A Good Little Boy
THERE were six more rings to go on, and then the curtains were finished. Olivia picked up the last but five, held it in position and began to sew. Somewhere behind her was the man she rather liked. He was at a disadvantage, because he had no curtains to sew. The strain of saying nothing would tell upon him first. He would have to begin. . . .
He walked across the room, humming carelessly to himself. Arrived at the fire-place, he bent down and knocked out his pipe against his heel carelessly. From this position he stole a glance at Olivia under his arm to see if she were looking at him. Her eyes were on her needle. There! Another ring finished. She turned for the last but four, and George’s eyes went hastily back to his heel. There was a crescendo effect in his humming, given with the abandon of the true artist. ‘Jolly afternoon, this,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I wonder what Olivia’s doing? Down in the garden picking roses, no doubt. Might stroll down there myself.’
Confound it, why didn’t she say something? He tried again to catch her eye, and then, in a sudden panic, tried to avoid it. Suppose she did begin? Suppose she said ‘Well, George?’ What could he say? Nothing but ‘Well, Olivia?’—and then, where were you? Nowhere. It would be better if he began himself. Casually. Er—by the way——
He was at the windows now, drawn there by an instinctive need for air. As he had said, he could see as well as anybody in the county. Between bushes he had a glimpse of Brian hurrying gaily after his beloved one, and even at that distance the glow of happiness on his face, the easy carriage, the charming youth of him was visible to George. Almost involuntarily he muttered, ‘H’m! Good-looking fellow, young Strange,’ and with the words realized that he had made a beginning.
Olivia, you may be sure, was ready for it.
‘Brian, yes, isn’t he?’ she said carelessly. ‘And such a nice boy.’
The nice boy had disappeared now round the corner of the drive, but George continued to gaze after him.
‘Got fifty pounds for a picture the other day, didn’t you tell me?’ he said, apparently to somebody on the terrace.
‘Yes,’ said Olivia, to her curtains. ‘Of course, he has only just begun,’ she told the last ring but three.
‘Critics think well of him, what?’
‘They all say he has genius,’ Olivia informed the scissors. ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt of it.’
George nodded to his informant on the terrace.
‘Of course,’ he said, with the air of one making a great concession, ‘I don’t profess to know anything about painting.’
Olivia reminded the curtains that he had never had the time to take it up.
‘I know what I like, of course,’ said George, thereby singling himself out from the rest of us. The trouble with the rest of us is that we know what other people tell us we ought to like, and pretend to like it. ‘I know what I like, and I can’t say I see much in this new-fangled stuff. If a man can paint, why can’t he paint like’—he frowned for a moment over the fellow’s name—‘like Rubens? Or’—he was in a magnanimous mood—‘like Reynolds?’
Why indeed? However, Olivia was able to suggest a possible reason.
‘I suppose we all have our own styles,’ she said.
He agreed eagerly. Yes, no doubt, that would be it.
‘Brian will find his style directly,’ she went on. ‘He’s only just beginning.’
‘But the critics think a lot of him, what?’
‘Oh, yes!’
‘Ah!’
It was very reassuring that the critics thought a lot of him, because the critics, it was well known, were mostly middle-aged men. Men of George’s age; men whose opinions, therefore, were of value. Sound men. The critic of The Times for instance, or of the Morning Post, would certainly be a man, a middle-aged man, of position and learning; possibly of family. If such a man thought well of young Strange there was hope for the fellow. And a good-looking fellow, too. Not one of these bearded anarchists, like so many of them.
He came away from the windows well pleased with himself. Things were going well; not quite as he had imagined them (they never go like that), but without embarrassment for either. He was convinced now that he could trust Dinah safely to this promising young artist. Naturally, he wanted to be sure of this before giving his consent to the engagement. If Olivia were worrying about Dinah, she need worry no more. He began to hum again; the happy, careless hum of a man who had got something off his mind and was now at ease again; the hum of a man whose wife might now be at ease again also.
But there was just one other little matter to be put right, one other little matter over which, it might be, Olivia was worrying. He leant against a chair, filling his pipe, and when all was ready for the match, he said, as he drew out the box:
‘Nearly finished ’em?’
‘Very nearly,’ she assured him. Then looking round, ‘Are my scissors there?’
