They sat at right angles at the breakfast table, and when they glanced up at each other’s cheeks their looks were kindly and affectionate. “You are a comfort to me, my dear, and I am a comfort to you,” those glances said.
Her cheek, in fact, was firm, and round, and fresh, and its strong cheekbone mounted almost to the little dark niche of her grey eye. Her hair, which had a sheen as though the sun were always falling on it, seemed to caress the top curve of her clean pink ear. There was just the suspicion of a chin beneath her rounded jaw. His cheek was not so strong and moulded; it was flat, and coloured reddish brown, with a small patch of special shaving just below the side growth of his hair, clipped close in to the top lobe of the ear. The bristly wing of his moustache showed sandy-brown above the corner of his lips, whose fullness was compressed. About that sideview of his face there was the faint suggestion that his appetites might some day get the better of his comfort.
Having finished breakfast they would separate; he to his vocation, she to her shopping and her calls. Their pursuit of these was marked by a direct and grave simplicity, a sort of genius for deciding what they should avoid, a real knowledge of what they wanted, and a certain power of getting it. They met again at dinner, and would recount all they had done throughout that busy day: What risks he had taken at Lloyd’s, where he was an underwriter; how she had ordered a skirt, been to a picture-gallery, and seen a royal personage; how he had looked in at Tattersall’s about the boy’s pony for the holidays; how she had interviewed three cooks without result. It was a pleasant thing to hear that talk, with its comfortable, home-like flavour, and its reliance on a real sympathy and understanding of each other.
Every now and then they would come home indignant or distressed, having seen a lost dog, or a horse dead from heat or overwork. They were peculiarly affected by the sufferings of animals; and covering her pink ears, she would cry: “Oh, Dick! how horrible!” or he would say: “Damn! don’t rub it in, old girl!” If they had seen any human being in distress, they rarely mentioned, or indeed remembered it, partly because it was such a common sight, partly because their instincts reasoned thus: “If I once begin to see what is happening before my eyes all day and every day, I shall either feel uncomfortable and be compelled to give time and sympathy and money, and do harm into the bargain, destroying people’s independence; or I shall become cynical, which is repulsive. But, if I stay in my own garden—as it were—and never look outside, I shall not see what is happening, and if I do not see, it will be as if there were nothing there to see!” Deeper than this, no doubt, they had an instinctive knowledge that they were the fittest persons in the State. They did not follow out this feeling in terms of reasoning, but they dimly understood that it was because their fathers, themselves, and children, had all lived in comfort, and that if they once began diminishing that comfort they would become nervous, and deteriorate. This deep instinct, for which Nature was responsible, made them feel that it was no real use to concern themselves with anything that did not help to preserve their comfort, and the comfort of all such as they were likely to be breeding from, to a degree that would ensure their nerves and their perceptions being coated, so that they literally could not see. It made them feel—with a splendid subtlety which kept them quite unconscious—that this was their duty to Nature, to themselves, and to the State.
Seated at dinner, they were more than ever like two pigeons, when those comfortable home-like birds are seen close together on a lawn, looking at each other between the movements of their necks towards the food before them. And suddenly, pausing with sweetbread on his fork, he would fix his round light eyes on the bowl of flowers in front of him, and say: “I saw Helen to-day, looking as thin as a lath; she simply works herself to death down there!”
When they had finished eating they would go down-stairs, and, summoning a cab, be driven to the play. On the way, they looked straight before them, digesting their food. In the streets the lamplight whitened the wet pavements, and the wind blew impartially on starved faces, and faces like their own. Without turning to him, she would murmur: “I can’t make up my mind, dear, whether to get the children’s summer suits at once, or wait till after Easter.” When he had answered, there would again be silence. And as the cab turned into a by-street, some woman, with a shawl over her head and a baby in her arms, would pass before the horse’s nose, and, turning her deathly face, mutter an imprecation. Throwing out the end of his cigar, he would say quietly: “Look here, if we’re not going abroad this year, it’s time I looked out for a fishing up in Skye.” Then, recovering the main thoroughfare, they would reach their destination.
The theatre had for them a strange attraction. They experienced beneath its roof a peculiar sense of rest, like some man-at-arms would feel in the old days when, putting off his armour, he stretched his feet out in the evening to the fire. It was a double process that produced in them this feeling of repose. They must have had a dim suspicion that they had been going about all day in armour; here, and here alone, they would be safe against gaunt realities, and naked truths; nothing here could assail their comfort, since the commercial value of the piece depended on its pleasing them. Everything would therefore be presented in a classic—not a cosmic—spirit, suitable to people of their status. But this was only half the process which wrought in them the sense of ease. For, seated side by side, their attentive eyes fixed on the stage, the thrill of “seeing life” would come; and this “life”—that was so far removed from life—seemed to bring to them a blessed absolution from all need to look on it in other forms.
They would come out, subtly inspired, secretly strengthened. And whether the play had made them what they were, or they had made the play, was another of those things that no man knows. Their spiritual exaltation would take them to their mansions, and elevate them till they reached their floor.
But when—seldom, luckily—their journal was at fault, and they found themselves confronted with a play subversive of their comfort, their faces, at first attentive, would grow a little puzzled, then hurt, and lastly angry; and they would turn to each other, as though by exchanging anger they could minimize the harm that they were suffering. She would say in a loud whisper: “I think it’s a perfectly disgusting play!” and he would answer: “So dull—that’s what I complain of!”
After a play like this they talked a good deal in the cab on the way home, of anything except the play, as though sending it to Coventry; but every now and then a queer silence would fall between them. He would break it by clucking his tongue against his palate, remarking: “Confound that beastly play!” And she, with her arms folded on her breast, would give herself a little hug of comfort. They felt how unfairly this play had taken them to see it.