Payment Deferred · Chapter 8 (1/2)

VIII

Next week kept all Malcolm Road on tiptoe. Various rumours had been flying round about Mr. Marble’s suddenly acquired wealth, stating its amount and its manner of coming in twenty different ways. Yet there were still some sceptics, who refused to believe the evidence presented to them, and who scornfully declared that they would give credit to the rumours only when they were proved beyond all doubt. Why, only a few months back there had been similar rumours, when the Marbles started to pay off their bills and Mrs. Marble had bought some new clothes. But in a short time they had been back to their old tricks again, owing money on all sides, while Mrs. Marble had been going about as dowdy as any of them.

But this time the sceptics were confounded. At first the news had flown from lip to lip⁠—“Number 53’s moving out.” It looked like it, indeed. An empty furniture van stood outside, and men were moving furniture into it from Number 53. Everywhere, from upper windows behind curtains, housewives were watching the process. Some, overwhelmed with curiosity, put on their hats and went thither on hurriedly-composed errands of borrowing or restoring in order to have a word with Mrs. Marble to find out what was really going on. But they retired baffled. Mrs. Marble was in too great a state of hurry and bewilderment to give them any satisfaction at all. And, having retired, they were doomed to further mystification. For more vans drew up outside Number 53, and from these men began to bring other furniture and take it inside.

Truly the neighbours were baffled. They had heard of people moving out before, and they had heard of people moving in. They knew of many cases where these two operations had been carried out as nearly simultaneously as might be. They had also heard, but more rarely, of people buying new furniture although they were not newly married. But the present process utterly confounded them. And the furniture that was arriving! Nothing half as splendid had ever been seen before in Malcolm Road. They saw the great Empire bed being carried in in sections, the gilding flaming in the daylight, and the Cupids, vapidly chubby, clustered upon it. The neighbours shook their heads sadly, and told each other that they thought that that bed could tell a tale or two if it wished. Then came chairs, and dressing-tables, and chests of drawers, all resplendent in gold, and covered thick with carving. There was little housework done in Malcolm Road that day. The housewives were too busy watching the new furniture being brought in to Number 53.

The work was still uncompleted late in the afternoon when Mr. Marble returned from the office. It was nearly done, but the task that remained was the hardest of all. The men were busy arranging to get the vast mosaic table into the house. Mr. Marble, with quite a pleasant bubble of excitement within him, flung down his hat and hastened out to superintend the handling of this, his chiefest treasure. He stood by the gate, hatless in the sunshine, giving useless and unheeded advice while the workmen toiled and sweated, handling the monstrosity. Mrs. Marble had sunk down on one of the uncomfortable gilt chairs, quite tired out.

As Mr. Marble stood on the pavement by his gate he felt a touch on his arm, and he looked round. She was a woman nearly of middle-age⁠—no, hardly that, thought Mr. Marble, but at any rate she gave an impression of ripe and luscious maturity. And she was dressed⁠—oh, simply to perfection. She was dressed as Mr. Marble sometimes vaguely wished his wife would dress. Despite her closely-fitting hat anyone could tell that she was auburn-haired, and her eyes were a rich brown and her complexion was splendid. She wore her clothes in a fashion only achieved by her countrywomen⁠—she was French. The whole atmosphere her appearance conveyed was one of ripeness and perfection⁠—overripeness, perhaps, but that was, if anything, an added attraction in Mr. Marble’s eyes.

“What lovely things you have got,” said this apparition. “I have been looking at them for ever so long. Those beautiful chairs and that lovely bed! They remind me of what I have seen in the Louvre.”

Mr. Marble was a little taken aback. He was unused to being addressed in the broad light of day by overripe and entirely delectable goddesses. But he was secretly pleased. It was a pleasant thing to have this long-coveted Empire furniture admired, especially by people of obvious good taste like this one. Mr. Marble realized that the difficulty that the newcomer displayed in tackling the aspirate was not the one usually met with in Malcolm Road. He noted her as French, with a pleased appreciation of his own perspicacity, and his head positively swam as he looked at her and strove to make some reply. The unknown noted his embarrassment, was pleased, and went swiftly on as though she had not.

“You do not mind my looking at your nice things? No? I am very rude, I know, and I should not, but I could not help it. And now I have confessed, and I ought to have pardon. You do pardon me, eh?”

