did he get relief from this secret chronic aching. There he could pursue the quest of that which can never be attained, and thus is both pursuit and quarry in one.
And now in his fiftieth year he was as friendless outside his home as he was companionless there. The years during which friendships can be made, that is to say, from boyhood up till about the age of forty, had passed for him in a practically incessant effort of building up the immense business which was his own property. And even if he had not been so employed, it is doubtful whether he would ever have made friends. Partly a certain stark austerity innate in him would have kept intimacy at a distance, partly he had never penetrated into circles at Bracebridge where he would have met his intellectual equals. Till now Keeling of the fish-shop had but expanded into Mr. Keeling, proprietor of the Universal Stores, that reared such lofty terra-cotta cupolas in the High Street, and the men he met, those with whom he habitually came in contact, he met on purely business grounds, and they would have felt as little at ease in the secret atmosphere of his library as he would have been in entertaining them there. They looked up to him as the shrewdest as well as the richest of the prosperous tradesmen of Bracebridge, and his contributions and suggestions at the meetings of the Town Council were received with the respect that their invariable common sense merited. But there their intercourse terminated; he could not conceive what was the pleasure of hitting a golf-ball over four miles of downland, and faced with blank incomprehension the fact that those who had been exercising their brains all day in business should sit up over games of cards to find themselves richer or poorer by a couple of pounds at one o’clock in the morning. He would willingly have drawn a cheque for such a sum in order to be permitted to go to bed at eleven as usual. He had no notion of sport in any form, neither had he the bonhomie, the pleasure in the company of cheerful human beings as such, which really lies at the root of the pursuits which he so frankly despised, nor any zeal for the chatter of social intercourse. To him a glass of whisky and soda was no more than half a pint of effervescing fluid, which you were better without: it had to him no value or existence as a symbol of good fellowship. There was never a man less clubbable. But in spite of the bleakness of nature here indicated, and the severity of his aspect towards his fellow men, he had a very considerable fund of kindly impulses towards any who treated him with sincerity. An appeal for help, whether it implied the expenditure of time or money was certainly subjected to a strict scrutiny, but if it passed that, it was as certainly responded to. He was as reticent about such acts of kindness as he was about the pleasures of his secret garden, or the steady increase in his annual receipts from his stores. But all three gave him considerable satisfaction, and the luxury of giving was to him no whit inferior to that of getting.
Charles Propert, who presently arrived from the kitchen-passage in charge of the boy in buttons, was one of those who well knew his employer’s generosity, for Keeling in a blunt and shamefaced way had borne all the expense of a long illness which had incapacitated him the previous winter, not only continuing to pay him his salary as head of the book department at the stores during the weeks in which he was invalided, but taking on himself all the charges for medical treatment and sea-side convalescence. He was an exceedingly well-educated man of two or three-and-thirty, and Keeling was far more at ease with him than with any other of his acquaintances, because he frankly enjoyed his society. He could have imagined himself sitting up till midnight talking to young Propert, because he had admitted him into the secret garden: Propert might indeed be described as the head gardener. Keeling nodded as the young man entered, and from under his big eyebrows observed that he was dressed entirely in black.
‘Good-afternoon, Propert,’ he said. ‘I got that edition of the Morte d’Arthur you told me of. But they made me pay for it.’
‘The Singleton Press edition, sir?’ asked Propert.
‘Yes; sit down and have a look at it. It’s a fine page, you know.’
‘Yes, sir, and if you’ll excuse me, I really think you got it rather cheap.’
‘H’m! I wonder if you’d have thought that if you had been the purchaser.’
Propert laughed.
‘I think so. As you said to me the other day, sir, good work is always cheap in comparison with bad work.’
Keeling bent over the book, and with his eyes on the page, just touched the arm of Propert’s black coat.
‘No trouble, I hope?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. I heard yesterday of my mother’s death.’
‘Very sorry. If you want a couple of days off, just arrange in your department. Then the copy of the Rape of the Lock illustrated by Beardsley came yesterday too. I like it better than anything I’ve seen of his.’
‘There’s a very fine Morte d’Arthur of his which you haven’t got, sir,’ said Propert.
‘Order it for me, please. The man could draw, couldn’t he? Look at the design of embroidery on the coat of that fellow kneeling there. There’s nothing messy about that. But it doesn’t seem much of a poem as far as I can judge. Not my idea of poetry; there’s more poetry in the prose of the Morte d’Arthur. Take a cigarette and make yourself comfortable.’
He paused a moment.
‘Or perhaps you’d sooner not stop and talk to-day after your news,’ he said.
Propert shook his head.
‘No, sir, I should like to stop. … Of course the Rape of the Lock is artificial: it belongs to its age: it’s got no more reality than a Watteau picture——’
‘Watteau?’ asked Keeling.
‘Yes; you’ve got a book of reproductions of Watteau drawings. I don’t think you cared for it much. Picnics and fêtes, and groups of people under trees.’
Keeling nodded.
‘I remember. Stupid, insipid sort of thing. I never could make out why you recommended me to buy it.’
‘I can sell it again for more than you paid for it, sir. The price of it has gone up considerably.’
This savoured a little of business.
‘No, you needn’t do that,’ he said. ‘It’s a handsome book enough. And then there is another Omar Khayyam.’
‘Indeed, sir; you’ve got a quantity of editions of that. But I know it’s useless for me to urge you to get hold of the original edition.’
Mr. Keeling passed him this latest acquisition.
‘Quite useless,’ he said. ‘What a man wants first editions for, unless they’ve got some special beauty, I can’t understand. I would as soon spend my money in getting postage-stamps because they are rare. But I wanted to talk to you about that poem. What’s he after? Is it some philosophy? Or is it a love poem? Or is he just a tippler?’
The conference lasted some time. Keeling was but learning now, through this one channel of books, that attitude of mind which through instinct, whetted and primed by education, came naturally to the younger man, and it was just this that made these talks the very essence of the secret garden. Propert, for all that he was but an employee at a few pounds a week, was gardener there; he knew the names of the flowers, and what was more, he had that comprehension and love of them which belongs to the true gardener and not the specimen grower or florist only. It was that which Keeling sought to acquire, and among the prosperous family friends, who were associated with
