On days when she was feeling particularly nervous she lacked the courage even to do this, but sat motionless, hoping that the noise of her heart might not be audible in the street, until the knocker at last wore out his patience and walked away. Next day the man from Selfridge’s would heap coals of fire upon her by apologizing for the retarded delivery. ‘Called yesterday evening, madam, but there was nobody at home.’ And Elinor would feel ashamed of herself and a fool. But the next time she was alone and nervous, she would do exactly the same thing.
This afternoon she had courage; she ventured to look at the enemy—at as much of him, that is to say, as she could see, peeping sideways through the glass towards the door. A grey trouser-leg and an elbow were all that entered her field of vision. There was yet another knock. Then the trouser-leg moved back, the whole coat came into view, the black hat and, with a turn of the head, Spandrell’s face. She ran to the door and opened.
‘Sspandrell!’ she called, for he had already turned to go. He came back, lifting his hat. They shook hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she explained. ‘I was alone. I thought it was at least a murderer. Then I peeped through the window and saw it was you.’
Spandrell gave vent to brief and noiseless laughter. ‘But it might still be a murderer, even though it is me.’ And he shook his knobbed stick at her with a playfulness which was, however, so dramatically like her imaginings of the genuinely homicidal article, that Elinor was made to feel quite uncomfortable.
She covered her emotion with a laugh, but decided not to ask him into the house. Standing on the doorstep she felt safer. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it would be better to be murdered by somebody one knows than by a stranger.’
‘Would it?’ He looked at her; the corners of his wide weal-like mouth twitched into a curious smile. ‘It needs a woman to think of those refinements. But if you should ever feel like having your throat cut in a thoroughly friendly fashion…’
‘My dear Spandrell!’ she protested, and felt gladder than ever that she was still on the doorstep and not inside the house.
‘… Don’t hesitate to send for me. No matter what the inconvenience,’ he laid his hand on his heart, ‘ I’d fly to your side. Or rather to your neck.’ He clicked his heels and bowed. ‘But tell me,’ he went on in another tone, ‘is Philip anywhere about? I wanted him to come and dine to-night. At Sbisa’s. I’d ask you too. Only it’s a purely masculine affair.’
She thanked him. ‘But I couldn’t come in any case, And Philip’s gone down into the country to see his mother. And will only be back just in time for Tolley’s concert at the Queen’s Hall. But I know he said he was going round to Sbisa’s afterwards, on the chance of meeting someone. You’ll see him then. Late.’
‘Well, better late than never. Or at least,’ he uttered another of his soundless laughs, ‘so one piously hopes, where one’s friends are concerned. Pious hopes! But to tell you the truth, the proverb needs changing. Better never than early.’
‘Then why go to the trouble of asking people to dine?’
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Force of habit,’ he said. ‘And besides, I generally make them pay, when I ask them out.’
They were both laughing, when a loud ringing made them turn. A telegraph boy on a red bicycle was shooting down the mews towards them.
‘Quarles?’ he asked, as he jumped off.
Elinor took the telegram and opened it. The laughter went out of her face as she read. ‘No answer.’ The boy remounted and rode away. Elinor stood staring at the telegram as though its words were written in an unfamiliar language difficult to interpret. She looked at the watch on her wrist, then back at the flimsy paper.
‘Will you do something for me?’ she said at last, turning to Spandrell.
‘But of course.’
‘My baby’s ill,’ she explained. ‘They want me to come. If I hurry ‘ (she looked again at her watch): ‘I can just catch the four-seventeen at Euston. But there’ll be no time for anything else. Will you ring up Everard Webley for me and explain why I can’t dine with him this evening?’ It was a warning, she thought; a prohibition. ‘Before six. At his office.’
‘Before six,’ he repeated slowly. ‘At his office. Very well.’
‘I must rush,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘But I’ll go and get you a cab, while you put on your hat.’
