The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (29 page)

Having thus, abruptly yet politely, made clear his attitude, Mr. Darby, much soothed, fell into an innocent sleep.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

Yet he awoke next morning out of humour. It was all very well, but Sarah's behaviour, throughout this H.C.S. business, had left much to be desired. She had made a mystery
of it to begin with, had never so much as mentioned that she was coming to London, and now, without consulting him, was hurrying back to Newchester. The truth was that Mr. Darby had grown accustomed, during the twenty years of his married life, to being an only child and had acquired the outlook of that pampered creature; and now that Sarah had presented him, in the H.C.S., with a little sister, he felt very keenly that his nose was put out. He hated his little sister and bitterly resented Sarah's absorption in her. He began to hate the Savershills too; for were they not the precise equivalent of those tyrannical, busy, maternity nurses who intrude upon such occasions? They had taken possession of Sarah and put a barrier between him and her. His philosophy was, unhappily, not comprehensive enough to afford him much comfort, for it failed to point out to him that Sarah was doing to him only what, with the arrival of his fortune, he had done to her. It is truly said that it takes two to make a quarrel. If one of the pair refuses to fight there can be no duel. But in the matter of an assertion of independence the reverse is true. Mr. Darby had boldly asserted his independence and Sarah had aided and abetted him by revealing an unexpected dependence upon him. It was natural therefore that he should resent her change of attitude. By this assertion of
her
independence she was poaching on his preserves and robbing him of a large share of his game. Without really knowing why, Mr. Darby felt deeply aggrieved. Pink-faced, vague-eyed (for his spectacles were on the dressing-table), he lay on his back and gazed at the window with the furrowed brow of a baby that is slowly working up towards a cry. Yes, it was all very well, but, H.C.S. or no H.C.S. he was her husband, the man whom, twenty years ago, she had solemnly sworn to love, honour and obey. By means of these reflections Mr. Darby worked himself up into a state of righteous indignation, and now a series of heated dialogues passed through his mind in which he gave rein to his feelings with such telling effect that Sarah was rapidly convinced of sin and reduced to humble repentance. The rudimentary sounds of indignation with
which he accompanied his part in these wordless arguments must have roused Sarah, for she turned over and asked in a sleepy voice: ‘What's the matter, Jim? Have you got one of your throats?'

‘Throat? Certainly not,' replied Mr. Darby sharply, embarrassed at the discovery that the intensity of his feelings had made them audible. ‘No!' he added more mildly. ‘No throat, thank you!' After a few minutes of silence he changed his mind and added loftily: ‘I was only wondering whether, after all, you and I are husband and wife.'

Sarah sat up and studied him grimly. ‘If there's any doubt about it, you'd better get out of bed at once,' she said sternly, and added aloud to herself, ‘Hm! What next?'

‘One wouldn't have thought it was much to ask,' went on Mr. Darby. ‘
A
simple and very … ah … natural request, one would have supposed.'

As a nurse might look at a child, wondering whether or not it had a slight temperature, Sarah studied him again, with knitted brows. ‘You'd better wake up and tell me what's the matter, Jim, instead of lying there
thinking
and
supposing.'

‘A day or two couldn't make any difference,' Mr. Darby went on, ignoring Sarah's remarks; ‘and a husband has a right to expect …'

‘To expect what?'

‘A little consideration, some slight … ah … prefidence … I mean, preservence.'

Sarah shook her head. ‘Goodness knows what you're talking about,' she said. ‘If you were to get up and have a wash and put on your spectacles, perhaps we should get some sense out of you.'

‘After all, you promised, every wife promises, at the … ah … the altar …'

Sarah threw aside the bedclothes. ‘I'm getting up,' she said: ‘it's time. When you've got something definite to say, I'll attend to you.'

Mr. Darby, seeing that his somewhat impressionistic methods were producing no effect, came to the point. ‘I
asked you to give me a day or two before you went back,' he said, ‘and, without so much as stopping to think, you. you … ah …'

‘I told you why I couldn't. That was all settled last night. Now up you get, or you'll be late for breakfast.'

‘I put it,' Mr. Darby stubbornly pursued, ‘as a request, a polite request. I might have made it an order, a command.'

‘Yes, I suppose you might,' said Sarah with weary tolerance, ‘but it wouldn't have made any difference.'

