of the moment, as a vision of the country came before her; and now she was annoyed with herself for having done so, and then she was annoyed at being annoyed.
“If I can’t face a walk in a field alone with Ralph,” she reasoned, “I’d better buy a cat and live in a lodging at Ealing, like Sally Seal—and he won’t come. Or did he mean that he would come?”
She shook her head. She really did not know what he had meant. She never felt quite certain; but now she was more than usually baffled. Was he concealing something from her? His manner had been odd; his deep absorption had impressed her; there was something in him that she had not fathomed, and the mystery of his nature laid more of a spell upon her than she liked. Moreover, she could not prevent herself from doing now what she had often blamed others of her sex for doing—from endowing her friend with a kind of heavenly fire, and passing her life before it for his sanction.
Under this process, the committee rather dwindled in importance; the Suffrage shrank; she vowed she would work harder at the Italian language; she thought she would take up the study of birds. But this program for a perfect life threatened to become so absurd that she very soon caught herself out in the evil habit, and was rehearsing her speech to the committee by the time the chestnut-colored bricks of Russell Square came in sight. Indeed, she never noticed them. She ran upstairs as usual, and was completely awakened to reality by the sight of Mrs. Seal, on the landing outside the office, inducing a very large dog to drink water out of a tumbler.
“Miss Markham has already arrived,” Mrs. Seal remarked, with due solemnity, “and this is her dog.”
“A very fine dog, too,” said Mary, patting him on the head.
“Yes. A magnificent fellow, Mrs. Seal agreed. “A kind of St. Bernard, she tells me—so like Kit to have a St. Bernard. And you guard your mistress well, don’t you, Sailor? You see that wicked men don’t break into her larder when she’s out at her work—helping poor souls who have lost their way…. But we’re late—we must begin!” and scattering the rest of the water indiscriminately over the floor, she hurried Mary into the committee-room.
Chapter XIV
Mr. Clacton was in his glory. The machinery which he had perfected and controlled was now about to turn out its bi-monthly product, a committee meeting; and his pride in the perfect structure of these assemblies was great. He loved the jargon of committee-rooms; he loved the way in which the door kept opening as the clock struck the hour, in obedience to a few strokes of his pen on a piece of paper; and when it had opened sufficiently often, he loved to issue from his inner chamber with documents in his hands, visibly important, with a preoccupied expression on his face that might have suited a Prime Minister advancing to meet his Cabinet. By his orders the table had been decorated beforehand with six sheets of blotting-paper, with six pens, six ink-pots, a tumbler and a jug of water, a bell, and, in deference to the taste of the lady members, a vase of hardy chrysanthemums. He had already surreptitiously straightened the sheets of blotting-paper in relation to the ink-pots, and now stood in front of the fire engaged in conversation with Miss Markham. But his eye was on the door, and when Mary and Mrs. Seal entered, he gave a little laugh and observed to the assembly which was scattered about the room:
“I fancy, ladies and gentlemen, that we are ready to commence.”
So speaking, he took his seat at the head of the table, and arranging one bundle of papers upon his right and another upon his left, called upon Miss Datchet to read the minutes of the previous meeting. Mary obeyed. A keen observer might have wondered why it was necessary for the secretary to knit her brows so closely over the tolerably matter-of-fact statement before her. Could there be any doubt in her mind that it had been resolved to circularize the provinces with Leaflet No. 3, or to issue a statistical diagram showing the proportion of married women to spinsters in New Zealand; or that the net profits of Mrs. Hipsley’s Bazaar had reached a total of five pounds eight shillings and twopence half-penny?
Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety of these statements be disturbing her? No one could have guessed, from the look of her, that she was disturbed at all. A pleasanter and saner woman than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room. She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest labor. Nevertheless, she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as was indeed the case, she had lost the power of visualizing what she read. And directly the list was completed, her mind floated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the fluttering wings of innumerable sparrows. Was Ralph still enticing the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand? Had he succeeded? Would he ever succeed? She had meant to ask him why it is that the sparrows in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are tamer than the sparrows in Hyde Park—perhaps it is that the passers-by are rarer, and they come to recognize their benefactors. For the first half-hour of the committee meeting, Mary had thus to do battle with the skeptical presence of Ralph Denham, who threatened to have it all his own way. Mary tried half a dozen methods of ousting him. She raised her voice, she articulated distinctly, she looked firmly at Mr. Clacton’s bald head, she began to write a note. To her annoyance, her pencil drew a little round figure on the blotting-paper, which, she could not deny, was really a bald-headed cock-sparrow. She looked again at Mr. Clacton; yes, he was bald, and so are cock-sparrows. Never was