Keeling went to his office on the following Monday morning, with his mind already made up about the extension of his business. He had an option on a big building site at the neighbouring manufacturing town of Nalesborough, and this he determined to exercise at once, and have put in hand, without delay, the erection of his new premises. His trade seemed to have reached its high-water mark here in Bracebridge, but the creation of a similar business elsewhere would occupy him for a dozen years yet, and what was more to his immediate purpose, give him a piece of critically important work now. Last summer he had more than half resolved to turn the Bracebridge Stores into a company, and, leaving Hugh as the director, himself retire from business, and enjoy among his books the leisure of which all his life he had had so little. Now his one desire was to set this new enterprise going, and thereby gain for himself not the leisure that lately he coveted, but the absorption which he hoped the work of organisation would bring him. It would be an immense task, and that was why he undertook it, for he had no desire any more for unoccupied hours, in which he could browse in{327} the pastures of his secret garden. What he wanted was work, work of the kind that kept him so busy all day, that he had no further energy left for thought. He proposed to continue directing the course of his Bracebridge business also: with these two to superintend, he surely would find stupefaction for those bees of the brain whose bitter honey-making he had no use for.
He had made an excursion into fairy land—that was how he framed the matter to himself. There had been The Cedars and work for him before, there would be work and The Cedars for him afterwards. Those who have drunk of the metheglin never perhaps afterwards are wholly free from the reminiscence of the sweet draught brewed magically from the heather and the honey, but they go back after their sojourn among the little people, and behave like ordinary mortals again, and eat the home-brewed bread, and move about their appointed ways. But the nights and days they have spent in the secret places of the earth will, till they die, be more vivid to them than all the actual experiences that they go through afterwards and went through before they penetrated the enchanted glen; the remembrance will colour their idle moments with the ensanguined hue of dream; that baseless fabric, that vision of hidden doors thrown open and the things that lurk within, is more rich, just because to them it is more real than the sober tonelessness of their profession or{328} pursuit. Therefore if they are wise, the best thing they can do is, like Prospero, to drown the magic book beneath the waters of absorbing employment. Often it will float up again to the surface, and each time it must be prodded back with averted eyes. So, for Keeling, a love that could not be realised once crowned the hill-tops of his nature; now that citadel and the very hill-tops themselves had been shaken down and strewn over the plains. He had now one paramount need—that of forgetting, and, since he could not forget, the need resolved itself into the effort to remember as little as possible, to use up in other ways the energy which was his, and the leisure that he could command if he chose.
He let himself into his office, where his letters were already being opened by the girl he had sent for to take over Norah’s work. On the little table by the window there still stood Norah’s typewriting machine, which it appeared she had altogether forgotten: her brother must be asked to take it away. By it was the pile of letters which dealt with businesses not yet concluded: all were in order with dockets of the affairs contained in them. Probably, before she quitted the office for the last time on Friday afternoon, she had foreseen that she would not return, and had left everything so that her successor might take up the work without difficulty. Nothing was omitted or left vague; she had finished everything{329} with the most meticulous care. He searched through these papers to see if there was any private word for him. But there was nothing: this was office work, and such private words as she had for him had all been said in the bluebell wood.
Her successor, a rasping young woman with strong knuckles, proved herself very efficient, and before long she retired to the small room adjoining with her sheaf of shorthand notes. Her typewriting machine was already installed there, and soon the clack of the keys proclaimed her a swift worker. For a few minutes only the sound worried him: there was a new touch, a new note, (one that meant nothing to him except that it told him that his work was going forward) to get accustomed to. But very soon he was absorbed in the mass of affairs which his new venture brought with it. There was twelve years’ work before him: here he was in the first hour of it. It stretched endlessly away, but he gave no attention to the enormous perspective. All he desired was to attend to the immediate foreground; he would progress inch by inch, detail by detail, till the perspective began to grow. He would look neither forwards nor backwards.
He left his office late that night after a long day’s uninterrupted work, and, still busy with some problem, took without thinking the path through the Cathedral graveyard, which farther on led past the house where Norah had lived. But{330} before he got there, he remembered, and turned off so as to avoid it. And then he paused, and retraced his steps again. Was it weak to avoid it, or was it weak to let himself walk by it? Perhaps the stronger course was just to get used to it. Sometime, perhaps, he would be able to go by it without noticing....
It was already the dinner-hour when he arrived home, and he went into his wife’s boudoir to tell her to begin without waiting for him. To his astonishment he found her not yet dressed, and as he entered, she hastily picked up her handkerchief, which was on the floor, and applied it to her eyes.
‘Why, Emmeline, what’s the matter?’ he said.
She did not seem to him to be actually crying, but the ritual of crying was there, and had to be respected.
‘Oh, my dear Thomas, you haven’t heard the terrible news then?’ she said. ‘I thought you would be sure to have seen it placarded somewhere. Alice went straight to her room, and I haven’t seen her since, though I repeatedly knocked at the door, which she has locked on the inside, and I’m sure it’s most unnatural of her not to let her own mother comfort her. It all happened in a moment: I have always said those great motor-cars shouldn’t be allowed to career about the streets, especially when they are all paved with cobbles as they are at Easton Haven, which are{331} so slippery when it’s wet. He slipped, and it went over him in a moment.’
‘Will you please tell me whom it went over?’ asked Keeling, as his wife paused for a second.
‘Why, poor Mr Silverdale, and to think that it was only last Friday that we had such fun over the slippers. I declare I shall never want to see a slipper again. He was crushed to a jelly, and I’m sure I hope the driver will be well hung for it, though they are certain to prove that it wasn’t his fault, which is so easy now that poor Mr Silverdale can’t give his account of the matter. It was all over in a moment, though I know quite well you didn’t like him, and said many sarcastic things about him and the young ladies whom he inspired. I’m sure I never said a hard thing about him, nor thought it either, though he didn’t ask Alice to be his wife. But I am convinced he would have if he had been spared, that’s one comfort. If only he had, all this might have been avoided, for they would be on their honeymoon now, let me see, February, March, April, or if they had come back, he wouldn’t have wanted to set out on this mission just yet, and so the van wouldn’t have been there. And what are we all to do now?’
These pathetic reflections had the effect of really working on Lady Keeling’s feelings, and her throat tied itself into knots.
‘His shepherd’s crook!’ she said. ‘All his delightful ways, though, as I say, you never liked{332} him. The muffins he has eaten sitting on the floor before this very fire! The way he used to run, like a boy! The Gregorian chants which he used to call so ripping! All that beautiful music! I declare I shall never want to go to church again. And pray what are we to do now? What’s to happen to Alice, if she won’t unlock her door.’
‘The best thing we can do is to leave Alice alone for the present,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up to her after dinner.’
‘She won’t see you,’ said Lady Keeling confidently. ‘She wouldn’t see me, who have always been so sympathetic about Mr Silverdale, so what chance is there of her seeing you?’
‘That is what I shall find out. Now it’s late already; I have been detained at the office, so let us go into dinner as we are.’
Lady Keeling sighed.
‘I couldn’t eat a morsel,’ she said, ‘though I know it is the duty of all of us to keep our strength up. There is hare soup too: he was so fond of hare soup. But I must run upstairs first, and put on a black fichu or something. I could not sit down to table without some little token of respect like that.’
Lady Keeling performed this duty of keeping her strength up with her usual conscientiousness, and after dinner her husband sent a note up to Alice, saying that he would be alone in his library if she would like to come down. While they were{333} still in the dining-room over coffee, the answer came back that she would do so,............