The Lion's Share by E. Arnold Bennett

E >> E. Arnold Bennett >> The Lion\'s Share

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26

THE LION'S SHARE

by

Arnold Bennett

First Published 1916.

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

NOVELS--
A MAN FROM THE NORTH
ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
LEONORA
A GREAT MAN
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
BURIED ALIVE
THE OLD WIVES' TALE
THE GLIMPSE
HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
CLAYHANGER
HILDA LESSWAYS
THESE TWAIN
THE CARD
THE REGENT
THE PRICE OF LOVE

FANTASIAS--
THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL
THE GATES OF WRATH
TERESA OF WATLING STREET
THE LOOT OF CITIES
HUGO
THE GHOST
THE CITY OF PLEASURE

SHORT STORIES--
TALES OF THE FIVE TOWNS
THE GRIM SMILE OF THE FIVE TOWNS
THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS

BELLES-LETTRES--
JOURNALISM FOR WOMEN
FAME AND FICTION
HOW TO BECOME AN AUTHOR
THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
THE REASONABLE LIFE
HOW TO LIVE ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY
THE HUMAN MACHINE
LITERARY TASTE
FRIENDSHIP AND HAPPINESS
THOSE UNITED STATES
MARRIAGE
LIBERTY

DRAMA--
POLITE FARCES
CUPID AND COMMONSENSE
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
THE HONEYMOON
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
MILESTONES (in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch)

* * * * *

(In collaboration with Eden Phillpotts)
THE SINEWS OF WAR: A Romance
THE STATUE: A Romance

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. MISS INGATE, AND THE YACHT
2. THE THIEF'S PLAN WRECKED
3. THE LEGACY
4. MR. FOULGER
5. THE DEAD HAND
6. THE YOUNG WIDOW
7. THE CIGARETTE GIRL
8. EXPLOITATION OF WIDOWHOOD
9. LIFE IN PARIS
10. FANCY DRESS
11. A POLITICAL REFUGEE
12. WIDOWHOOD IN THE STUDIO
13. THE SWOON
14. MISS INGATE POINTS OUT THE DOOR
15. THE RIGHT BANK
16. ROBES
17. SOIREE
18. A DECISION
19. THE BOUDOIR
20. PAGET GARDENS
21. JANE
22. THE DETECTIVE
23. THE BLUE CITY
24. THE SPATTS
25. THE MUTE
26. NOCTURNE
27. IN THE GARDEN
28. ENCOUNTER
29. FLIGHT
30. ARIADNE
31. THE NOSTRUM
32. BY THE BINNACLE
33. AGUILAR'S DOUBLE LIFE
34. THE TANK-ROOM
35. THE THIRD SORT OF WOMAN
36. IN THE DINGHY
37. AFLOAT
38. IN THE UNIVERSE
39. THE IMMINENT DRIVE
40. GENIUS AT BAY
41. FINANCIAL NEWS
42. INTERVAL
43. ENTR'ACTE
44. END OF THE CONCERT
45. STRANGE RESULT OF A QUARREL
46. AN EPILOGUE

CHAPTER I

MISS INGATE, AND THE YACHT

Audrey had just closed the safe in her father's study when she was startled
by a slight noise. She turned like a defensive animal to face danger. It
had indeed occurred to her that she was rather like an animal in captivity,
and she found a bitter pleasure in the idea, though it was not at all
original.

"And Flank Hall is my Zoo!" she had said. (Not that she had ever seen the
Zoological Gardens or visited London.)

She was lithe; she moved with charm. Her short, plain blue serge
walking-frock disclosed the form of her limbs and left them free, and it
made her look younger even than she was. Its simplicity suited her gestures
and took grace from them. But she wore the old thing without the least
interest in it--almost unconsciously. She had none of the preoccupations
caused by the paraphernalia of existence. She scarcely knew what it was to
own. She was aware only of her body and her soul. Beyond these her
possessions were so few, so mean, so unimportant, that she might have
carried them to the grave and into heaven without protest from the
authorities earthly or celestial.

The slight noise was due to the door of the study, which great age had
distorted and bereft of sense, and, in fact, almost unhinged. It unlatched
itself, paused, and then calmly but firmly swung wide open. When it could
swing no farther it shook, vibrating into repose.

Audrey condemned the door for a senile lunatic, and herself for a poltroon.
She became defiant of peril, until the sound of a step on the stair beyond
the door threw her back into alarm. But when the figure of Miss Ingate
appeared in the doorway she was definitely reassured, to the point of
disdain. All her facial expression said: "It's only Miss Ingate."

