Helena Brett's Career Part 7

And presently he spoke--if it is speaking to say, "Ah!"

They were at Charing Cross.

They had agreed to take old baggage and look a very long-established couple, but somehow porters and people were nudging each other with sympathetic joy long before they reached the first-cla.s.s carriage with its wickedly big label marked "engaged."

Helena, embarra.s.sed if amused, sat on the far side. Hubert leaned out of the window and bought all the evening papers. He knew that there had been reporters.

"May as well see what they put," he said, almost as though in apology.

She could not understand his tones, but Mother had told her last night that men were funny things with curious ideas.

He took up one after another and flipped through them all.

"Solemnised--Langham Place--ecru lace," he read from the first; and then more hurriedly, "Reception--residence--numerous and costly--happy couple--Riviera."

Judging from his extracts, Helena thought, they were all very much alike. She wondered if one man had written the whole lot, and if so, what all the rest of the reporters did.

Her husband's face grew blacker as he reached the last. He threw it down with a contemptuous laugh.

"Why, what is it?" she asked. "Don't you like them?" She still felt oddly shy about using his name. "Are you disappointed?"

"One doesn't expect much from journalists," he said. "One's never disappointed."

But he was.

One account said that he was "a" novelist, but that was all: no adjective before it, not even "well-known." The others didn't mention that he _was_ an author.

They might have been just ordinary people.

PART II

HUBERT BRETT'S WIFE

CHAPTER V

ROUTINE

It was something of a career, Helena soon learnt, to be the wife of Hubert Brett.

Gradually, however, she got a grip of the rough lines of her whole duty. At first it had been difficult, for she was not methodical by nature; but now it all seemed natural, the ordinary thing. When you got into it, the day ran smoothly. She never even had to think by now.

She had the housemaid's mind.

Everything in the little garden suburb home--for Hubert, capitulating to Kenneth Boyd all along the whole line, had settled out at Hampstead--every smallest detail was ordered to one end: the Work.

This, he reminded her so soon as they returned to England, was not just his pride or hobby: it was their existence. She had her three hundred pounds a year, which he wished her to keep, whilst his fixed income was a trifle less--his father had been that fatal sort of mongrel, half a cleric, half a City man--and for the rest they must depend upon his writing. How important then, but how essential, that he should be left free to do his very best.

"You're my little housekeeper," he told her playfully the first evening, always loving to treat her as a child. "You'll get new cooks about every other day and try new dishes out of shilling books with them, and I shall say: 'My dear, this isn't edible'--like that--and then you'll cry----"

"Oh no, I shan't!" she laughed back, for they got on extremely well in an unsentimental way. It was almost as though Hubert had merely exchanged his sister for a younger one.

"Well, I like to think you will," he answered. "I shall be hurt if you don't mind in the least when I'm cross.... But what I was going to say is: whatever domestic tragedies there are--and kitchens are the last home in England of poor Tragedy--don't bring them round to me. I don't mind _what_ I eat, I'm very tame that way really; but I don't want to know who cooked the chop or where the large woman who cooked the last one is. Those details don't inspire an author, even with a realistic novel!" The which she thought great fun. She loved to hear him talk.

None the less, it was not easy just at first. There was a hideous lot to remember for any one not good at lessons. The kitchen with its rows of plates, and all the currants and things you served out from tins--this was quite splendid. The hours and what you mustn't do were the real worries.

Hubert Brett, in the old days of city life, had never breakfasted till half-past nine. "They sleep in the city, and more is the pity, but you on the hills, awake!" exhorts the Harrow song. But Hubert did not see it in that light at all. Nine-thirty had been his hour down in London; nine-thirty seemed quite good enough up on the Hampstead hills. So nine-thirty it was--when it was not nine-forty-five.

This was the one fixed meal of the day.... Now work put in its claim.

At breakfast, he told people, was the only time that he could skim the daily; he was so intensely busy; and certainly he propped the _Telegraph_ before him on the table every morning (this shocked Helena at first, for she had not seen any farces and had no notion it was ever done); but somehow or other he appeared never to have quite finished just the paragraph that he was reading when the meal concluded. There was an armchair temptingly near alike to table, fire, and cigarettes.

Helena's first important duty was to steer him tactfully from this chair to the harder one whereon he sat to write. She must not jar him, must not hurry him, or he lost every one of his ideas, and it was all her fault at lunch.... But, on the other hand, she must not let him sit there, gazing at a thrice-read page--"thinking out my day's work,"

he called it--till too late. This she certainly did not desire to do, for Lily never was allowed to come and clear the meal away till he had gone into his study (that upset him, too), so that delay bred chaos in the household.

When once, however, he was safely at his writing-table, all was quiet, must be, until lunch-time. These were his best hours for work. The small house brooded under a funereal silence.

Lunch was a movable affair.

