petals. Her fingers trembled with pleasure as she loosed the little
tapes. I always remember the inarticulate delight with which she took
the child in her hands, when at last his little shirt was removed, and
felt his soft white limbs and body. A distinct, glowing atmosphere
seemed suddenly to burst out around her and the child, leaving me
outside. The moment before she had been very near to me, her eyes
searching mine, her spirit clinging timidly about me. Now I was put
away, quite alone, neglected, forgotten, outside the glow which
surrounded the woman and the baby.
“Ha!—Ha-a-a!” she said with a deep throated vowel, as she put her face
against the child’s small breasts, so round, almost like a girl’s,
silken and warm and wonderful. She kissed him, and touched him, and
hovered over him, drinking in his baby sweetnesses, the sweetness of
the laughing little mouth’s wide, wet kisses, of the round, waving
limbs, of the little shoulders so winsomely curving to the arms and the
breasts, of the tiny soft neck hidden very warm beneath the chin,
tasting deliciously with her lips and her cheeks all the exquisite
softness, silkiness, warmth, and tender life of the baby’s body.
A woman is so ready to disclaim the body of a man’s love; she yields
him her own soft beauty with so much gentle patience and regret; she
clings to his neck, to his head and his cheeks, fondling them for the
soul’s meaning that is there, and shrinking from his passionate limbs
and his body. It was with some perplexity, some anger and bitterness
that I watched Emily moved almost to ecstasy by the baby’s small,
innocuous person.
“Meg never found any pleasure in me as she does in the kids,” said
George bitterly, for himself.
The child, laughing and crowing, caught his hands in Emily’s hair and
pulled dark tresses down, while she cried out in remonstrance, and
tried to loosen the small fists that were shut so fast. She took him
from the water and rubbed him dry, with marvellous gentle little rubs,
he kicking and expostulating. She brought his fine hair into one silken
up-springing of ruddy gold like an aureole. She played with his tiny
balls of toes, like wee pink mushrooms, till at last she dare detain
him no longer, when she put on his flannel and his night-gown and gave
him to Meg.
Before carrying him to bed Meg took him to feed him. His mouth was
stretched round the nipple as he sucked, his face was pressed close and
closer to the breast, his fingers wandered over the fine white globe,
blue veined and heavy, trying to hold it. Meg looked down upon him with
a consuming passion of tenderness, and Emily clasped her hands and
leaned forward to him. Even thus they thought him exquisite.
When the twins were both asleep, I must tiptoe upstairs to see them.
They lay cheek by cheek in the crib next the large white bed, breathing
little, ruffling breaths, out of unison, so small and pathetic with
their tiny shut fingers. I remembered the two larks.
From the next room came a heavy sound of the old woman’s breathing. Meg
went in to her. As in passing I caught sight of the large, prone figure
in the bed, I thought of Guy de Maupassant’s “Toine,” who acted as an
incubator.
CHAPTER V
THE DOMINANT MOTIF OF SUFFERING
The old woman lay still another year, then she suddenly sank out of
life. George ceased to write to me, but I learned his news elsewhere.
He became more and more intimate with the Mayhews. After old Mayhew’s
bankruptcy, the two sons had remained on in the large dark house that
stood off the Nottingham Road in Eberwich. This house had been
bequeathed to the oldest daughter by the mother. Maud Mayhew, who was
married and separated from her husband, kept house for her brothers.
She was a tall, large woman with high cheek-bones and oily black hair
looped over her ears. Tom Mayhew was also a handsome man, very dark and
ruddy, with insolent bright eyes.
The Mayhews’ house was called the “Hollies.” It was a solid building,
of old red brick, standing fifty yards back from the Eberwich highroad.
Between it and the road was an unkempt lawn, surrounded by very high
black holly trees. The house seemed to be imprisoned among the
bristling hollies. Passing through the large gate, one came immediately
upon the bare side of the house and upon the great range of stables.
Old Mayhew had in his day stabled thirty or more horses there. Now
grass was between the red bricks, and all the bleaching doors were
shut, save perhaps two or three which were open for George’s horses.
The “Hollies” became a kind of club for the disconsolate, “better-off”
men of the district. The large dining-room was gloomily and sparsely
furnished, the drawing-room was a desert, but the smaller morning-room
was comfortable enough, with wicker arm-chairs, heavy curtains, and a
large sideboard. In this room George and the Mayhews met with several
men two or three times a week. There they discussed horses and made
mock of the authority of women. George provided the whisky, and they
all gambled timidly at cards. These bachelor parties were the source of
great annoyance to the wives of the married men who attended them.
“He’s quite unbearable when he’s been at those Mayhews’,” said Meg.
“I’m sure they do nothing but cry us down.”
Maud Mayhew kept apart from these meetings, watching over her two
children. She had been very unhappily married, and now was reserved,
silent. The women of Eberwich watched her as she went swiftly along the
street in the morning with her basket, and they gloried a little in her
overthrow, because she was too proud to accept consolation, yet they
were sorry in their hearts for her, and she was never touched with
calumny. George saw her frequently, but she treated him coldly as she
treated the other men, so he was afraid of her.
He had more facilities now for his horse-dealing. When the grandmother
died, in the October two years after the marriage of George she left
him seven hundred pounds. To Meg she left the Inn, and the two houses
she had built in Newerton, together with brewery shares to the value of
nearly a thousand pounds. George and Meg felt themselves to be people
of property. The result, however, was only a little further coldness
between them. He was very careful that she had all that was hers. She
said to him once when they were quarrelling, that he needn’t go feeding
the Mayhews on the money that came out of her business. Thenceforward
he kept strict accounts of all his affairs, and she must audit them,
receiving her exact dues. This was a mortification to her woman’s
capricious soul of generosity and cruelty.
The Christmas after the grandmother’s death another son was born to
them. For the time George and Meg became very good friends again.
When in the following March I heard he was coming down to London with
Tom Mayhew on business, I wrote and asked him to stay with me. Meg
replied, saying she was so glad I had asked him: she did not want him
going off with that fellow again; he had been such a lot better lately,
and she was sure it was only those men at Mayhew’s made him what he
was.
He consented to stay with me. I wrote and told him Lettie and Leslie
were in London, and that we should dine with them one evening. I met
him at King’s Cross and we all three drove west. Mayhew was a
remarkably handsome, well-built man; he and George made a notable
couple. They were both in breeches and gaiters, but George still looked
like a yeoman, while Mayhew had all the braggadocio of the stable. We
made an impossible trio. Mayhew laughed and jested broadly for a short
time, then he grew restless and fidgety. He felt restrained and awkward
in my presence. Later, he told George I was a damned parson. On the
other hand, I was content to look at his rather vulgar beauty—his teeth
were blackened with smoking—and to listen to his ineffectual talk, but
I could find absolutely no response. George was go-between. To me he
was cautious and rather deferential, to Mayhew he was careless, and his
attitude was tinged with contempt.
When the son of the horse-dealer at last left us to go to some of his
father’s old cronies, we were glad. Very uncertain, very sensitive and
wavering, our old intimacy burned again like the fragile burning of
alcohol. Closed together in the same blue flames, we discovered and
watched the pageant of life in the town revealed wonderfully to us. We
laughed at the tyranny of old romance. We scorned the faded procession
of old years, and made mock of the vast pilgrimage of by-gone romances
travelling farther into the dim distance. Were we not in the midst of
the bewildering pageant of modern life, with all its confusion of
bannerets and colours, with its infinite interweaving of sounds, the
screech of the modern toys of haste striking like keen spray, the heavy
boom of busy mankind gathering its bread, earnestly, forming the bed of
all other sounds; and between these two the swiftness of songs, the
triumphant tilt of the joy of life, the hoarse oboes of privation, the
shuddering drums of tragedy, and the eternal scraping of the two
deep-toned strings of despair?
We watched the taxicabs coursing with their noses down to the street,
we watched the rocking hansoms, and the lumbering stateliness of buses.
In the silent green cavern of the park we stood and listened to the
surging of the ocean of life. We watched a girl with streaming hair go
galloping down the Row, a dark man, laughing and showing his white
teeth, galloping more heavily at her elbow. We saw a squad of
life-guards enter the gates of the park, erect and glittering with
silver and white and red. They came near to us, and we thrilled a
little as we watched the muscles of their white smooth thighs answering
the movement of the horses, and their cheeks and their chins bending
with proud manliness to the rhythm of the march. We watched the
exquisite rhythm of the body of men moving in scarlet and silver
further down the leafless avenue, like a slightly wavering spark of red
life blown along. At the Marble Arch Corner we listened to a little
socialist who was flaring fiercely under a plane tree. The hot stream
of his words flowed over the old wounds that the knowledge of the
unending miseries of the poor had given me, and I winced. For him the
world was all East-end, and all the East-End was as a pool from which
the waters are drained off, leaving the water-things to wrestle in the
wet mud under the sun, till the whole of the city seems a heaving,
shuddering struggle of black-mudded objects deprived of the elements of
life. I felt a great terror of the little man, lest he should make me
see all mud, as I had seen before. Then I felt a breathless pity for
him, that his eyes should be always filled with mud, and never
brightened. George listened intently to the speaker, very much moved by
him.
At night, after the theatre, we saw the outcasts sleep in a rank under
the Waterloo bridge, their heads to the wall, their feet lying out on
the pavement: a long, black, ruffled heap at the foot of the wall. All
the faces were covered but two, that of a peaked, pale little man, and
that of a brutal woman. Over these two faces, floating like uneasy pale
dreams on their obscurity, swept now and again the trailing light of
the tram cars. We picked our way past the line of abandoned feet,
shrinking from the sight of the thin bare ankles of a young man, from
the draggled edge of the skirts of a bunched-up woman, from the
pitiable sight of the men who had wrapped their legs in newspaper for a
little warmth, and lay like worthless parcels. It was raining. Some men
stood at the edge of the causeway fixed in dreary misery, finding no
room to sleep. Outside, on a seat in the blackness and the rain, a
woman sat sleeping, while the water trickled and hung heavily at the
ends of her loosened strands of hair. Her hands were pushed in the
bosom of her jacket. She lurched forward in her sleep, started, and one
of her hands fell out of her bosom. She sank again to sleep. George
gripped my arm.
“Give her something,” he whispered in panic. I was afraid. Then
suddenly getting a florin from my pocket, I stiffened my nerves and
slid it into her palm. Her hand was soft, and warm, and curled in
sleep. She started violently, looking up at me, then down at her hand.
I turned my face aside, terrified lest she should look in my eyes, and
full of shame and grief I ran down the embankment to him. We hurried
along under the plane trees in silence. The shining cars were drawing
tall in the distance over Westminster Bridge, a fainter, yellow light
running with them on the water below. The wet streets were spilled with
golden liquor of light, and on the deep blackness of the river were the
restless yellow slashes of the lamps.
Lettie and Leslie were staying up at Hampstead with a friend of the
Tempests, one of the largest shareholders in the firm of Tempest,
Wharton & Co. The Raphaels had a substantial house, and Lettie
preferred to go to them rather than to an hotel, especially as she had
brought with her her infant son, now ten months old, with his nurse.
