The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (24 page)

Mr. Darby had smiled as he read this. Well, he had thought, there was no accounting for tastes. Here was Sarah, a free woman with ten thousand pounds to play with, voluntarily absorbing herself in the petty tasks of a small suburban house, instead of making use of her wealth to leave herself free for … well, more important activities. ‘Poor Sarah,' he said to himself, ‘she has no … ah …
vision'

Well he would write to her. But writing to Sarah was not a complete release, for there was much that he would have liked to say, on which he must keep silence. If he told her of his picture-collecting she would merely laugh at him. So this side of his activities received only a passing reference in his letter. ‘I, too,' he wrote, ‘have been kept busy. I have had a good deal of important work on my hands recently in connection with the National Gallery, and now Lord Savershill has persuaded me to interest myself in the H.C.S., an influential body for reforming the hospitals. We have a big general meeting here in London to-morrow; so you can imagine my time is pretty full.' He ended the letter hurriedly, scribbled an address, and rose briskly to his feet. Then he paused. After all, now that he came to think of it,
why
was he hurrying? The meeting was not till to-morrow afternoon, and in the meantime he had nothing whatever to do except pursue his quest for British masterpieces. But he felt disinclined for this, at the moment. It was as if his energies had suddenly flagged. Could it be that he was overdoing it, involving himself in too many duties and interests? After all, he had been at it until half past ten last night, listening hard to Lord Savershill's account of the organization and activities of the H.C.S. Perhaps he had better take a morning off. He got his hat, stick and gloves and went out.

It was a warm, sunny morning and soon he found himself at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. Seeing a 19 bus, he boarded it, and climbed on to the top. It was just the morning for a bus ride and then, perhaps, for
a stroll across the Park. When the bus stopped beside St. George's Hospital, Mr. Darby studied the building critically, conscious of his new responsibilities. Almost at once his quick eye had detected something wrong. The building wanted washing, or perhaps repainting. He shook his head solemnly. ‘A bad business!' he said to himself. ‘We shall have to see to that.' And he determined to mention it at the general meeting.

Mr. Darby woke full of energy and importance on the eventful day. In the morning he made a thorough search of Penge, but, for once, returned home without a single masterpiece. He had been on the point of buying a Watts, but had refrained on discovering, in the nick of time, that it was an oleograph. Having lunched, he ordered a taxi and reached the address given him by Lord Savershill twenty minutes before the hour fixed for the General Meeting of the H.G.S. He was surprised and disconcerted to find that the place of assembly was not, as he had expected, a room in which he could sit and confer with Lord and Lady Savershill and a few other people, but a large hall with platform and auditorium. At first he thought he had made a mistake, but on enquiry he learned that this was indeed the place. The rows of chairs on the platform were still empty, but the auditorium was already nearly half full. Obviously, it seemed to him, his place was on the platform and he left the body of the hall and found his way to the stage door. But there he was obliged to confess to an official-looking person with a bunch of papers in his hand that he was not a member of the committee: in consequence he was politely told that his place was in the auditorium. Mr. Darby with dignified surprise mentioned that he was a friend of Lord Savershill's and was there by his special invitation. But even this did not produce the effect Mr. Darby had confidently expected on the official personage. Mr. Darby was politely, amiably, but firmly driven back to the auditorium.

Arrived there, he surveyed the hall. Doubtless, then, the
front row had been reserved for Lord Savershill's friends. But no, the front row was packed, in fact the whole hall was rapidly filling up and Mr. Darby, hurriedly choosing a seat for himself while there was still one to be had, found himself wedged into the general throng ten or twelve rows from the back of the hall. The whole thing was very annoying. From where he sat, Mr. Darby, being below the average height, could at first see nothing. Then, by a little shifting and manceuvring, he was able to get fleeting glimpses of the platform; and at last, by sitting very much on the left of his chair he succeeded, after many contortions, in identifying Lord Savershill through a long alley of heads and ears and ladies' hats. As Chairman Lord Savershill sat at a table in the centre of the platform.

Having achieved this, Mr. Darby felt reassured. Unfortunately, just as he had established this contact with the Chair, a stout lady two rows in front of him lurched sideways and cut Mr. Darby off again. At first he hoped that this displacement was temporary, that the lady would right herself in a moment, and reopen his communications. But no, her change of position was to be, it seemed, a permanent one, and when Lord Savershill stood up to speak, Mr. Darby could see only the top of his head.

