The card, p.2
The Card, page 2
‘How do?’ the eldest of the Swetnam boys nodded carelessly.
‘How do, Swetnam?’ said Denry, with equal carelessness.
The thing was accomplished! That greeting was like a Masonic initiation, and henceforward he was the peer of no matter whom. At first he had thought that four hundred eyes would be fastened on him, their glance saying, ‘This youth is wearing a dress-suit for the first time, and it is not paid for, either!’ But it was not so. And the reason was that the entire population of the Town Hall was heartily engaged in pretending that never in its life had it been seen after seven o’clock of a night apart from a dress-suit. Denry observed with joy that, while numerous middle-aged and awkward men wore red or white silk handkerchiefs in their waistcoats, such people as Charles Fearns, the Swetnams, and Harold Etches did not. He was, then, in the shyness of his handkerchief, on the side of the angels.
He passed up the double staircase (decorated with white or pale frocks of unparalleled richness), and so into the grand hall. A scarlet orchestra was on the platform, and many people strolled about the floor in attitudes of expectation. The walls were festooned with flowers. The thrill of being magnificent seized him, and he was drenched in a vast desire to be truly magnificent himself. He dreamt of magnificence and boot-brushes kept sticking out of this dream like black mud out of snow. In his reverie he looked about for Ruth Earp, but she was invisible. Then he went downstairs again, idly; gorgeously feigning that he spent six evenings a week in ascending and descending monumental staircases, appropriately clad. He was determined to be as sublime as anyone.
There was a stir in the corridor, and the sublimest consented to be excited.
The Countess was announced to be imminent. Everybody was grouped round the main portal, careless of temperatures. Six times was the Countess announced to be imminent before she actually appeared, expanding from the narrow gloom of her black carriage like a magic vision. Aldermen received her – and they did not do it with any excess of gracefulness. They seemed afraid of her, as though she was recovering from influenza and they feared to catch it. She had precisely the same high voice, and precisely the same efficient smile, as she had employed to Denry, and these instruments worked marvels on aldermen; they were as melting as salt on snow. The Countess disappeared upstairs in a cloud of shrill apologies and trailing aldermen. She seemed to have greeted everybody except Denry. Somehow he was relieved that she had not drawn attention to him. He lingered, hesitating, and then he saw a being in a long yellow overcoat, with a bit of peacock’s feather at the summit of a shiny high hat. This being held a lady’s fur mantle. Their eyes met. Denry had to decide instantly. He decided.
‘Hello, Jock!’ he said.
‘Hello, Denry!’ said the other, pleased.
‘What’s been happening?’ Denry inquired, friendly.
Then Jock told him about the antics of one of the Countess’s horses.
He went upstairs again, and met Ruth Earp coming down. She was glorious in white. Except that nothing glittered in her hair, she looked the very equal of the Countess, at a little distance, plain though her features were.
‘What about that waltz?’ Denry began informally.
‘That waltz is nearly over,’ said Ruth Earp, with chilliness. ‘I suppose you’ve been staring at her ladyship with all the other men.’
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know the waltz was—’
‘Well, why didn’t you look at your programme?’
‘Haven’t got one,’ he said naïvely.
He had omitted to take a programme. Ninny! Barbarian!
‘Better get one,’ she said cuttingly, somewhat in her role of dancing mistress.
‘Can’t we finish the waltz?’ he suggested, crestfallen.
‘No!’ she said, and continued her solitary way downwards.
She was hurt. He tried to think of something to say that was equal to the situation, and equal to the style of his suit. But he could not. In a moment he heard her, below him, greeting some male acquaintance in the most effusive way.
Yet, if Denry had not committed a wicked crime for her, she could never have come to the dance at all!
He got a programme, and with terror gripping his heart he asked sundry young and middle-aged women whom he knew by sight and by name for a dance. (Ruth had taught him how to ask.) Not one of them had a dance left. Several looked at him as much as to say: ‘You must be a goose to suppose that my programme is not filled up in the twinkling of my eye!’
Then he joined a group of despisers of dancing near the main door. Harold Etches was there, the wealthiest manufacturer of his years (barely twenty-four) in the Five Towns. Also Shillitoe, cause of another of Denry’s wicked crimes. The group was taciturn, critical, and very doggish.