‘Scissors?’ He was all eagerness to find them for her.
‘Ah, here they are.’ She had them all the time, but she wanted him to feel that he was helping her. He seemed to her like a little boy, who has been bad, but is now trying to be very good, so that nothing shall be said about his badness. Little boy! She longed to kiss him and tell him that it was all right now. Very soon it would be all right now, and then she would kiss him. Funny little boy!
His pipe was now lighted. He walked across to the fire-place which was waiting for the match-end, and, as he went, he asked the great question.
‘Where are you going to put ’em?’
It was the question, so it seemed to Olivia at that moment, up to which all Mr. Pim’s visits—three, or was it four?—had slowly but inevitably been leading Why, she asked herself whimsically, had he come at all, if not to hang her curtains for her? ‘What shall we do about Olivia’s curtains?’ one of the Household Gods had asked on Olympus. ‘That fellow George won’t let her hang them in the morning-room.’ And they had looked down, and seen a little old gentleman getting into a train at Paddington. ‘Why, that’s just the man you want,’ said a second god. ‘Meeting the girl first, of course?’ said the other. ‘Meeting the girl first, of course,’ he agreed. And so now her curtains were going up. What a funny old world it was!
But she appreciated the way in which George had put it. Any previous argument about the curtains was wiped out. There had been no mention of them before; indeed, it was doubtful if he had even seen them. Seeing them now for the first time, he naturally asked her where she was going to put them.
‘I don’t quite know,’ she said, looking at them thoughtfully, head on one side. Evidently she, too, was now giving them her attention for the first time. ‘I had thought of this room, but’—she frowned at them—‘I’m not quite sure.’ She was still, it seemed, open to suggestion.
George suggested casually that they would brighten the room up a bit.
‘Yes,’ said Olivia doubtfully.
He walked over to the windows and examined the curtains now hanging there. He had never really looked at them before. There they had always been, ever since he could remember; as a boy he had pulled at them, tripped over them, hidden behind them. If you had asked him suddenly what colour they were, I doubt whether he could have told you. But they were part of the room, and the room was part of the house, and the house was part of his inheritance, entrusted to him by his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, and, as Dinah had said, all the rest of them. No, not his room now; that was where he had been wrong; his and Olivia’s.
‘Well, yes,’ he admitted, surprise in his voice, ‘they are a bit faded.’
Olivia held her own curtains up and had a good look at them. The curtains were a moral triumph without doubt, but she was not certain now that they were an artistic one. She was in that state of indecision to which every artist comes sooner or later. We look at our new masterpiece, and we say, as she said now to George, ‘Sometimes I think I love it, and sometimes—I’m not quite sure.’
‘The best way,’ he suggested, ‘is to hang them up and see how you like them then. Always take them down again.’
She looked at him with admiration.
‘That’s rather a good idea, George.’
‘Best way,’ said George, pleased to be so helpful. He was a little surprised that Olivia had not thought of it herself. It was the obvious thing.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think we might do that. The only thing is——’
‘What?’ said George, seeing her hesitate.
‘Well, the carpet and the chairs and the cushions and things.’
‘What about ’em?’ For the moment he was a little slow.
‘Well, if you had new curtains——’ She waited for him. He was there at once.
‘You mean we’d want a new carpet,’ he said triumphantly.
‘Yes. Well, new chair-covers, anyhow.’
‘Well, why not?’
How good, how very good the bad little boy was being!
‘Oh, but——’
‘We’re not so hard up as all that, you know,’ he said, a little awkwardly. This was uncomfortable talk, dangerously reminiscent of certain conversations which, they were agreed now, had never taken place.
‘No, I suppose not,’ said Olivia, with a smile for herself only.
‘That’s ah right,’ he said cheerfully.
But still, unaccountably, she hesitated.
‘I suppose it would mean that I should have to go up to London for them. That’s rather a nuisance.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, more casual now than ever. Hands in pockets, eyes on the floor, he moved across the room, falling slowly from one foot to the other. ‘We might go up together one day.’
‘Well, of course, if we were up for anything else’—she stole a glance at him—‘we could just look about us, and see if we could find what we want.’
‘That’s what I meant. If we were up—for anything else.’
‘Exactly,’ said Olivia.