And yet Miss Ingate was not a negligible woman. Her untidy hair was
greying; she was stout, she was fifty, she was plain, she had not elegance;
her accent and turns of speech were noticeably those of Essex. But she had
a magnificent pale forehead; the eyes beneath it sparkled with energy,
inquisitiveness, and sagacity; and the mouth beneath the eyes showed by its
sardonic dropping corners that she had come to a settled, cheerful
conclusion about human nature, and that the conclusion was not flattering.
Miss Ingate was a Guardian of the Poor, and the Local Representative of the
Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association. She had studied intimately
the needy and the rich and the middling. She was charitable without
illusions; and, while adhering to every social convention, she did so with
a toleration pleasantly contemptuous; in her heart she had no mercy for
snobs of any kind, though, unfortunately, she was at times absurdly
intimidated by them--at other times she was not.

To the west, within a radius of twelve miles, she knew everybody and
everybody knew her; to the east her fame was bounded only by the regardless
sea. She and her ancestors had lived in the village of Moze as long as even
Mr. Mathew Moze and his ancestors. In the village, and to the village, she
was Miss Ingate, a natural phenomenon, like the lie of the land and the
river Moze. Her opinions offended nobody, not Mr. Moze himself--she was
Miss Ingate. She was laughed at, beloved and respected. Her sagacity had
one flaw, and the flaw sprang from her sincere conviction that human nature
in that corner of Essex, which she understood so profoundly, and where she
was so perfectly at home, was different from, and more fondly foolish than,
human nature in any other part of the world. She could not believe that
distant populations could be at once so pathetically and so naughtily human
as the population in and around Moze.

If Audrey disdained Miss Ingate, it was only because Miss Ingate was
neither young nor fair nor the proprietress of some man, and because people
made out that she was peculiar. In some respects Audrey looked upon Miss
Ingate as a life-belt, as the speck of light at the end of a tunnel, as the
enigmatic smile which glimmers always in the frown of destiny.

"Well?" cried Miss Ingate in her rather shrill voice, grinning
sardonically, with the corners of her lips still lower than usual in
anticipatory sarcasm. It was as if she had said: "You cannot surprise me by
any narrative of imbecility or turpitude or bathos. All the same, I am
dying to hear the latest eccentricity of this village."

"Well?" parried Audrey, holding one hand behind her.

They did not shake hands. People who call at ten o'clock in the morning
cannot expect to have their hands shaken. Miss Ingate certainly expected
nothing of the sort. She had the freedom of Flank Hall, as of scores of
other houses, at all times of day. Servants opened front doors for her with
a careless smile, and having shut front doors they left her loose, like a
familiar cat, to find what she wanted. They seldom "showed" her into any
room, nor did they dream of acting before her the unconvincing comedy of
going to "see" whether masters or mistresses were out or in.

"Where's your mother?" asked Miss Ingate idly, quite sure that interesting
divulgations would come, and quite content to wait for them. She had been
out of the village for over a week.

"Mother's taking her acetyl salicylic," Audrey answered, coming to the door
of the study.

This meant merely that Mrs. Moze had a customary attack of the neuralgia
for which the district is justly renowned among strangers.

"Oh!" murmured Miss Ingate callously. Mrs. Moze, though she had lived in
the district for twenty-five years, did not belong to it. If she chose to
keep on having neuralgia, that was her affair, but in justice to natives
and to the district she ought not to make too much of it, and she ought to
admit that it might well be due to her weakness after her operation. Miss
Ingate considered the climate to be the finest in England; which it was, on
the condition that you were proof against neuralgia.

"Father's gone to Colchester in the car to see the Bishop," Audrey coldly
added.

"If I'd known he was going to Colchester I should have asked him for a
lift," said Miss Ingate, with determination.

"Oh, yes! He'd have taken _you!_" said Audrey, reserved. "I suppose you
had fine times in London!"

"Oh! It was vehy exciting! It was vehy exciting!" Miss Ingate agreed
loudly.

"Father wouldn't let me read about it in the paper," said Audrey, still
reserved. "He never will, you know. But I did!"

"Oh! But you didn't read about me playing the barrel organ all the way down
Regent Street, because that wasn't in any of the papers."

"You _didn't!_" Audrey protested, with a sudden dark smile.

"Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. And vehy tiring it was. Vehy tiring
indeed. It's quite an art to turn a barrel organ. If you don't keep going
perfectly even it makes the tune jerky. Oh! I know a bit about barrel
organs now. They smashed it all to pieces. Oh yes! All to pieces. I spoke
to the police. I said, 'Aren't you going to protect these ladies'
property?' But they didn't lift a finger."

"And weren't you arrested?"

