Short Fiction by Arthur Machen (ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Alice says that⁠—upstairs⁠—they have only⁠—one room furnished. The maid told her⁠—herself.”

With an unconscious gesture she pressed his head to her breast, and he in turn was bending her red lips to his own, when a violent jangle clamoured through the silent house. They sat up, and Mrs. Darnell went hurriedly to the door.

“That’s Alice,” she said. “She is always in in time. It has only just struck ten.”

Darnell shivered with annoyance. His lips, he knew, had almost been opened. Mary’s pretty handkerchief, delicately scented from a little flagon that a school friend had given her, lay on the floor, and he picked it up, and kissed it, and hid it away.

The question of the range occupied them all through June and far into July. Mrs. Darnell took every opportunity of going to the West End and investigating the capacity of the latest makes, gravely viewing the new improvements and hearing what the shopmen had to say; while Darnell, as he said, “kept his eyes open” about the City. They accumulated quite a literature of the subject, bringing away illustrated pamphlets, and in the evenings it was an amusement to look at the pictures. They viewed with reverence and interest the drawings of great ranges for hotels and public institutions, mighty contrivances furnished with a series of ovens each for a different use, with wonderful apparatus for grilling, with batteries of accessories which seemed to invest the cook almost with the dignity of a chief engineer. But when, in one of the lists, they encountered the images of little toy “cottage” ranges, for four pounds, and even for three pounds ten, they grew scornful, on the strength of the eight or ten pound article which they meant to purchase⁠—when the merits of the diverse patents had been thoroughly thrashed out.

The Raven was for a long time Mary’s favourite. It promised the utmost economy with the highest efficiency, and many times they were on the point of giving the order. But the Glow seemed equally seductive, and it was only £8 5s. as compared with £9 7s. 6d., and though the Raven was supplied to the Royal Kitchen, the Glow could show more fervent testimonials from continental potentates.

It seemed a debate without end, and it endured day after day till that morning, when Darnell woke from the dream of the ancient wood, of the fountains rising into grey vapour beneath the heat of the sun. As he dressed, an idea struck him, and he brought it as a shock to the hurried breakfast, disturbed by the thought of the City bus which passed the corner of the street at 9:15.

“I’ve got an improvement on your plan, Mary,” he said, with triumph. “Look at that,” and he flung a little book on the table.

He laughed. “It beats your notion all to fits. After all, the great expense is the coal. It’s not the stove⁠—at least that’s not the real mischief. It’s the coal is so dear. And here you are. Look at those oil stoves. They don’t burn any coal, but the cheapest fuel in the world⁠—oil; and for two pounds ten you can get a range that will do everything you want.”

“Give me the book,” said Mary, “and we will talk it over in the evening, when you come home. Must you be going?”

Darnell cast an anxious glance at the clock.

“Goodbye,” and they kissed each other seriously and dutifully, and Mary’s eyes made Darnell think of those lonely water-pools, hidden in the shadow of the ancient woods.

So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life. To Darnell the true life would have seemed madness, and when, now and again, the shadows and vague images reflected from its splendour fell across his path, he was afraid, and took refuge in what he would have called the sane “reality” of common and usual incidents and interests. His absurdity was, perhaps, the more evident, inasmuch as “reality” for him was a matter of kitchen ranges, of saving a few shillings; but in truth the folly would have been greater if it had been concerned with racing stables, steam yachts, and the spending of many thousand pounds.

But so went forth Darnell, day by day, strangely mistaking death for life, madness for sanity, and purposeless and wandering phantoms for true beings. He was sincerely of opinion that he was a City clerk, living in Shepherd’s Bush⁠—having forgotten the mysteries and the far-shining glories of the kingdom which was his by legitimate inheritance.

All day long a fierce and heavy heat had brooded over the City, and as Darnell neared home he saw the mist lying on all the damp lowlands, wreathed in coils about Bedford Park to the south, and mounting to the west, so that the tower of Acton Church loomed out of a grey lake. The grass in the squares and on the lawns which he overlooked as the bus lumbered wearily along was burnt to the colour of dust. Shepherd’s Bush Green was a wretched desert, trampled brown, bordered with monotonous poplars, whose leaves hung motionless in air that was still, hot smoke. The foot passengers struggled wearily along the pavements, and the reek of the summer’s end mingled with the breath of the brickfields made Darnell gasp, as if he were inhaling the poison of some foul sickroom.

He made but a slight inroad into the cold mutton that adorned the tea-table, and confessed that he felt rather “done up” by the weather and the day’s work.

“I have had a trying day, too,” said Mary. “Alice has been very queer and troublesome all day, and I have had to speak to her quite seriously. You know I think her Sunday evenings out have a rather unsettling influence on the girl. But what is one to do?”

“Has she got a young man?”

“Of course: a grocer’s assistant from the Goldhawk Road⁠—Wilkin’s, you know.