Helen with the High Hand by Arnold Bennett (good beach reads txt) 📕

forty times congratulated himself on catching Helen. And now...!

But it must stop.

Then he thought of the cooking. His mouth remembered its first taste of the incomparable kidney omelette. What an ecstasy! Still, a ten-pound note for even a kidney omelette jarred on the fineness of his sense of values.

A feminine laugh--Helen's--came down the narrow stairs and through the kitchen.... No, the whole house was altered, with well-bred, distinguished women's laughter floating about the stairs like that.

He called upon his lifelong friend and comforter--the concertina. That senseless thing of rose-wood, ivory, ebony, mother-of-pearl, and leather was to him what a brother, a pipe, a bull terrier, a trusted confidant, might have been to another James. And now, in the accents of the Hallelujah Chorus, it yielded to his squeezings the secret and sublime solace which men term poetry.

Then there was a second, and equally imperious, knock at the door.

He loosed his fingers from his friend, and opened the door.

Mr. Emanuel Prockter stood on the doorstep. Mr. Emanuel Prockter wore a beautiful blue suit, with a white waistcoat and pale gold tie; yellow gloves, boots with pointed toes, a glossy bowler hat, a cane, and an eyeglass. He was an impeccable young man, and the avowed delight of his tailor, whose bills were paid by Mrs. Prockter.

"Is Miss Rathbone at home?" asked Emanuel, after a cough.

"Helen?"

"Ye-es."

"Ay," said James, grimly. "Her's quite at home."

"Can I see her?"

James opened more widely the door. "Happen you'd better step inside," said he.

"Thanks, Mr. Ollerenshaw. What--er--fine weather we're having!"

James ignored this quite courteous and truthful remark. He shut the door, went into the kitchen, and called up the stairs: "Helen, a young man to see ye."

In the bedroom, Helen and Sarah Swetnam had exhausted the Brunt hat, and were spaciously at sea in an enchanted ocean of miscellaneous gossip such as is only possible between two highly-educated women who scorn tittle-tattle. Helen had the back bedroom; partly because the front bedroom was her uncle's, but partly also because the back bedroom was just as large as and much quieter than the other, and because she preferred it. There had been no difficulty about furniture. Even so good a landlord as James Ollerenshaw is obliged now and then to go to extremes in the pursuit of arrears of rent, and the upper part of the house was crowded with choice specimens of furniture which had once belonged to the more magnificent of his defaulting tenants. Helen's bedroom was not "finished"; nor, since she regarded it as a temporary lodging rather than a permanent habitation, was she in a mind to finish it. Still, with her frocks dotted about, the hat on the four-post bed, and her silver-mounted brushes and manicure tools on the dressing-table, it had a certain stylishness. Sarah shared the bed with the hat. Helen knelt at a trunk.

"Whatever made you think of coming to Bursley?" Sarah questioned.

"Don't you think it's better than Longshaw?" said Helen.

"Yes, my darling child. But that's not why you came. If you ask me, I believe it was your deliberate intention to capture your great-uncle. Anyhow, I congratulate you on your success."

"Ah!" Helen murmured, smiling to herself, "I'm not out of the wood yet."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you see, uncle and I haven't quite decided whether he is to have his way or I am to have mine; we were both thinking about it when you happened to call." And then, as there was a little pause: "Are people talking about us much?"

She did not care whether people were talking much or little, but she had an obscure desire to shift ever so slightly the direction of the conversation.

"I've only been here a day or two, so I can scarcely judge," said Sarah. "But Lilian came in from the art school this morning with an armful of chatter."

"Let me see, I forget," Helen said. "Is Lilian the youngest, or the next to the youngest?"

"My dearest child, Lilian is the youngest but one, of course; but she's grown up now--naturally."

"What! When I saw her last, that day when she was with you at Knype, she had a ribbon in her hair, and she looked ten."

"She's eighteen. And haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"Do you mean to say you've been in Bursley a week and more, and haven't heard? Surely you know Andrew Dean?"

"I know Andrew Dean," said Helen; and she said nothing else.

"When did you last see him?"

"Oh, about a fortnight ago."

"It was before that. He didn't tell you? Well, it's just like him, that is; that's Andrew all over!"

"What is?"

"He's engaged to Lilian. It's the first engagement in the family, and she's the youngest but one."

Helen shut the trunk with a snap, then opened it and shut it again. And then she rose, smoothing her hair.

"I scarcely know Lilian," she said, coldly. "And I don't know your mother at all. But I must call and congratulate the child. No, Andrew Dean didn't breathe a word."

"I may tell you as a dreadful secret, Nell, that we aren't any of us in the seventh heaven about it. Aunt Annie said yesterday: 'I don't know that I'm so set up with it as all that, Jane' (meaning mother). We aren't so set up with it as all that."

"Why not?"

