Quinneys 6

Quinneys 6

Mother and daughter gasped. Quinney seemed to have swollen to monstrous

dimensions. Was he stark mad? Tremblingly they waited for what might

follow.

 

"Perhaps more," he added flamboyantly, "and everything is going to be

good, because I shall choose it. It’s become a sort of religion with

me. A fine thing like that K’ang He jar of mine makes me feel good. I

can kneel down before it."

 

Mrs. Biddlecombe observed majestically:

 

"Don’t be blasphemous, Joseph!"

 

"Blasphemous?" he repeated derisively. "It’s blasphemy to my notion to

prefer ugliness to beauty. Suppose I’d done as father wanted me to do,

and got engaged to that ugly laughin’ hyena, Arabella Pinker, because

she had something in her stocking besides a leg like a bed-post."

 

"Now you are indelicate, isn’t he, Susan?"

 

"I chose Susan instead of Bella. Blasphemous! Now, tell me, what do you

go to the Cathedral for?"

 

"To worship my Maker."

 

"Well, I’m going to be honest with you and Sue. I go to the Cathedral to

look at the roof, the finest bit of stonework in the kingdom. My

thoughts just soar up into that vaulting. I feel like a bird o’

Paradise. Our Cathedral is God’s House, and no mistake. My mind can’t

grapple with Him, but it gets to close grips with that fan vaulting,

which He must have designed."

 

"Never heard you talk like this before," murmured Susan.

 

In her heart, which was beating faster than usual, Miss Biddlecombe was

profoundly impressed, because she had wit enough to perceive that her

Joe was absolutely sincere. But she trembled at his audacity, because

she had been trained to say "Gawd" rather than "God," believing devoutly

that the lengthening of the vowel indicated piety.

 

"I’ve had to bottle up things," said Quinney grimly. "Now I’m free to

speak my mind, and you’re free too, my girl. Hooray, for plain speech!

Lawsy, how it hurts a poor devil to hold his tongue!"

 

Mrs. Biddlecombe retired from the parlour feeling quite unable to deal

faithfully with a young man who must be, so she decided, slightly under

the influence of liquor. Her ideas had been put to headlong flight, but

they returned like homing doves to the great and joyous fact that her

prospective son-in-law possessed ten thousand pounds. Enough to

intoxicate anybody—that! Her own steady head swam at the luck of

things. Later, when the first exuberance had passed, Susan and she

would have a word or two to say. For the moment there were ten thousand

reasons, all of them pure gold, in favour of discreet silence.

 

 

*V*

 

To Susan alone, under a pledge of secrecy, Quinney became alluringly

expansive. Once, in her flapper days, she had seen Lord George Sanger’s

famous three-ring circus, and had tried to take in and assimilate three

simultaneous shows. Result—a headache! Peering into Quinney’s mind was

quite as exciting as the three-ring circus, and nearly as confusing. He

could soar to the giddy pinnacles of Melchester Cathedral, and thence,

with a swallow’s flight, wing his way through the open windows of a

stately pile of buildings designed by Inigo Jones for the fourth

Marquess of Mel.

 

Indeed, the door had not closed behind the ample rotundities of Mrs.

Biddlecombe when he asked abruptly:

 

"Ever seen the Saloon at Mel Court?"

 

"Never, Joe."

 

"It’s furnished just right according to my ideas. I want to have

furniture of that sort. Georgian—hey? We’ll go there together, when the

family are in town. In that Saloon I feel as I do in the

Cathedral—reg’lar saint! It’s spiffin’! And every bit of the period.

Not all English—that don’t matter. The china will make your mouth

fairly water, the finest Oriental! Pictures, too, but of course we

can’t touch them yet."

 

Susan gazed anxiously into his face, which was glowing with enthusiasm.

 

"Joe, dear, shall I fetch you a glass of barley water?"

 

"Barley water? Not for Joe! I’ve thought of that, too, my pretty. I’m

going to have a cellar. None o’ your cheap poisons! Sound port and old

brown sherry, in cut-glass decanters!"

 

Susan opened her mouth, closed it, and burst into tears. At the moment

she believed that her clever Joe had gone quite mad. The young man

kissed away her tears, and soon brought the ready smile back to her

lips, as the sanity which informed so remarkably his powers of speech

percolated through her mind. He might say the strangest and most

surprising things, but they were convincing, indeed overpoweringly so.

He held her hands, as he talked, in his masterful grip, and looked

keenly into her soft brown eyes.

 

"Sue, dear, it’s not surprisin’ that I surprise you, because, as I told

you before, I surprise myself. I lie awake nights wondering at the

ideas that come into my head. I suppose the old man was such an

example——"

 

"An example, Joe?"