They invited George and me to dinner on the Friday evening. The party
included Lettie’s host and hostess, and also a Scottish poetess, and an
Irish musician, composer of songs and pianoforte rhapsodies.
Lettie wore a black lace dress in mourning for one of Leslie’s maternal
aunts. This made her look older, otherwise there seemed to be no change
in her. A subtle observer might have noticed a little hardness about
her mouth, and disillusion hanging slightly on her eyes. She was,
however, excited by the company in which she found herself, therefore
she overflowed with clever speeches and rapid, brilliant observations.
Certainly on such occasions she was admirable. The rest of the company
formed, as it were, the orchestra which accompanied her.
George was exceedingly quiet. He spoke a few words now and then to Mrs
Raphael, but on the whole he was altogether silent, listening.
“Really!” Lettie was saying, “I don’t see that one thing is worth doing
any more than another. It’s like dessert: you are equally indifferent
whether you have grapes, or pears, or pineapple.”
“Have you already dined so far?” sang the Scottish poetess in her
musical, plaintive manner.
“The only thing worth doing is producing,” said Lettie.
“Alas, that is what all the young folk are saying nowadays!” sighed the
Irish musician.
“That is the only thing one finds any pleasure in—that is to say, any
satisfaction,” continued Lettie, smiling, and turning to the two
artists.
“Do you not think so?” she added.
“You do come to a point at last,” said the Scottish poetess, “when your
work is a real source of satisfaction.”
“Do you write poetry then?” asked George of Lettie.
“I! Oh, dear no! I have tried strenuously to make up a Limerick for a
competition, but in vain. So you see, I am a failure there. Did you
know I have a son, though?—a marvellous little fellow, is he not,
Leslie?—he is my work. I am a wonderful mother, am I not, Leslie?”
“Too devoted,” he replied.
“There!” she exclaimed in triumph—“When I have to sign my name and
occupation in a visitor’s book, it will be ‘——Mother’. I hope my
business will flourish,” she concluded, smiling.
There was a touch of ironical brutality in her now. She was, at the
bottom, quite sincere. Having reached that point in a woman’s career
when most, perhaps all of the things in life seem worthless and
insipid, she had determined to put up with it, to ignore her own self,
to empty her own potentialities into the vessel of another or others,
and to live her life at second hand. This peculiar abnegation of self
is the resource of a woman for the escaping of the responsibilities of
her own development. Like a nun, she puts over her living face a veil,
as a sign that the woman no longer exists for herself: she is the
servant of God, of some man, of her children, or may be of some cause.
As a servant, she is no longer responsible for her self, which would
make her terrified and lonely. Service is light and easy. To be
responsible for the good progress of one’s life is terrifying. It is
the most insufferable form of loneliness, and the heaviest of
responsibilities. So Lettie indulged her husband, but did not yield her
independence to him; rather it was she who took much of the
responsibility of him into her hands, and therefore he was so devoted
to her. She had, however, now determined to abandon the charge of
herself to serve her children. When the children grew up, either they
would unconsciously fling her away, back upon herself again in
bitterness and loneliness, or they would tenderly cherish her, chafing
at her love-bonds occasionally.
George looked and listened to all the flutter of conversation, and said
nothing. It seemed to him like so much unreasonable rustling of pieces
of paper, of leaves of books, and so on. Later in the evening Lettie
sang, no longer Italian folk songs, but the fragmentary utterances of
Debussy and Strauss. These also to George were quite meaningless, and
rather wearisome. It made him impatient to see her wasting herself upon
them.
“Do you like those songs?” she asked in the frank, careless manner she
affected.
“Not much,” he replied, ungraciously.
“Don’t you?” she exclaimed, adding with a smile, “Those are the most
wonderful things in the world, those little things”—she began to hum a
Debussy idiom. He could not answer her on the point, so he sat with the
arrow sticking in him, and did not speak.
She enquired of him concerning Meg and his children and the affairs of
Eberwich, but the interest was flimsy, as she preserved a wide distance
between them, although apparently she was so unaffected and friendly.
We left before eleven.
When we were seated in the cab and rushing down hill, he said:
“You know, she makes me mad.”
He was frowning, looking out of the window away from me.
“Who, Lettie? Why, what riles you?” I asked.
He was some time in replying.
“Why, she’s so affected.”
I sat still in the small, close space and waited.
“Do you know——?” he laughed, keeping his face averted from me. “She
makes my blood boil. I could hate her.”
“Why?” I said gently.
“I don’t know. I feel as if she’d insulted me. She does lie, doesn’t
she?”
“I didn’t notice it,” I said, but I knew he meant her shirking, her
shuffling of her life.
“And you think of those poor devils under the bridge—and then of her
and them frittering away themselves and money in that idiocy——”
He spoke with passion.
“You are quoting Longfellow,” I said.
“What?” he asked, looking at me suddenly.
“‘Life is real, life is earnest——’”
He flushed slightly at my good-natured gibe.
“I don’t know what it is,” he replied. “But it’s a pretty rotten
business, when you think of her fooling about wasting herself, and all
the waste that goes on up there, and the poor devils rotting on the
embankment—and——”
“And you—and Mayhew—and me——” I continued.
He looked at me very intently to see if I were mocking. He laughed. I
could see he was very much moved.
“Is the time quite out of joint?” I asked.
“Why!”—he laughed. “No. But she makes me feel so angry—as if I should
burst—I don’t know when I felt in such a rage. I wonder why. I’m sorry
for him, poor devil. ‘Lettie and Leslie’—they seemed christened for one
another, didn’t they?”
“What if you’d had her?” I asked.
“We should have been like a cat and dog; I’d rather be with Meg a
thousand times—now!” he added significantly. He sat watching the lamps
and the people and the dark buildings slipping past us.
“Shall we go and have a drink?” I asked him, thinking we would call in
Frascati’s to see the come-and-go.
“I could do with a brandy,” he replied, looking at me slowly.
We sat in the restaurant listening to the jigging of the music,
watching the changing flow of the people. I like to sit a long time by
the hollyhocks watching the throng of varied bees which poise and
hesitate outside the wild flowers, then swing in with a hum which sets
everything aquiver. But still more fascinating it is to watch the come
and go of people weaving and intermingling in the complex mesh of their
intentions, with all the subtle grace and mystery of their moving,
shapely bodies.
I sat still, looking out across the amphitheatre. George looked also,
but he drank glass after glass of brandy.
“I like to watch the people,” said I.
“Ay—and doesn’t it seem an aimless, idiotic business—look at them!” he
replied in tones of contempt. I looked instead at him, in some surprise
and resentment His face was gloomy, stupid and unrelieved. The amount
of brandy he had drunk had increased his ill humour.
“Shall we be going?” I said. I did not want him to get drunk in his
present state of mind.
“Ay—in half a minute,” he finished the brandy, and rose. Although he
had drunk a good deal, he was quite steady, only there was a
disagreeable look always on his face, and his eyes seemed smaller and
more glittering than I had seen them. We took a bus to Victoria. He sat
swaying on his seat in the dim, clumsy vehicle, saying not a word. In
the vast cavern of the station the theatre-goers were hastening,
crossing the pale grey strand, small creatures scurrying hither and
thither in the space beneath the lonely lamps. As the train crawled
over the river we watched the far-flung hoop of diamond lights curving
slowly round and striping with bright threads the black water. He sat
looking with heavy eyes, seeming to shrink from the enormous
unintelligible lettering of the poem of London.
The town was too large for him, he could not take in its immense, its
stupendous poetry. What did come home to him was its flagrant discords.
The unintelligibility of the vast city made him apprehensive, and the
crudity of its big, coarse contrasts wounded him unutterably.
“What is the matter?” I asked him as we went along the silent pavement
at Norwood.
“Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing!” and I did not trouble him further.
We occupied a large, two-bedded room—that looked down the hill and over
to the far woods of Kent. He was morose and untalkative. I brought up a
soda-syphon and whisky, and we proceeded to undress. When he stood in
his pajamas he waited as if uncertain.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
I did not. He crossed to the table, and as I got into my bed I heard
the brief fizzing of the syphon. He drank his glass at one draught,
then switched off the light. In the sudden darkness I saw his pale
shadow go across to the sofa in the window-space. The blinds were
undrawn, and the stars looked in. He gazed out on the great bay of
darkness wherein, far away and below, floated a few sparks of lamps
like herring boats at sea.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” I asked.
“I’m not sleepy—you go to sleep,” he answered, resenting having to
speak at all.
“Then put on a dressing gown—there’s one in that corner—turn the light
on.”
He did not answer, but fumbled for the garment in the darkness. When he
had found it, he said:
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
I did not. He fumbled again in his pockets for cigarettes, always
refusing to switch on the light. I watched his face bowed to the match
as he lighted his cigarette. He was still handsome in the ruddy light,
but his features were coarser. I felt very sorry for him, but I saw
that I could get no nearer to him, to relieve him. For some time I lay
in the darkness watching the end of his cigarette like a ruddy,
malignant insect hovering near his lips, putting the timid stars
immensely far away. He sat quite still, leaning on the sofa arm.
Occasionally there was a little glow on his cheeks as the cigarette
burned brighter, then again I could see nothing but the dull red bee.
I suppose I must have dropped asleep. Suddenly I started as something
fell to the floor. I heard him cursing under his breath.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I’ve only knocked something down—cigarette case or something,” he
replied, apologetically.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m coming,” he answered quite docile.
He seemed to wander about and knock against things as he came. He
dropped heavily into bed.
“Are you sleepy now?” I asked.
“I dunno—I shall be directly,” he replied.
“What’s up with you?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he answered. “I am like this sometimes, when there’s nothing
I want to do, and nowhere I want to go, and nobody I want to be near.
Then you feel so rottenly lonely, Cyril. You feel awful, like a vacuum,
with a pressure on you, a sort of pressure of darkness, and you
yourself—just nothing, a vacuum—that’s what it’s like—a little vacuum
that’s not dark, all loose in the middle of a space of darkness, that’s
pressing on you.”
“Good gracious!” I exclaimed, rousing myself in bed. “That sounds bad!”
He laughed slightly.
“It’s all right,” he said, “it’s only the excitement of London, and
that little man in the park, and that woman on the seat—I wonder where
she is to-night, poor devil—and then Lettie. I seem thrown off my
balance.—I think really, I ought to have made something of myself——”
“What?” I asked, as he hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he replied slowly, “—a poet or something, like Burns—I
don’t know. I shall laugh at myself for thinking so, to-morrow. But I
am born a generation too soon—I wasn’t ripe enough when I came. I
wanted something I hadn’t got. I’m something short. I’m like corn in a
wet harvest—full, but pappy, no good. Is’ll rot. I came too soon; or I
wanted something that would ha’ made me grow fierce. That’s why I
wanted Lettie—I think. But am I talking damn rot? What am I saying?
What are you making me talk for? What are you listening for?”
I rose and went across to him, saying: “I don’t want you to talk! If
you sleep till morning things will look different.”
I sat on his bed and took his hand. He lay quite still.
“I’m only a kid after all, Cyril,” he said, a few moments later.
“We all are,” I answered, still holding his hand. Presently he fell
asleep.
