The Tale of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice | Page 4

to discuss it
sometimes, in the evenings, when he was kept out late at his job--it's an
uncertain business, reporting--we used to discuss it with the tolerance
of fond people, and smile over his weaknesses, and say that he was
incorrigible. All the same, it continued to irritate me. Sometimes I
could see that he hurt her, when in his impatient way he swung round
to devastate her opinions with those sly and unanswerable phrases that

placed everything once and for always in a ridiculous light. What a
devilish gift he had, that man, of humiliating one! And he did it always
in so smiling and friendly a fashion that one could neither take offence
nor retaliate. In fact, one didn't realise that one had been attacked until
one felt the blood running warm from one's wounds, while he had
already danced away upon some other quest.
"I can hardly trace the steps by which my admiration of him grew to
affection, my affection to uneasiness, and my uneasiness to resentment.
I only know that I took to flushing scarlet when I saw her wince, and to
making about him, when I was alone with her, remarks that were less
and less tolerant and more and more critical. My temper grew readier to
bite out at him, my amusement less easily beguiled. I don't know
whether he noticed it. Most probably he did, for he always noticed
everything. If he did, then he gave no sign. His friendliness towards me
continued unvarying, and there were times when I thought he really
bestirred himself to impress me, to seduce me, he who was usually so
contemptuous, and seemed to enjoy stirring up people's dislike. It
wasn't difficult for him to impress me, if that was what he wanted, for
he had, of course, a far better brain than my own; the sort of brain that
compelled one's startled admiration, even when one least wanted to
accord it. By Jove, how well he used to talk, on those evenings, when
we sat and dangled our legs from the window-sill, looking out at the
barges! The best talk I ever heard. You could have taken it all down in
shorthand, and not a word to alter.
"Then he got a regular job which kept him out for three evenings a
week, but he told me that mustn't make any difference to my habits: I
was to drop in just the same, whenever I wanted to; and since I hadn't
anywhere else to go, and since the house had become a home to me, I
took him at his word. In a way I missed him, on the evenings he wasn't
there; although I could no longer pretend to myself that I was fond of
him, he was a perpetual interest and stimulation to me, an angry
stimulation, if you can understand what I mean, and I missed his
presence, if only because it deprived me of the occupation of picking
holes in him, and of making mental pounces for my own satisfaction
upon everything he said. Not upon its intellectual value. That was

above reproach. Only upon it as a signpost to his character. I took a
delight in silently finding fault with him. But presently this desire
passed from me, and I came to prefer the repose of the evenings I spent
alone with his wife to the strenuousness of the evenings when we were
all three together. We talked very little, his wife and I, when he was not
there. She had about her an amazing quality of restfulness, of which I
quickly got into the habit of taking advantage, after the vulgar,
competitive days of a journalist's existence. You can't imagine what it
meant to me, to drift into the seclusion of that little Chelsea room, with
the mistiness of the trees and the river outside the window, to be
greeted by her smile, and to sink into my familiar arm-chair, where I
might lounge sucking at my pipe and watching the cool glimmer of her
beautiful hands over the rhythm of her needle. Can you wonder that we
didn't talk much? And can you wonder that our silence became heavy
with the things we hadn't said?
"Not at first. Our love-affair ran a course contrary to the usual ordering
of such things. If it indeed ended in all the fever and pain of passion, it
certainly began with all the calm of the hearth; yes, I went through a
long phase of accepting that room as my home, and that gentle woman
as my natural companion therein. I don't think I examined the situation
at all closely at that time. I was more than content to let so pleasant an
acquiescence take possession of me; for the first time in my