The Marbeck Inn: A Novel

by Harold Brighouse

It wasn’t, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted, genuinely raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering notoriety. He had a new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little was beyond his reach, that he might even hope to come to terms with Effie. Not, that is to say, to such terms as her last employer had proposed. Sam was not, in these matters, the average sensual man. The point was, and it was to his credit, that he discerned something fine in Effie even at this stage, and the mood of confidence gave him to hope that he might not seem commonplace to her. Already, that afternoon, he cared so much. Her opinion mattered.

It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do. She might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to know. He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was not any employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he had done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his record would come better from others than from himself. In the office they knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much which the routine work would tell her of him.

He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office, where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to her.

All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private office. It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a typist-secretary, and to bring her from the general office could excite no comment. On the contrary, to leave her there so long might look strange or at least suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much he cared whether she was efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly efficient, and still he coquetted with his purpose of having her with him. It seemed to him that to call her in would be a step definite and irrevocable, one which he wanted and even yearned to make, but about which he hesitated sensuously as a bridegroom might hesitate on the threshold of the bridal chamber. He neglected to make two certainly profitable journeys to London at this time because he could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she bent over her typewriter when he passed through the office.

And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada, but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t exist. She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the step from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness was almost imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the radiance of the present. The sun puts out the candlelight.

He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving eyes. She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; it certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie saw him, or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have expressed more desire to break than to kiss it.

He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at present as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to learn. But it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her who was not used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth while, his bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the rankness of him. Chance might not come her way, and she thought it unlikely that it would, but if it did, she meant to take it with both hands. Effie, aged twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam Bran-stone, who was thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her preposterous audacity, but the more she saw and the more she heard of him, the more determination bit into her. Droll, officious, absurd—all these her idea was, and she liked it because it was fantastic and because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam seemed bound together. And yet he paid her wages; he was a solid man, a member of the Council, and a serious politician! She was impertinent indeed.

But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on the threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably nervous, and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple action of calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a ritual to which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to its solemnity, to usher her into that office with all that was most impressive, to signify to her the importance of being secretary to Branstone; and, instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was painfully correct dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there most comically aghast at his slip.

Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the something, at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and to drop an aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of the ritualist, it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the more solemn the occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude on light pretext.

Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his confusion was too much for her. She hadn’t the strength to resist, and though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not before he had seen.