Mr. Marble had not even yet recovered himself, and this charming little speech did nothing to assist in the process. He stammered out some banal phrase or other⁠—the only intelligible word was “charmed”⁠—but somehow the newcomer soon put him at his ease and they were chatting away as though they had been friends for years. She greeted the appearance of the mosaic table with little shrieks of delight.

“Oh, how lovely!” she said. “It is magnificent. You are a very lucky man, Mr.⁠—?”

“Marble,” said Mr. Marble.

Upstairs, three doors off, one woman said to another:

“The French dressmaker woman, you know, Madame Collins, she calls herself, has just got off with Mr. Marble. Nice goings on, I call it, right in the street outside his front door, with beds and I-don’t-know-what being carried past them. I wonder what Mrs. Marble will have to say about that.”

“Nothing, I don’t expect. She doesn’t never have a word to say for herself. He treats her cruel, so I’ve heard.”

But Mr. Marble for the moment cared nothing for tittle-tattling neighbours. He was too busy thinking of something nice to say to this wonderful woman. He was still talking to her when the table had at last been manoeuvred through the narrow hall door and the workmen were gathering in the background with a furtive lust for tips in their eyes. He paid them testily, and signed the forms they held out to him without even glancing over them. He did not want her to go away just yet, but for the life of him he did not see how he could possibly detain her. Then came his wife, and this, instead of spoiling everything, as he had feared, was the saving of the situation. He was not to know that Madame Collins’ dearest wish at the moment was to scrape acquaintance with such obviously well-to-do people. She had noted the furniture, and she had noted Mr. Marble’s well-cut clothes, just obtained from the best tailor in the City, and his platinum wristwatch bracelet and his gold cigarette case. They would be acquaintances worth having, she had decided. When Mrs. Marble appeared she went effusively towards her.

“Oh, Mrs. Marble,” she said, “I ’ave just been talking to your ’usband about all your nice furniture. It is too lovely. You are a lucky woman to ’ave such nice things.”

Mrs. Marble was as startled as her husband had been ten minutes ago. She glanced quaveringly at him, and took from him her cue of agreeableness.

“I’m glad you like them,” she said.

Mr. Marble took his chance.

“Won’t you come in?” he said. “Then you could see them in the rooms. My wife could give you a cup of tea, too.”

“Thank you so much,” said Madame Collins, and she passed the threshold, in more senses than one. They passed into the dining-room. It was crammed unbearably with gilt chairs and the abominable mosaic table, whose tawdriness was accentuated by the faded flowered wallpaper and what was left of the dingy old furniture. With its glitter and glare the room looked like a cheap-jack jeweller’s stall. Madame Collins looked grimly round, but she was very charming about it, and praised the effect so delicately that even pale little Mrs. Marble flushed with pleasure. And she introduced herself in such a ladylike fashion that everybody felt happy instead of uncomfortable as they expected to feel.

They had tea with the silver tea-set on the gilt and mosaic table⁠—a combination that annoyed Madame Collins’ really sensitive eye extremely⁠—and when she rose to take her leave Mrs. Marble was almost sorry, tired though she was, and she eagerly accepted Madame Collins’ invitation to call whenever she felt like it.

Madame Collins had been very tactful and had let them know all about her past and present circumstances, without being too obvious about it. They had gathered that she was French, of a very old and distinguished family ruined by the war⁠—her father was actually a Normandy peasant⁠—and she had married an English officer of vast talent but no money. Now they were struggling to make both ends meet, she with her dressmaking and he with his music. She admitted with a shy laugh that he really tuned pianos, but that was not at all the work he was fitted for. He had great ideas about what he could do, and⁠—so she said⁠—she believed in them, too. To Mrs. Marble she conveyed the impression of a devoted couple with a great future before them; to Mr. Marble it did not seem as if the devotion were so pronounced. That goes to show what a clever woman Madame Collins was, even allowing for the fact that Mrs. Marble was very tired, and so preoccupied with being ladylike and pouring out the tea that she missed the one or two flashing glances with which Madame Collins favoured Mr. Marble from her warm, brown eyes.

And when she had gone, Mr. Marble, with his money scorching a hole in his pocket, was so excited and pleased with his inner thoughts that for the time he had no care about anything else. His riotous imagination had, for the nonce, something to riot over other than the possibilities of detection, and he made the most of it. He dreamed away the evening very pleasantly. He was not even disturbed by the fact that John and Winnie found it difficult to do homework on the mosaic table in consequence of the raised gilt border; he had no care for Mrs. Marble, who was patiently clearing up the confusion left by the men when they had brought the furniture, and who was toiling putting mattresses and sheets on the cupid-encumbered Empire bed in the front bedroom.

