Success
the other inmates of the house looked upon her as a friend, and one
they were pleased to see. They seemed to regard her as something
young and bright, a sort of glimmer of gentle sunshine, and in their
company she developed something of the quality, and for that reason,
or perhaps by contrast with them, seemed younger here than anywhere
else. Mr. Cordover himself was her chief friend, they were on excellent
terms; she made fun of him sometimes and contradicted him sometimes,
and though he retorted on her gruffly, he really liked it. He made a
point of grumbling to her about everything, largely, one suspected,
for the satisfaction of having her disagree. He grumbled to her that
Saturday as he hunted about for dead flowers in the spotlessly kept
conservatory. The cause of complaint was the negligence of gardeners,
and, as it was obviously and entirely without foundation, Nan
sympathised gravely and then concluded by saying:
“They ought to leave you something to do, it’s too bad of them; I would
if I were your gardener, I’d leave a lot of dead flowers for you to cut
off.”
“You’d get the sack, if you did,” he told her.
She laughed, she knew better.
“You don’t believe anything I say,” he complained, “but it’s true all
the same; I’d give you notice to quit fast enough. Talking of that, has
your father been able to fix up anything about his notice to quit?”
He had not; Nan said so with a clouded face, for the subject was one
much on her mind just now. More still on her father’s, for he was
attached to the two houses in Soho with an attachment that is rare;
and it had been decided by the County Council, or the Local Government
Board, or some other body concerned with the improvement of London,
that they must come down. They were safe and they were sanitary,
but, either to widen the street, or to bring it into uniformity with
others, or to make way for some improvement, they were condemned. It
was useless to appeal or protest, he had done that to the last limit;
but it was of no avail. He might be compensated; he might, very likely
would, have new and more commodious warehouses rebuilt on the spot; but
the old houses where he had lived and worked so long must go, and he
felt it with an acuteness few besides Nan could realise.
One would have expected Mr. Cordover to have regarded the attitude as
ridiculous; with his reforming principles he was likely to have held
that a new warehouse was infinitely preferable to an eighteenth-century
house built for another purpose. Very likely he did think so; but
then he also held that for any council, board, or body to compel a
man to vacate or pull down a house at their orders was tyranny and
bureaucracy in its worst form. This opinion modified the other, and,
probably assisted by personal bias, made him as warm a sympathiser as
Nan could wish. He sympathised afresh this day, abusing the authorities
whole-heartedly; finally telling Nan that, if nothing could be done,
and tyranny had its way, she had better make her father come and live
somewhere in this neighbourhood, where he would guarantee there should
be no nonsense with councils or anybody else.
“Your house is not let,” he said; “you had better make him take that.”
They had come to call the long house embowered in trees Nan’s. It was
still empty, as it had been on the day of her first visit when she had
seen and admired it. She had often looked at the outside, and once at
the in.
“The garden’s gone to rack and ruin,” Mr. Cordover said, “and the trees
shut out every bit of daylight now; still, a couple of men with axes
and scythes could do something towards putting that to rights.”
“Or wrong—” Nan said. “We’re not going to cut down the trees about my
house. Though,” she added, “I don’t know that we need arrange that, as
it’s never likely to be mine; I am sure father could not afford such a
big house, not nearly so big, I should think. Besides, he would not be
happy so far from his work.”
“Bosh!” Mr. Cordover said. “A man’s better away from his work.”
“Not all men,” Nan said; “he wouldn’t be. He always wanted to live and
die with it; he thought he would too—in that house.”
“We most of us don’t do what we think we will—and all the better for
us.”
“It wouldn’t be the better for him,” Nan persisted; “his plans have
nearly always been fulfilled, I think.”
“Then he’s luckier than most—or more moderate in what he sets out
to get. Other folks aren’t so successful. Look at the Annarlys, for
instance—do their plans ever come off?”
“Some,” said Nan; “at least, I should think so.”
“H’m, some!” Mr. Cordover said contemptuously. “Not half, nor a
quarter! And a good thing too! Fool plans and fool planning; and no
work, no beef, or sticking to it put into bringing them off either.
Look at them. They were going to make an engineer of Master Giles
(might as well have set out to make a ballet-dancer), and all they did
was to think how useful his step-brother would be. Then, before he
had learnt the hind end of an engine from the fore, they had changed
all that and were going to make a Rothschild of him. And all they
did towards that was to remind me I was his uncle; and before he had
learnt to add two and two and on which side his bread was buttered,
that idea was done with. As for Michael, I don’t know what he wasn’t
going to do, according to their plans—set the Thames on fire, and
receive a baronetcy from a grateful country for having found out a more
effective—and expensive—way of annihilating other nations than anyone
before him—and what’s that all come to?”
“You can’t blame them because Michael has not done what they expected,”
Nan protested.
Mr. Cordover could blame them for expecting the impossible. “And what’s
more,” he said, “I can blame them for being ashamed of him and what
he’s doing now.”
“I don’t think they are ashamed,” Nan said; “they are bitterly
disappointed; they think him such a failure.”
