[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
one holding a bunch of galley proofs. By the other entered the two ladies. Standing on the
threshold Ethel looked at them. One of them was tall and remarkably thin. Almost
equally tall, the other was portly. Neither of them was any longer young. The thin lady
seemed a withered and virgin forty three or four. The portly one was perhaps a little
older, but had preserved a full-blown and widowed freshness. The thin one was sallow,
with sharp bony features, nondescript brown hair and grey eyes, and was dressed rather
fashionably, not in the style of Paris, but in the more youthful and jaunty mode of
Hollywood, in pale grey and pink. The other lady was very blonde, with blue eyes, and
long dangling earrings and lapis lazuli beads to match. Her style of dressing was more
matronly and European than the other's, and numbers of not very precious ornaments
were suspended here and there all over her person and tinkled a little as she walked.
The two ladies advanced across the room. Burlap pretended to be so deeply
immersed in composition that he had not heard the opening of the door. It was only when
the ladies had come to within a few feet of his table that he looked up from the paper on
which he had been furiously scribbling--with what a start of amazement, what an
expression of apologetic embarrassment! He sprang to his feet.
'I'm so sorry. Forgive...I hadn't noticed. One gets so deeply absorbed.' The n's and
m's had turned to d's and b's. He had a cold.'so idvolved id ode's work.'
He came round the table to meet them, smiling his subtlest and most spiritual
Sodoma smile. But, 'Oh God!' he was inwardly exclaiming. 'What appalling females!'
'And which,' he went on aloud, smiling from one to the other,' which, may I
venture to ask, is Miss Saville?'
'Neither of us,' said the portly lady in a rather deep voice, but playfully and with a
smile.
'Or both, if you like,' said the other. Her voice was high and metallic and she
spoke sharply, in little spurts, and with an extraordinary and vertiginous rapidity. 'Both
_and_ neither.'
And the two ladies burst into simultaneous laughter. Burlap looked and listened
with a sinking heart. What had he let himself in for? They were formidable. He blew his
nose; he coughed. They were making his cold worse.
'The fact is,' said the portly lady, cocking her head rather archly on one side and
affecting the slightest lisp, 'the fact ith...'
But the thin one interrupted her. 'The fact is,' she said pouring out her words so
fast that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to articulate them at all, 'that
we're a partnership, a combination, almost a conspiracy.' She uttered her sharp shrill
laugh.
'Yeth, a conthpirathy,' said the portly one lisping from sheer playfulness.
'We're the two parts of Romola Saville's dual personality.'
'I being the Dr. Jekyll,' put in the portly one, and both laughed yet once more.
'A conspiracy,' thought Burlap with a growing sense of horror. 'I should think it
was!'
'Dr. Jekyll, _alias_ Ruth Goffer. May I introduce you to Mrs. Goffer?'
'While I do the same for Mr. Hyde, alias Miss Hignett?'
'While together we introduce ourselves as the Romola Saville whose poor poems
you said such very kind things about.'
Burlap shook hands with the two ladies and said something about his pleasure at
beefing the authors of work he had so much adbired. 'But how shall I ever get rid of
them?' he wondered. So much energy, such an exuberance of force and will! Getting rid
of them would be no joke. He shuddered inwardly. 'They're like steam engines,' he
decided. And they'd pester him to go on printing their beastly verses. Their obscene
verses--for that's what they were, in the light of these women's age and energy and
personal appearance--just obscene. 'The bitches!' he said to himself, feeling resentfully
that they'd got something out of him on false pretences, that they'd taken advantage of his
innocence and swindled him. It was at this moment that he caught sight of Miss Cobbett.
She held up her bundle of proofs enquiringly. He shook his head. 'Later,' he said to her,
with a dignified and editorial expression. Miss Cobbett turned away, but not before he
had remarked the look of derisive triumph on her face. Damn the woman! It was
intolerable.
'We were so thrilled and delighted by your kind letter,' said the stouter of the
ladies.
Burlap smiled Franciscanly. 'One's glad to be able to do something for literature.'
'So _few_ take any interest.'
'Yes, so few,' echoed Miss Hignett. And speaking with the rapidity of one who
tries to say ' Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper ' in the shortest possible time and
with the fewest possible mistakes, she poured out their history and their grievances. It
appeared that they had been living together at Wimbledon and conspiring to be Romola
Saville for upwards of six years now, and that only on nine occasions in all that time had
any of their works been printed. But they hadn't lost courage. Their day, they knew,
would come. They had gone on writing. They had written a great deal. Perhaps Mr.
Burlap would be interested to see the plays they had written? And Miss Hignett opened a
despatch case and laid four thick wads of typescript on the table. Historical plays they
were, in blank verse. And the titles were 'Fredegond,' 'The Bastard of Normandy,'
'Semiramis' and 'Gilles de Retz.'
They went at last, taking with them Burlap's promise to read their plays, to print a
sonnet sequence, to come to lunch at Wimbledon. Burlap sighed; then recomposing his
face to stoniness and superiority, rang for Miss Cobbett.
'You've got the proofs?' he asked distantly and without looking at her.
She handed them to him. 'I've telephoned to say they must hurry up with the rest.'
'Good.'
There was a silence. It was Miss Cobbett who broke it, and though he did not
deign to look up at her, Burlap could tell from the tone of her voice that she was smiling.
'Your Romola Saville,' she said; 'that was a bit of a shock, wasn't it?'
Miss Cobbett's loyalty to Susan's memory was the intenser for being forced and
deliberate. She had been in love with Burlap herself. Her loyalty to Susan and to that
platonic spirituality which was Burlap's amorous speciality (she believed, at first, that he
meant what he so constantly and beautifully said) was exercised by a continual struggle
against love, and grew strong in the process. Burlap, who was experienced in these
matters, had soon realized, from the quality of her response to his first platonic advances,
that there was, in the vulgar language which even his devil hardly ever used,' nothing
doing.' Persisting, he would only damage his own high spiritual reputation. In spite of the
fact that the gitl was in love with him, or even in a certain sense because of it (for, loving,
she realized how dangerously easy it would be to betray the cause of Susan and pure
spirit and, realizing the danger, braced herself against it), she would never, he saw, permit
his passage, however gradual, from spirituality to a carnality however refined. And since
he himself was not in love with her, since she had aroused in him only the vague
adolescent itch of desire which almost any personable woman could satisfy, it cost him
little to be wise and retire. Retirement, he calculated, would enhance her admiration for
his spirituality, would quicken her love. It is always useful, as Burlap had found in the
past, to have employees who are in love with one. They work much harder and ask much
less than those who are not in love. For a little everything went according to plan. Miss
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]