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Winslow.
Minnie began to read. “Oh!” she screamed. She dropped the letter, collapsed into a crouching heap, her hands covering her eyes. Winslow snatched at it. “A most terrible accident has occurred,” he read; “Melchior’s chimney fell down yesterday evening right on the top of your uncle’s house, and every living soul was killed—your uncle, your cousin Mary, Will and Ned, and the girl—every one of them, and smashed—you would hardly know them. I’m writing to you to break the news before you see it in the papers—” The letter fluttered from Winslow’s fingers. He put out his hand against the mantel to steady himself.
All of them dead! Then he saw, as in a vision, a row of seven cottages, each let at seven shillings a week, a timber yard, two villas, and the ruins —still marketable—of the avuncular residence. He tried to feel a sense of loss and could not. They were sure to have been left to Minnie’s aunt. All dead! 7x7x52÷20 began insensibly to work itself out in his mind, but discipline was ever weak in his mental arithmetic; figures kept moving from one line to another, like children playing at Widdy, Widdy Way. Was it two hundred pounds about—or one hundred pounds? Presently he picked up the letter again, and finished reading it. “You being the next of kin,” said Mr. Speight.
“How awful!” said Minnie in horror-struck whisper, and looking up at last. Winslow stared back at her, shaking his head solemnly. There were a thousand things running through his mind, but none that, even to his dull sense, seemed appropriate as a remark. “It was the Lord’s will,” he said at last.
“It seems so very, very terrible,” said Minnie; “auntie, dear auntie —Ted—poor, dear uncle—”
“It was the Lord’s will, Minnie,” said Winslow, with infinite feeling. A long silence.
“Yes,” said Minnie, very slowly, staring thoughtfully at the crackling black paper in the grate. The fire had gone out. “Yes, perhaps it was the Lord’s will.”
They looked gravely at one another. Each would have been terribly shocked at any mention of the property by the other. She turned to the dark fireplace and began tearing up an old newspaper slowly. Whatever our losses may be, the world’s work still waits for us. Winslow gave a deep sigh and walked in a hushed manner towards the front door. As he opened it, a flood of sunlight came streaming into the dark shadows of the closed shop. Bandersnatch, Helter, Skelter, and Garb, had vanished out of his mind like the mists before the rising sun.
Presently he was carrying in the shutters, and in the briskest way, the fire in the kitchen was crackling exhilaratingly, with a little saucepan walloping above it, for Minnie was boiling two eggs—, one for herself this morning, as well as one for him—, and Minnie herself was audible, laying breakfast with the great eclat. The blow was a sudden and terrible one —but it behoves us to face such things bravely in this sad, unaccountable world. It was quite midday before either of them mentioned the cottages.
LE MARI TERRIBLE
First published in The New Budget, May 23, 1895
“You are always so sympathetic,” she said; and added, reflectively, “and one can talk of one’s troubles to you without any nonsense.”
I wondered dimly if she meant that as a challenge. I helped myself to a biscuit thing that looked neither poisonous nor sandy. “You are one of the most puzzling human beings I ever met,” I said,—a perfectly safe remark to any woman under any circumstances.
“Do you find me so hard to understand?” she said.
“You are dreadfully complex.” I bit at the biscuit thing, and found it full of a kind of creamy bird-lime. (I wonder why women will arrange these unpleasant surprises for me—I sickened of sweets twenty years ago.)
“How so?” she was saying, and smiling her most brilliant smile.
I have no doubt she thought we were talking rather nicely. “Oh!” said I, and waved the cream biscuit thing. “You challenge me to dissect you.”
“Well?”
“And that is precisely what I cannot do.”
“I’m afraid you are very satirical,” she said, with a touch of disappointment. She is always saying that when pur conversation has become absolutely idiotic—as it invariably does. I felt an inevitable desire to quote bogus Latin to her. It seemed the very language for her.
“Malorum fiducia pars quosque libet,” I said, in a low voice, looking meaningly into her eyes.
“Ah!” she said, colouring a little, and turned to pour hot water into the teapot, looking prettily at me over her arm as she did so.
“That is one of the truest things that has ever been said of sympathy,” I remarked. “Don’t you think so?”
“Sympathy,” she said, “is a very wonderful thing, and a very precious thing.”
“You speak,” said I (with a cough behind my hand), “as though you knew what it was to be lonely.”
“There is solitude even in a crowd,” she said, and looked round at the six other people—three discreet pairs—who were in the room.
“I, too,” I was beginning, but Hopdangle came with a teacup, and seemed inclined to linger. He belongs to the “Nice Boy” class, and gives himself ridiculous airs of familiarity with grown-up people.
Then the Giffens went.
“Do you know, I always take such an interest in your work,” she was saying to me, when her husband (confound him!) came into the room.
He was a violent discord. He wore a short brown jacket and carpet slippers, and three of his waistcoat buttons were (as usual) undone. “Got any tea left, Millie?” he said, and came and sat down in the arm-chair beside the table.
“How do, Delalune?” he said to the man in the comer. “Damned ho, Bellows,” he remarked to me, subsiding creakily.
She poured some more hot water into the teapot. (Why must charming married women always have these husbands?)
“It is very hot,” I said.
There was a perceptible pause. He is one of those rather adipose people, who are not disconcerted by conversational gaps. “Are you, too, working at Argon?” I said. He is some kind of chemical investigator, I know.
He began at once to explain the most horribly complex things about elements to me. She gave him his tea, and rose and went and talked to the other people about autotypes. “Yes,” I said, not hearing what he was saying.
“‘No’ would be more appropriate,” he said. “You are absent-minded, Bellows. Not in love, I hope—at your age ? “
Really, I am not thirty, but a certain perceptible thinness in my hair may account for his invariably regarding me as a contemporary. But he should understand that nowadays the beginnings of baldness merely mark the virile epoch.
“I say, Millie,” he said, out loud and across the roo, “you haven’t been collecting Bellows here, have you?”
She looked round startled, and I saw a paied look come into her eyes. “For the bazaar?” she said ” Not yet, dear.” It seemed to me that she shot a glance of entreaty at him. Then she turned to the others again.
“My wife,” he said, “has two distinctive traits. She is a born poetess and a born collector. I ought to warn you.”
“I did not know,” said I, “that she rhymed.”
“I was speaking more of the imaginative quality, the temperament that finds a splendour in the grass, a glory in the flower, that clothes the whole world in a vestiture of interpretation.”
“Indeed!” I said I felt