When I awoke the sunlight was laughing with the young morning in the
room. The large blue sky shone against the window, and the birds were
calling in the garden below, shouting to one another and making fun of
life. I felt glad to have opened my eyes. I lay for a moment looking
out on the morning as on a blue bright sea in which I was going to
plunge.
Then my eyes wandered to the little table near the couch. I noticed the
glitter of George’s cigarette case, and then, with a start, the whisky
decanter. It was nearly empty. He must have drunk three-quarters of a
pint of liquor while I was dozing. I could not believe it. I thought I
must have been mistaken as to the quantity the bottle contained. I
leaned out to see what it was that had startled me by its fall the
night before. It was the large, heavy drinking glass which he had
knocked down but not broken. I could see no stain on the carpet.
George was still asleep. He lay half uncovered, and was breathing
quietly. His face looked inert like a mask. The pallid, uninspired clay
of his features seemed to have sunk a little out of shape, so that he
appeared rather haggard, rather ugly, with grooves of ineffectual
misery along his cheeks. I wanted him to wake, so that his inert,
flaccid features might be inspired with life again. I could not believe
his charm and his beauty could have forsaken him so, and left his
features dreary, sunken clay.
As I looked he woke. His eyes opened slowly. He looked at me and turned
away, unable to meet my eyes. He pulled the bedclothes up over his
shoulders, as though to cover himself from me, and he lay with his back
to me, quite still, as if he were asleep, although I knew he was quite
awake; he was suffering the humiliation of lying waiting for his life
to crawl back and inhabit his body. As it was, his vitality was not yet
sufficient to inform the muscles of his face and give him an
expression, much less to answer by challenge.
CHAPTER VI
PISGAH
When her eldest boy was three years old Lettie returned to live at
Eberwich. Old Mr. Tempest died suddenly, so Leslie came down to inhabit
“Highclose.” He was a very much occupied man. Very often he was in
Germany or in the South of England engaged on business. At home he was
unfailingly attentive to his wife and his two children. He had
cultivated a taste for public life. In spite of his pressure of
business he had become a County Councillor, and one of the prominent
members of the Conservative Association. He was very fond of answering
or proposing toasts at some public dinner, of entertaining political
men at “Highclose,” of taking the chair at political meetings, and
finally, of speaking on this or that platform. His name was fairly
often seen in the newspapers. As a mine owner, he spoke as an authority
on the employment of labour, on royalties, land-owning and so on.
At home he was quite tame. He treated his wife with respect, romped in
the nursery, and domineered the servants royally. They liked him for
it—her they did not like. He was noisy, but unobservant, she was quiet
and exacting. He would swear and bluster furiously, but when he was
round the corner they smiled. She gave her orders and passed very
moderate censure, but they went away cursing to themselves. As Lettie
was always a very good wife, Leslie adored her when he had the time,
and when he had not, forgot her comfortably.
She was very contradictory. At times she would write to me in terms of
passionate dissatisfaction: she had nothing at all in her life, it was
a barren futility.
“I hope I shall have another child next spring,” she would write,
“there is only that to take away the misery of this torpor. I seem full
of passion and energy, and it all fizzles out in day to day
domestics——”
When I replied to her urging her to take some work that she could throw
her soul into, she would reply indifferently. Then later:
“You charge me with contradiction. Well, naturally. You see I wrote
that screeching letter in a mood which won’t come again for some time.
Generally I am quite content to take the rain and the calm days just as
they come, then something flings me out of myself—and I am a trifle
demented:—very, very blue, as I tell Leslie.”
Like so many women, she seemed to live, for the most part contentedly,
a small indoor existence with artificial light and padded upholstery.
Only occasionally, hearing the winds of life outside, she clamoured to
be out in the black, keen storm. She was driven to the door, she looked
out and called into the tumult wildly, but feminine caution kept her
from stepping over the threshold.
George was flourishing in his horse-dealing.
In the morning, processions of splendid shire horses, tied tail and
head, would tramp grandly along the quiet lanes of Eberwich, led by
George’s man, or by Tom Mayhew, while in the fresh clean sunlight
George would go riding by, two restless nags dancing beside him.
When I came home from France five years after our meeting in London I
found him installed in the “Hollies.” He had rented the house from the
Mayhews, and had moved there with his family, leaving Oswald in charge
of the “Ram.” I called at the large house one afternoon, but George was
out. His family surprised me. The twins were tall lads of six. There
were two more boys, and Meg was nursing a beautiful baby-girl about a
year old. This child was evidently mistress of the household. Meg, who
was growing stouter, indulged the little creature in every way.
“How is George?” I asked her.
“Oh, he’s very well,” she replied. “He’s always got something on hand.
He hardly seems to have a spare moment; what with his socialism, and
one thing and another.”
It was true, the outcome of his visit to London had been a wild
devotion to the cause of the down-trodden. I saw a picture of Watt’s
“Mammon,” on the walls of the morning-room, and the works of
Blatchford, Masterman, and Chiozza Money on the side table. The
socialists of the district used to meet every other Thursday evening at
the “Hollies” to discuss reform. Meg did not care for these earnest
souls.
“They’re not my sort,” she said, “too jerky and bumptious. They think
everybody’s slow-witted but them. There’s one thing about them, though,
they don’t drink, so that’s a blessing.”
“Why!” I said, “Have you had much trouble that way?”
She lowered her voice to a pitch which was sufficiently mysterious to
attract the attention of the boys.
“I shouldn’t say anything if it wasn’t that you were like brothers,”
she said. “But he did begin to have dreadful drinking bouts. You know
it was always spirits, and generally brandy:—and that makes such work
with them. You’ve no idea what he’s like when he’s evil-drunk.
Sometimes he’s all for talk, sometimes he’s laughing at everything, and
sometimes he’s just snappy. And then——” here her tones grew ominous,
“——he’ll come home evil-drunk.”
At the memory she grew serious.
“You couldn’t imagine what it’s like, Cyril,” she said. “It’s like
having Satan in the house with you, or a black tiger glowering at you.
I’m sure nobody knows what I’ve suffered with him——”
The children stood with large awful eyes and paling lips, listening.
“But he’s better now?” I said.
“Oh, yes—since Gertie came,”—she looked fondly at the baby in her
arms—“He’s a lot better now. You see he always wanted a girl, and he’s
very fond of her—isn’t he, pet?—are you your Dadda’s girlie?—and
Mamma’s too, aren’t you?”
The baby turned with sudden coy shyness, and clung to her mother’s
neck. Meg kissed her fondly, then the child laid her cheek against her
mother’s. The mother’s dark eyes, and the baby’s large, hazel eyes
looked at me serenely. The two were very calm, very complete and
triumphant together. In their completeness was a security which made me
feel alone and ineffectual. A woman who has her child in her arms is a
tower of strength, a beautiful, unassailable tower of strength that may
in its turn stand quietly dealing death.
I told Meg I would call again to see George. Two evenings later I asked
Lettie to lend me a dog-cart to drive over to the “Hollies.” Leslie was
away on one of his political jaunts, and she was restless. She proposed
to go with me. She had called on Meg twice before in the new large
home.
We started about six o’clock. The night was dark and muddy. Lettie
wanted to call in Eberwich village, so she drove the long way round
Selsby. The horse was walking through the gate of the “Hollies” at
about seven o’clock. Meg was upstairs in the nursery, the maid told me,
and George was in the dining-room getting baby to sleep.
“All right!” I said, “we will go in to him. Don’t bother to tell him.”
As we stood in the gloomy, square hall we heard the rumble of a
rocking-chair, the stroke coming slow and heavy to the tune of “Henry
Martin,” one of our Strelley Mill folk songs. Then, through the man’s
heavily-accented singing floated the long light crooning of the baby as
she sang, in her quaint little fashion, a mischievous second to her
father’s lullaby. He waxed a little louder; and without knowing why, we
found ourselves smiling with piquant amusement. The baby grew louder
too, till there was a shrill ring of laughter and mockery in her music.
He sang louder and louder, the baby shrilled higher and higher, the
chair swung in long, heavy beats. Then suddenly he began to laugh. The
rocking stopped, and he said, still with laughter and enjoyment in his
tones:
“Now that is very wicked! Ah, naughty Girlie—go to boh, go to bohey!—at
once.”
The baby chuckled her small, insolent mockery.
“Come, Mamma!” he said, “come and take Girlie to bohey!”
The baby laughed again, but with an uncertain touch of appeal in her
tone. We opened the door and entered. He looked up very much startled
to see us. He was sitting in a tall rocking-chair by the fire,
coatless, with white shirtsleeves. The baby, in her high-waisted, tight
little night-gown, stood on his knee, her wide eyes fixed on us, wild
wisps of her brown hair brushed across her forehead and glinting like
puffs of bronze dust over her ears. Quickly she put her arms round his
neck and tucked her face under his chin, her small feet poised on his
thigh, the night-gown dropping upon them. He shook his head as the puff
of soft brown hair tickled him. He smiled at us, saying:
“You see I’m busy!”
Then he turned again to the little brown head tucked under his chin,
blew away the luminous cloud of hair, and rubbed his lips and his
moustache on the small white neck, so warm and secret. The baby put up
her shoulders, and shrank a little, bubbling in his neck with hidden
laughter. She did not lift her face or loosen her arms.
“She thinks she is shy,” he said. “Look up, young hussy, and see the
lady and gentleman. She is a positive owl, she won’t go to bed—will
you, young brown-owl?”
He tickled her neck again with his moustache, and the child bubbled
over with naughty, merry laughter.
The room was very warm, with a red bank of fire up the chimney mouth.
It was half lighted from a heavy bronze chandelier, black and gloomy,
in the middle of the room. There was the same sombre, sparse furniture
that the Mayhews had had. George looked large and handsome, the glossy
black silk of his waistcoat fitting close to his sides, the roundness
of the shoulder muscle filling the white linen of his sleeves.
Suddenly the baby lifted her head and stared at us, thrusting into her
mouth the dummy that was pinned to the breast of her night-gown. The
faded pink sleeves of the night-gown were tight on her fat little
wrists. She stood thus sucking her dummy, one arm round her father’s
neck, watching us with hazel solemn eyes. Then she pushed her fat
little fist up among the bush of small curls, and began to twist her
fingers about her ear that was white like a camelia flower.
“She is really sleepy,” said Lettie.
“Come then!” said he, folding her for sleep against his breast. “Come
and go to boh.”
But the young rascal immediately began to cry her remonstrance. She
stiffened herself, freed herself, and stood again on his knee, watching
us solemnly, vibrating the dummy in her mouth as she suddenly sucked at
it, twisting her father’s ear in her small fingers till he winced.
“Her nails _are_ sharp,” he said, smiling.
He began asking and giving the small information that pass between
friends who have not met for a long time. The baby laid her head on his
shoulder, keeping her tired, owl-like eyes fixed darkly on us. Then
gradually the lids fluttered and sank, and she dropped on to his arm.
“She is asleep,” whispered Lettie.
Immediately the dark eyes opened again. We looked significantly at one
another, continuing our subdued talk. After a while the baby slept
soundly.
Presently Meg came downstairs. She greeted us in breathless whispers of
surprise, and then turned to her husband.
