# Encounters (Bowen)/The New House

Coming up the avenue in the February dusk he could see the flash and shimmer of firelight through the naked windows of the library. There was something unearthly in those squares of pulsing light that fretted the shadowy façade, and lent to the whole an air of pasteboard unreality.
The scrunch beneath his feet of the wet gravel brought his sister to the doorstep.
"Herbert!" she cried, "oh, do come in and see it all. You've been such ages to-day—what were you doing?"
"Your messages," he said; "they delayed me. That stupid fellow at Billingham's had made a muddle over those window measurements for the blinds; I had to go over to the workshop and give the order personally."
Standing in the hall, he was surprised to hear his voice ring out into spaciousness.
"I never realised how big it was," he said with gratification. "Why, Cicely, you're ​all in the dark. You might have lighted up and made the place look a bit more festive. It's all very well to hear how big one's house is, but I'd like to see it with my own eyes."
"I'm sorry," said Cicely; "as a matter of fact I'd only just come in myself. I was out in the garden."
"Gardening?"
"No. Just poking about. You never heard anything like the way the thrushes sing. I never knew before they could sing like that. Or perhaps I'd never had time to listen. And the snowdrops are coming out all along the kitchen garden border. Oh, Herbert—"
"I shouldn't have thought that a house-move was exactly the most leisurely time to listen to thrushes. But of course———!"
"But I had been working."
His injured dignity was impenetrable, like a barrier of steel. She turned aside from it with a shrug.
"Come in and see what I have done. The library———Janet!" she called down a dark archway. "Janet, tea! The master's in."
Down the far end of the long room was ​an open fireplace. His chair was pushed up to the fire and an impromptu tea-table covered with newspaper had been set beside it. His books were stacked in piles against the walls, and their mustiness contested with the clean smell of scrubbed and naked boards.
"A nice room," said Herbert. "On Sunday I shall have a good long day at the picture-hanging. I can't have these windows, Cicely; they're quite indecent. Haven't you even got a dust sheet to pin up across them? Any tramp———"
"I'll see. There won't be much light, though, anyhow. The man was in to-day about the fittings, and he says they won't be able to turn the gas on at the main till to-morrow afternoon. We shall have to do our best by candle-light. I've got some ready."
She folded paper into a spill and lighted a long row of candles, ranged in motley candlesticks along the chimney-piece.
"Tut-tut," said Herbert. "We shall find it very difficult to work. How tiresome these people are."
​"Yes," said Cicely.
He resented her tone of detachment. She had blown out her spill and stood twisting the charred ends of paper between her fingers. Long streaks of hair had loosened themselves and hung across her forehead, her cheeks were smeared with dust, her tall thin figure drooped with weariness, but her eyes were shining in the firelight with a strange excitement.
She became conscious of his irritated scrutiny.
"I must be looking simply awful———"
"Yes," said Herbert.
"I'd better try and tidy before tea."
"Yes. If we are going to have tea. If it doesn't come at once I really can't be bothered. There's a great deal for me to do, and I can't afford to waste any time."
He was a hungry man and peevish, having snatched a hasty and insufficient lunch. He thought that he detected a smile of indulgence as she raised her voice and shouted:
"Janet—hurry!"
They heard Janet stumbling up the three steps from the kitchen. She entered with ​the squat brown tea-pot, one hand splayed against her heart.
"Such a house!" she gasped. "It's that unexpected, really it is!"
They ate in silence. All Herbert's old irritation with his sister surged up within him. She was such a vague, uncertain, feckless creature; the air of startled spirituality that had become her as a girl now sat grotesquely on her middle-aged uncomeliness. He contrasted her with the buxom Emily. Emily would have known how to make her brother comfortable. But, of course, Emily had married.
She spoke.
"I suppose I might take mother's furniture. It really is mine, isn't it? Just that little work-table, and the book-shelf, and the escritoire."
"I don't see what you mean by 'take it.' It'll all be in the same rooms, in the same house as the rest. Of course, poor mother gave them to you. But I don't see how that makes any difference. I was thinking we might put that little escritoire in the drawing-room. It will look very well there."
​Cicely was silent.
Herbert brushed the crumbs out of the creases in his waistcoat.
"Poor mother," he unctuously remarked.
"Come and see the house," said Cicely—she was aware that her quick speech shattered what should have been a little silence sacred to the memory of the dead—"come and see what you'd like to begin on, and what Janet and I had better do to-morrow. We got the bedrooms tidy, but your basin and jug are odd, I'm afraid. The cases of crockery haven't arrived yet———
"I haven't got a basin and jug at all," she said defensively.
Every step of Herbert's through the disordered house was a step in a triumphal progress. Every echo from the tiles and naked boards derided and denied the memory of that small brick villa where he and Cicely had been born, where their mother's wedded life had begun and ended; that villa now empty and denuded, whose furniture looked so meagre in this spaciousness and height.
He carried a candlestick in either hand and raised them high above his head as he ​passed from room to room, peering round him into corners, looking up to moulded cornices and ceilings.
Standing in the big front bedroom he saw himself reflected in the mirrored doors of a vast portentous wardrobe, and beamed back at his beaming, curiously-shadowed face. Behind him he saw Cicely seat herself on the edge of the wire mattress, and place her candle carefully beside her on the floor. The mahogany bedroom suite loomed up round them out of the shadows. She sensed his radiant satisfaction with relief.
"It is a lovely house," she said. "Oh, Herbert, I do hope you're going to be happy!"
"I hope we both are," he amended kindly. "We must have some people staying, Cicely. The Jenkins, and that lot. Entertain a bit—after all, my dear girl, we can afford it now!"
He was glad when she did not seem to realise how their circumstances had bettered—it gave him the opportunity for emphatic reminders.