Lord Savershill spoke well. His eloquence and ardour, which had fired Mr. Darby at the Brunswick two nights ago, gripped the attention of everyone in the hall,—everyone, that is, except Mr. Darby, who preserved a somewhat sceptical attitude. He was beginning to have his doubts of the merits of the H.C.S. But Lord Savershill seemed unaware of this coldly critical element in his audience and with undiminished enthusiasm he went on to speak of the extension of the Society's influence, of the gratifying way in which hospitals all over the kingdom had permitted and actually welcomed its intrusions, put necessary information at its disposal, allowed its inspectors and visitors free scope. When he had spoken for half an hour, he announced that they would now hear two reports, one from an inspector on Southern Division, on
Overlapping and its Prevention
, and
another from the Northern Division on the subject of
The Housing and Feeding of Hospital Staffs.

Mr. Darby, who had lunched well before the meeting, began now to find that the occasion was not without its soporific qualities. The gentleman who spoke on
Overlapping
obviously knew his job; but, lulled perhaps by this speaker's rather monotonous voice, perhaps by the close air of the hall, perhaps by his new doubts about the H.C.S., perhaps by the excellence of his lunch, Mr. Darby found, after ten minutes or so, that his attention had imperceptibly wandered far afield, indeed it had wandered so far that it had not only reached, but even done a considerable journey into, the Jungle where it had had a rather curious adventure with a large green parrot. He came to himself with a shock, blinked, yawned, and concentrated his attention once more on the speaker.

The next thing that he knew was that his neighbour was tapping him on the arm. Mr. Darby turned his head and found a lady's smiling face regarding him. ‘Excuse me,' she whispered; ‘you were snoring.'

Mr. Darby did not reply, but he was furious. Snoring, indeed! Whoever heard of such a thing. How could he be snoring when he wasn't asleep. Then a curious thing happened. He noticed for the first time that the monotonous-voiced speaker was no longer speaking. The voice speaking now was a woman's, and not only a woman's but a voice that was amazingly, unmistakably familiar. Goodness gracious! Gracious goodness! Could he be …? Yes, he must be dreaming. He made a violent effort, which disturbed and alarmed his neighbours on either side, to get a view of the speaker. In vain. The forest of heads and shoulders and ears walled him in. He seemed to be struggling at the bottom of a well. With a thumping heart he settled down resignedly to listen. ‘You may ask, ladies and gentlemen,' the voice was saying, and the voice was unmistakably Sarah's, ‘what qualifications I have for the work I have done.' Good lord! Mr. Darby went hot all over. Surely she wasn't going to blurt it out, standing there in front of everybody? ‘I will
tell you. In my younger days'—Mr. Darby writhed in his chair. If only he could silence her. No more! Not another word, Sarah. I order you to stop talking at once. It was so entirely unnecessary. So … so damnably idiotic. Just like her. She had no tact, no restraint, no sense of decency. These helpless and despairing expostulations shot through his mind, while his ears, scarlet to their tips, took in the appalling words—‘I was for some years head housemaid in a very large household, and during that time I frequently replaced the housekeeper.' Mr. Darby lowered his head, crimson with mortification, while Sarah's voice went imperturbably on. ‘That house was very well run. The staff was well fed, well housed, well organized, and happy. The report which I am now giving you is the result of several visits to two hospitals in the Northern Division, hospitals which, for reasons which you will understand, I shall not name. In each the staff—not the trained medical staff, but the household staff—were unsatisfactory and discontented. I will now give you as clear an account as I can—and I hope you will excuse me if I sometimes get muddled, for I'm not used to public speaking—as clear an account as I can of what I saw, remarking as I go along on what, in my opinion, I
ought
to have seen.'

