like a skate. It was not, he reflected, any less likely that it should keep its balance than that a bicycle should.…
Suddenly he laid down his pen. His imagination was beginning to hurt him. It would be a terrible thing if Phoebe’s cat, while it prowled though the herbaceous bed, stepped on the blade of the safety razor. Blunt though it was for shaving purposes, it would easily inflict a cruel wound on Tommy’s paw. When his work was done, he must really hunt for the blade, and bestow it in some safer place.
He took up his pen again and wrote, “Ever faster through the deepening winter twilight sped the iceship, and Eva controlling the tiller in her long taper fingers, watched the dusky banks fly past her. ‘Oh, God,’ she murmured, ‘grant that I may be in time!’ The woods of Richmond…”
The cat had finished its toilet and jumped down again into the herbaceous bed. Philip heard a faint mew, and his awaking imagination told him that Tommy had cut his foot already. With a spasm of remorse he ran out into the garden and began a frenzied search for the razorblade which with such culpable carelessness he had thrown away. A quarter of an hour’s search was rewarded by its discovery, and as there was no blood on the edge of it he thankfully assumed that he had not been punished (nor Tommy either) for his thoughtlessness. He unfortunately stepped on a fine calceolaria, and regained the gravel path with the blade in his hand.
He locked it up in the drawer of his knee-hole table, where he kept his will and his pass-book and his cheque book, and with a free mind returned to Eva, perilously voyaging on the ice past the woods of Richmond, and praying that she should be “in time.” But suddenly, and for the first time in their dual and prosperous career as feuilleton writers, Philip found himself finding a certain want of actuality in Phoebe’s imaginings. They lacked the bite of such realism as he had found illustrated in the poignancy of his own search for the discarded razorblade in the herbaceous border. There was emotion, real human emotion, though only concerned with the paws of a cat and a razor, whereas Eva’s taper ringers on the tiller of this remarkable craft seemed to want the solidity of mortal experience. But it would never do to lose faith in Phoebe’s inventions, for it was his faith in them that lent him his unique skill as interpreter and chronicler of them. And, anyhow, the razor-blade was safely inaccessible now to any cat on its pleasure excursions, and he turned his mind back to the woods of Richmond.
With the unexpectedness of a clock loudly chiming, his imagination began to work again. What if he should suddenly die even as he sat there at his table! Phoebe alone knew where his will was kept, and he saw her, blind with tears, unlocking the drawer and groping with trembling hand among its contents. Suddenly she would start back with a cry of pain, and withdraw her hand, on which the fastflowing blood denoted that she had severed an artery or two, and would bleed to death in a few reconds, as had happened to a most obnoxious Marquis in the tale, “Kind hearts are more than coronets.”
Next moment he had unlocked the drawer, and gingerly holding the dread instrument of Phoebe’s death between finger and thumb, looked wildly round for some secure asylum for the hateful thing. Long he stood there in hesitation; then, mounting a set of “library steps,” deposited it on the top of the tall bookcase which held the complete file of all the newspapers in which their tales had appeared. Then he set to work again on Eva, who presently ran her ice-boat ashore below the Star and Garter hotel. But half the morning had already gone, and he had scarcely yet made a beginning of the morning’s work.
Phoebe was unusually buoyant at lunch time today, but for once her cheerfulness failed in shedding sunshine on Philip.
“My dear, I have got over such a difficult point,” she said. “Do you remember how Moses Isaacson got Algernon to sign the paper which acknowledged that he was not Lord St. Austell’s legitimate son?”
“Yes, yes,” said Philip feverishly, trying to recall the exact happening of those miserable events.
“Well, all that was written in invisible ink, and all he thought he signed was the lease of Eagles Castle. There! And look, here is the first dish of asparagus.”
“And how about the lease?” asked Philip.
“It was written in water-colour ink, and, of course, Moses Isaacson washed it off afterwards.”
“Capital!” said Philip. “That does the trick.”
There was silence for a minute or two as the novelists ate the fresh asparagus, and then Phoebe said:
“Tomorrow, dear, you will have to come and work with me in the drawing-room. The maids must begin their spring cleaning, and indeed it should have been done a month ago. We will have lunch and dinner in the hall while they do this room, and the day after they will do the drawing-room, and I will do my work with you here.”
Philip’s fingers were stealing towards the last stick of asparagus, but at this they were suddenly arrested.
“Ah, spring cleaning!” he said with assumed cheerfulness. “They just dust the books, I suppose, and sweep the floor.”
She laughed. She had Eva’s celebrated laugh, which was like a peal of silver bells.
“Indeed, they do much more than that,” she said. “Every book is taken out and dusted; they move all the furniture, and clean it all, back and front and top and bottom. But you won’t know a thing about it, except that our dear Elizabethan dining-room will look so spick and span that Elizabeth herself might have dinner in it. Some day we must do an historical novel, you and I. Think what a setting we have here!”
Though the day was so deliciously warm, it felt rather chilly in the evening, or so Philip thought, and a fire was lit in the drawing-room. Phoebe had a slight headache, and thus it was quite natural that she should go to bed early, leaving her husband sitting up. As soon as he had heard the door of her bedroom close, he went softly to the diningroom, and again mounting the library-steps, took down the razor-blade from the cache which this morning had seemed so secure, and went back with it into the drawing-room. It would have been terrible if Jane, the housemaid, who always sang at her work, should tomorrow have suddenly interrupted her warblings with a wild scream, as she dusted the top of the bookcase. Perhaps the razor-blade would have embedded itself in her hand; perhaps, even more tragically, her flapping duster would have flicked it into her smiling and songful face, and have buried it deep in her eye or her open mouth. But now this gruesome domestic tragedy had been averted by Philip’s ingenious perception of the chilliness of the evening, and with a sigh of relief he dropped the fatal blade into the core of the fire.
He went softly up to bed, feeling very tired after this emotional day. Now that his anxiety was allayed he would have liked to tell Phoebe how silly he had been, for never before had he had a secret from her. But then one of Phoebe’s most sacred idols in life was her husband’s stern masculine common sense that (like Algernon’s) was never the prey of foolish fears and unfounded tremors. He hated the idea of smashing up this cherished image of Phoebe’s, and determined to keep his unaccountable failing to himself. Phoebe should never know. Besides, it would vex her very much to be told that her present to him had occasioned him such uneasiness.
He fell asleep at once, and woke in the grey dawn of the morning to the sound, as it were, of clashing cymbals of terror in his brain.… The housemaid would clear up the fireplace in the drawing-room, and there among the ashes, like a snake in the grass, would be the keen tooth of the razor-blade. Perhaps already Philip was too late, and before he could get down a cry of pain would ring through the silent house, betokening that Jane’s life-blood was already spreading over the new Kidderminster carpet, and he sprang from his bed and with bare feet went hurriedly down to the drawing-room.
Thank God he was in time, and a minute afterwards he was on his way up to bed again
