Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [45]
'By Jove...' he said to himself: 'It's true! What a jolly little mistress she'd make!'
He blamed Campion, Sandbach and the club gossips for the form the thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and female in its inexorable rings of talk, it will be because there is something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of suggestion!
He took a look at Mrs Duchemin and considered her infinitely commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered, many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough.
He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs Duchemin:
'Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?' Mrs Duchemin answered:
'No! I've asked Miss Fox to pour out. She's nearly stone deaf.' Miss Fox was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. 'You're to amuse Mr Tietjens.'
Tietjens noticed that Mrs Duchemin had an agreeable turret voice; it penetrated the noises of Mr Horsley as the missel-thrush's note a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop made a little grimace.
Mr Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens' turn again in a moment to hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs Haglen at Nobeys. But Tietjens' turn did not come...
A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fivish lady, with agreeable eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed, entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr Horsley on his declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones:
'Which is Mr Macmaster, the critic?' and then, in the dead lull to Tietjens: 'Are you Mr Macmaster, the critic? No!...Then you must be.'
Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it was an affair so strictly businesslike that he took it without any offence. She was remarking to Macmaster:
'Oh, Mr Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week,' and she had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room.
Miss Wannop said:
'What have you done with Genie?'
'Genie Mrs Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a dream. 'Oh yes! She's fast asleep. She'll sleep till four. I told Hannah to give a look at her now and then.'
Miss Wannop's hands fell open at her side.
'Oh, mother!' forced itself from her.
'Oh, yes,' Mrs Wannop said, 'we'd agreed to tell old Hannah we didn't want her to-day. So we had!' She said to Macmaster: 'Old Hannah is our charwoman,' wavered a little and then went on brightly: 'Of course it will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a little bit of previous explanation...' and she dragged off Macmaster, who seemed to bleat faintly...
That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to be driven to the rectory--for she herself could not drive a horse--Miss Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one whose name she didn't know; the other, a Mr Macmaster, a celebrated critic. Mrs Wannop had called up to her:
'A critic? Of what?' her whole sleepy being electrified.
'I don't know,' her daughter had answered. 'Books, I daresay...'
A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn't stand, had made twenty yards or so at several bounds, the handy man who drove had said:
Yer mother's 'owlin' after yer.' But Miss Wannop had answered that it didn't matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional look at Genie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did the news would be all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on them.