Widdershins | Page 7

entirely right, and I haven't a word to say. If I could only turn Romilly over to you you'd make an enormous success of her. But that can't be, and I, for my part, am seriously doubting whether she's worth my while. You know what that means."
"What does it mean?" she demanded bluntly.
"Well," he said, smiling wanly, "what does it mean when you're convinced a thing isn't worth doing? You simply don't do it."
Miss Bengough's eyes swept the ceiling for assistance against this impossible man.
"What utter rubbish!" she broke out at last. "Why, when I saw you last you were simply oozing Romilly; you were turning her off at the rate of four chapters a week; if you hadn't moved you'd have had her three-parts done by now. What on earth possessed you to move right in the middle of your most important work?"
Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she wouldn't have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason. He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He had had twenty years of it--twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of dinginess and shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever--or if it was not, he no longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his hand and take it. It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of exhaustion that only another effort is required of him; if he cannot make it he is as far off as ever....
"Anyway," Oleron summed up, "I'm happier here than I've been for a long time. That's some sort of a justification."
"And doing no work," said Miss Bengough pointedly.
At that a trifling petulance that had been gathering in Oleron came to a head.
"And why should I do nothing but work?" he demanded. "How much happier am I for it? I don't say I don't love my work--when it's done; but I hate doing it. Sometimes it's an intolerable burden that I simply long to be rid of. Once in many weeks it has a moment, one moment, of glow and thrill for me; I remember the days when it was all glow and thrill; and now I'm forty-four, and it's becoming drudgery. Nobody wants it; I'm ceasing to want it myself; and if any ordinary sensible man were to ask me whether I didn't think I was a fool to go on, I think I should agree that I was."
Miss Bengough's comely pink face was serious.
"But you knew all that, many, many years ago, Paul--and still you chose it," she said in a low voice.
"Well, and how should I have known?" he demanded. "I didn't know. I was told so. My heart, if you like, told me so, and I thought I knew. Youth always thinks it knows; then one day it discovers that it is nearly fifty--"
"Forty-four, Paul--"
"--forty-four, then--and it finds that the glamour isn't in front, but behind. Yes, I knew and chose, if that's knowing and choosing ... but it's a costly choice we're called on to make when we're young!"
Miss Bengough's eyes were on the floor. Without moving them she said, "You're not regretting it, Paul?"
"Am I not?" he took her up. "Upon my word, I've lately thought I am! What do I get in return for it all?"
"You know what you get," she replied.
He might have known from her tone what else he could have had for the holding up of a finger--herself. She knew, but could not tell him, that he could have done no better thing for himself. Had he, any time these ten years, asked her to marry him, she would have replied quietly, "Very well; when?" He had never thought of it....
"Yours is the real work," she continued quietly. "Without you we jackals couldn't exist. You and a few like you hold everything upon your shoulders."
For a minute there was a silence. Then it occurred to Oleron that this was common vulgar grumbling. It was not his habit. Suddenly he rose and began to stack cups and plates on the tray.
"Sorry you catch me like this, Elsie," he said, with a little laugh.... "No, I'll take them out; then we'll go for a walk, if you like...."
He carried out the tray, and then began to show Miss Bengough round his flat. She made few comments. In the kitchen she asked what an old faded square of reddish frieze was, that Mrs. Barrett used as a cushion for her wooden chair.
"That? I should be glad if you could tell me what it is," Oleron replied as he unfolded the bag and related the story of its finding in the window-seat.
"I think I know