Success
an extra person, had to stand on the doorstep until Nan had gone part
of the way upstairs in answer to Miss Janet’s beckoning.
Miss Janet wore a dark green _moiré_ dress, which had graced many
similar occasions, and was brought up to the requirements of a figure
bigger than the one from whom it was inherited by inlets, in unexpected
places, of a younger silk of a different shade. Not that anyone of
taste would have quarrelled with the costume, it was so essentially
suited to the wearer. Certainly, no one would have quarrelled with her
as a hostess; she had the hospitality which is the prerogative of the
good housewife, proudly giving of her best, and conscious that of its
kind it is excellent. Excellent it certainly was: a simple supper,
but in its way perfect, each article personally selected by one who
thoroughly understood the subject and personally prepared with the
same understanding. Miss Janet was frankly proud of it, although, as
she herself was aware, the present company were not gourmets enough to
appreciate it at its true worth.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me what we had this time last year,”
she said; “not Mr. Barmister, nor Nan, nor Josiah, any more than Mr.
Annarly and George, who weren’t here—though they wouldn’t know any
better if they had been.”
Nobody could tell her, and Michael said, “I’m afraid I should only have
remembered that it was very good; when things are that one does not
recollect anything else, unless one is the maker and has been through
the details and difficulties of manufacture—outsiders only enjoy and
forget, which seems unfair.”
“If there wasn’t anything unfairer than that in the world, there
wouldn’t be much to complain of,” George said gruffly, and without
raising his fierce eyes. They were fierce eyes, and distrustful too;
those of one foredoomed by Nature to fight on the losing side, but a
person most would not seek to fight or contradict unnecessarily. Miss
Janet had no such scruples: the man was yet to be found concerning
whom she did have them, if she thought the occasion demanded
contradiction or correction.
“Don’t be grumpy, George,” she said. “It isn’t unfairness people
complain of principally; that’s not at the bottom of most people’s
grumbling, though they may think it is, it’s their own temper and
stupidity generally. Half the time when one’s food disagrees with one,
it’s because one brings a sour stomach and a grievance to table.”
Having announced which, she returned to her original subject, and
recalled other celebrations of the anniversary; not omitting the first
of all, at which Nan, being too small, had not been present.
“I was left at home in charge of the landlady’s daughter,” Nan
explained to Michael. “I remember she put me to bed, and I think she
must have put me wrong, for I woke up after a little while and was
frightened because I thought I heard someone scream downstairs. I
screamed then in good earnest, and she had to leave her friend, the
policeman, to come up and comfort me.”
“Serve her right,” was Miss Janet’s comment. “I have no doubt it was
her giggling and squealing with him that woke you, poor child.”
“Maybe,” Nan said, “but I don’t think she wasted much time; I can
remember being down in the kitchen after that, so I suppose she took me
there. I wonder if I was much in the way of the courtship?”
“Not a bit,” said Miss Janet decidedly; “why, you wouldn’t be in the
way now! In a very little you’d find them going on just as if you
weren’t there.”
This may have been true, though perhaps not altogether flattering. Nan
did not contradict it, and conversation went other ways, only returning
to the subject of the anniversary when supper was over and a bottle of
choice wine was put on the table. It was the annual custom to drink
to the success of the business in the best that Josiah’s resources
could afford; better than he could afford without deprivation in the
early days. This year it was a port worth mention, and the toast was
drunk with a very real meaning on the part of most. Afterwards, George
Foregood, who had made no pretence of sharing the sentiment, proposed
an addition.
“Better drink success to me too,” he said, “and damnation to Blackwell
and Blackwell.”
Josiah lowered the glass he had raised. “Success, if you like,” he
said, “not damnation.”
“Same thing,” his brother returned; “their damnation is my success:
there isn’t another I care for.”
Josiah shook his head. “Pity,” he said. “It’s a pity. There isn’t much
good trying to get even with people; it’s ‘spending your substance for
nought, and your money for that which profiteth not.’ Besides, you
never succeed in doing it really.”
“Depends on who you are,” George said shortly, and Nan pondered the
subject.
“Perhaps a little on how much you are prepared to pay?” she suggested.
“It might be like Samson and the Philistines: he pulled the house down
on them, certainly, but on himself too. I suppose it was worth while to
him?”
Josiah looked doubtful. “Perhaps so,” he said, “perhaps so. You always
do have to pull down to get even with people; them down and often
yourself down to the same level of dirty tricks, or injustice, or bad
feeling, or something: it hardly seems worth it. You vindicate yourself
that way, certainly, or you may—but it doesn’t seem much—just be able
to stick out your chest and say, ‘You see, I’m right after all.’”
George did not agree, and said so emphatically. Barmister, who had
been talking to Miss Janet, turned to give his curt, and a trifle
contemptuous, opinion of those who ever allowed a score to accumulate
to need avenging. Miss Janet and Nan left him doing so when they
retired to the other room, where the re-covered chairs stood in a row,
and the clocks of Josiah’s collecting ticked softly from brackets and
shelves.
