The afternoon, thank goodness, cleared up, and Harold prepared his acetylene lamp till the whole village knew he was going to ride out on his bicycle, and wondered if Miss Bostock was taken worse, you know.
He reached Warsop by half-past six, having ridden against the wind. Walter George did not come in till seven, because the bank was doing overtime. When he came, Harold greeted him as man to man, and met with a similar greeting back again.
Walter George — his family name was Whiffen, since trifles matter — was a nice, well-built, plump lad of twenty-one, with round rosy cheeks and neat hair cut rather long and brushed carefully sideways: not backwards: who looked exacdy like a choir-boy grown into a High-School boy, and a High-School boy grown into a bank-clerk, and a bank-clerk just budding for a nice, confidential, comfortable-looking, eminendy satisfactory manager of a little bank in some little industrial place in the provinces. Already he inspired confidence, he looked so like the right kind of choir-boy grown into the right kind of high-school boy, the kind that mothers find so satisfactory as a product of their own.
And indubitably he was gone on Emmie. We prefer the slang, as having finer shades than the cant though correct phrase in love with. In-love-with means just anything. But to be gone on somebody is quite different from being smitten by her, or sweet on her, or barmy over her. Walter George was gone on Emmie, and he was neither smitten by her nor barmy over her.
“Hello Harold! You’re a stranger.”
Walter George Whiffen was just a tinge patronising towards the bicycle-bespattered, wind-harrowed young schoolmaster.
“You’ve not ridden over from Eakrast?”
Why, you bank-clerk, do you think he’d flown over, with bicycle clips round his trouser-ankles and spots of mud on his nose.
“Yes, I’ve come with a message for you.”
“For me?”
Immediately Walter George’s rosy face looked anxious.
“We’ve got Emmie bad at our house.”
The choir-boy — he was no more at this moment — looked with round eyes on Harold.
“Bad!” he re-echoed. “How long?”
“Oh, since Tuesday. She’s been in a rare way, I tell you: awful amount of pain.”
“Where?”
“Why, the doctor says neuralgia of the stomach, but I say it was more like cramp of the stomach. We were up half the night two nights with hot bran-bags. I thought she’d go off any minute, as true as I’m here I did. She couldn’t speak, and her face went that funny. Cramp of the stomach catches you and you die like a fly, almost before you know where you are. I was thankful when she came round a bit, with hot bran-bags and hot water-bottles to her feet, I can tell you.”
The choir-boy stood with his mouth open and his eyes blue and round, and did not say a word for some moments.
“Had she got it when she came?” he asked at length.
“Bad, she had. She’d got it bad when I came in and found her at tea-time. It took her I don’t know how long to walk from the station. She had to keep sitting down by the roadside, and going off in a dead faint. — It’s a thousand wonders she ever got to our house: our Fanny says so an’ all.”
The choir-boy’s pleasant mouth, that still looked more like chocolate than cigarettes, began to quiver, and he turned aside his face as his eyes filled with tears. Harold, also moved too deeply, turned his pale and hollow face in the opposite direction, and so they remained for some minutes like a split statue of Janus, looking two ways.
“Did she ask for me?” quavered the choir-boy’s voice in the east.
“She did,” sounded the schoolmaster’s voice from the west. “She sent you a note.” And he took the missive from his pocket.
Then the two halves of the Janus statue turned to one another as if for the first time, and the choir-boy wiped his eyes with a dashing and gentlemanly silk handkerchief which he had bought for himself at the best shop in Warsop. Having wiped his eyes he took the letter. Having read the contents he looked at the envelope. After which he kissed the note-paper, and let Harold see him do it. Harold approved heartily, and knew that was how he himself would feel if it was Fanny. The hearts of the two young men beat as one.
“Poor little child,” said the high-school boy, wiping his eyes again. “How did she get it?”
“It’s nerves, you know. She’s a bundle of nerves — / know from Fanny. She lives on her spirit, till her nerves break down. And she’d had a row with her father again. He doesn’t understand her a bit.” This last from the psychological schoolmaster with some spleen.
“Had he been tormenting her?” asked the bank-clerk.
“Why he makes her life a misery,” said the schoolmaster, with a curl of the lip.
The bank-clerk, almost a man now, looked aside and became red with profound indignation.
“She’s only a bit of a thing you know,” he said brokenly.
“I tell you,” rejoined Harold. “She ran away to Fanny and me for a bit of protection.”
“Damned devil,” murmured the bank-clerk, making his brows heavy against the bugbear.
“Oh but she’s a king to what she was,” said Harold. “And that’s one thing, she’ll be better nearly as sudden as she got bad: I’m hoping so, anyhow. She’s eating a bit today. She seemed fair comforted when I told her to ask you over for the week-end, and when I said she could stop with us and take Miss Tewson’s place. Don’t you think that would be better all round?”
“Yes — ” but the young gentleman wasn’t listening. “I’ll ride back with you tonight.”
“Oh I shouldn’t,” said Harold. “Can’t you come tomorrow and stop over Sunday? That’s what we were counting on.”
“Yes, I shall be only too glad. But I’ll see her tonight.”
The high-school boy had no sooner uttered this resolve, and was fixing his clouded brow like another Roland, than his landlady tapped at the door and hovered half way into the little parlour. She was a nice old lady with a lace cap.
“Your pardon, young gentlemen — but tea is ready for you.”
“Oh!” and the high-school boy became the incipient bank- manager. He put his hand lightly through Harold’s arm. “Come on. We have dinner at one o’clock here, and a late tea. Mrs Slater can’t cope with dinner at night. We’ll sit down, shall we?” And he led the half-willing Harold to the door.
“No thanks,” said Harold. “I’ll be off. I had my tea before I came. I’d better be getting back.”
“Oh no you won’t — not till you’ve had a cup of tea.” And he led his friend hospitably across the little hall or entrance passage, to where his landlady stood hovering in the doorway of the little dining-room.
“Mrs Slater — you know Mr Wagstaff, don’t you?”
“Indeed I do. Indeed I do. Come and sit down both of you.”
She spoke in a small, piping voice, quite briskly for the sake of the young men. But her face looked remote, as if she hardly belonged. She seemed to be looking across the gulfs which separate us from early Victorian days, a little dazedly and wanly.
Walter George, of course, did not dream of going without his tea. He ate large quantities of toast and bloater-paste and jam and cake, and Harold tucked in also. And the little woman in a lace cap looked at them from far away behind the tea-pot — not that it was geographically far away, only ethnologically — and was glad they were there, but seemed a little bewildered, as if she could hardly understand their language.
Harold, as appetite began to be appeased, demonstrated methodically to the bank-clerk that it was no use his, Walter George’s, riding to Eakrast tonight, that he would only knock himself up for tomorrow and spoil Emmie’s chance of a perfect recovery and her bliss in a perfect meeting. Of which the young gentleman allowed himself to be convinced. Therefore he begged to be allowed to write a line in answer to Emmie’s. Therefore Harold sat on pins and needles while the young Tristan covered much paper. Harold, of course, was thinking of Fanny and the baby, and how they’d be getting nervous etc. etc.
But at length Walter George sealed his letter and addressed it to Miss E. Bostock. He wrung Harold’s hand in the highroad, and watched the acetylene flare elope down the hill.