Leaven of Malice Read online

  “Father hates ebb and flow,” said Pearl. “He hates you now and that’s all there is to it.”

  “He’s as mad as a hornet at the thought of you marrying anybody. That’s what it is.”

  “Please. We aren’t here to discuss my father.”

  “Very well, Madam Chairman. But I’ll bet we can’t keep off him for long. Go ahead.”

  “As I was saying, this report is a nuisance, and it will take some living down, but there is no very great harm done, provided there is no legal action.”

  “No very great harm done?”

  “Father thinks so. I don’t. After all, you’re a human being. It is within the range of possibility that I might have been engaged to you. There are people who aspire to that condition, in case you don’t know it; and in case you do know it and are conceited about it, I may tell you that Tessie Forgie is the most avid of them all. But the fact is that I’m not engaged to you, and while I am annoyed at the report that I am, I do not consider it to be libellous or insulting.”

  “You overwhelm me,”

  “Please don’t be sarcastic. I’m simply trying to be objective.”

  “You are succeeding magnificently. I hardly feel as if I were present in the flesh at all.”

  “Unfortunately, my father takes a very serious view of this whole affair. He thinks it is part of a plot to make him appear ridiculous.”

  “Please! You’re turning my head with all this subtle flattery.”

  “He wants to bring an action against the newspaper. The editor is behaving abominably. Do you know this man Ridley?”

  “I’ve met him once or twice—

  A poor, unfruitful, prying, windy scribe,

  Who scratches down hell’s witsome spirits, that he

  May show them to her vulgar, gaping crowds,

  Extended on his tablets.”

  “What?”

  “I am amazed that you, a librarian, cannot place the quotation instantly. From the great Charles Heavysege, Canada’s earliest and foremost dramatist. I presume that when your father formed his opinion of me he did not know that I was the coming big man in the Heavysege field.”

  “The what field?”

  “It’s a rich new vein of Amcan. We scholars are pegging out our claims in this new Yukon.”

  “Please be serious. Ridley has behaved with dreadful discourtesy to Father. So far as I can see there’s only one way to appease Father, and that’s to find whoever put that notice in the paper.”

  “And how are we going to do that?”

  “Well, surely you have some ideas? Am I expected to do everything? All I can think of is that it must be somebody who knows us both.”

  “Quite a wide field.”

  “Not too wide when you think it must be somebody who knows us both and hates us both.”

  “Oh, come, surely whoever it is only hates you. I’m just an insulting accessory to this business. Still, you’re right. Who can it be? What goblin of ignoble mind?”

  “Heavysege again?”

  “Quite right.”

  “I think Father knows already.”

  “Really?”

  “He was being extremely mysterious and hinting a lot this evening.”

  “Well, why didn’t you ask him?”

  Pearl hesitated for a moment. “At present it isn’t very easy to ask him questions,” said she.

  Solly thought he knew why, but this time he had tact enough not to refer to the happening of Wednesday night.

  “If we could find out who it was,” said Pearl, “without asking Father, naturally, we might be able to do something. Perhaps even go to see the person.”

  “Have you thought of calling your cousin Ronnie?”

  “I did. I went out to a public phone, and called him. All he would say was that Mr. Snelgrove knew, but wouldn’t tell him. He thinks there’s to be some kind of big pow-wow tomorrow at Snelgrove’s office at three.”

  “If we’re to catch whoever it is first, we’ll have to be quick. Frankly, I don’t think we have much of a chance.”

  “Oh, don’t be so defeatist! Don’t you want to get this settled?”

  “Pearl, have you said your say?”

  “Why yes, I suppose so. For the present, anyhow.”

  “Well, then, it’s my turn. So far as I’m concerned this affair is settled, in its most important aspect, already.”

  “How?”

  “You mentioned Griselda this morning. I got this cable this afternoon.”