“Well, he’s earning an honest living, anyway,” Mr. Cordover said, “and
that’s something, even if he is a foreman or works manager of one
dye-vat, one man and a boy. He’s just as much use to the community
dyeing wool as inventing new arms, more—I disapprove of all this
rivalry of armaments.”
Nan knew that, and did not enter upon the political question; instead,
she said, “I don’t think Michael a failure myself.”
Mr. Cordover turned on her at that. “Not a failure? How do you make
that out? Oh, I see, you still think he’s going to pick up, make a name
and secure general recognition, and all the rest of it some day?”
“I’m not at all sure,” she said. “I’m not sure, either, that it really
matters.”
“What does then? If that doesn’t constitute success and doesn’t matter,
I should like to know what does.”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, “I can’t exactly explain, but to me
it seems the important thing is the being able to do things, not the
having it known that you have done them.”
“H’m.” Mr. Cordover was rather sceptical. “To me it seems reputation is
a somewhat important thing likewise. Pray, do you think it unimportant
whether or not that scandal about Michael at Galhardy’s is cleared up?”
“I used to want that it should be,” Nan admitted, “but I think more
from a sense of its injustice than anything else. I don’t much fancy it
ever will be, anyhow, not for a long time, and if it ever is, I doubt
if it will make much difference; after a time things don’t, do they?
One has got used to them, or found out how to do without them, or bear
them, as the case may be. Do you know, I don’t believe it is a thing
itself, however evil, that really matters, it’s the way one takes it;
if one has found out that and found out how to stand the strain of it,
it does not really much matter if, after a long while, it is taken
away. It makes very little difference; one hardly notices, for one
could keep on standing it for ever.”
“Oh?” Mr. Cordover said. “That’s your opinion, is it? Well, it’s mine
that a man’s reputation counts a good deal, and his loss of his good
name makes a considerable difference.”
“In his work, yes,” Nan admitted—“until a new name is made; after that
one would not mind about the old; in other things I’m not sure that one
would mind at all.”
“You’re a bit of a girl who knows nothing of the world,” Mr. Cordover
told her, “and a dreamer into the bargain.”
“Am I?” she said. “Then I believe Michael’s a dreamer too.”
“Stuff!” Mr. Cordover retorted. “He’s got brains, and he had a career,
and he knows it, and knows it’s done for.”
“I suppose it is, in a way,” she said. “But somehow a career, that
sort of career, doesn’t seem to be everything. It always seems to me
to be a bit like ornament, I mean ornament as applied to cabinet work,
furniture, the only thing I understand. Sometimes you see a piece of
furniture in which the symmetry of the design has been sacrificed to
the ornament—a wonderful ornament, exquisite, the work of an artist,
but which has so possessed the man that he has lost the true proportion
of the whole in developing it. The really great artist, having the
whole design in mind, sacrifices beautiful parts of the beautiful
ornament, so as to bring the whole into perfect proportion.”
“H’m,” Mr. Cordover said. “We don’t get much perfection in this world,
I’m hanged if we do; and if we are to buy it at the price of the sort
of cropper your friend Michael came there won’t be a rush of customers
for it.”
Nan laughed. “Oh, one is not a voluntary customer,” she said, “one
doesn’t choose such things, they are forced upon one; but sometimes,
after a while, one may begin to a little understand how they work out,
don’t you think?”
“Depends who one is,” Mr. Cordover said. “I suppose if one is Nan one
does—or thinks so—and if one is Michael——”
He recalled the curious momentary resemblance he had seen between the
two on the day when he first met Nan—a resemblance of expression rather
than features, the look of persons who have some mutual experience or
attitude in common. He glanced sharply at her, the thought coming into
his mind which had crossed Robert Barmister’s some months earlier—Would
she marry Michael? And he disapproved it as Barmister had.
“Too much alike,” was his opinion, “and not enough wholesome flesh and
blood in the business.”
Aloud he said, “Come along in and get a cup of tea before you start;
you’ve none too much time, if you want to get home by dark.”
They went in, and soon afterwards Nan left.
Even then, and even by going at a considerable pace, the car did not
reach Soho before dusk. The streets were already lighted as it came
through, though the old houses in the cul-de-sac were not as yet. Nan
noticed the dark windows as she said good evening to the chauffeur;
Mrs. Bidden was probably out, she often was at that hour on a Saturday,
and Barmister was probably finishing some work by the lingering
daylight in the upper room where the light lasted longest.
She fitted her key into the lock and let herself in. The wide hall
was dim, but she knew it so well, and knew all the obstacles of old
and recent importation, that that was no trouble to her, even when
she had shut the outer door, and so shut out what light there was
in the street. The house was very quiet; the steady but indistinct
noise of London was not close enough to be more than an accompaniment,
and one to which she was so used that it did not break the sense of
silence. She went up the broad, uncarpeted stairs, her footfall hardly
breaking the silence either. On the landing there was more light, the
grey twilight of March, lingering on some point of carving above the
door-frames and falling on some spot on the floor, where the dust lay
thick and undisturbed. She crossed the landing, and opened the door of
the living-room.