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Updated: June 22, 2025
"If I tell you are you going to get angry?" "Why should I get angry?" "You are looking very fierce." He altered his expression. "It's the work," he muttered. "When one grinds as I do one does feel fierce." "That's why I'm beginning to well, love Mr. Jernington a little less than I used to. He's almost killing you." "Jernington!" "Yes. It's got to stop." Her voice and manner had quite changed.
It was a keen pleasure to show a man of such deep knowledge what he had been doing, a keener pleasure still when he approved, when he said, in his German voice, "That goes!" And they had been trying over passages with instrumentalists who had been "unearthed," as Jernington expressed it, in Algiers.
Two days later, on the 4th of September, Charmian had got rid of Claude as well as of old Jernington, and, in a condition of expectation that was tinged agreeably with triumph, was awaiting the arrival of important visitors. She had received a telegram from Lake: "Have got him into the Chateaux country going on to Orange hope on hope ever ALSTON."
But Lake was impulsive. He might hurry things, might arrive with the impresario sooner. Jernington must not be at Djenan-el-Maqui when he arrived. If Claude were found studying with a sort of professor Crayford would certainly get a wrong impression. It might just make the difference between the success of the great plan and its failure.
Charmian found herself absurdly feeling against that rustic and Arcadian charmer an enmity such as she had scarcely ever experienced against a human being. One night she spoke unkindly, almost with a warmth of malignity, about the oboe. Jernington sprang amorously to its defense. She tried to quarrel with him, but was disarmed by his fidelity to the object of his affections.
If he stuck to the plan of leaving them at the end of August there would probably be no need of diplomacy, or of forcible ejection; but it had become obvious to Charmian that the last thing old Jernington was capable of doing was just that sticking to a plan. "Do you mean to sail on the Maréchal Bugeaud or the Ville d'Alger?" she asked him. "I wonder," he replied artlessly.
But Jernington was conscious of no subtleties except those connected with the employment of musical instruments. And Charmian found it almost impossible to be glacial to such a simple and warm-hearted creature. His very boots seemed to claim her cordiality with their unabashed elastic sides.
So ingeniously did Charmian manage things that he believed he went of his own accord, indeed that it had been his "idea" to go. She told Claude to leave it to her and not to say one word. Then she went to Jernington, and began to talk of his extraordinary influence over her husband. He soon pulled at his boots, thrust his cuffs up his arms, and showed other unmistakable symptoms of gratification.
"You can do anything with him," she said presently. "I wish I could." Jernington protested with guttural exclamations. "He's killing himself," she resumed. "And I have to sit by and see it, and say nothing." "Killing himself!" Jernington, who believed in women, was shocked. "With overwork. He's on the verge of a complete breakdown. And it's you, Mr. Jernington, it's all you!"
She thought of making a hole in his mosquito net, to permit the entry of those marauders whom he dreaded; of casually mentioning that there had been cases suspiciously resembling Asiatic cholera in the Casbah of Algiers; of pretending to fall ill and saying that Claude must take her away for a change; even of getting Alston Lake to send a telegram to Jernington saying that his presence was urgently demanded in his native Suffolk.
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