Mr. Darby sat open-mouthed. He was not only amazed, he was annoyed, seriously annoyed. Sarah, he felt, was poaching on his preserves, and what was especially galling was that the poacher was evidently a much better shot and had scored a much bigger bag than the owner. He was annoyed too that she had kept so quiet about it. Not a word to him about all these activities of hers, not a word, even, about this visit to London. He was so resentful that he would not even admit to himself that Sarah was giving an astonishingly lucid and able account of her subject, and that the hall was following her with all the concentrated interest with which it had followed Lord Savershill. He sat, pink and mortified, no longer attempting to get a view of the platform, and when, soon after Sarah's report, the proceedings came to an end, he rose to his feet determined to leave the hall at once. But here he was defeated. A small and unimportant fraction of
the crowded audience, he was forced to submit to the will of the crowd and to drift with exasperating slowness in the direction in which it pushed him. Once through an opening in the crowd he got an uninterrupted glimpse of the platform. It too was emptying its crowd through the doors at the back, but a little group still lingered in front and Mr. Darby recognized Lord and Lady Savershill and Sarah. Lord Savershill and Sarah were in earnest conversation. Lady Savershill was gazing down, trying, it seemed, to find someone in the crowd below her: probably she was trying to catch him before he left the hall, to invite him to go with them. Well, Sarah and Lord Savershill could go on talking and Lady Savershill could go on searching:
he
was going home. With an angry struggle he forced his way to the exit and went out. As he drove home, he suddenly remembered with horror the letter he had written to Sarah on the previous morning. ‘We have a big general meeting here in London to-morrow,' he had written.

We!
There had been precious little
we
about it, he reflected bitterly. And now the letter was posted, gone past recall. Sarah would hardly have got it yet, but she would get it eventually, and, turning crimson to the very roots of his hair, he pictured her sarcastic smile and heard her grim chuckle as she read the unfortunate phrase.

Though it had been of her own free will that she returned home, Sarah had travelled north with a heavy heart. It was a far from happy life that she was returning to, and it was only because she was flying from a still less bearable one that she had been able to persist in her determination. But this persistence was not the result of thought and conscious choice. The question of staying in London or returning home alone had not presented itself to her as a problem: her action in face of it was impulsive. She fled from idleness instinctively, because idleness for her was the worst of all ills. Work producing practical results was for her an indispensable condition of life. With Mr. Darby's sedulous accumulation of culture for the mere sake of culture she had not the smallest sympathy; it was nothing better than self-indulgent idleness. She did not expect to be happy at home. To be alone, to have no one to work for but herself, would deprive her life of most of its meaning; but, at least, if there was honest hard work to do, life would have more meaning than it had had during the last fortnight at the Balmoral. The truth was, though she did not know it, that she was an even more fanatical devotee of work for work's sake than Mr. Darby was of culture for culture's sake. She travelled home ravenous for work. She had refrained from letting Mrs. Bricketts know of her return, because she wanted for herself all the work she could find to do. She would scrub floors, wash, dust, polish, slave from morning till night till she had shaken off this disease of idleness.

She dined in the train and on arriving at Newchester took a taxi home, stopping it once or twice on the way to lay in supplies for the morrow.

She was surprised, on arriving at Number Seven Moseley Terrace, to find some difficulty in opening the front door. The latchkey had worked as usual: it was when she had already unlatched the door that the difficulty occurred. Something inside was in the way. But the door yielded to an extra push, and Sarah, on entering, found the floor heaped with letters. What, in the name of fortune, was the meaning of it? Jim usually received about half a dozen letters a week, and she seldom received one: yet here, after a fortnight, was a perfect haystack of them. She swept the pile aside with her foot, so as to open the door wide and let in the taxi-man with her luggage. When he was gone, she went into the sitting-room, drew up the blinds and opened the windows, for it was warm and still daylight; went to the kitchen and put a kettle on the gas-stove to make herself a cup of tea; then carried her luggage up to her bedroom, took off her things, unpacked the smaller of her two pieces of luggage, and put on an apron. It was not until she had had her tea, returned to the bedroom and made the bed, and to some degree turned the chilly, lifeless house into a living and human thing once more that she went and took another look at the letters. What
could
be the meaning of that huge heap of rubbish? She stooped down and began turning them over. They were for Jim, of course; no doubt some nonsensical idea of his had brought them along; but here and there, as she continued her examination of them, she found one addressed to herself, and by the time she had run through the whole heap she had picked out no less than twenty-seven. These she took to the sitting-room and, settling into the armchair, opened one.