"Me!" shrieked Miss Ingate. "Me arrested!" Then more quietly, in an assured
tone, "Oh no! I wasn't arrested. You see, as soon as the row began I just
walked away from the organ and became one of the crowd. I'm all _for_ them,
but I wasn't going to be arrested."

Miss Ingate's sparkling eyes seemed to say: "Sylvia Pankhurst can be
arrested if she likes, and so can Mrs. Despard and Annie Kenney and Jane
Foley, or any of them. But the policeman that is clever enough to catch
Miss Ingate of Moze does not exist. And the gumption of Miss Ingate of Moze
surpasses the united gumption of all the other feminists in England."

"Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!" repeated Miss Ingate with mingled complacency, glee,
passion, and sardonic tolerance of the whole panorama of worldly existence.
"The police were awful, shocking. But I was not arrested."

"Well, _I_ was--this morning," said Audrey in a low and poignant voice.

Miss Ingate was startled out of her mood of the detached ironic spectator.

"What?" she frowned.

They heard a servant moving about at the foot of the stairs, and a capped
head could be seen through the interstices of the white Chinese balustrade.
The study was the only immediate refuge; Miss Ingate advanced right into
it, and Audrey pushed the door to.

"Father's given me a month's C.B."

Miss Ingate, gazing at the girl's face, saw in its quiet and yet savage
desperation the possibility that after all she might indeed be surprised by
the vagaries of human nature in the village. And her glance became
sympathetic, even tender, as well as apprehensive.

"'C.B.'? What do you mean--'C.B.'?"

"Don't you know what C.B. means?" exclaimed Audrey with scornful
superiority over the old spinster. "Confined to barracks. Father says I'm
not to go beyond the grounds for a month. And to-day's the second of
April!"

"No!"

"Yes, he does. He's given me a week, you know, before. Now it's a month."

Silence fell.

Miss Ingate looked round at the shabby study, with its guns, cigar-boxes,
prints, books neither old nor new, japanned boxes of documents, and general
litter scattered over the voluted walnut furniture. Her own house was
old-fashioned, and she realised it was old-fashioned; but when she came
into Flank Hall, and particularly into Mr. Moze's study, she felt as if
she was stepping backwards into history--and this in spite of the fact that
nothing in the place was really ancient, save the ceilings and the woodwork
round the windows. It was Mr. Moze's habit of mind that dominated and
transmogrified the whole interior, giving it the quality of a mausoleum.
The suffragette procession in which Miss Ingate had musically and
discreetly taken part seemed to her as she stood in Mr. Moze's changeless
lair to be a phantasm. Then she looked at the young captive animal and
perceived that two centuries may coincide on the same carpet and that time
is merely a convention.

"What you been doing?" she questioned, with delicacy.

"I took a strange man by the hand," said Audrey, choosing her words
queerly, as she sometimes did, to produce a dramatic effect.

"This morning?"

"Yes. Eight o'clock."

"What? Is there a strange man in the village?"

"You don't mean to say you haven't seen the yacht!"

"Yacht?" Miss Ingate showed some excitement.

"Come and look, Winnie," said Audrey, who occasionally thought fit to
address Miss Ingate in the manner of the elder generation. She drew Miss
Ingate to the window.

Between the brown curtains Mozewater, the broad, shallow estuary of the
Moze, was spread out glittering in the sunshine which could not get into
the chilly room. The tide was nearly at full, and the estuary looked like a
mighty harbour for great ships; but in six hours it would be reduced to a
narrow stream winding through mud flats of marvellous ochres, greens, and
pinks. In the hazy distance a fitful white flash showed where ocean waves
were breaking on a sand-bank. And in the foreground, against a disused Hard
that was a couple of hundred yards lower down than the village Hard, a
large white yacht was moored, probably the largest yacht that had ever
threaded that ticklish navigation. She was a shallow-draft barge-yacht,
rigged like a Thames barge, and her whiteness and the glint of her brass,
and the flicker of her ensign at the stern were dazzling. Blue figures ran
busily about on her, and a white-and-blue person in a peaked cap stood
importantly at the wheel.

"She was on the mud last night," said Audrey eagerly, "opposite the Flank
buoy, and she came up this morning at half-flood. I think they made fast at
Lousey Hard, because they couldn't get any farther without waiting. They
have a motor, and it must be their first trip this season. I was on the
dyke. I wasn't even looking at them, but they called me, so I had to go.
They only wanted to know if Lousey Hard was private. Of course I told them
it wasn't. It was a very middle-aged man spoke to me. He must be the owner.
As soon as they were tied up he wanted to jump ashore. It was rather
awkward, and I just held out my hand to help him. Father saw me from here.
I might have known he would."