The group observed that the Countess was not dancing. The Earl was dancing (need it be said with Mrs Jos Curtenty, second wife of the Deputy Mayor?), but the Countess stood resolutely smiling, surrounded by aldermen. Possibly she was getting her breath; possibly nobody had had the pluck to ask her. Anyhow, she seemed to be stranded there, on a beach of aldermen. Very wisely she had brought with her no members of a house-party from Sneyd Hall. Members of a house-party, at a municipal ball, invariably operate as a bar between greatness and democracy; and the Countess desired to participate in the life of the people.
‘Why don’t some of those johnnies ask her?’ Denry burst out. He had hitherto said nothing in the group, and he felt that he must be a man with the rest of them.
‘Well, you go and do it. It’s a free country,’ said Shillitoe.
‘So I would, for two pins!’ said Denry.
Harold Etches glanced at him, apparently resentful of his presence there. Harold Etches was determined to put the extinguisher on him.
‘I’ll bet you a fiver you don’t,’ said Etches scornfully.
‘I’ll take you,’ said Denry, very quickly, and very quickly walked off.
VII
‘She can’t eat me. She can’t eat me!’
This was what he said to himself as he crossed the floor. People seemed to make a lane for him, divining his incredible intention. If he had not started at once, if his legs had not started of themselves, he would never have started; and, not being in command of a fiver, he would afterwards have cut a preposterous figure in the group. But started he was, like a piece of clockwork that could not be stopped! In the grand crises of his life something not himself, something more powerful than himself, jumped up in him and forced him to do things. Now for the first time he seemed to understand what had occurred within him in previous crises.
In a second – so it appeared – he had reached the Countess. Just behind her was his employer, Mr Duncalf, whom Denry had not previously noticed there. Denry regretted this, for he had never mentioned to Mr Duncalf that he was coming to the ball, and he feared Mr Duncalf.
‘Could I have this dance with you?’ he demanded bluntly, but smiling and showing his teeth.
No ceremonial title! No mention of ‘pleasure’ or ‘honour’. Not a trace of the formula in which Ruth Earp had instructed him! He forgot all such trivialities.
‘I’ve won that fiver, Mr Harold Etches,’ he said to himself.
The mouths of aldermen inadvertently opened. Mr Duncalf blenched.
‘It’s nearly over, isn’t it?’ said the Countess, still efficiently smiling. She did not recognize Denry. In that suit he might have been a Foreign Office attaché.
‘Oh! that doesn’t matter, I’m sure,’ said Denry.
She yielded, and he took the paradisiacal creature in his arms. It was her business that evening to be universally and inclusively polite. She could not have begun with a refusal. A refusal might have dried up all other invitations whatsoever. Besides, she saw that the aldermen wanted a lead. Besides, she was young, though a countess, and adored dancing.
Thus they waltzed together, while the flower of Bursley’s chivalry gazed in enchantment. The Countess’s fan, depending from her arm, dangled against Denry’s suit in a rather confusing fashion, which withdrew his attention from his feet. He laid hold of it gingerly between two unemployed fingers. After that he managed fairly well. Once they came perilously near the Earl and his partner; nothing else. And then the dance ended, exactly when Denry had begun to savour the astounding spectacle of himself enclasping the Countess.
The Countess had soon perceived that he was the merest boy.
‘You waltz quite nicely!’ she said, like an aunt, but with more than an aunt’s smile.
‘Do I?’ he beamed. Then something compelled him to say: ‘Do you know, it’s the first time I’ve ever waltzed in my life, except in a lesson, you know?’
‘Really!’ she murmured. ‘You pick things up easily, I suppose?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
Either the question or the tone sent the Countess off into carillons of amusement. Everybody could see that Denry had made the Countess laugh tremendously. It was on this note that the waltz finished. She was still laughing when he bowed to her (as taught by Ruth Earp). He could not comprehend why she had so laughed, save on the supposition that he was more humorous than he had suspected. Anyhow, he laughed too, and they parted laughing. He remembered that he had made a marked effect (though not one of laughter) on the tailor by quickly returning the question, ‘Are you?’ And his unpremeditated stroke with the Countess was similar. When he had got ten yards on his way towards Harold Etches and a fiver he felt something in his hand. The Countess’s fan was sticking between his fingers. It had unhooked itself from her chain. He furtively pocketed it.