“Has she gone?” she whispered, bending over the sleeping child in
astonishment. “My, this is wonderful, isn’t it!”
She took the sleeping drooping baby from his arms, putting her mouth
close to its forehead, murmuring with soothing, inarticulate sounds.
We stayed talking for some time when Meg had put the baby to bed.
George had a new tone of assurance and authority. In the first place he
was an established man, living in a large house, having altogether
three men working for him. In the second place he had ceased to value
the conventional treasures of social position and ostentatious
refinement. Very, very many things he condemned as flummery and sickly
waste of time. The life of an ordinary well-to-do person he set down as
adorned futility, almost idiocy. He spoke passionately of the monstrous
denial of life to the many by the fortunate few. He talked at Lettie
most flagrantly.
“Of course,” she said, “I have read Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw, and even
Niel Lyons and a Dutchman—what is his name, Querido? But what can I do?
I think the rich have as much misery as the poor, and of quite as
deadly a sort. What can I do? It is a question of life and the
development of the human race. Society and its regulations is not a
sort of drill that endless Napoleons have forced on us: it is the only
way we have yet found of living together.”
“Pah!” said he, “that is rank cowardice. It is feeble and futile to the
last degree.”
“We can’t grow consumption-proof in a generation, nor can we grow
poverty-proof.”
“We can begin to take active measures,” he replied contemptuously.
“We can all go into a sanatorium and live miserably and dejectedly
warding off death,” she said, “but life is full of goodliness for all
that.”
“It is fuller of misery,” he said.
Nevertheless, she had shaken him. She still kept her astonishing power
of influencing his opinions. All his passion, and heat, and rude
speech, analysed out, was only his terror at her threatening of his
life-interest.
She was rather piqued by his rough treatment of her, and by his
contemptuous tone. Moreover, she could never quite let him be. She felt
a driving force which impelled her almost against her will to interfere
in his life. She invited him to dine with them at Highclose. He was now
quite possible. He had, in the course of his business, been
sufficiently in the company of gentlemen to be altogether _“comme it
faut”_ at a private dinner, and after dinner.
She wrote me concerning him occasionally:
“George Saxton was here to dinner yesterday. He and Leslie had
frightful battles over the nationalisation of industries. George is
rather more than a match for Leslie, which, in his secret heart, makes
our friend gloriously proud. It is very amusing. I, of course, have to
preserve the balance of power, and, of course, to bolster my husband’s
dignity. At a crucial dangerous moment, when George is just going to
wave his bloody sword and Leslie lies bleeding with rage, I step in and
prick the victor under the heart with some little satire or some
esoteric question, I raise Leslie and say his blood is luminous for the
truth, and vous voilà! Then I abate for the thousandth time Leslie’s
conservative crow, and I appeal once more to George—it is no use my
arguing with him, he gets so angry—I make an abtruse appeal for all the
wonderful, sad, and beautiful expressions on the countenance of life,
expressions which he does not see or which he distorts by his oblique
vision of socialism into grimaces—and there I am! I think I am
something of a Machiavelli, but it is quite true, what I say——”
Again she wrote:
“We happened to be motoring from Derby on Sunday morning, and as we
came to the top of the hill, we had to thread our way through quite a
large crowd. I looked up, and whom should I see but our friend George,
holding forth about the state endowment of mothers. I made Leslie stop
while we listened. The market-place was quite full of people. George
saw us, and became fiery. Leslie then grew excited, and although I
clung to the skirts of his coat with all my strength, he jumped up and
began to question. I must say it with shame and humility—he made an ass
of himself. The men all round were jeering and muttering under their
breath. I think Leslie is not very popular among them, he is such an
advocate of machinery which will do the work of men. So they cheered
our friend George when he thundered forth his replies and his
demonstrations. He pointed his finger at us, and flung his hand at us,
and shouted till I quailed in my seat. I cannot understand why he
should become so frenzied as soon as I am within range. George had a
triumph that morning, but when I saw him a few days later he seemed
very uneasy, rather self-mistrustful——”
Almost a year later I heard from her again on the same subject.
“I have had such a lark. Two or three times I have been to the
‘Hollies’; to socialist meetings. Leslie does not know. They are great
fun. Of course, I am in sympathy with the socialists, but I cannot
narrow my eyes till I see one thing only. Life is like a large, rather
beautiful man who is young and full of vigour, but hairy, barbaric,
with hands hard and dirty, the dirt ingrained. I know his hands are
very ugly, I know his mouth is not firmly shapen, I know his limbs are
hairy and brutal: but his eyes are deep and very beautiful. That is
what I tell George.
The people are so earnest, they make me sad. But then, they are so
didactic, they hold forth so much, they are so cock-sure and so
narrow-eyed, they make me laugh. George laughs too. I am sure we made
such fun of a straight-haired goggle of a girl who had suffered in
prison for the cause of women, that I am ashamed when I see my “Woman’s
League” badge. At the bottom, you know, Cyril, I don’t care for
anything very much, except myself. Things seem so frivolous. I am the
only real thing, I and the children——”
Gradually George fell out of the socialist movement. It wearied him. It
did not feed him altogether. He began by mocking his friends of the
confraternity. Then he spoke in bitter dislike of Hudson, the wordy,
humorous, shallow leader of the movement in Eberwich; it was Hudson
with his wriggling and his clap-trap who disgusted George with the
cause. Finally the meetings at the ‘Hollies’ ceased, and my friend
dropped all connection with his former associates.
He began to speculate in land. A hosiery factory moved to Eberwich,
giving the place a new stimulus to growth. George happened to buy a
piece of land at the end of the street of the village. When he got it,
it was laid out in allotment gardens. These were becoming valueless
owing to the encroachment of houses. He took it, divided it up, and
offered it as sites for a new row of shops. He sold at a good profit.
Altogether he was becoming very well off. I heard from Meg that he was
flourishing, that he did not drink “anything to speak of,” but that he
was always out, she hardly saw anything of him. If getting-on was to
keep him so much away from home, she would be content with a little
less fortune. He complained that she was narrow, and that she would not
entertain any sympathy with any of his ideas.
“Nobody comes here to see me twice,” he said. “Because Meg receives
them in such an off-hand fashion. I asked Jim Curtiss and his wife from
Everley Hall one evening. We were uncomfortable all the time. Meg had
hardly a word for anybody—‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and ‘Hm Hm!’—They’ll never
come again.”
Meg herself said:
“Oh, I can’t stand stuck-up folks. They make me feel uncomfortable. As
soon as they begin mincing their words I’m done for—I can no more talk
than a lobster——”
Thus their natures contradicted each other. He tried hard to gain a
footing in Eberwich. As it was he belonged to no class of society
whatsoever. Meg visited and entertained the wives of small shop-keepers
and publicans: this was her set.
George voted the women loud-mouthed, vulgar, and narrow—not without
some cause. Meg, however, persisted. She visited when she thought fit,
and entertained when he was out. He made acquaintance after
acquaintance: Dr. Francis; Mr. Cartridge, the veterinary surgeon; Toby
Heswall, the brewer’s son; the Curtisses, farmers of good standing from
Everley Hall. But it was no good. George was by nature a family man. He
wanted to be private and secure in his own rooms, then he was at ease.
As Meg never went out with him, and as every attempt to entertain at
the “Hollies” filled him with shame and mortification, he began to give
up trying to place himself, and remained suspended in social isolation
at the “Hollies.”
The friendship between Lettie and himself had been kept up, in spite of
all things. Leslie was sometimes jealous, but he dared not show it
openly, for fear of his wife’s scathing contempt. George went to
“Highclose” perhaps once in a fortnight, perhaps not so often. Lettie
never went to the “Hollies,” as Meg’s attitude was too antagonistic.
Meg complained very bitterly of her husband. He often made a beast of
himself drinking, he thought more of himself than he ought, home was
not good enough for him, he was selfish to the back-bone, he cared
neither for her nor the children, only for himself.
I happened to be at home for Lettie’s thirty-first birthday. George was
then thirty-five. Lettie had allowed her husband to forget her
birthday. He was now very much immersed in politics, foreseeing a
general election in the following year, and intending to contest the
seat in parliament. The division was an impregnable Liberal stronghold,
but Leslie had hopes that he might capture the situation. Therefore he
spent a great deal of time at the conservative club, and among the men
of influence in the southern division. Lettie encouraged him in these
affairs. It relieved her of him. It was thus that she let him forget
her birthday, while, for some unknown reason, she let the intelligence
slip to George. He was invited to dinner, as I was at home.
George came at seven o’clock. There was a strange feeling of festivity
in the house, although there were no evident signs. Lettie had dressed
with some magnificence in a blackish purple gauze over soft satin of
lighter tone, nearly the colour of double violets. She wore vivid green
azurite ornaments on the fairness of her bosom, and her bright hair was
bound by a band of the same colour. It was rather startling. She was
conscious of her effect, and was very excited. Immediately George saw
her his eyes wakened with a dark glow. She stood up as he entered, her
hand stretched straight out to him, her body very erect, her eyes
bright and rousing, like two blue pennants.
“Thank you so much,” she said softly, giving his hand a last pressure
before she let it go. He could not answer, so he sat down, bowing his
head, then looking up at her in suspense. She smiled at her.
Presently the children came in. They looked very quaint, like acolytes,
in their long straight dressing-gowns of quilted blue silk. The boy,
particularly, looked as if he were going to light the candles in some
childish church in paradise. He was very tall and slender and fair,
with a round fine head, and serene features. Both children looked
remarkably, almost transparently clean: it is impossible to consider
anything more fresh and fair. The girl was a merry, curly headed puss
of six. She played with her mother’s green jewels and prattled
prettily, while the boy stood at his mother’s side, a slender and
silent acolyte in his pale blue gown. I was impressed by his patience
and his purity. When the girl had bounded away into George’s arms, the
lad laid his hand timidly on Lettie’s knee and looked with a little
wonder at her dress.
“How pretty those green stones are, mother!” he said.
“Yes,” replied Lettie brightly, lifting them and letting their strange
pattern fall again on her bosom. “I like them.”
“Are you going to sing, mother?” he asked.
“Perhaps. But why?” said Lettie, smiling.
“Because you generally sing when Mr. Saxton comes.”
He bent his head and stroked Lettie’s dress shyly.
“Do I,” she said, laughing, “Can you hear?”
“Just a little,” he replied. “Quite small, as if it were nearly lost in
the dark.”
He was hesitating, shy as boys are. Lettie laid her hand on his head
and stroked his smooth fair hair.
“Sing a song for us before we go, mother” he asked, almost shamefully.
She kissed him.
“You shall sing with me,” she said. “What shall it be?”
She played without a copy of the music. He stood at her side, while
Lucy, the little mouse, sat on her mother’s skirts, pressing Lettie’s
silk slippers in turn upon the pedals. The mother and the boy sang
their song.
“Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar
As he was hastening from the war.”
The boy had a pure treble, clear as the flight of swallows in the
morning. The light shone on his lips. Under the piano the girl child
sat laughing, pressing her mother’s feet with all her strength, and
laughing again. Lettie smiled as she sang.