  Solly brought a yellow cable form from his breast inside pocket, and gave it to Pearl, turning on the light on the dashboard of the car. She read:

  DARLING DELIGHTED NEWS PEARL DEAR GIRL JUST RIGHT FOR YOU HAPPY FOR YOU BOTH GIVE PEARL KISS FOR ME MUCH LOVE WRITING GRISELDA

  “Oh, Solly,” said Pearl, in a stricken voice.

  “Yes,” said Solly. “That’s the end of an old song.” And he switched off the light.

  In the half-darkness Pearl stared at him. She had ceased to be a woman of the world. Her eyes filled with tears, and very slowly they brimmed over and ran down her cheeks.

  Solly was wretched, for he thought his heart was broken. Very probably it was so, in the meaning which is usually attached to the phrase. Most hearts of any quality are broken on two or three occasions in a lifetime. They mend, of course, and are often stronger than before, but something of the essence of life is lost at every break. Still, hurt as he was, he could not see Pearl weep unmoved. He took her in his arms, and comforted her as well as he could, and for a time they were miserable together.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you threw me into that bay,” said Pearl, when she felt a little better, and had been accommodated with the clean handkerchief out of Solly’s breast pocket. “I’ve been a self-centred fool. I talked endlessly about myself and what this meant to me, and now you’ve lost Griselda. Everybody knows how much you loved her.”

  “Yes,” said Solly, “I’m afraid I have been rather obvious for a couple of years. Well, I don’t care. I suppose it’s better to feel something and look a fool than to take damned good care to feel nothing, and be a fool.”

  “Would it help if I wrote to her? I could explain everything.”

  “No you couldn’t. This doesn’t really concern you. I knew some good friend would be quick to tell Griselda. They even went to the expense of a cable. I’m sure it was a relief to her. She never cared much about me, really. I’m certain that cable means every word it says, quite literally. She’d be happy to think I had stopped crying for the moon, and had taken up with somebody else. Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “Please don’t feel guilty,” said Pearl. “I said dreadful things to you. You must loathe me.”

  “I don’t loathe anybody,” said Solly, “except myself.”

  But Pearl was not to be denied self-abasement. “I’m not very good about other people’s feelings,” said she. And then, much more fully than she had ever been able to confide in Norman Yarrow, she told Solly about her life at home. About the division which her mother’s religiosity and her father’s agnosticism had made there. About the hard egotism, rising sometimes almost to the point of madness, which possessed him. About the life she led between them, torn this way and that, and cut off from young people, from ordinary pleasures, and with little before her save a continuance of this weary course, ending undoubtedly in the bitter role of the unmarried daughter who nurses both parents into the grave. She spoke without self-pity, but she spoke with point.

  Solly was horrified. “My God,” said he. “It’s monstrous. Of course everybody knows you have a grim time in that house, but everybody’s always thought of it as a kind of joke. They’re horrible.”

  Pearl shook her head. “No,” said she, “that isn’t it at all. They have done everything they have done out of love. They loved each other very much, and I think they still do, if they could hear one another, in their private worlds. And they loved me as much as they were able. They did the best for me that
they could—the best they knew. Don’t try to persuade me to think differently now. It’s all I can bear at home now—more than I can bear for long, I know. But in spite of it all I love them very much.”

  Solly’s heart, which had contracted and grown hard that afternoon, when he received Griselda’s cable, seemed to melt and beat freely now for the first time.

  “I know what you mean,” said he. “It’s much the same with my mother. I’m tied to her apron strings. I’m a joke, I know. Griselda was very bitter about it once. But filial piety isn’t simply a foolish phrase. It’s a hard reality. Some people never seem to feel it. In happy families it is never put to any real test. But duty to parents is an obligation that some of us must recognize. However hellish parents may be, the duty is as real as the duty that exists in marriage. God, what a lot we hear about unhappy marriages, and how little we hear about unhappy sons and daughters. There’s no divorce for them. You’ve told me about your parents. Well—you know my mother. And that reminds me that it’s half-past ten, and she won’t go to sleep till I come home, and she needs sleep.”