He gave a sigh of relief. He had done his part; tactfully, delicately. Everything was now comfortable; misunderstandings had been removed. It only remained to settle about this ‘something else’ which might demand their presence in London. To propose to her again, in fact. He cleared his throat warningly.
But Olivia had not finished playing her part. For just a little longer George must be kept in ignorance of the truth—the truth which by now was known to that chatter-box Dinah. There was only one way of doing this. Was it quite—well, quite honourable? All was fair in love and war, and this was a mixture of both. A wise woman keeps her husband in ignorance of many things; for his own good, of course. This was for George’s own good, but was it quite——? Anyhow, it was rather fun; a joke; perhaps that saved it.
‘Oh, by the way, George,’ she said, before he could begin, ‘I told Brian—and that means telling Dinah, of course—that Mr. Pim had made a mistake about the name.’
He stared at her. He could only repeat the words after her, not realizing yet what they meant.
‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I told Brian that the whole thing was a mistake.’
Slowly he understood her, or thought that he understood. ‘Olivia!’ he cried eagerly.
How misleading the truth is! She had uttered no more, no less, than the truth—that she had told Brian that Mr. Pim had made a mistake. But accepting this as the truth, George, as Olivia had foreseen, put his own construction upon it. He assumed that she had misled Brian in order to make things easy for them.
‘Olivia! Then you mean that Brian and Dinah think that we have been married all the time?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘They both think so now.’
He came very close to her. There could be only one reason for Olivia’s brilliant diplomacy.
‘Does that mean,’ he asked shyly, ‘that you are thinking of marrying me?’
‘At your old registry office?’
‘Yes!’
‘To-morrow?’
‘Yes!’
How eager, how happy he was, this good little boy who had been so bad.
‘Do you want me to very much?’
‘My darling,’ he cried, ‘you know that I do.’
She had a moment of apprehension. In spite of Brian’s contempt of the Law, in spite of France’s nice ideas about marriage ceremonies, she was still a little anxious as to whether the great joke could be carried off.
‘We should have to do it very quietly,’ she warned him.
‘Of course, darling,’ he agreed eagerly. ‘Nobody need know at all. We don’t want anybody to know. And now that you have put Brian and Dinah off the scent by telling them that Mr. Pim made a mistake—’ He stopped, and looked at her with admiration. What diplomacy! What a brain! ‘That was very clever of you, Olivia,’ he said gravely. ‘I should never have thought of that.’
‘No, darling.’ Then anxiously, ‘You don’t think it was wrong, George?’
George, the man with the conscience, the authority on what the Law, Heaven, and the Best People really thought, Justice of the Peace in the County of Buckinghamshire, delivered his verdict.
‘An innocent deception, my dear. Perfectly harmless.’
Olivia breathed again.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was what I thought about—about what I was doing.’
Now let Dinah chatter as she would. George, on this matter, was truth-proof. In an hour he would be in the train on his way to London; in twenty-four hours, if it could be arranged by then, they would be married again, ‘very quietly.’ And then? Well, then perhaps she would tell him the truth. What fun!
‘Then you will come to-morrow?’ he asked, very close to her now.
She nodded.
‘And if we happen to see a carpet, or anything that you want——’
‘Oh, how lovely!’ she cried.
She was like a child herself now, clapping her hands at the treats in store for her. He felt the joy of making this child happy.
‘And a wedding-lunch at the Carlton?’ he beamed.
Again her excited nod.
‘And a bit of a honeymoon in Paris?’
This was almost too much. ‘Oh, George!’ she cried.
He put out his arms to her.
‘Give us a kiss, old girl,’ he asked, humbly, entreatingly, hungrily; asking, with the words, forgiveness for the past, promising happiness for the future. A kiss as a sign that they were back to the old comfortable friendly times again, when ‘Olivia’ was a warm glow at the heart, not a dull ache. Olivia, be friends!
And now her arms were round him, comforting him, taking him back. ‘My dear!’ she murmured.
‘Don’t ever leave me, old girl,’ he prayed.
‘Don’t ever send me away, old boy,’ she said.
‘I won’t!’ he cried fervently. And then, remembering with shame how nearly he had done it, he said awkwardly, eyes hidden from her, ‘I—I don’t think I would have, you know.’
Little boy!