"Oh, we aren't. I don't know why. I pretend to be, lest Lilian should imagine I'm jealous."

It was at this point that the voice of James Ollerenshaw announced a young man.

The remainder of that afternoon was like a bewildering dream to James Ollerenshaw. His front room seemed to be crowded with a multitude of peacocks, that would have been more at home under the sun of Mrs. Prockter's lawns up at Hillport. Yet there were only three persons present besides himself. But decidedly they were not of his world; they were of the world that referred to him as "old Jimmy Ollerenshaw," or briefly as "Jimmy." And he had to sit and listen to them, and even to answer coherently when spoken to. Emanuel Prockter was brilliant. He had put his hat on one chair and his cane across another, and he conversed with ducal facility. The two things about him that puzzled the master of the house were--first, why he was not, at such an hour, engaged in at any rate the pretence of earning his living; and, second, why he did not take his gloves off. No notion of work seemed to exist in the minds of the three. They chattered of tennis, novels, music, and particularly of amateur operatic societies. James acquired the information that Emanuel was famous as a singer of songs. The topic led then naturally to James's concertina; the talk lightly caressed James's concertina, and then Emanuel swept it off to the afternoon tea-room of the new Midland Grand Hotel at Manchester, where Emanuel had lately been. And that led to the Old Oak Tree tea-house in Bond-street, where, not to be beaten by Emanuel, Sarah Swetnam had lately been.

"Suppose we have tea," said Helen.

And she picked up a little brass bell which stood on the central table and tinkled it. James had not noticed the bell. It was one of the many little changes that Helen had introduced. Each change by itself was a nothing--what is one small bell in a house?--yet in the mass they amounted to much. The bell was obviously new. She must have bought it; but she had not mentioned it to him. And how could they all sit at the tiny table in the kitchen? Moreover, he had no fancy for entertaining the whole town of Bursley to meals. However, the immediate prospect of tea produced in James a feeling of satisfaction, even though he remained in perfect ignorance of the methods by which Helen meant to achieve the tea. She had rung the bell, and gone on talking, as if the tea would cook itself and walk in on its hind legs and ask to be eaten.

Then the new servant entered with a large tray. James had never seen such a servant, a servant so entirely new. She was wearing a black frock and various parts of the frock, and the top of her head, were covered with stiffly-starched white linen--or was it cotton? Her apron, which had two pockets, was more elaborate than an antimacassar. Helen coolly instructed her to place the tray on his desk; which she did, brushing irreverently aside a number of rent books.

On the tray there was nothing whatever to eat but a dozen slices of the thinnest conceivable bread and butter.

Helen rose. Emanuel also rose.

Helen poured out the tea. Emanuel took a cup and saucer in one hand and the plate of bread and butter in the other, and ceremoniously approached Sarah Swetnam. Sarah accepted the cup and saucer, delicately chose a piece of bread and butter and lodged it on her saucer, and went on talking.

Emanuel returned to the table, and, reladen, approached old Jimmy, and old Jimmy had to lodge a piece of bread and butter on his saucer. Then Emanuel removed his gloves, and in a moment they were all drinking tea and nibbling bread and butter.

What a fall was this from kidney omelettes! And four had struck! Did Helen expect her uncle to make his tea off a slice of bread and butter that weighed about two drachms?

When the alleged tea was over James got on his feet, and silently slid into the kitchen. The fact was that Emanuel Prockter and the manikin airs of Emanuel Prockter made him positively sick. He had not been in the kitchen more than a minute before he was aware of amazing matters in the conversation.

"Yes," said Helen; "it's small."

"But, my child, you've always been used to a small house, surely. I think it's just as quaint and pretty as a little museum."

"Would you like to live in a little museum?"

A laugh from Emanuel, and the voice of Helen proceeding:

"I've always lived in a small house, just as I've taught six hours a day in a school. But not because I wanted to. I like room. I daresay that uncle and I may find another house one of these days."

"Up at Hillport, I hope," Emanuel put in. James could see his mincing imbecile smile through the kitchen wall.

"Who knows?" said Helen.

James returned to the front room. "What's that ye're saying?" he questioned the company.

"I was just saying how quaint and pretty your house is," said Sarah, and she rose to depart. More kissings, flutterings, swishings! Emanuel bowed.

Emanuel followed Miss Swetnam in a few minutes. Helen accompanied him to the gate, where she stayed a little while talking to him. James was in the blackest gloom.

"And now, you dear old thing," said Helen, vivaciously bustling into the house, "you shall have your _tea_. You've behaved like a perfect angel."

And she kissed him on the cheek, very excitedly, as he thought.

She gave him another kidney omelette for his tea. It was even more adorable than the former one. With the taste of it in his mouth, he could not recur to the question of the ten-pound note all at once. When tea was over she retired upstairs, and remained in retirement for ages. She descended at a quarter to eight, with