At last they kissed us a gentle “good-night,” and flitted out of the
room. The girl popped her curly head round the door again. We saw the
white cuff on the nurse’s wrist as she held the youngster’s arm.
“You’ll come and kiss us when we’re in bed, Mum?” asked the rogue. Her
mother laughed and agreed.
Lucy was withdrawn for a moment; then we heard her, “Just a tick,
nurse, just half-a-tick!”
The curly head appeared round the door again.
“And _one_ teenie sweetie,” she suggested, “only _one!_”
“Go, you——!” Lettie clapped her hands in mock wrath. The child
vanished, but immediately there appeared again round the door two blue
laughing eyes and the snub tip of a nose.
“A nice one, Mum—not a jelly-one!”
Lettie rose with a rustle to sweep upon her. The child vanished with a
glitter of laughter. We heard her calling breathlessly on the
stairs—“Wait a bit, Freddie,—wait for me!”
George and Lettie smiled at each other when the children had gone. As
the smile died from their faces they looked down sadly, and until
dinner was announced they were very still and heavy with melancholy.
After dinner Lettie debated pleasantly which bon-bon she should take
for the children. When she came down again she smoked a cigarette with
us over coffee. George did not like to see her smoking, yet he
brightened a little when he sat down after giving her a light, pleased
with the mark of recklessness in her.
“It is ten years to-day since my party at Woodside,” she said, reaching
for the small Roman salt-cellar of green jade that she used as an
ash-tray.
“My Lord—ten years!” he exclaimed bitterly. “It seems a hundred.”
“It does and it doesn’t,” she answered, smiling.
“If I look straight back, and think of my excitement, it seems only
yesterday. If I look between then and now, at all the days that lie
between, it is an age.”
“If I look at myself,” he said, “I think I am another person
altogether.”
“You have changed,” she agreed, looking at him sadly. “There is a great
change—but you are not another person. I often think—there is one of
his old looks, he is just the same at the bottom!”
They embarked on a barge of gloomy recollections and drifted along the
soiled canal of their past.
“The worst of it is,” he said. “I have got a miserable carelessness, a
contempt for things. You know I had such a faculty for reverence. I
always believed in things.”
“I know you did,” she smiled. “You were so humbly-minded—too
humbly-minded, I always considered. You always thought things had a
deep religious meaning, somewhere hidden, and you reverenced them. Is
it different now?”
“You know me very well,” he laughed. “What is there left for me to
believe in, if not in myself?”
“You have to live for your wife and children,” she said with firmness.
“Meg has plenty to secure her and the children as long as they live,”
he said, smiling. “So I don’t know that I’m essential.”
“But you are,” she replied. “You are necessary as a father and a
husband, if not as a provider.”
“I think,” said he, “marriage is more of a duel than a duet. One party
wins and takes the other captive, slave, servant—what you like. It is
so, more or less.”
“Well?” said Lettie.
“Well!” he answered. “Meg is not like you. She wants me, part of me, so
she’d kill me rather than let me go loose.”
“Oh, no!” said Lettie, emphatically.
“You know nothing about it,” he said quietly.
“In the marital duel Meg is winning. The woman generally does; she has
the children on her side. I can’t give her any of the real part of me,
the vital part that she wants—I can’t, any more than you could give
kisses to a stranger. And I feel that I’m losing—and don’t care.”
“No,” she said, “you are getting morbid.”
He put the cigarette between his lips, drew a deep breath, then slowly
sent the smoke down his nostrils.
“No,” he said.
“Look here!” she said. “Let me sing to you, shall I, and make you
cheerful again?”
She sang from Wagner. It was the music of resignation and despair. She
had not thought of it. All the time he listened he was thinking. The
music stimulated his thoughts and illuminated the trend of his
brooding. All the time he sat looking at her his eyes were dark with
his thoughts. She finished the “Star of Eve” from Tannhäuser and came
over to him.
“Why are you so sad to-night, when it is my birthday?” she asked
plaintively.
“Am I slow?” he replied. “I am sorry.”
“What is the matter?” she said, sinking onto the small sofa near to
him.
“Nothing!” he replied—“You are looking very beautiful.”
“There, I wanted you to say that! You ought to be quite gay, you know,
when I am so smart to-night.”
“Nay,” he said, “I know I ought. But the to-morrow seems to have fallen
in love with me. I can’t get out of its lean arms.”
“Why!” she said. “To-morrow’s arms are not lean. They are white, like
mine.” She lifted her arms and looked at them, smiling.
“How do you know?” he asked, pertinently.
“Oh, of course they are,” was her light answer.
He laughed, brief and sceptical.
“No!” he said. “It came when the children kissed us.”
“What?” she asked.
“These lean arms of tomorrow’s round me, and the white arms round you,”
he replied, smiling whimsically. She reached out and clasped his hand.
“You foolish boy,” she said.
He laughed painfully, not able to look at her.
“You know,” he said, and his voice was low and difficult “I have needed
you for a light. You will soon be the only light again.”
“Who is the other?” she asked.
“My little girl!” he answered. Then he continued, “And you know, I
couldn’t endure complete darkness, I couldn’t. It’s the solitariness.”
“You mustn’t talk like this,” she said. “You know you mustn’t.” She put
her hand on his head and ran her fingers through the hair he had so
ruffled.
“It is as thick as ever, your hair,” she said.
He did not answer, but kept his face bent out of sight. She rose from
her seat and stood at the back of his low arm-chair. Taking an amber
comb from her hair, she bent over him, and with the translucent comb
and her white fingers she busied herself with his hair.
“I believe you _would_ have a parting,” she said softly.
He laughed shortly at her playfulness. She continued combing, just
touching, pressing the strands in place with the tips of her fingers.
“I was only a warmth to you,” he said, pursuing the same train of
thought. “So you could do without me. But you were like the light to
me, and otherwise it was dark and aimless. Aimlessness is horrible.”
She had finally smoothed his hair, so she lifted her hands and put back
her head.
“There!” she said. “It looks fair fine, as Alice would say. Raven’s
wings are raggy in comparison.”
He did not pay any attention to her.
“Aren’t you going to look at yourself?” she said, playfully
reproachful. She put her finger-tips under his chin. He lifted his head
and they looked at each other, she smiling, trying to make him play, he
smiling with his lips, but not with eyes, dark with pain.
“We can’t go on like this, Lettie, can we?” he said softly.
“Yes,” she answered him, “Yes; why not?”
“It can’t!” he said, “It can’t, I couldn’t keep it up, Lettie.”
“But don’t think about it,” she answered. “Don’t think of it.”
“Lettie,” he said. “I have to set my teeth with loneliness.”
“Hush!” she said. “No! There are the children. Don’t say anything—do
not be serious, will you?”
“No, there are the children,” he replied, smiling dimly.
“Yes! Hush now! Stand up and look what a fine parting I have made in
your hair. Stand up, and see if my style becomes you.”
“It is no good, Lettie,” he said, “we can’t go on.”
“Oh, but come, come, come!” she exclaimed. “We are not talking about
going on; we are considering what a fine parting I have made you down
the middle, like two wings of a spread bird——” she looked down, smiling
playfully on him, just closing her eyes slightly in petition.
He rose and took a deep breath, and set his shoulders.
“No,” he said, and at the sound of his voice, Lettie went pale and also
stiffened herself.
“No!” he repeated. “It is impossible. I felt as soon as Fred came into
the room—it must be one way or another.”
“Very well then,” said Lettie, coldly. Her voice was “muted” like a
violin.
“Yes,” he replied, submissive. “The children.” He looked at her,
contracting his lips in a smile of misery.
“Are you sure it must be so final?” she asked, rebellious, even
resentful. She was twisting the azurite jewels on her bosom, and
pressing the blunt points into her flesh. He looked up from the
fascination of her action when he heard the tone of her last question.
He was angry.
“Quite sure!” he said at last, simply, ironically.
She bowed her head in assent. His face twitched sharply as he
restrained himself from speaking again. Then he turned and quietly left
the room. She did not watch him go, but stood as he had left her. When,
after some time, she heard the grating of his dog-cart on the gravel,
and then the sharp trot of hoofs down the frozen road, she dropped
herself on the settee, and lay with her bosom against the cushions,
looking fixedly at the wall.
CHAPTER VII
NETHERMTHE SCARP SLOPEERE
Leslie won the conservative victory in the general election which took
place a year or so after my last visit to “Highclose.”
In the interim the Tempests had entertained a continuous stream of
people. I heard occasionally from Lettie how she was busy, amused, or
bored. She told me that George had thrown himself into the struggle on
behalf of the candidate of the Labour Party; that she had not seen him,
except in the streets, for a very long time.
When I went down to Eberwich in the March succeeding the election, I
found several people staying with my sister. She had under her wing a
young literary fellow who affected the “Doady” style—Dora Copperfield’s
“Doady.” He had bunches of half-curly hair, and a romantic black
cravat; he played the impulsive part, but was really as calculating as
any man on the stock-exchange. It delighted Lettie to “mother” him. He
was so shrewd as to be less than harmless. His fellow guests, a woman
much experienced in music and an elderly man who was in the artistic
world without being of it, were interesting for a time. Bubble after
bubble of floating fancy and wit we blew with our breath in the
evenings. I rose in the morning loathing the idea of more
bubble-blowing.
I wandered around Nethermere, which had now forgotten me. The daffodils
under the boat-house continued their golden laughter, and nodded to one
another in gossip, as I watched them, never for a moment pausing to
notice me. The yellow reflection of daffodils among the shadows of grey
willow in the water trembled faintly as they told haunted tales in the
gloom. I felt like a child left out of the group of my playmates. There
was a wind running across Nethermere, and on the eager water blue and
glistening grey shadows changed places swiftly. Along the shore the
wild birds rose, flapping in expostulation as I passed, peewits mewing
fiercely round my head, while two white swans lifted their glistening
feathers till they looked like grand double water-lilies, laying back
their orange beaks among the petals, and fronting me with haughty
resentment, charging towards me insolently.
I wanted to be recognised by something. I said to myself that the
dryads were looking out for me from the wood’s edge. But as I advanced
they shrank, and glancing wistfully, turned back like pale flowers
falling in the shadow of the forest. I was a stranger, an intruder.
Among the bushes a twitter of lively birds exclaimed upon me. Finches
went leaping past in bright flashes, and a robin sat and asked rudely:
“Hello! Who are you?”
The bracken lay sere under the trees, broken and chavelled by the
restless wild winds of the long winter.
The trees caught the wind in their tall netted twigs, and the young
morning wind moaned at its captivity. As I trod the discarded
oak-leaves and the bracken they uttered their last sharp gasps, pressed
into oblivion. The wood was roofed with a wide young sobbing sound, and
floored with a faint hiss like the intaking of the last breath.
Between, was all the glad out-peeping of buds and anemone flowers and
the rush of birds. I, wandering alone, felt them all, the anguish of
the bracken fallen face-down in defeat, the careless dash of the birds,
the sobbing of the young wind arrested in its haste, the trembling,
expanding delight of the buds. I alone among them could hear the whole
succession of chords.