They passed out on to the landing, and ​stood looking down into the depths of the well-staircase.
"I'm sure mother did want us both to be happy," said Cicely, peering over the banisters. Herbert felt eerily as though she were deferring to the opinion of some unseen presence below them in the darkness.
"Of course she wished us the best, poor mother." He clattered a little ostentatiously past her down the stairs.
"She would have loved this house!" Her voice came softly after him, and he heard her limp hand slithering along the banister-rail.
"Damn the gas-man," he muttered, feeling his way across the hall, where his candle-flames writhed and flickered in a draught. It was enough to give anyone the creeps, thus groping through an echoing, deserted house with a ghost-ridden, lackadaisical woman trailing at his heels. If only they'd had the gas on.
Cicely was a fool: he'd teach her!
At the root of his malaise was a suspicion that the house was sneering at him; that as he repudiated the small brick villa so the ​house repudiated him. That Cicely and the house had made a pact against him, shutting him out.
He was no bourgeois and no parvenu. He, Herbert Pilkington, was good enough for any house bought with his own well-earned money. He pushed savagely against the panels of the drawing-room door.
This was the largest room in the house. A pale light fell across the floor from the scoops of two great bow-windows, and there was a glimmer in the mirrors—fixtures—panelling the walls.
Herbert put down his candles and stood back in admiration.
"Next year," he said, "we will buy a grand piano; it would look well there, slanting out from that corner."
"The shutters—we ought to shut the shutters." Fussily he wrestled with the catches. For all his middle-aged precision he was like a child delirious over some new toy.
"It needs children; it's a room for children," said Cicely, when the clatter had subsided.
​Something in her tone filled him with a sense of impropriety. She was gripping the edges of the chimney-piece and staring down into the grate. Her knuckles stood out white and strained.
"Herbert, Richard Evans wrote to me again yesterday. To-day I answered him. I—I am going to be married."
Sitting on the Chesterfield, Herbert scrutinised his boots. He heard his voice say:
"Who is going to see about the furniture?"
His mind grappled with something immeasurably far away.
Cicely repeated, "I am going to be married."
Suddenly it flashed across him: he was full of angry light.
"Married!" he shouted, "married—you!"
"I thought it was too late," she whispered, "till quite lately. Then, when mother went, everything was broken up; this move came—all my life I seem to have been tied up, fastened on to things and people. Why, even the way the furniture was arranged at No. 17 held me so that I couldn't get away. The way the chairs went in the sitting-room. ​And mother. Then, when I stayed behind to see the vans off; when I saw them taking down the overmantels, and your books went out, and the round table, and the sofa, I felt quite suddenly 'I'm free.' I said to myself, 'If Richard asks me again———' But I thought he must be tired of asking me. I said, 'If only he asks me again I can get away before this new house fastens on to me.'"
With her stoop, her untidiness, her vagueness and confusion, her irritating streaks of mysticism, he wondered: Could any man find her desirable?
He remembered Richard Evans, thin and jerky and vaguely displeasing to his orderly mind; with his terrible spasms of eloquence and his straggly moustache. He had come in often when they were at No. 17 and sat for hours in the lamplight, with his shadow gesticulating behind him on the wall.
"Nobody needs me," she was saying. "Nobody wants me, really, except him. I see it now, and I've got to———"
"What about me? Don't I count? Don't I need you? What about all these years; ​the housekeeping?" His voice rose to a wail, "and what the devil am I to do about the move?"
"Of course I'll see you through the move. Really, Herbert———"
"I've been a good brother to you. We've got along very well; we've had a happy little home together all these years, haven't we, and now poor mother's gone———"
His eloquence choked him. He was stabbed by the conviction that she should be saying all this to him. Instead she stood there, mulishly, hanging down her head.
"You're too old to marry," he shouted; "it's—it's ridiculous!"
"Richard doesn't think so."
"You don't seem to realise you're leaving me alone with this great house on my hands, this great barn of a house; me a lonely man, with just that one silly old woman. I suppose Janet 'll go off and get married next! Nobody's too old to marry nowadays, it seems."
"No," she said with placid conviction. "You'll marry, of course."
"Marry—me?"
​She turned to look at him, pink, self-confident, idiotically pretty.
"But of course. That's what I've been feeling. While I was here——— Men are so conservative! But this is no sort of life for you really, Herbert; you want a wife, a pretty, cheery wife. And children———"
"Children!"
"Oh, don't shout, Herbert. Yes, you don't want the family to die out, do you, after you've made such a name for it, done such fine big things?"
He felt that two springs were broken in the sofa, and pressed the cushions carefully with his hand to discover the extent of further damage.
"Damn it all," he said querulously, "I can't get used to another woman at my time of life!"
"Herbert, you've got no imagination." Her tone was amused, dispassionate. She was suddenly superior, radiant and aloof; his no longer, another man's possession.
Her speech chimed in with his thoughts.
"Every man's got to have one woman!"
Taking one of the candles, she turned and left the room.
​He sat there almost in the darkness; putting one hand up he fidgeted with his tie. Sleeking down his hair he smiled to find it crisp, unthinned and healthy.
Slowly and cumbrously the machinery of his imagination creaked into movement.
He saw the drawing-room suffused with rosy light. Chairs and sofas were bright with the sheen of flowered chintzes, hung about with crisp and fluted frills. Over by the fire was the dark triangle of a grand piano; the top was open and a woman, with bright crimpy hair, sat before it, playing and singing. "A pretty, cheery wife." There was a crimson carpet, soft like moss, and a tall palm shadowed up towards the ceiling. Muffled by the carpet he heard the patter of quick feet. The little girl wore a blue sash trailing down behind her, and there was a little boy in a black velvet suit. They could do very well without Cicely's escritoire.