ONE:The clock chimed again, and his room had grown so dark that he had to turn on the electric light to see what the hour was. He went downstairs and through the show rooms, blazing with lights still populous with customers, into the square. The toneless blue of night had already advanced far past the zenith; in the west a band of orange marked where the sun had set, and just above it was a space of delicate pale green on the upper{306} edge of which a faint star twinkled. As he passed between the hornbeam hedges in the disused graveyard, the odour of the spring night, of dew on the path, of the green growth on the trees, was alert in the air. The mysterious rapture of the renewal of life tingled round him, the summons to expand, to blossom, to love was echoed and re-echoed from the bushes, where mated birds were still chirruping. As he walked through the gathering dusk, thick with the choruses of spring, the years fell from him like withered leaves long-lingering, and his step quickened into the pace of youth, though it only bore him to The Cedars, and the amazing futility of one of Lady Keelings smaller dinner-parties."About sixteen. Our two horses will be Yankees again to-morrow."
FORE:Keeling went out through his book department, where he nodded to Propert, into the bustle of the square, noticing, with a satisfaction that never failed him, as he walked by the various doors of his block of building, how busy was the traffic in and out of the Stores. It was still an hour to sunset: on the left the municipal offices and town-hall rose pretentious and hideous against the blue of the southern sky, while in front to{82} the west the gray Gothic glories of the Cathedral, separated from the square by a line of canonical houses, aspired high above the house-roofs and leaf-laden elm-towers in the Close. The fact struck him that the front of the town-hall, with its wealth of fussy adornment, its meaningless rows of polished marble pilasters, its foolish little pinnacles and finials, was somehow strangely like the drawing-room in his own house, with its decorations selected by the amazingly futile taste of his wife. There was a very similar confusion of detail about the two, a kindred ostentation of unnecessary objects. There was waste in them both, expense that was not represented on the other side of the ledger by a credit balance of efficiency. No one took pleasure in the little pink granite pilasters between the lights of the windows in the town-hall, and certainly they were entirely useless. The money spent on them was thrown away: whereas money spent ought to yield its dividend, producing either something that was useful or something that gave pleasure. If you liked a thing it was worth paying for it, if it was directly useful it was worth paying for it. But where was the return on the money spent on pink pilasters or on the lilies painted on the huge looking-glass above his wifes drawing-room chimney-piece? Those lilies certainly were not useful, since they prevented the mirror exercising its proper function of reflecting what stood in front of it. Or did they yield{83} a dividend in pleasure to Emmeline? He did not believe that they did: he felt sure that she had just bought No. 1 drawing-room suite dining-room suite with extras, as set forth in his catalogue. He knew the catalogues well: with extras No. 1 suite came to 117. It had much in common with the front of the town-hall. So, too, if you came to consider it, had the crocodile with the calling-cards in the abominable hall.The event occurred at the most inopportune moment. He had concluded a bargain, a day or two before, for the purchase of the entire vintage of a French vine-grower in the Bordeaux district, and had just opened a letter to say that owing to the absence of a certain payment in advance, the stock had been disposed of to another purchaser, and he had lost one of the best bargains he had ever made. But he felt sure that he had drawn the cheque in question: he remembered drawing it in his private cheque-book, just before leaving one afternoon, when the cashier had already gone home. He opened the drawer where he kept his cheque-book and examined it. There it was: it was true he had drawn the cheque, but he had forgotten to tear it out and despatch it, meaning no doubt to do so in the morning.{122}
FORE:On they went over the Great Western Railway of Canada, and then over the Michigan Central; and on the morning after leaving Niagara they rolled into Chicago. Here they spent a day in visiting the interesting places in the Lake City. An old friend of Doctor Bronson came to see him at the Tremont House, and took the party out for a drive. Under the guidance of this hospitable citizen, they were taken to see the City-hall, the stock-yards, the tunnel under the river, the grain-elevators, and other things with which every one who spends a short time in Chicago is sure to be made familiar. They were shown the traces of the great fire of 1870, and were shown, too, what progress had been made in rebuilding the city and removing the signs of the calamity. Before they finished their tour, they had absorbed much of the enthusiasm of their guide, and were ready to pronounce Chicago the most remarkable city of the present time.While he waited for the completion of her work, he occupied himself with businesses that demanded his scrutiny, but all the while his ear was pricked to listen to the sound of her typewriting machine, or rather to listen for the silence of its cessation, for that would mean that Norah would presently come in with the letters for his signature. There was nothing in his work that demanded a close grip of his mind, and beneath the mechanical attention that he gave it, memory like some deep-water undertow was flowing on its own course past the hidden subaqueous landscape. There was a whole stretch of scenery there out of sight of the surface of his life. Till she had come into it, there was no man who possessed less of a secret history: he had his hobby of books as all the world knew, his blameless domestic conduct, his hard{254} Puritan morality and religion, his integrity and success in money-making and keen business faculty. That was all there was to him. But now he had dived below that, yet without making any break in the surface. All that he had done and been before continued its uninterrupted course; his life beneath the deep waters did not make itself known by as much as a bubble coming to the surface.
FORE:"Halt!" We halted. "About face!" As the prisoner eyed me both of us listened. His equanimity was almost winsome, and I saw that friendliness was going to be his tactics.Keeling found that Norah had got back to his office when he arrived, and was busy at the typewriting of the letters he had dictated to her that morning. She was in the little room opening off his, and the door was shut, but her presence was{253} indicated by the muffled clacking of her machine. That sound was infinitely more real to him than what he thought of as the flummeries of the day, and he was far more interested in how she would take the divulging of the donors name than how all the rest of the town would take it. The significance which it held for him on account of the honour that would come to him, or on account of this matter of his election to the Club, mattered nothing in comparison to how she took it. He was determined to make no allusion to it himself, he would leave it to her to state the revision of her views about his support of the hospital.
FORE:"Well, I reckon I'll stop all night." I began to move on. His eyes followed greedily.Mrs Keeling felt shocked at this positively carnal view of Mr Silverdales tendernesses. At the same time she thought they had a promising aspect besides the spiritual one.
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