VIII
‘Just the same as dancing with any other woman!’ He told this untruth in reply to a question from Shillitoe. It was the least he could do. And any other young man in his place would have said as much or as little.
‘What was she laughing at?’ somebody asked.
‘Ah!’ said Denry, judiciously, ‘wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Here you are!’ said Etches, with an inattentive, plutocratic gesture handing over a five-pound note. He was one of those men who never venture out of sight of a bank without a banknote in their pockets – ‘Because you never know what may turn up.’
Denry accepted the note with a silent nod. In some directions he was gifted with astounding insight, and he could read in the faces of the haughty males surrounding him that in the space of a few minutes he had risen from nonentity into renown. He had become a great man. He did not at once realize how great, how renowned. But he saw enough in those eyes to cause his heart to glow, and to rouse in his brain those ambitious dreams which stirred him upon occasion. He left the group; he had need of motion, and also of that mental privacy which one may enjoy while strolling about on a crowded floor in the midst of a considerable noise. He noticed that the Countess was now dancing with an alderman, and that the alderman, by an oversight inexcusable in an alderman, was not wearing gloves. It was he, Denry, who had broken the ice, so that the alderman might plunge into the water. He first had danced with the Countess, and had rendered her up to the alderman with delicious gaiety upon her countenance. By instinct he knew Bursley, and he knew that he would be talked of. He knew that, for a time at any rate, he would displace even Jos Curtenty, that almost professional ‘card’ and amuser of burgesses, in the popular imagination. It would not be: ‘Have ye heard Jos’s latest?’ It would be: ‘Have ye heard about young Machin, Duncalf’s clerk?’
Then he met Ruth Earp, strolling in the opposite direction with a young girl, one of her pupils, of whom all he knew was that her name was Nellie, and that this was her first ball: a childish little thing with a wistful face. He could not decide whether to look at Ruth or to avoid her glance. She settled the point by smiling at him in a manner that could not be ignored.
‘Are you going to make it up to me for that waltz you missed?’ said Ruth Earp. She pretended to be vexed and stern, but he knew that she was not. ‘Or is your programme full?’ she added.
‘I should like to,’ he said simply.
‘But perhaps you don’t care to dance with us poor, ordinary people, now you’ve danced with the Countess!’ she said, with a certain lofty and bitter pride.
He perceived that his tone had lacked eagerness.
‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said, as if hurt.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can have the supper dance.’
He took her programme to write on it.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘there’s a name down here for the supper-dance. “Herbert”, it looks like.’
‘Oh!’ she replied carelessly, ‘that’s nothing. Cross it out.’
So he crossed Herbert out.
‘Why don’t you ask Nellie here for a dance?’ said Ruth Earp.
And Nellie blushed. He gathered that the possible honour of dancing with the supremely great man had surpassed Nellie’s modest expectations.
‘Can I have the next one?’ he said.
‘Oh, yes!’ Nellie timidly whispered.
‘It’s a polka, and you aren’t very good at polking, you know,’ Ruth warned him. ‘Still, Nellie will pull you through.’
Nellie laughed, in silver. The naïve child thought that Ruth was trying to joke at Denry’s expense. Her very manifest joy and pride in being seen with the unique Mr Machin, in being the next after the Countess to dance with him, made another mirror in which Denry could discern the reflection of his vast importance.
At the supper, which was worthy of the hospitable traditions of the Chell family (though served standing-up in the police-court), he learnt all the gossip of the dance from Ruth Earp; amongst other things that more than one young man had asked the Countess for a dance, and had been refused, though Ruth Earp for her part declined to believe that aldermen and councillors had utterly absorbed the Countess’s programme. Ruth hinted that the Countess was keeping a second dance open for him, Denry. When she asked him squarely if he meant to request another from the Countess, he said no, positively. He knew when to let well alone, a knowledge which is more precious than a knowledge of geography. The supper was the summit of Denry’s triumph. The best people spoke to him without being introduced. And lovely creatures mysteriously and intoxicatingly discovered that programmes which had been crammed two hours before were not, after all, quite full.