But he paid for this slight relaxation. He had to pay for it sooner or later of course, and as it happened this came about the next evening.

Mr. Marble was sitting smoking in the glittering dining-room. He was still happy and peaceful; he ignored the discomfort of the Empire armchair in which he sat; in the hall stood a crate of books he had ordered that morning⁠—crime books, mystery books, all the books he had seen advertised at the back of the limited selection available at the Public Library, and had coveted during his poverty⁠—and when he felt like it he would leisurely unpack them and would arrange them in the drawing-room so that he could browse in them when he would. But he was rudely disturbed. Mrs. Marble had come into the room and had sat down, and was fidgeting with her sewing in a nervous fashion. If Mr. Marble had given the matter a thought he would have known that she was nerving herself to ask something of him, but he had been too preoccupied in thinking about Madame Collins and her brown eyes⁠—the money in his pocket had something to do with it as well⁠—and the natural result was that her request took him unawares.

“Will,” said Mrs. Marble, “don’t you think we could have Mrs. Summers back here again now that we can afford it? This house means a lot of work for me, and now that we’ve got all this new furniture⁠—”

Mr. Marble sat very still. His mind had raced away to all the books about crimes that he had read. He had impressed it upon himself so very often that he could only be found out if he made some stupid mistake, like the people whose unhappy lives were told in Historic Days at the Assizes. He was not going to make any stupid mistake. Mrs. Summers was a harmless soul enough, but she had the usual besetting sin of charwomen⁠—inquisitiveness. Goodness knows what she might not find out for herself. Or perhaps his wife would say something that would set her tongue wagging in the other houses in which she worked. It was only to be expected. Mr. Marble did not mind being gossiped about⁠—he rather liked it, in the ordinary way, in fact. But he would have no gossip about himself nowadays. He simply could not afford it. He could foresee with vivid clearness what would happen. His wife would let fall a careless word or two, and Mrs. Summers would repeat them equally carelessly but with a lavish percentage of imaginative detail. The woman who heard her would tell someone else, and before anyone could say Jack Robinson there would be all sorts of tales flying round. There was plenty of gossip about him already, thanks to the new furniture; any addition might result in disaster⁠—anonymous letters to the police, or a committee of neighbours coming secretly to investigate. No one would know, of course, anything about the real state of affairs, but Mr. Marble did not want there to be any suspicion, however baseless, attached to him. For his position was not absolutely secure. If the interest of the police were sufficiently roused even for them to make a casual inspection of all his financial arrangements they might easily find something to interest them regarding certain banknotes that had passed into his possession one stormy night last winter. And it was not mere money that was at stake, nor comfort, nor even Empire furniture. What was in peril was his life! Much reading of books about crime had given him a good idea of the formalities of the condemned cell and of the scaffold. And he writhed in anguish at the thought. He could not possibly run any risks. Already in imagination he was being torn from his bed one bleak morning, and dragged fainting along a grey corridor to a tarred shed wherein awaited him a trapdoor and a noose. There was sweat on his face as he forced this picture on one side and turned to face his wife.

“No,” he said, “we don’t want any charwomen in here. You will have to manage on your own.”

Even Mrs. Marble expostulated at this arbitrary decision.

“But, Will, dear,” she said, “I don’t think you understand. I’m not asking for anything, I’m not really. You’re giving me nine pounds a week housekeeping money, and that’s a lot more than I can spend at all. We could have a maid to live in with all that money, two maids perhaps, with caps and aprons and all. But I don’t want that. They’d be too much trouble. I only want old Mrs. Summers to come in three or four days a week and help me with the rough work. It’s too much for me, really and truly it is.”

“What, in this little house?”

“Of course I could do it, if I had to, Will. But it does seem silly, doesn’t it, that I should have to sweep and dust and wash up, when there are lots of people who would be thankful to have the chance to do it for me? And my back still aches from lifting those mattresses yesterday.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Marble.

Mrs. Marble was incapable of sustaining an argument for long. She had already made two speeches, each of them thrice the length of any of her usual remarks, and she could do no more for the present. She relapsed into unhappy silence, while Mr. Marble battled with the train of thought that had been raised by his wife’s suggestion. His imagination tortured him with peculiar malignity for the next few minutes.