The Marbeck Inn: A Novel

by Harold Brighouse

THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to him: there was a radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than her physical appeal. He was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him before—not even applause—but did not see that more had come to him than loveliness where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that there were greater things in Effie than her comeliness.

She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country, which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage.

There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now. With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift habits of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a passion for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In the East, it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home and, granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing for his mother. He could deny himself nothing.

It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go into the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother’s luxuries. Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed, quite sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of Manchester and withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence. Was it not by going to offices that Dr. Mannering’s rich patients had been able to pay their bills? And hadn’t they an army of friends who used to eat their salt?

But the friends, misunderstanding Effie’s pride, offered no help of the kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where, with dress and servants’ tips, it would cost her more to live than in the rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative now, and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk’s place. They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to ask.

Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared, Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries made.

Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality; Effie’s net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts than theirs.

It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot live by money and then lose money without losing more than money.

Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that; that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did not buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes and watched her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old extravagance, it was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman moderately happy, she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby when she came into Mr. Branstone’s office for the post of typist one bright, revealing afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the polls and he had made himself a figure on the hustings.

Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the difference between the friendship which is given and the friendship which is bought. She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from their first encounter, seemed to her more like a friend than an employer. By then, she had experience of employers. That was why she was out of work.