  Saying no more, he started the car and drove Pearl back to her door.

  “Good night,” said she, and held out her hand to him.

  Solly turned toward her. His face was set and white. But as their eyes met his expression softened, until he smiled.

  “ ‘Ah, lovely hellsnake, wilt thou stare at me?’ ” he whispered.

  “Heavysege?” said Pearl.

  He nodded, and for the second time that day they laughed together. Solly suddenly seized Pearl, and kissed her again and again. Then, once more he seemed to be angry.

  “Damn it all,” said he, “haven’t you any name but Pearl?”

  “I’ve got a saint’s name,” she said. “Veronica.”

  “That’s a little better,” said Solly, and kissed her again.

  “I must go in,” she said, struggling free.

  “Yes,” said he, and this time the shadow of Wednesday night did not divide but united them.

  SOLLY TIPTOED up the stairs, but the light under his mother’s door was shining, as he knew it would be. He tapped and went in.

  “You’re late, lovey,” said Mrs. Bridgetower. Without her teeth, and with her thin long hair in a braid, she was both pitiable and terrible.

  “Not really, Mother. It’s a little after eleven.”

  “It always seems late when you’re out, dear.”

  “Sorry. Now you must go to sleep.”

  “Where were you, dear?”

  “Just out, Mother.”

  “Dearie, it hurts me so to be shut out of your confidence.”

  “Oh, you know I haven’t been up to anything very terrible.”

  “Dearie, I’m worried.”

  “What about, Mother?”

  “I’m worried that I’m going to lose my little boy.”

  Oh God, thought Solly, here we go. She’s coming the pitiable over me. There ought to be rules for these encounters—an intergeneration agreement about hitting below the belt.

  “Well, and how do you expect to lose him this time?”

  Mrs. Bridgetower had had a sedative pill, and was groggy, but Solly knew her well enough to know that she could be most dangerous when at her groggiest. She spoke lispingly from her toothless mouth.

  “Dearie, there’s nothing in it about this girl, is there?”

  “What girl?”

  “This horrid Vambrace girl.”

  “She’s not horrid, Mother. You know her.”

  “The whole family is horrid. Dearie, say there’s nothing in it.”

  “But, Mother, you know the whole thing began as a practical joke.”

  The old eyes filled with tears; the old chin quivered a little.

  “Then say it, lovey. Mother wants to hear you say it. There’s nothing in it, is there?”

  “Now, Mother dearest, you must get off to sleep, or you won’t be able to get up tomorrow.”

  Solly kissed his mother and turned off her bedside lamp. A night-light glowed from the floor. As he reached the door his mother’s voice came to him, lisping still, but sharp and without assumed infantile charm.

  “I wouldn’t like it to be said that my marriage had begun as the result of a practical joke.”

  He closed the door and hastened to his attic. What a demon she was! It was impossible to conceal anything from her. She could smell a change of emotion in him!

  Yet what Pearl had confided to him about her family life had strengthened him, and as he lay in his bed he pitied his mother. And the more he pitied his mother, the more he thought of Pearl, until he could think of nothing else.

  Veronica; as Veronica she seemed to be someone quite new.

  Mrs. Bridgetower also lay awake, and her heart yearned toward her son. He was all that she had in life. All—save a large house and nearly half a million dollars very shrewdly invested. Her heart longed toward him.

  How easy, how utterly simple, for Solly to turn back to Mother—to drive away the powerful but still strange vision of Veronica, and to give himself to Mother forever! Should he run down the stairs and into her room now, to kiss her, and tell her that he would be her little boy forever? Thus life and death warred in Solly’s bosom in the night, and in her bedroom his mother lay, yearning for him, willing him to come to her.