‘Do tell us what the Countess was laughing at?’ This question was shot at him at least thirty times. He always said he would not tell. And one girl who had danced with Mr Stanway, who had danced with the Countess, said that Mr Stanway had said that the Countess would not tell either. Proof, here, that he was being extensively talked about!
Towards the end of the festivity the rumour floated abroad that the Countess had lost her fan. The rumour reached Denry, who maintained a culpable silence. But when all was over, and the Countess was departing, he rushed down after her, and, in a dramatic fashion which demonstrated his genius for the effective, he caught her exactly as she was getting into her carriage.
‘I’ve just picked it up,’ he said, pushing through the crowd of worshippers.
‘Oh! thank you so much!’ she said. And the Earl also thanked Denry. And then the Countess, leaning from the carriage, said, with archness in her efficient smile: ‘You do pick things up easily, don’t you?’
And both Denry and the Countess laughed without restraint, and the pillars of Bursley society were mystified.
Denry winked at Jock as the horses pawed away. And Jock winked back.
The envied of all, Denry walked home, thinking violently. At a stroke he had become possessed of more than he could earn from Duncalf in a month. The faces of the Countess, of Ruth Earp, and of the timid Nellie mingled in exquisite hallucinations before his tired eyes. He was inexpressibly happy. Trouble, however, awaited him.
2
The Widow Hullins’s House
I
The simple fact that he first, of all the citizens of Bursley, had asked a countess for a dance (and not been refused) made a new man of Denry Machin. He was not only regarded by the whole town as a fellow wonderful and dazzling, but he so regarded himself. He could not get over it. He had always been cheerful, even to optimism. He was now in a permanent state of calm, assured jollity. He would get up in the morning with song and dance. Bursley and the general world were no longer Bursley and the general world; they had been mysteriously transformed into an oyster; and Denry felt strangely that the oyster-knife was lying about somewhere handy, but just out of sight, and that presently he should spy it and seize it. He waited for something to happen. And not in vain.
A few days after the historic revelry, Mrs Codleyn called to see Denry’s employer. Mr Duncalf was her solicitor. A stout, breathless, and yet muscular woman of near sixty, the widow of a chemist and druggist who had made money before limited companies had taken the liberty of being pharmaceutical. The money had been largely invested in mortgage on cottage property; the interest on it had not been paid, and latterly Mrs Codleyn had been obliged to foreclose, thus becoming the owner of some seventy cottages. Mrs Codleyn, though they brought her in about twelve pounds a week gross, esteemed these cottages an infliction, a bugbear, an affront, and a positive source of loss. Invariably she talked as though she would willingly present them to anybody who cared to accept – ‘and glad to be rid of ’em!’ Most owners of property talk thus. She particularly hated paying the rates on them.
Now there had recently occurred, under the direction of the Borough Surveyor, a revaluation of the whole town. This may not sound exciting; yet a revaluation is the most exciting event (save a municipal ball given by a titled mayor) that can happen in any town. If your house is rated at forty pounds a year, and rates are seven shillings in the pound, and the revaluation lifts you up to forty-five pounds, it means thirty-five shillings a year right out of your pocket, which is the interest on thirty-five pounds. And if the revaluation drops you to thirty-five pounds, it means thirty-five shillings in your pocket, which is a box of Havanas or a fancy waistcoat. Is not this exciting? And there are seven thousand houses in Bursley. Mrs Codleyn hoped that her rateable value would be reduced. She based the hope chiefly on the fact that she was a client of Mr Duncalf, the Town Clerk. The Town Clerk was not the Borough Surveyor and had nothing to do with the revaluation. Moreover, Mrs Codleyn presumably entrusted him with her affairs because she considered him an honest man, and an honest man could not honestly have sought to tickle the Borough Surveyor out of the narrow path of rectitude in order to oblige a client. Nevertheless, Mrs Codleyn thought that because she patronized the Town Clerk her rates ought to be reduced! Such is human nature in the provinces! So different from human nature in London, where nobody ever dreams of offering even a match to a municipal official, lest the act might be construed into an insult.