Nothing more was heard of George’s enterprise that night, though it
was obvious, from what he had said, that he had an ambition set before
himself which he hoped soon to accomplish. Michael rather wondered what
it was: for the first time since the happenings at Galhardy’s he felt
some small interest in a fellow-creature. On the next day, a Sunday,
when he was out with Nan, he asked her about the man.
“George Foregood?” she said. “He hopes to ruin or, at all events,
seriously damage the trade of his old employers. He has invented
another apparatus, or else much improved the one he invented before,
and it is so much better than the first that he believes the dyers who
have it will easily get all the trade of those using the first. He has
been years perfecting it. All the spare money he had has gone that way,
and some of Josiah’s too, and what little he got with his wife. She is
dead now, which is perhaps as well. I believe she was an unsatisfactory
wife, and I’m sure he must have been a still more unsatisfactory
husband.”
It was easy to believe this, Michael said; then asked, “Has he really
perfected his invention now?”
“He thinks so,” Nan answered; “and done it with his own time and own
money, so there can be no dispute about ownership. Now he is looking
out for someone who will float it for him. He wants to make money out
of it; but he is set, above all things, on his old employers suffering
through it.”
“One can understand that,” Michael said.
Nan agreed, but added: “I’m not sure it’s wise. I don’t believe it’s
really the best thing: rather grasping the shadow, don’t you think?”
She stopped by a stile as she spoke, and turned to him, though she was
questioning herself more than him. They had taken the train a little
way out of London, and were spending the short day in walking out
into the country. They sometimes made such excursions on a Sunday.
Rather bare excursions, perhaps; they had never enough money for any
but third-class travelling, and never lunch at country inns, only
sandwiches provided from home, and eaten under a southern hedge, or
among trees; any shelter from the weather which could be found. But
there was something in the expeditions: something akin to the quiet
brown land and low sky, in a way tranquil and apart from ordinary life.
The landscape that day was soft-toned. Nan, leaning against the stile,
looked out across bare fields, green and brown with a film of mist on
them. Even the sun was meek, only a white shining in the higher haze.
“I wonder,” she speculated, her eyes on a little copse, where some
belated leaves still lingered—“I wonder if George will find it worth
while?”
“To wipe off his score with those people?” Michael said. “I suppose so.”
“He will have given a good deal for it,” she said: “all his life; not
only work, and time, and money, but most other things too. I doubt if
it is worth it.”
“Nothing is,” Michael said wearily. “I sometimes doubt if anything is
worth while.”
He offered a hand to help her over the stile as he spoke, and they went
on together in silence.
It was one of her distinctive characteristics, her capacity for
companionable silence: Michael came to value it a good deal on those
Sunday excursions. There was usually an excursion on a Sunday. When,
as sometimes, they could not afford the railway to the country, they
went somewhere in town. Nan knew the City and its purlieus as few
Londoners did, and they wandered down the deserted streets and into
old forgotten corners, finding places little known and beauties not
often recognised. Attending quiet City churches: old churches with
their glories half obscured in the dim light of leaded windows and
overshadowing buildings. Places where worshippers were few, and that
few half lost in high, dark pews; and the clergy and sweet-voiced
choir held the service, as of old, more for the glory of God than the
edification of man. Strange, peaceful places, where a man may seek and,
perhaps, find for himself something of the Mystery which lies behind
the Universe.
CHAPTER VIII
Every profession and most trades, except perhaps a few humble female
ones, such as that of washerwoman, have their societies: some have
only trade unions, but many have more or less social and club-like
ones as well. So vast and wide a profession as engineering, stretching
from the construction of the Assouan Dam to the nice adjustment of a
waste-pipe, naturally has many societies in connection with it. Michael
Annarly was a member of several; also of several others of a more
generally scientific or quasi-scientific nature. It cannot be said that
he had very often attended the meetings of any, or found them of great
interest when he did; he was essentially of the unco-operative sort,
in his work independent of ordinary methods, indifferent to accepted
opinions, and a little impatient of them and of the people dealing in
them. Still, partly from policy, and partly from a rather pathetic
effort to be in union with his kind, he had occasionally attended
various meetings. The opportunities naturally had not been numerous
during the time he was at Galhardy’s, but he had taken them when they
came. He had occasionally read a paper or contributed to a discussion:
always to the advancement of knowledge, both of the subject and his
hearers; though not always to the advancement of the self-esteem of
former reputed authorities, of which he had not always thought to
be tender. Such a thing is not forgotten, notably by the sufferer;
indeed, it is very liable to be remembered, especially when the man who
committed the offence has come to grief. There are some, then, who see
in his downfall the consequence of his dangerously unconstitutional
mind and methods, and some who perceive a just retribution on one who
has caught them (the authorities) tripping, and frankly said so. Such
things would be remembered against Michael now; and those who had no
personal reasons against him would look upon him with curiosity or