The brooks talked on just the same, just as gladly, just as
boisterously as they had done when I had netted small, glittering fish
in the rest-pools. At Strelley Mill a servant girl in a white cap, and
white apron-bands, came running out of the house with purple
prayer-books, which she gave to the elder of two finicking girls who
sat disconsolately with their black-silked mother in the governess cart
at the gate, ready to go to church. Near Woodside there was barbed-wire
along the path, and at the end of every riding it was tarred on the
tree-trunks, “Private.”
I had done with the valley of Nethermere. The valley of Nethermere had
cast me out many years before, while I had fondly believed it cherished
me in memory.
I went along the road to Eberwich. The church bells were ringing
boisterously, with the careless boisterousness of the brooks and the
birds and the rollicking coltsfoots and celandines.
A few people were hastening blithely to service. Miners and other
labouring men were passing in aimless gangs, walking nowhere in
particular, so long as they reached a sufficiently distant public
house.
I reached the ‘Hollies.’ It was much more spruce than it had been. The
yard, however, and the stables had again a somewhat abandoned air. I
asked the maid for George.
“Oh, master’s not up yet,” she said, giving a little significant toss
of her head, and smiling. I waited a moment.
“But he rung for a bottle of beer about ten minutes since, so I should
think——” she emphasised the word with some ironical contempt, “—he
won’t be very long,” she added, in tones which conveyed that she was
not by any means sure. I asked for Meg.
“Oh, Missis is gone to church—and the children—But Miss Saxton is in,
she might——”
“Emily!” I exclaimed.
The maid smiled.
“She’s in the drawing-room. She’s engaged, but perhaps if I tell her——”
“Yes, do,” said I, sure that Emily would receive me.
I found my old sweetheart sitting in a low chair by the fire, a man
standing on the hearthrug pulling his moustache. Emily and I both felt
a thrill of old delight at meeting.
“I can hardly believe it is really you,” she said, laughing me one of
the old intimate looks. She had changed a great deal. She was very
handsome, but she had now a new self-confidence, a fine, free
indifference.
“Let me introduce you. Mr. Renshaw, Cyril. Tom, you know who it is you
have heard me speak often enough of Cyril. I am going to marry Tom in
three weeks’ time,” she said, laughing.
“The devil you are!” I exclaimed involuntarily.
“If he will have me,” she added, quite as a playful afterthought.
Tom was a well-built fair man, smoothly, almost delicately tanned.
There was something soldierly in his bearing, something self-conscious
in the way he bent his head and pulled his moustache, something
charming and fresh in the way he laughed at Emily’s last preposterous
speech.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you ask me?” she retorted, arching her brows.
“Mr. Renshaw,” I said. “You have out-manoeuvred me all unawares, quite
indecently.”
“I am very sorry,” he said, giving one more twist to his moustache,
then breaking into a loud, short laugh at his joke.
“Do you really feel cross?” said Emily to me, knitting her brows and
smiling quaintly.
“I do!” I replied, with truthful emphasis.
She laughed, and laughed again, very much amused.
“It is such a joke,” she said. “To think you should feel cross now,
when it is—how long is it ago——?
“I will not count up,” said I.
“Are you not sorry for me?” I asked of Tom Renshaw.
He looked at me with his young blue eyes, eyes so bright, so naïvely
inquisitive, so winsomely meditative. He did not know quite what to
say, or how to take it.
“Very!” he replied in another short burst of laughter, quickly twisting
his moustache again and looking down at his feet.
He was twenty-nine years old; had been a soldier in China for five
years, was now farming his father’s farm at Papplewick, where Emily was
schoolmistress. He had been at home eighteen months. His father was an
old man of seventy who had had his right hand chopped to bits in the
chopping machine. So they told me. I liked Tom for his handsome bearing
and his fresh, winsome way. He was exceedingly manly: that is to say he
did not dream of questioning or analysing anything. All that came his
way was ready labelled nice or nasty, good or bad. He did not imagine
that anything could be other than just what it appeared to be:—and with
this appearance, he was quite content. He looked up to Emily as one
wiser, nobler, nearer to God than himself.
“I am a thousand years older than he,” she said to me, laughing. “Just
as you are centuries older than I.”
“And you love him for his youth?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “For that and—he is wonderfully sagacious—and so
gentle.”
“And I was never gentle, was I?” I said.
“No! As restless and as urgent as the wind,” she said, and I saw a last
flicker of the old terror.
“Where is George?” I asked.
“In bed,” she replies briefly. “He’s recovering from one of his orgies.
If I were Meg I would not live with him.”
“Is he so bad?” I asked.
“Bad!” she replied. “He’s disgusting, and I’m sure he’s dangerous. I’d
have him removed to an inebriate’s home.”
“You’d have to persuade him to go,” said Tom, who had come into the
room again. “He does have dreadful bouts, though! He’s killing himself,
sure enough. I feel awfully sorry for the fellow.”
“It seems so contemptible to me,” said Emily, “to become enslaved to
one of your likings till it makes a beast of you. Look what a spectacle
he is for his children, and what a disgusting disgrace for his wife.”
“Well, if he can’t help it, he can’t, poor chap,” said Tom. “Though I
do think a man should have more backbone.”
We heard heavy noises from the room above.
“He is getting up,” said Emily. “I suppose I’d better see if he’ll have
any breakfast.” She waited, however. Presently the door opened, and
there stood George with his hand on the knob, leaning, looking in.
“I thought I heard three voices,” he said, as if it freed him from a
certain apprehension. He smiled. His waistcoat hung open over his
woollen shirt, he wore no coat and was slipperless. His hair and his
moustache were dishevelled, his face pale and stupid with sleep, his
eyes small. He turned aside from our looks as from a bright light. His
hand as I shook it was flaccid and chill.
“How do you come to be here, Cyril?” he said subduedly, faintly
smiling.
“Will you have any breakfast?” Emily asked him coldly.
“I’ll have a bit if there’s any for me,” he replied.
“It has been waiting for you long enough,” she answered. He turned and
went with a dull thud of his stockinged feet across to the dining-room.
Emily rang for the maid, I followed George, leaving the betrothed
together. I found my host moving about the dining-room, looking behind
the chairs and in the corners.
“I wonder where the devil my slippers are!” he muttered explanatorily.
Meanwhile he continued his search. I noticed he did not ring the bell
to have them found for him. Presently he came to the fire, spreading
his hands over it. As he was smashing the slowly burning coal the maid
came in with the tray. He desisted, and put the poker carefully down.
While the maid spread his meal on one corner of the table, he looked in
the fire, paying her no heed. When she had finished:
“It’s fried white-bait,” she said. “Shall you have that?”
He lifted his head and looked at the plate.
“Ay,” he said. “Have you brought the vinegar?”
Without answering, she took the cruet from the sideboard and set it on
the table. As she was closing the door, she looked back to say:
“You’d better eat it now, while it’s hot.”
He took no notice, but sat looking in the fire.
“And how are you going on?” he asked me.
“I? Oh, very well! And you——?”
“As you see,” he replied, turning his head on one side with a little
gesture of irony.
“As I am very sorry to see,” I rejoined.
He sat forward with his elbows on his knees, tapping the back of his
hand with one finger, in monotonous two-pulse like heart-beats.
“Aren’t you going to have breakfast?” I urged. The clock at that moment
began to ring a sonorous twelve. He looked up at it with subdued
irritation.
“Ay, I suppose so,” he answered me, when the clock had finished
striking. He rose heavily and went to the table. As he poured out a cup
of tea he spilled it on the cloth, and stood looking at the stain. It
was still some time before he began to eat. He poured vinegar freely
over the hot fish, and ate with an indifference that made eating ugly,
pausing now and again to wipe the tea off his moustache, or to pick a
bit of fish from off his knee.
“You are not married, I suppose?” he said in one of his pauses.
“No,” I replied. “I expect I shall have to be looking round.”
“You’re wiser not,” he replied, quiet and bitter.
A moment or two later the maid came in with a letter.
“This came this morning,” she said, as she laid it on the table beside
him. He looked at it, then he said:
“You didn’t give me a knife for the marmalade.”
“Didn’t I?” she replied. “I thought you wouldn’t want it. You don’t as
a rule.”
“And do you know where my slippers are?” he asked.
“They ought to be in their usual place.” She went and looked in the
corner. “I suppose Miss Gertie’s put them somewhere. I’ll get you
another pair.”
As he waited for her he read the letter. He read it twice, then he put
it back in the envelope, quietly, without any change of expression. But
he ate no more breakfast, even after the maid had brought the knife and
his slippers, and though he had had but a few mouthfuls.
At half-past twelve there was an imperious woman’s voice in the house.
Meg came to the door. As she entered the room, and saw me, she stood
still. She sniffed, glanced at the table, and exclaimed, coming forward
effusively:
“Well I never, Cyril! Who’d a thought of seeing you here this morning!
How are you?”
She waited for the last of my words, then immediately she turned to
George, and said:
“I must say you’re in a nice state for Cyril to see you! Have you
finished?—if you have, Kate can take that tray out. It smells quite
sickly. Have you finished?”
He did not answer, but drained his cup of tea and pushed it away with
the back of his hand. Meg rang the bell, and having taken off her
gloves, began to put the things on the tray, tipping the fragments of
fish and bones from the edge of his plate to the middle with short,
disgusted jerks of the fork. Her attitude and expression were of
resentment and disgust. The maid came in.
“Clear the table Kate, and open the window. Have you opened the bedroom
windows?”
“No’m—not yet,”—she glanced at George as if to say he had only been
down a few minutes.
“Then do it when you have taken the tray,” said Meg.
“You don’t open this window,” said George churlishly. “It’s cold enough
as it is.”
“You should put a coat on then if you’re starved,” replied Meg
contemptuously. “It’s warm enough for those that have got any life in
their blood. You do not find it cold, do you Cyril?”
“It is fresh this morning,” I replied.
“Of course it is, not cold at all. And I’m sure this room needs
airing.”
The maid, however, folded the cloth and went out without approaching
the windows.
Meg had grown stouter, and there was a certain immovable confidence in
her. She was authoritative, amiable, calm. She wore a handsome dress of
dark green, and a toque with opulent ostrich feathers. As she moved
about the room she seemed to dominate everything, particularly her
husband, who sat ruffled and dejected, his waistcoat hanging loose over
his shirt.
A girl entered. She was proud and mincing in her deportment. Her face
was handsome, but too haughty for a child. She wore a white coat, with
ermine tippet, muff, and hat. Her long brown hair hung twining down her
back.
“Has dad only just had his breakfast?” she exclaimed in high censorious
tones as she came in.
“He has!” replied Meg.
The girl looked at her father in calm, childish censure.
“And we have been to church, and come home to dinner,” she said, as she
drew off her little white gloves. George watched her with ironical
amusement.
“Hello!” said Meg, glancing at the opened letter which lay near his
elbow. “Who is that from?”
He glanced round, having forgotten it. He took the envelope, doubled it
and pushed it in his waistcoat pocket.
“It’s from William Housley,” he replied.
“Oh! And what has he to say?” she asked.
George turned his dark eyes at her.
“Nothing!” he said.
“Hm-Hm!” sneered Meg. “Funny letter, about nothing!”
“I suppose,” said the child, with her insolent, high-pitched
superiority, “It’s some money that he doesn’t want us to know about.”