Hubert could not endure clocks in his working-room. Their sound, which he declared was just not regular, got on his nerves, and he found himself on days when his inspiration would not flow, gazing at the dial with growing despair, like a bad sleeper who begins to count the hours which strike at ever lessening intervals, until he knows at last that now he will not sleep at all.

The writer's estimate of time varied largely with the amount of his success. When he was writing well, the hours would speed away and he would then emerge at half-past two or even--once--at three, full of a joy so intense as to ignore, or even to melt, the iciness of Helena and Lily. At other times, when his pen dragged itself along the paper sleepily or idly drew vague circles on the blotting-pad, he would get tired and hungry. On these days lunch was punctual at one o'clock.

After lunch, which was a meal solid almost to the limits of bad art, he would subside on the tempting armchair again and Helena be asked to bring him the weekly reviews. Not only the literary pages were digested; Hubert read the music, art, even the drama columns--everything except the science meetings in the _Athenaeum_.

This took, roughly, half-an-hour each day and the lonely time so occupied, he told Helena when he explained his ways to her, was devoted to "keeping in touch with the modern movements." There is no one English word for the Italian _siesta_.

Then came the part of the day to which Helena looked forward; the afternoon, when they took ever such long tramps with Spook, the small white Aberdeen, across the wide free heath, and so home to tea beside a comfortable fire. Helena could almost hate his work when at the stroke of five he would get up, more stern by now than in the sleepy morn, and leave her with the statutory kiss. And when it rained, so that this jolliest part of the day was lost and he said in a masculine way that it would be a chance to do some letters (instead of having fun indoors!), she would sit by the drenched windows and look out through the jerky raindrops with all the pathetic grievance against Fate of children in a seaside lodging on wet holidays.

This was a shorter bout of work and dinner was generally not later than half-past seven, though there were times of course when it had to be later. This led to Hubert's prophecy about the change of cooks not being too far from inspired.

After dinner was the other jolly time, if Hubert had worked well. If things had gone badly, he would mope and say that he was going to grow cabbages instead and silly things like that, which worried her because she knew he never would; but if a good sheaf of written paper was in his hand, he would read it to her, while she sat against his legs upon the hearthrug, and when she had said how good it was, they talked of other things--he talked so well--and it was all as comfy as could be in their own little home, and, oh, so different from Devonshire!

Sometimes she felt guilty about her poor mother, down there all alone among those stodgy people; but she wrote to her every Sunday, and sometimes on other days if Hubert was silent and gloomy (without of course letting her know why she wrote).

His moods puzzled her a good deal in those first days, but she supposed all really clever men were a bit odd or they would not be clever.

Certainly it was curious that Hubert, who was so strong and splendid in most ways, was so awfully easily pleased or upset by anything about his books. Any success made him as cheery as could be and they would go to Kew or somewhere and he'd say; "Blow the evening work!" although she always said she was not sure they ought. Once, a few months after the wedding, a reader wrote to him from Surbiton and thanked him for a book of his he had just read, because he thought it beautiful and full of inspiriting ideas. Of course she had been immensely pleased, but Hubert had been more. He had shown it to every one who called for three weeks, and kept on wondering what sort of person could have written it, and left it about on tables, and she was sure the servants read it, and he told Mr. Alison about it twice, until she really began to wonder whether people wouldn't laugh at him, but didn't say so because he was so sensitive.

It was always the same, about a good review or anything. Sometimes, after one, he would ask in a thoughtful, puzzled way; "Why don't we ever go to a theatre, dear?" but by the next night something had probably upset him or he forgot, and she never reminded him because he _did_ work hard--and, as he said, for _her_--and she was really very happy in their little home, so long as he was not at work.

And then, he was so easily upset.

A bad review had just the opposite effect. He got so violent about the critics, saying they were men who had failed to create, and any a.s.s could say that elephants were rotten things but it took G.o.d to make one, and other awful things like that; or else he'd begin thinking who of his pals read the paper where the criticism was and sometimes even--if she couldn't stop him--write and tell them why the critic was so down on him, which she was half afraid they must think very silly; unless, perhaps, they were clever too, so understood.

Once, too, at the end of the first year, he quite frightened her.

Among their wedding presents, duly numerous and costly--perhaps extreme in both respects for a suburban home--the one that Helena prized and used most was an enamelled watch. It was the size, roughly, of a shilling: deep translucent blue, decked with tiny pearls, and hung from an appropriate brooch by a thin golden chain. Too thin possibly, for on arrival home one morning from what she called her marketing, the little gewgaw, valued for ornament and use alike, was gone. A few links of the chain hung desolately from a brooch that, robbed of its purpose, now looked almost vulgar.

Without thinking, without reflecting that no one was allowed to interrupt him before lunch-time, she found her thoughts turning restfully, in quite a wifely way, to Hubert. She knocked at his door.