  Of course, sensible modern people, though they believe a variety of strange things, do not believe in any such communion in emotion as this which seemed to be at work between Solly and his mother in the darkness of their house. That is why such things are never mentioned by those who have experienced them.

  GLOSTER RIDLEY had fled for comfort to Mrs. Fielding as soon as he felt that he could decently do so, and he arrived in her house precisely at half-past eight, but it was ten o’clock before he had a chance to speak to her intimately. No man should ever assume that he will be able to get the immediate and undivided attention of a woman who has children. Miss Cora Fielding was going to a dance, and needed her mother’s help in certain fine details of dressing. Even Ridley was called into service, Mr. Fielding being out, to help with a stuck zipper; the women had a pitiful faith in the ability of a man to meet such a problem, and Ridley broke two fingernails, and pinched Cora severely, in order to sustain the credit of his sex. Young George Fielding, who was seventeen, was encountering the Crimean War for the first time in his history lessons and, although he did not say so, he clearly had a feeling that Ridley remembered this encounter as a personal experience, and repeatedly came into the living-room to ask him questions about it. Ridley finally found it quicker to dictate an essay on Balaclava than to help George to find the facts himself. But at last the essay was done, and at last Cora’s escort called for her, and at last Ridley was alone with Mrs Fielding.

  “Now, Gloss, tell me all about it,” said she, leaning back in her chair and turning her level gaze upon him.

  This was exactly what Ridley was aching to do, but he could never get used to the way in which Elspeth Fielding cut corners. He had expected at least a quarter of an hour of preliminaries before he got to his theme, and without them he was not completely sure that he knew what that theme was.

  “All about what?” he said, to gain time.

  “All about what’s worrying you half to death. Dear old Gloss, you come here white as a sheet, you smoke without a stop, your hands shake, you pinch poor Cora, you lecture Georgie as if he were a public meeting, and then you try to pretend that everything is all right. Richard will be home in about an hour, and unless you tell me quickly, you may not tell me at all. Is it about this lawsuit with Professor Vambrace?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “It comes out of you in strong rays. Now let me get you a drink, and then you can tell me all about it.”

  Ridley told her all that he thought was relevant. And because he was a good journalist, and was used to getting a story straight, he told it briefly and with all the points in the proper order. But Mrs. Fielding was not to be fooled.
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br />   “But you don’t really care about an honorary degree. Don’t tell me that. Of course it would be very nice, but you don’t need it and you don’t want it—not as much as you’re pretending.”

  “How do you know, Elspeth? I’m not a university man. An honorary degree to me means the degree I might have earned years ago. I’ve earned it a different way. I’ve always missed a university training. I didn’t have an easy time when I was young. I thought you understood all that.”

  “Of course I understand it. But you’re not a vain man. An honour of that sort wouldn’t mean all this to you. You wouldn’t shake and look sick at the thought of missing it.”

  “I’m not a very self-assured man. I need things to bolster me up. Comfort, for instance. People think me a fussy old bachelor to take so much thought for my own comfort, though I really don’t think I live any more comfortably than most married men I know. And the position I’ve made for myself. I’m really very well thought of as an editor, you know. And money. Of course I haven’t a lot of money; my expenses have been heavy. But what I’ve got is rather carefully placed. All these things are necessary to me in a way that I don’t suppose they are to most people. I’ve got to be secure.”

  “Yes, that’s an obsession of yours. But what has this particular trouble got to do with your security? How can it shake you, even if you do have a lawsuit, and lose it? Even if you lose your piddling degree. You’ll still be you, won’t you?”

  “Don’t hector me, Elspeth. I don’t feel up to it.”

  “Gloss dear, I’m not trying to hector, only to find out. Tell me truly—I’ll never breathe it to a soul—do you terribly want that red gown? I’d understand, if you said you did. Nearly everybody has some hankering like that. Please tell me? Does it mean something very special?”

  “It would be one more thing between me and—”

  “Between you and what?”