She thanked him. Spandrell hurried away along the mews. A prohibition, Elinor repeated to herself, as she adjusted her hat in front of the Venetian mirror in the living-room. The choice had been made for her. It was at once a relief and a disappointment. But made, she went on to reflect, at poor little Phil’s expense. She wondered what was the matter with him. Her mother’s telegram—such a characteristic one, that she could not help smiling now that she thought of it again—said nothing. ‘PHILIP RATHER SOUFFRANT AND THOUGH UNALARMINGLY SHOULD ADVISE PROMPT HOMECOMING MOTHER.’ She remembered how nervous and difficult the child had been of late, how easily fatigued. She reproached herself for not having realized that he was working up for an illness. Now it had come.
A touch of influenza, perhaps. ‘I ought to have taken more care,’ she kept repeating. She scribbled a note for her husband. ‘The accompanying telegram explains my sudden departure. Join me at Gattenden to-morrow morning.’ Where should she put it so that Philip should be sure to see it when he came in? Leaning against the clock on the mantelpiece? But would he necessarily want to know the time? Or on the table? No; pin it to the screen; that was the thing! He couldn’t miss it. She ran upstairs in search of a pin. On Philip’s dressing-table she saw a bunch of keys. She picked them up and looked at them, frowning. ‘The idiot’s forgotten his latchkey. How will he get in to-night?’ The noise of a taxi under the window suggested a solution. She hurried down, pinned the note and the telegram conspicuously to the screen that shut off the drawing-room part of the living-room from the door and let herself out into the mews. Spandrell was standing at the door of the cab.
‘That is kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t finished exploiting you even now.’ She held up the keys. ‘When you see Philip this evening, give him these and tell him with my love that he’s an imbecile. He wouldn’t have been able to get in without them.’ Spandrell took the keys in silence. ‘And tell him why I’ve gone and that I’m expecting him to-morrow.’ She got into the cab. ‘And don’t forget to ring up Webley. Before six. Because he was supposed to be meeting me here at six.’
‘Here?’ he asked with an expression of sudden interest and curiosity which Elinor found rather offensive and embarrassing. Was he imagining something, was he daring to suppose…?
‘Yes, here,’ she nodded curtly.
‘I won’t forget,’ he assured her emphatically, and there was still something about his expression which made her suspect a private significance behind the obvious words.
‘Thank you,’ said Elinor, without cordiality. ‘And now I must fly.’ She gave the word to the driver. The taxi backed up the mews, under the archway, turned and was gone.
Spandrell walked slowly up to Hyde Park Corner. From the public call-box in the station he telephoned to Illidge.
Everard Webley was striding about the room, dictating. Sedentary composition he found impossible. ‘How do people write when they’re grafted to chairs all day long, year in year out?’ He found it incomprehensible. ‘When I’m sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, I become like the furniture I’ve combined myself with—mere wood and stuffing. My mind doesn’t move unless my muscles move.’ On days when his correspondence was large, when there were articles to dictate, speeches to compose, Everard’s working day was an eight-hour walking tour. ‘Doing the lion,’ was how his secretaries described his methods of dictation. He was doing the lion now—the restless lion, a little before feeding time—pacing from wall to wall of his big bare office.
‘Remember,’ he was saying, frowning, as he spoke, at the grey carpet; under his secretary’s pencil the shorthand scurried across the page, ‘remember that the final authority is in all cases mine and that, so long as I remain at the head of the B. B. F., every attempt at insubordination will be promptly and ruthlessly suppressed.
Yours etcetera.’ He was silent and, walking back to his desk from the spot where the conclusion of his thoughtful and leonine pacing had left him, he turned over the scattered papers. ‘That seems to be all,’ he said and looked at his watch. It was just after a quarter to six. ‘Have these last letters ready for me in the morning,’ he went on. ‘I’ll sign them then.’ He took his hat from the peg. ‘Good evening.’ And slamming the door, he descended the stairs