"Why! It's going off!" exclaimed Miss Ingate.

The yacht swung slowly round, held by her stern to the Hard. Then the last
hawser was cast off, and she floated away on the first of the ebb; and as
she moved, her main-sail, unbrailed, spread itself out and became a vast
pinion. Like a dream of happiness she lessened and faded, and Lousey Hard
was as lonely and forlorn as ever.

"But didn't you explain to your father?" Miss Ingate demanded of Audrey.

"Of course I did. But he wouldn't listen. He never does. I might just as
well have explained to the hall-clock. He raged. I think he enjoys losing
his temper. He said I oughtn't to have been there at all, and it was just
like me, and he couldn't understand it in a daughter of his, and it would
be a great shock to my poor mother, and he'd talked enough--he should now
proceed to action. All the usual things. He actually asked me who 'the man'
was."

"And who was it?"

"How can I tell? For goodness' sake don't go imitating father, Winnie! ...
Rather a dull man, I should say. Rather like father, only not so old. He
had a beautiful necktie; I think it must have been made out of a strip of
Joseph's coat."

Miss Ingate giggled at a high pitch, and Audrey responsively smiled.

"Oh dear! Oh dear!" murmured Miss Ingate when her giggling was exhausted.
"How queer it is that a girl like you can't keep your father in a good
temper!"

"Father hates me to say funny things. If I say anything funny he turns as
black as ink--and he takes care to keep gloomy all the rest of the day,
too. He never laughs. Mother laughs now and then, but I never heard father
laugh. Oh yes, I did. He laughed when the cat fell out of the bathroom
window on to the lawn-roller. He went quite red in the face with
laughing.... I say, Miss Ingate, do you think father's mad?"

"I shouldn't think he's what you call mad," replied Miss Ingate judicially,
with admirable sang-froid. "I've known so many peculiar people in my time.
And you must remember, Audrey, this is a peculiar part of the world."

"Well, I believe he's mad, anyway. I believe he's got men on the brain,
especially young men. He's growing worse. Yesterday he told me I musn't
have the punt out on Mozewater this season unless he's with me. Fancy
skiffing about with father! He says I'm too old for that now. So there you
are. The older I get the less I'm allowed to do. I can't go a walk, unless
it's an errand. The pedal is off my bike, and father is much too cunning to
have it repaired. I can't boat. I'm never given any money. He grumbles
frightfully if I want any clothes, so I never want any. That's my latest
dodge. I've read every book in the house except the silly liturgical and
legal things he's always having from the London Library--and I've read even
some of those. He won't buy any new music. Golf! Ye gods, Winnie, you
should hear him talk about ladies and golf!"

"I have," said Miss Ingate. "But it doesn't ruffle me, because I don't
play."

"But he plays with girls, and young girls, too, all the same. He's been
caught in the act. Ethel told me. He little thinks I know. He'd let me play
if he could be the only man on the course. He's mad about me and men. He
never looks at me without thinking of all the boys in the district."

"But he's really very fond of you, Audrey."

"Yes, I know," said Audrey. "He ought to keep me in the china cupboard."

"Well, it's a great problem."

"He's invented a beautiful new trick for keeping me in when he's out. I
have to copy his beastly Society letters for him."

"I see he's got a new box," observed Miss Ingate, glancing into the open
cupboard in which stood the safe. On the top of the safe were two japanned
boxes, each lettered in white: "The National Reformation Society." The
uppermost box was freshly unpacked and shone with all the intact pride of
virginity.

"You should read some of the letters. You really should, Winnie," said
Audrey. "All the bigwigs of the Society love writing to each other. I bet
you father will get a typewriting machine this year, and make me learn it.
The chairman has a typewriter, and father means to be the next chairman.
You'll see.... Oh! What's that? Listen!"

"What's what?"

A faint distant throbbing could be heard.

"It's the motor! He's coming back for something. Fly out of here, Winnie,
fly!"

Audrey felt sick at the thought that if her father had returned only a few
minutes earlier he might have trapped her at the safe itself. She still
kept one hand behind her.

Miss Ingate, who with all her qualities was rather easily flustered, ran
out of the dangerous room in Audrey's wake. They met Mr. Mathew Moze at
the half-landing of the stairs.

He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years. He had plump
cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were
quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and
waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand
in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant,
a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker--for
anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not
possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land. His face was
preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was
on the stairs it instantly brightened into a warm and rather wistful smile.

"Good morning, Miss Ingate," he greeted her with deferential cordiality.
"I'm so glad to see you back."

"Good morning, good morning, Mr. Moze," responded Miss Ingate. "Vehy nice
of you. Vehy nice of you."