“That’s about it!” said Meg, giving a small laugh at the child’s
perspicuity.
“So’s he can keep it for himself, that’s what it is,” continued the
child, nodding her head in rebuke at him.
“I’ve no right to any money, have I?” asked the father sarcastically.
“No, you haven’t,” the child nodded her head at him dictatorially, “you
haven’t, because you only put it in the fire.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” he sneered. “You mean it’s like giving a child
fire to play with.”
“Um!—and it is, isn’t it Mam?”—the small woman turned to her mother for
corroboration. Meg had flushed at his sneer, when he quoted for the
child its mother’s dictum.
“And you’re very naughty!” preached Gertie, turning her back
disdainfully on her father.
“Is that what the parson’s been telling you?” he asked, a grain of
amusement still in his bitterness.
“No it isn’t!” retorted the youngster. “If you want to know you should
go and listen for yourself. Everybody that goes to church looks nice——”
she glanced at her mother and at herself, pruning herself proudly,
“—and God loves them,” she added. She assumed a sanctified expression,
and continued after a little thought: “Because they look nice and are
meek.”
“What!” exclaimed Meg, laughing, glancing with secret pride at me.
“Because they’re meek!” repeated Gertie, with a superior little smile
of knowledge.
“You’re off the mark this time,” said George.
“No, I’m not, am I Mam? Isn’t it right Mam? ‘The meek shall inevit the
erf’?”
Meg was too much amused to answer.
“The meek shall have herrings on earth,” mocked the father, also
amused. His daughter looked dubiously at him. She smelled impropriety.
“It’s not, Mam, is it?” she asked, turning to her mother. Meg laughed.
“The meek shall have herrings on earth,” repeated George with soft
banter.
“No it’s not Mam, is it?” cried the child in real distress.
“Tell your father he’s always teaching you something wrong,” answered
Meg.
Then I said I must go. They pressed me to stay.
“Oh, yes—do stop to dinner,” suddenly pleaded the child, smoothing her
wild ravels of curls after having drawn off her hat. She asked me again
and again, with much earnestness.
“But why?” I asked.
“So’s you can talk to us this afternoon—an’ so’s Dad won’t be so
dis’greeable,” she replied plaintively, poking the black spots on her
muff.
Meg moved nearer to her daughter with a little gesture of compassion.
“But,” said I, “I promised a lady I would be back for lunch, so I must.
You have some more visitors, you know.”
“Oh, well!” she complained, “They go in another room, and Dad doesn’t
care about them.”
“But come!” said I.
“Well, he’s just as dis’greeable when Auntie Emily’s here—he is with
her an’ all.”
“You _are_ having your character given away,” said Meg brutally,
turning to him.
I bade them good-bye. He did me the honour of coming with me to the
door. We could neither of us find a word to say, though we were both
moved. When at last I held his hand and was looking at him as I said
“Good-bye”, he looked back at me for the first time during our meeting.
His eyes were heavy and as he lifted them to me, seemed to recoil in an
agony of shame.
CHAPTER VIII
A PROSPECT AMONG THE MARSHES OF LETHE
George steadily declined from this time. I went to see him two years
later. He was not at home. Meg wept to me as she told me of him, how he
let the business slip, how he drank, what a brute he was in drink, and
how unbearable afterwards. He was ruining his constitution, he was
ruining her life and the children’s. I felt very sorry for her as she
sat, large and ruddy, brimming over with bitter tears. She asked me if
I did not think I might influence him. He was, she said, at the “Ram.”
When he had an extra bad bout on he went up there, and stayed sometimes
for a week at a time, with Oswald, coming back to the “Hollies” when he
had recovered—“though,” said Meg, “he’s sick every morning and almost
after every meal.”
All the time Meg was telling me this, sat curled up in a large chair
their youngest boy, a pale, sensitive, rather spoiled lad of seven or
eight years, with a petulant mouth and nervous dark eyes. He sat
watching his mother as she told her tale, heaving his shoulders and
settling himself in a new position when his feelings were nearly too
much for him. He was full of wild, childish pity for his mother, and
furious, childish hate of his father, the author of all their trouble.
I called at the “Ram” and saw George. He was half drunk.
I went up to Highclose with a heavy heart. Lettie’s last child had been
born, much to the surprise of everybody, some few months before I came
down. There was a space of seven years between her youngest girl and
this baby. Lettie was much absorbed in motherhood.
When I went up to talk to her about George I found her in the bedroom
nursing the baby, who was very good and quiet on her knee. She listened
to me sadly, but her attention was caught away by each movement made by
the child. As I was telling her of the attitude of George’s children
towards their father and mother, she glanced from the baby to me, and
exclaimed:
“See how he watches the light flash across your spectacles when you
turn suddenly—Look!”
But I was weary of babies. My friends had all grown up and married and
inflicted them on me. There were storms of babies. I longed for a place
where they would be obsolete, and young, arrogant, impervious mothers
might be a forgotten tradition. Lettie’s heart would quicken in answer
to only one pulse, the easy, light ticking of the baby’s blood.
I remembered, one day as I sat in the train hastening to Charing Cross
on my way from France, that that was George’s birthday. I had the
feeling of him upon me, heavily, and I could not rid myself of the
depression. I put it down to travel fatigue, and tried to dismiss it.
As I watched the evening sun glitter along the new corn-stubble in the
fields we passed, trying to describe the effect to myself, I found
myself asking: “But—what’s the matter? I’ve not had bad news, have I,
to make my chest feel so weighted?”
I was surprised when I reached my lodging in New Maiden to find no
letters for me, save one fat budget from Alice. I knew her squat,
saturnine handwriting on the envelope, and I thought I knew what
contents to expect from the letter.
She had married an old acquaintance who had been her particular
aversion. This young man had got himself into trouble, so that the
condemnations of the righteous pursued him like clouds of gnats on a
summer evening. Alice immediately rose to sting back his vulgar
enemies, and having rendered him a service, felt she could only wipe
out the score by marrying him. They were fairly comfortable.
Occasionally, as she said, there were displays of small fireworks in
the back yard. He worked in the offices of some iron foundries just
over the Erewash in Derbyshire. Alice lived in a dirty little place in
the valley a mile and a half from Eberwich, not far from his work. She
had no children, and practically no friends; a few young matrons for
acquaintances. As wife of a superior clerk, she had to preserve her
dignity among the work-people. So all her little crackling fires were
sodded down with the sods of British respectability. Occasionally she
smouldered a fierce smoke that made one’s eyes water. Occasionally,
perhaps once a year, she wrote me a whole venomous budget, much to my
amusement.
I was not in any haste to open this fat letter until, after supper, I
turned to it as a resource from my depression.
“Oh dear Cyril, I’m in a bubbling state, I want to yell, not write. Oh,
Cyril, why didn’t _you_ marry me, or why didn’t our Georgie Saxton, or
somebody. I’m deadly sick. Percival Charles is enough to stop a clock.
Oh, Cyril, he lives in an eternal Sunday suit, holy broadcloth and
righteous three inches of cuffs! He goes to bed in it. Nay, he wallows
in Bibles when he goes to bed. I can feel the brass covers of all his
family Bibles sticking in my ribs as I lie by his side. I could weep
with wrath, yet I put on my black hat and trot to chapel with him like
a lamb.
“Oh, Cyril, nothing’s happened. Nothing has happened to me all these
years. I shall die of it. When I see Percival Charles at dinner, after
having asked a blessing, I feel as if I should never touch a bit at his
table again. In about an hour I shall hear him hurrying up the
entry—prayers always make him hungry—and his first look will be on the
table. But I’m not fair to him—he’s really a good fellow—I only wish he
wasn’t.
“It’s George Saxton who’s put this seidlitz powder in my marital cup of
cocoa. Cyril, I must a tale unfold. It is fifteen years since our
George married Meg. When I count up, and think of the future, it nearly
makes me scream. But my tale, my tale!
“Can you remember his faithful-dog, wounded-stag, gentle-gazelle eyes?
Cyril, you can see the whisky or the brandy combusting in them. He’s
got d—t’s, blue-devils—and I’ve seen him, and I’m swarming myself with
little red devils after it. I went up to Eberwich on Wednesday
afternoon for a pound of fry for Percival Charles’ Thursday dinner. I
walked by that little path which you know goes round the back of the
‘Hollies’—it’s as near as any way for me. I thought I heard a row in
the paddock at the back of the stables, so I said I might as well see
the fun. I went to the gate, basket in one hand, ninepence in coppers
in the other, a demure deacon’s wife. I didn’t take in the scene at
first.
“There was our Georgie, in leggings and breeches as of yore, and a
whip. He was flourishing, and striding, and yelling. ‘Go it old boy,’ I
said, ‘you’ll want your stocking round your throat to-night.’ But
Cyril, I had spoken too soon. Oh, lum! There came raking up the croft
that long, wire-springy racehorse of his, ears flat, and, clinging to
its neck, the pale-faced lad, Wilfred. The kid was white as death, and
squealing ‘Mam! mam!’ I thought it was a bit rotten of Georgie trying
to teach the kid to jockey. The race-horse, Bonny-Boy—Boney Boy I call
him—came bouncing round like a spiral egg-whish. Then I saw our Georgie
rush up screaming, nearly spitting the moustache off his face, and
fetch the horse a cut with the whip. It went off like a flame along hot
paraffin. The kid shrieked and clung. Georgie went rushing after him,
running staggery, and swearing, fairly screaming,—awful—‘a lily-livered
little swine!’ The high lanky race-horse went larroping round as if it
was going mad. I was dazed. Then Meg came rushing, and the other two
lads, all screaming. She went for George, but he lifted his whip like
the devil. She daren’t go near him—she rushed at him, and stopped,
rushed at him, and stopped, striking at him with her two fists. He
waved his whip and kept her off, and the race-horse kept tearing along.
Meg flew to stop it, he ran with his drunken totter-step, brandishing
his whip. I flew as well. I hit him with my basket. The kid fell off,
and Meg rushed to him. Some men came running. George stood fairly
shuddering. You would never have known his face, Cyril. He was mad,
demoniacal. I feel sometimes as if I should burst and shatter to bits
like a sky-rocket when I think of it. I’ve got such a weal on my arm.
“I lost Percival Charles’ ninepence and my nice white cloth out of the
basket, and everything, besides having black looks on Thursday because
it was mutton chops, which he hates. Oh, Cyril, ‘I wish I was a
cassowary, on the banks of the Timbuctoo.’ When I saw Meg sobbing over
that lad—thank goodness he wasn’t hurt—! I wished our Georgie was dead;
I do now, also; I wish we only had to remember him. I haven’t been to
see them lately—can’t stand Meg’s ikeyness. I wonder how it all will
end.
“There’s P. C. bidding ‘Good night and God Bless You’ to Brother Jakes,
and no supper ready——”
As soon as I could, after reading Alice’s letter, I went down to
Eberwich to see how things were. Memories of the old days came over me
again till my heart hungered for its old people.