‘So the solemn promise, the solemn vow to love, honour and obey goes for nothing, I take it?'

‘You can't love, honour and obey someone who isn't there,' said Sarah. ‘If you choose to leave me and your home and go idling about by yourself, well, you must take the consequences.'

‘I didn't leave you, Sarah. How can you talk such … ah … falsehoods,' replied Mr. Darby with some heat. ‘You left
me
. You refused to remain with me here in London.'

Sarah, in a bodice and petticoat with hands on hips, faced the recumbent Mr. Darby. ‘The only reason you didn't leave me, Jim, was that I came with you: but you were going in any case, and you know it.' She turned her back on him and went over to the dressing-table.

Mr. Darby, pink, fretful, blue-eyed, sat up in bed. ‘I shall not argue with you,' he said. He felt a tide of indignation and eloquence rushing to his head. ‘If you prefer,' he announced conclusively, ‘to be disingeenious and … ah … prevaricacious, there is no more to be said. I can only leave you to the … ah … contemplation of your broken promises.'

‘Thank you! ‘said Sarah. ‘You couldn't do better. I'm quite able to look after my own promises.' She took up a hairbrush and turned her head aggressively. ‘And in the meantime you'd better get hold of the Prayer Book and see what it was
you
promised and vowed. You've forgotten that part of it, it seems. Just you look it up. You'll be surprised.'

‘I shall do nothing of the sort,' Mr. Darby retorted angrily.

‘Don't then!' said Sarah. ‘But don't try to teach me my
business either. And unless you get up at once I shall come and pull the clothes off you: that'll cool you.'

When, half an hour later, Mr. and Mrs. Darby appeared serenely at breakfast, no one could have suspected that a tempestuous gulf yawned between them. But it did, and Mr. Darby never ceased to be aware of it, even while relishing with a perfect placidity the sweets of a baronial breakfast-table. Lady Savershill and Sarah were leaving for the north by the morning train and Mr. Darby, still cherishing a fierce resentment against Sarah, resolved to exhibit it by leaving before they did. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, he waylaid the butler, asked for his bag to be packed immediately and a cab to be ordered, and, taking leave of his host and hostess with that old-world punctiliousness which so well became him, left the house without another word to Sarah.

The smoking room in Bedford Square had in it a large writing-desk and Mr. Darby therefore used the room not only for the purposes of digestive leisure but also as his study. Arrived back from Eaton Square, he instantly hastened to this retreat, anxious to get back to real work. ‘Society,' he thought to himself, ‘is all very well, but for serious-minded and public-spirited persons there are more important things in the world than dinner-parties, house-parties, public meetings, H.C.S's, and suchlike trifles.' He entered the room with the same businesslike precision as that with which he had been accustomed to enter Messrs. Lamb & Marston's, rubbing the palms of his hands together to show his eagerness to get to grips with work; cast an authoritative glance round the room; then seated himself briskly at his desk. He got out pen, ink, and paper, fumbled in a pigeonhole, found a scarlet notebook, opened it and laid it before him. He was about to construct a descriptive catalogue of the Darby Collection. On the sheets of paper in front of him he wrote the number, title and artist's name of the pictures, leaving a large space under each. When this was finished he rose with the same industrious precision, took up the sheets and a stiff-backed blotter, brought from his pocket a gold pencil case, and went to the door. Passing Princep in the corridor on his way to the Picture Gallery he said: ‘I shall be busy until lunch-time, Princep. Please see that I am not disturbed.'

If Princep, instead of his formal ‘Very good, sir,' had asked him in what way he expected to be disturbed, Mr. Darby, for the life of him, could not have told him, for nobody ever called, even at the appropriate hours for calling, and the telephone was seldom used except by Princep and Mrs. Princep for the purposes of housekeeping. Mr. Darby's order
could therefore have been nothing more than one of those meaningless formalities which add dignity to a dignified occasion.

Having entered the Gallery he switched on the full force of light and heat with a commanding gesture, and it was only the pale unreality of the electric light that reminded him that it was broad daylight and summer weather. But Mr. Darby did not, even to himself, confess to a mistake. He had changed his mind, that was all, in the autocratic, almost petulant way that millionaires do,—decided that daylight and summer would suffice, and with another commanding gesture he abolished the artificial aids.