 

"Of how not to do things! Lawsy, what a wriggler, to be sure, twisting

and turning in the dark, and disliking the light. Wouldn’t clean our

windows, because he didn’t want our customers to see the fakes too

plainly. We just pigged it. You know that? Yes. I had to make a

flannel shirt last a fortnight. Same way with food. Cheap meat, badly

cooked. Stunted my growth, it did, but not my mind. I used to spend my

time thinking what I’d do when I got out of Melchester."

 

"Out of Melchester?"

 

Susan and her mother were in and of the ancient town. In these days of

cheap excursions and motor-cars it is not easy to project the mind back

to the time when the middle classes rarely stirred from home. To be in

Melchester, according to Susan Biddlecombe, was a pleasure; to be of it,

a privilege. Melchester had imposed upon her its inexorable conventions,

the more inexorable because they were unformulated, exuding from every

pore of the body corporate. Chief amongst them perhaps was veneration

for the Bishop, who ruled his diocese with doctrinal severity tempered

by gifts of port wine and tea and beef. Nonconformity was ill at ease

and slightly out of elbows beneath the shadow of the most beautiful

spire in England. The only Radical of importance in the town was

Pinker, the rich grocer. And when the Marquess of Mel said to him,

chaffingly, "Ah, Pinker, why don’t you belong to us?" the honest fellow

replied, "It’s this way, my lord. The Conservative gentry deal with me

because I know my business. The Radicals buy from me because I’m a

Radical. They’d sooner deal with the Stores than with a Tory grocer."

 

Quinney continued:

 

"I have my eye on London, Paris, and New York."

 

"Mercy me!"

 

"Meanwhile, Melchester is good enough. But our house must be a show

place—see?"

 

Susan tried to see, but blinked.

 

"I shall take some of our customers to our house, to show them the

things they can’t have. I mean, of course, the things they can’t have

except at a big price. Nothing bothers a collector so much as that.

Your real connoisseur"—Quinney had not yet mastered the pronunciation of

this word—"goes dotty when he can’t get what he wants. By Gum, he feels

as I used to feel when I wanted you, and the old man was alive and

everlastingly jawing about Arabella Pinker. I shall have a lot of

Arabellas in the shop, but my Susans will be at home."

 

"But, Joe, mother and I were so looking forward to furnishing the Dream

Cottage."

 

"I know, I know!" He began to skate swiftly over the thin ice. "But

your ideas, sweetie, are so—so semi-detached. You haven’t got the

instinct for the right stuff. I have. You and your mother want to stir

up Laburnum Row. I’m a-going to make the whole of Melchester sit up and

howl. See?"

 

Susan nodded. Very dimly she apprehended these incredible ambitions,

and yet her instinct, no more at fault than his, whispered to her that

Joe could do it. From that moment Laburnum Row appeared in its true

proportions. Quinney said quickly:

 

"I’ll leave the kitchen and the bedrooms to you, but, remember, no

rubbish."

 

Accordingly it came to pass that the Dream Cottage was furnished with

charming bits of Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton, picked up here

and there throughout Wessex. The rubbish in the shop was sold _en

bloc_, being taken over by a small dealer. The premises were put into

the hands of a London decorator, a friend of the great Tomlin.

 

Upon the day the painters went in Quinney marched out and married his

Susan.

 

 

 

 

*CHAPTER III*

 

*THE PLEASANT LAND OF FRANCE*

 

*I*

 

 

They crossed to Saint Malo two days after the wedding. The groom was

horribly sea-sick; the bride, a capital sailor, ministered to him

faithfully. This experience is recorded, because it opened Joe’s eyes

to the fact that physical infirmity is a serious disability. He had

never been "outed," as he expressed it, before. And it was humiliating

to reflect that his small Susan could confront without a qualm wild

waves when he lay prostrate, limp in mind and body, capable only of

cursing Tomlin, who had dispatched him upon this perilous enterprise.

He was not too well pleased when Susan kissed his clammy brow and

whispered, "Oh, Joe, I do love to look after you." Somehow he had never

contemplated her looking after him. His very gorge rose at the thought

of his inferiority. Twenty-four hours afterwards he felt himself again,

the better perhaps for the upheaval, but the memory of what he had

suffered remained. He told himself (and Susan) that he would be

satisfied with establishing himself in London. New York and Paris could

go hang!

 

They wandered about Saint Malo, criticizing with entire candour

everything they beheld. Susan aired her French; the true Briton

expressed a preference for his own honest tongue. The Cathedral aroused

certain enthusiasms tempered by disgust at the tawdry embellishments of

the interior. Susan, however, was impressed by the kneeling men and

women, who wandered in and out at all hours. She stared at their

weather-beaten faces uplifted in supplication to some unknown saint.

She became sensible of an emotion passing from them to her, a desire to

kneel with them, to share, so to speak, the graces and benedictions

obviously bestowed upon them. For the first time in her life she

realized that religion may be more than an act of allegiance to God.

These simple folk, workers all of them, could spare five minutes out of

a busy morning to pray. Her own prayers never varied.