and letters, and Keeling was eager to acquire at any cost the sense of native, unconscious citizenship. He felt he belonged there, but he had to win his way back there. … He must have learned the language in some psychically dim epoch of his existence, for exploration among these alleys in his garden had to him the thrill not of discovery, but the more delicate sense of recollection, of revisiting forgotten scenes which were remembered as soon as they disentangled themselves again from the jungle of materialistic interests that absorbed him all the week. Mr. Keeling had very likely hardly heard of the theory of reincarnation, and had some modern Pythagoras spoken to him of beans, he would undoubtedly have considered it great nonsense. But he would have confessed to the illusion (the fancy he would have called it) of having known something of all this before when Propert, with his handsome face aglow and his eyes alight, sat and turned over books with him thus, forgetting, as his own absorption increased, to interject his sentences with the respectful ‘sir’ of their ordinary week-day intercourse. Keeling ceased to be the proprietor and master of the universal stores, he ceased even to be the proprietor of his own books. They and their pictures and their binding and their aroma of the kingdom of intellect and beauty, were common possessions of all who chose to claim them, and belonged to neither of them individually any more than the French language belongs to the teacher who instructs and the pupil who learns.
The hour that Propert usually stayed had to-day lengthened itself out (so short was it) to two before the young man looked at his watch, and jumped up from his chair.
‘I’m afraid I’ve been staying a very long time, sir,’ he said. ‘I had no idea it was so late.’
Mr. Keeling got up also, and walked to the window, where he spoke with his back towards him.
‘I should like to know a little more about your family trouble,’ he said. ‘Any other children beside yourself? I remember you once told me your mother was a widow.’
‘Yes, sir, one sister,’ said Propert.
‘Unmarried? Work for her living?’ asked Keeling.
‘Yes, sir. I think she’ll come and live here with me,’ said he. ‘She’s got work in London, but I don’t want her to live there alone.’
‘No; quite proper. What’s her work?’
‘Clerical work, including shorthand and typewriting.’
‘Efficient?’
‘Yes, sir. The highest certificates in both. She’s a bit of an artist too in drawing and wood-cutting.’
Mr. Keeling ceased to address the larch-trees that were the sponsors of his house’s name, and turned round.
‘And a book-worm like you?’ he asked.
Propert laughed.
‘I wish I was a book-worm like her,’ he said. ‘But in London you get so much more opportunity for study of all sorts. She had a British Museum ticket, and studied at the Polytechnic.’
Keeling picked up the Singleton Morte d’Arthur and carefully blew a grain of cigarette ash from the opened page.
‘Let me know when she comes,’ he said. ‘I might be able to find her some job, if she still wants work. Perhaps your mother’s death has made her independent.’
He paused a moment.
‘Naturally I don’t want to be impertinent in inquiring into your affairs, Propert,’ he said. ‘Don’t think that. But if I can help, let me know. Going, are you? Good-bye; don’t forget to order me Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur.’
He walked out with him into the square Gothic hall with its hideous tiles, its castellated chimney-piece, its painted wheelbarrow, its card-bearing crocodile, and observed Propert going towards the green-baize door that led to the kitchen passage.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Keeling.
‘I always come and go this way, sir,’ said Propert.
Keeling opened the front door for him.
‘This is the proper door to use, when you come to see me,’ he said.
He stood a minute or two at the front door, with broken melodies from Omar Khayyam lingering like fragments of half-remembered tunes in his head. ‘And Thou, beside me singing in the wilderness,’ was one that sang itself again and again to him. But no one had ever sung to him in the wilderness. The chink of money, the flattering rustle of bank-notes had sung to him in the High Street, and he could remember certain ardours of his early manhood, when the thought that Emmeline was waiting for him at home made him hurry back from the establishment which had been the nucleus-cell which had developed into the acres of show-rooms and passages that he now controlled. But Emmeline’s presence at home never made him arrive at his work later than nine o’clock next morning. No emotion, caused either by Emmeline or ledger-entries, had ever dominated him: there had always been something beyond, something to which perhaps his books and his Sunday afternoon dimly led. And they could scarcely lead anywhere except to the Wilderness where the ‘Thou’ yet unencountered, made Paradise with singing. … Then with a swift and sudden return to normal consciousness, he became aware that Mrs. Goodford’s bath-chair was no longer drawn up on the grass below the larches, and that he might, without risk of being worried again, beyond the usual power of Emmeline to worry him, take his cup of tea in the drawing-room before going to evening service.
He found Emmeline alone, just beginning to make tea in the heavily fluted tea-pot with its equipage of harlequin cups and saucers. Alice and John were somewhere in the ‘grounds.’ Hugh had gone to see his young lady (the expression was Mrs. Keeling’s), and she herself had suffered a slight eclipse from her usual geniality owing to her mother having stopped the whole afternoon, and having thus interrupted her reading, by which she meant going gently to sleep on the sofa, with her book periodically falling off her lap. The first two times that this happened she almost invariably picked it up, on the third occasion she had really gone to sleep, and the rumble of its avalanche did not disturb her. But the loss of this intellectual refreshment had rendered her rather querulous, and since she was not of very vigorous vitality, her querulousness oozed in a leaky manner from her instead of discharging itself at high pressure. A tea-leaf had stuck, too, in the spout of the tea-pot, which made that handsome piece contribute to the general impression of dribbling at Mrs. Keeling’s tea-table; it also provided her with another grievance, though not quite so acute as that which took its rise from what had occurred at lunch.
‘I’m sure it’s years since I’ve been so upset as I’ve been to-day, Thomas,’ she said, ‘for what with you and Mamma worrying each other so at lunch, and Mamma stopping all afternoon and biting my head off, if I said as much as to hope that her rheumatism hadn’t troubled her lately, and it’s wonderful how little it does trouble her really, for I’m sure that though I don’t complain, I suffer twice as much as she does when we get that damp November weather—Dear me, this tea-pot was always a bad pourer: I should have been wiser to get a less handsome one with a straight spout. Well, there’s your cup of tea, I’m sure you’ll be glad of it. But there are some days when everything combines to vex one, and it will all be in a piece with what has gone before, if Alice forgets and takes some salmon-mayonnaise, and Mr. Silverdale goes away thinking that I’m a stingy housekeeper, which has never been said of me yet.’
Keeling failed to find any indication of ‘singing in the wilderness’ here, nor had he got that particular sense of humour which could find provender for itself in these almost