Nobody would have guessed from their demeanour that they differed on every
subject except their loyalty to that particular corner of Essex, that he
regarded her and her political associates as deadly microbes in the
national organism, and that she regarded him as a nincompoop crossed with a
tyrant. Each of them had a magic glass to see in the other nothing but a
local Effendi and familiar guardian angel of Moze. Moreover, Mr. Moze's
public smile and public manner were irresistible--until he lost his temper.
He might have had friends by the score, had it not been for his deep
constitutional reserve--due partly to diffidence and partly to an immense
hidden conceit. Mr. Moze's existence was actuated, though he knew it not,
by the conviction that the historic traditions of England were committed to
his keeping. Hence the conceit, which was that of a soul secretly
self-dedicated.

Audrey, outraged by the hateful hypocrisy of persons over fifty, and
terribly constrained and alarmed, turned vaguely back up the stairs. Miss
Ingate, not quite knowing what she did, with an equal vagueness followed
her.

"Come in. Do come in," urged Mr. Moze at the door of the study.

Audrey, who remained on the landing, heard her elders talk smoothly of
grave Mozian things, while Mr. Moze unlocked the new tin box above the
safe.

"I'd forgotten a most important paper," said he, as he relocked the box. "I
have an appointment with the Bishop of Colchester at ten-forty-five, and I
fear I may be late. Will you excuse me, Miss Ingate?"

She excused him.

Departing, he put the paper into his pocket with a careful and loving
gesture that well symbolised his passionate affection for the Society of
which he was already the vice-chairman. He had been a member of the
National Reformation Society for eleven years. Despite the promise of its
name, this wealthy association of idealists had no care for reforms in a
sadly imperfect England. Its aim was anti-Romanist. The Reformation which
it had in mind was Luther's, and it wished, by fighting an alleged
insidious revival of Roman Catholicism, to make sure that so far as England
was concerned Luther had not preached in vain.

Mr. Moze's connection with the Society had originated in a quarrel between
himself and a Catholic priest from Ipswich who had instituted a boys'
summer camp on the banks of Mozewater near the village of Moze. Until that
quarrel, the exceeding noxiousness of the Papal doctrine had not clearly
presented itself to Mr. Moze. In such strange ways may an ideal come to
birth. As Mr. Moze, preoccupied and gloomy once more, steered himself
rapidly out of Moze towards the episcopal presence, the image of the
imperturbable and Jesuitical priest took shape in his mind, refreshing his
determination to be even with Rome at any cost.

CHAPTER II

THE THIEF'S PLAN WRECKED

"The fact is," said Audrey, "father has another woman in the house now."

Mr. Moze had left Miss Ingate in the study and Audrey had cautiously
rejoined her there.

"Another woman in the house!" repeated Miss Ingate, sitting down in happy
expectation. "What on earth do you mean? Who on earth do you mean?"

"I mean me."

"You aren't a woman, Audrey."

"I'm just as much of a woman as you are. All father's behaviour proves it."

"But your father treats you as a child."

"No, he doesn't. He treats me as a woman. If he thought I was a child he
wouldn't have anything to worry about. I'm over nineteen."

"You don't look it."

"Of course I don't. But I could if I liked. I simply won't look it because
I don't care to be made ridiculous. I should start to look my age at once
if father stopped treating me like a child."

"But you've just said he treats you as a woman!"

"You don't understand, Winnie," said the girl sharply. "Unless you're
pretending. Now you've never told me anything about yourself, and I've
always told you lots about myself. You belong to an old-fashioned family.
How were you treated when you were my age?"

"In what way?"

"You know what way," said Audrey, gazing at her.

"Well, my dear. Things seemed to come very naturally, somehow."

"Were you ever engaged?"

"Me? Oh, no!" answered Miss Ingate with tranquillity. "I'm vehy interested
in them. Oh, vehy! Oh, vehy! And I like talking to them. But anything more
than that gets on my nerves. My eldest sister was the one. Oh! She was the
one. She refused eleven men, and when she was going to be married she made
me embroider the monograms of all of them on the skirt of her
wedding-dress. She made me, and I had to do it. I sat up all night the
night before the wedding to finish them."

"And what did the bridegroom say about it?"

"The bridegroom didn't say anything about it because he didn't know. Nobody
knew except Arabella and me. She just wanted to feel that the monograms
were on her dress, that was all."

"How strange!"

"Yes, it was. But this is a vehy strange part of the world."

"And what happened afterwards?"

"Bella died when she had her first baby, and the baby died as well. And the
father's dead now, too."

"What a horrid story, Winnie!" Audrey murmured. And after a pause: "I like
your sister."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26