Then, crossing the polished floor and stationing himself in front of
No
. I.
Portrait of a Young Lady by Romney
, he began to take notes. ‘The young lady,' he wrote: then he paused, crossed out
young lady
, and substituted
figure. That
was better. ‘The figure is dressed …'
Dressed
sounded to Mr. Darby's practised ear a little commonplace. He cancelled it and pursued for a moment with knitted brows an elusive rabbit of a word. Suddenly his brow cleared, his spectacles shone, and with the pursed lips of the epicure he wrote, in place of the word
dressed
, the word
garbed
. With head on one side Mr. Darby considered this happy find. Yes,
garbed
was certainly much better. ‘The figure is garbed in white muslin, the head slightly inclined to the left.' Then, recalling the phrase he had coined when he first caught sight of the picture in the little shop in Greenwich, he added: ‘Observe the natural elegance of the pose.' Now for the pink sash. What was that word, rather an effective word, that writers on art often used when speaking of colour? Chord? Harmony? No. Note! That was the word. ‘The pink sash introduces a pleasant note and contrasts well…' No, not
well
, a better word than
well
. Effish …? Effic …? Efficaciously? Not quite! Effectively! That was it,—
effectively!
‘… contrasts effectively with the head … the mass … the
shock!
… with the shock of golden curls.'

So, for nearly two hours, Mr. Darby continued, lost to the world, completely absorbed in his fascinating task, often
hurrying, in the throes of literary composition, to one of the settees in the middle of the room, so as to enable himself, with the pad on his knees, to scribble more rapidly and legibly and so diminish the risk of losing some particularly admirable phrase before he could put it on paper. By lunch-time the work was well in hand and Mr. Darby in great good-humour. He had begun it in a spirit of protest, almost of vengeance, against Sarah. His object had been far less to produce a catalogue for its own sake, than to prove to himself that his work was of infinitely more importance than hers, with her hospitals and societies and Savershills. This object had now been perfectly achieved. He was thoroughly pleased with himself and with the world in general and he was also extremely hungry.

As he opened the door of the Gallery with his pad and papers under his arm, the roar of the luncheon gong greeted him. ‘Really,' he reflected, as he hurried down the corridor, ‘one never gets a moment to oneself.'

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After an excellent lunch, an excellent cigar, and a well earned nap, Mr. Darby found that mind and body were clamouring for physical action. The feverish labour of literary composition demanded a contrast, even an antidote. He summoned Princep, ordered him to telephone for a car to be round in ten minutes. He was resolved on an afternoon of picture-hunting. His pocket-book told him that Streatham was the next objective on the list; and a quarter of an hour later, upright, important, bowler-hatted, a pair of butter-coloured gloves lying on his lap, a single pearl glimmering in his subdued but lustrous tie, he was spinning down Charing Cross Road, while, away to the south, Streatham, utterly unconscious of its impending invasion, flaunted its art-treasures undefended. By tea-time, without a struggle, without even a murmur, it had yielded up a fine Lawrence, a passable Gainsborough, a large work ticketed ‘Salisbury Cathedral by Constable (?) 35 guineas,' and several less important pieces.

The sack of Streatham was followed in the ensuing weeks by a series of brilliant operations. With an invariable and dazzling success Mr. Darby combed London (and by London is meant Greater London), swept the suburbs, and by a number of bold, sudden, and well-planned sallies rifled towns as remote as Sutton, Cheam, Croydon, Barnet, St. Albans, Bromley and innumerable others. Indeed those days were (or would have been, if all these towns and districts had realized what was happening to them) an artistic Reign of Terror. In a few short weeks a vast area was plundered and laid waste with a swiftness, a precision and a completeness unequalled even by the campaigns of Buonaparte. Few people who saw, through the windows of the smart bloodred limousine as it swept down Piccadilly, Whitehall or the Tottenham Court Road, the plump, upright, correct, and apparently conventional little man, gazing always straight ahead of him as if at an invisible destination, can have realized that a revolution was afoot or guessed at the ruthless determination and the fever of patriotism that burned behind that bland and child-like countenance. Least of all did the Trustees and Director of the National Gallery, wrapped snug and unsuspecting in their hide-bound traditions, or those Madonnas and Saints—Italians, Spaniards, Flemings and the various other undesirable aliens—who smiled in happy ignorance from their frames at the crowds of renegade Britons who stopped to admire them.