They told me at the “Hollies” that, after a bad attack of delirium
tremens, George had been sent to Papplewick in the lonely country to
stay with Emily. I borrowed a bicycle to ride the nine miles. The
summer had been wet, and everything was late. At the end of September
the foliage was heavy green, and the wheat stood dejectedly in stook. I
rode through the still sweetness of an autumn morning. The mist was
folded blue along the hedges; the elm trees loomed up along the dim
walls of the morning, the horse-chestnut trees at hand flickered with a
few yellow leaves like bright blossoms. As I rode through the tree
tunnel by the church where, on his last night, the keeper had told me
his story, I smelled the cold rotting of the leaves of the cloudy
summer.
I passed silently through the lanes, where the chill grass was weighed
down with grey-blue seed-pearls of dew in the shadow, where the wet
woollen spider-cloths of autumn were spread as on a loom. Brown birds
rustled in flocks like driven leaves before me. I heard the far-off
hooting of the “loose-all” at the pits, telling me it was half-past
eleven, that the men and boys would be sitting in the narrow darkness
of the mines eating their “snap,” while shadowy mice darted for the
crumbs, and the boys laughed with red mouths rimmed with grime, as the
bold little creatures peeped at them in the dim light of the lamps. The
dogwood berries stood jauntily scarlet on the hedge-tops, the bunched
scarlet and green berries of the convolvulus and bryony hung amid
golden trails, the blackberries dropped ungathered. I rode slowly on,
the plants dying around me, the berries leaning their heavy ruddy
mouths, and languishing for the birds, the men imprisoned underground
below me, the brown birds dashing in haste along the hedges.
Swineshed Farm, where the Renshaws lived, stood quite alone among its
fields, hidden from the highway and from everything. The lane leading
up to it was deep and unsunned. On my right, I caught glimpses through
the hedge of the corn-fields, where the shocks of wheat stood like
small yellow-sailed ships in a widespread flotilla. The upper part of
the field was cleared. I heard the clank of a wagon and the voices of
men, and I saw the high load of sheaves go lurching, rocking up the
incline to the stackyard.
The lane debouched into a close-bitten field, and out of this empty
land the farm rose up with its buildings like a huddle of old, painted
vessels floating in still water. White fowls went stepping discreetly
through the mild sunshine and the shadow. I leaned my bicycle against
the grey, silken doors of the old coach-house. The place was breathing
with silence. I hesitated to knock at the open door. Emily came. She
was rich as always with her large beauty, and stately now with the
stateliness of a strong woman six months gone with child.
She exclaimed with surprise, and I followed her into the kitchen,
catching a glimpse of the glistening pans and the white wood baths as I
passed through the scullery. The kitchen was a good-sized, low room
that through long course of years had become absolutely a home. The
great beams of the ceiling bowed easily, the chimney-seat had a bit of
dark-green curtain, and under the high mantel-piece was another low
shelf that the men could reach with their hands as they sat in the
ingle-nook. There the pipes lay. Many generations of peaceful men and
fruitful women had passed through the room, and not one but had added a
new small comfort; a chair in the right place, a hook, a stool, a
cushion, a certain pleasing cloth for the sofa covers, a shelf of
books. The room, that looked so quiet and crude, was a home evolved
through generations to fit the large bodies of the men who dwelled in
it, and the placid fancy of the women. At last, it had an
individuality. It was the home of the Renshaws, warm, lovable, serene.
Emily was in perfect accord with its brownness, its shadows, its ease.
I, as I sat on the sofa under the window, felt rejected by the kind
room. I was distressed with a sense of ephemerality, of pale, erratic
fragility.
Emily, in her full-blooded beauty, was at home. It is rare now to feel
a kinship between a room and the one who inhabits it, a close bond of
blood relation. Emily had at last found her place, and had escaped from
the torture of strange, complex modern life. She was making a pie, and
the flour was white on her brown arms. She pushed the tickling hair
from her face with her arm, and looked at me with tranquil pleasure, as
she worked the paste in the yellow bowl. I was quiet, subdued before
her.
“You are very happy?” I said.
“Ah very!” she replied. “And you?—you are not, you look worn.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I am happy enough. I am living my life.”
“Don’t you find it wearisome?” she asked pityingly.
She made me tell her all my doings, and she marvelled, but all the time
her eyes were dubious and pitiful.
“You have George here,” I said.
“Yes. He’s in a poor state, but he’s not as sick as he was.”
“What about the delirium tremens?”
“Oh, he was better of that—very nearly—before he came here. He
sometimes fancies they’re coming on again, and he’s terrified. Isn’t it
awful! And he’s brought it all on himself. Tom’s very good to him.”
“There’s nothing the matter with him—physically, is there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied, as she went to the oven to turn a pie that
was baking. She put her arm to her forehead and brushed aside her hair,
leaving a mark of flour on her nose. For a moment or two she remained
kneeling on the fender, looking into the fire and thinking. “He was in
a poor way when he came here, could eat nothing, sick every morning. I
suppose it’s his liver. They all end like that.” She continued to wipe
the large black plums and put them in the dish.
“Hardening of the liver?” I asked. She nodded.
“And is he in bed?” I asked again.
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s as I say, if he’d get up and potter about a
bit, he’d get over it. But he lies there skulking.”
“And what time will he get up?” I insisted.
“I don’t know. He may crawl down somewhere towards tea-time. Do you
want to see him? That’s what you came for, isn’t it?”
She smiled at me with a little sarcasm, and added: “You always thought
more of him than anybody, didn’t you? Ah, well, come up and see him.”
I followed her up the back stairs, which led out of the kitchen, and
which emerged straight in a bedroom. We crossed the hollow-sounding
plaster-floor of this naked room and opened a door at the opposite
side. George lay in bed watching us with apprehensive eyes.
“Here is Cyril come to see you,” said Emily, “so I’ve brought him up,
for I didn’t know when you’d be downstairs.”
A small smile of relief came on his face, and he put out his hand from
the bed. He lay with the disorderly clothes pulled up to his chin. His
face was discoloured and rather bloated, his nose swollen.
“Don’t you feel so well this morning?” asked Emily, softening with pity
when she came into contact with his sickness.
“Oh, all right,” he replied, wishing only to get rid of us.
“You should try to get up a bit, it’s a beautiful morning, warm and
soft—” she said gently. He did not reply, and she went downstairs.
I looked round to the cold, whitewashed room, with its ceiling curving
and sloping down the walls. It was sparsely furnished, and bare of even
the slightest ornament. The only things of warm colour were the cow and
horse skins on the floor. All the rest was white or grey or drab. On
one side, the roof sloped down so that the window was below my knees,
and nearly touching the floor, on the other side was a larger window,
breast high. Through it one could see the jumbled, ruddy roofs of the
sheds and the skies. The tiles were shining with patches of vivid
orange lichen. Beyond was the corn-field, and the men, small in the
distance, lifting the sheaves on the cart.
“You will come back to farming again, won’t you?” I asked him, turning
to the bed. He smiled.
“I don’t know,” he answered dully.
“Would you rather I went downstairs?” I asked.
“No, I’m glad to see you,” he replied, in the same uneasy fashion.
“I’ve only just come back from France,” I said.
“Ah!” he replied, indifferent.
“I am sorry you’re ill,” I said.
He stared unmovedly at the opposite wall. I went to the window and
looked out. After some time, I compelled myself to say, in a casual
manner:
“Won’t you get up and come out a bit?”
“I suppose Is’ll have to,” he said, gathering himself slowly together
for the effort. He pushed himself up in bed.
When he took off the jacket of his pajamas to wash himself I turned
away. His arms seemed thin, and he had bellied, and was bowed and
unsightly. I remembered the morning we swam in the mill-pond. I
remembered that he was now in the prime of his life. I looked at his
bluish feeble hands as he laboriously washed himself. The soap once
slipped from his fingers as he was picking it up, and fell, rattling
the pot loudly. It startled us, and he seemed to grip the sides of the
washstand to steady himself. Then he went on with his slow, painful
toilet. As he combed his hair he looked at himself with dull eyes of
shame.
The men were coming in from the scullery when we got downstairs. Dinner
was smoking on the table. I shook hands with Tom Renshaw, and with the
old man’s hard, fierce left hand. Then I was introduced to Arthur
Renshaw, a clean-faced, large, bashful lad of twenty. I nodded to the
man, Jim, and to Jim’s wife, Annie. We all sat down to table.
“Well, an’ ’ow are ter feelin’ by now, like?” asked the old man
heartily of George. Receiving no answer, he continued, “Tha should ’a
gor up an’ com’ an’ gen us a ’and wi’ th’ wheat, it ’ud ’a done thee
good.”
“You will have a bit of this mutton, won’t you?” Tom asked him, tapping
the joint with the carving knife. George shook his head.
“It’s quite lean and tender,” he said gently.
“No, thanks,” said George.
“Gi’e ’im a bit, gi’e ’im a bit!” cried the old man. “It’ll do ’im
good—it’s what ’e wants, a bit o’ strengthenin’ nourishment.”
“It’s no good if his stomach won’t have it,” said Tom, in mild reproof,
as if he were speaking of a child. Arthur filled George’s glass with
beer without speaking. The two young men were full of kind, gentle
attention.
“Let ’im ’a’e a spoonful o’ tonnup then,” persisted the old man. “I
canna eat while ’is plate stands there emp’y.”
So they put turnip and onion sauce on George’s plate, and he took up
his fork and tasted a few mouthfuls. The men ate largely, and with
zest. The sight of their grand satisfaction, amounting almost to gusto,
sickened him.
When at last the old man laid down the dessert spoon which he used in
place of a knife and fork, he looked again at George’s plate, and said:
“Why tha ’asna aten a smite, not a smite! Tha non goos th’ raight road
to be better.”
George maintained a stupid silence.
“Don’t bother him, father,” said Emily.
“Tha art an öwd whittle, feyther,” added Tom, smiling good-naturedly.
He spoke to his father in dialect, but to Emily in good English.
Whatever she said had Tom’s immediate support. Before serving us with
pie, Emily gave her brother junket and damsons, setting the plate and
the spoon before him as if he were a child. For this act of grace Tom
looked at her lovingly, and stroked her hand as she passed.
After dinner, George said, with a miserable struggle for an indifferent
tone:
“Aren’t you going to give Cyril a glass of whisky?”
He looked up furtively, in a conflict of shame and hope. A silence fell
on the room.
“Ay!” said the old man softly. “Let ’im ’ave a drop.”
“Yes!” added Tom, in submissive pleading.
All the men in the room shrank a little, awaiting the verdict of the
woman.
“I don’t know,” she said clearly, “that Cyril wants a glass.”
“I don’t mind.” I answered, feeling myself blush. I had not the courage
to counteract her will directly. Not even the old man had that courage.
We waited in suspense. After keeping us so for a few minutes, while we
smouldered with mortification, she went into another room, and we heard
her unlocking a door. She returned with a decanter containing rather
less than half a pint of liquor. She put out five tumblers.
“Tha nedna gi’e me none,” said the old man. “Ah’m non a proud chap.
Ah’m not.”
“Nor me neither,” said Arthur.
“You will Tom?” she asked.
“Do you want me to?” he replied, smiling.
“I don’t,” she answered sharply. “I want nobody to have it, when you
look at the results of it. But if Cyril is having a glass, you may as
well have one with him.”
Tom was pleased with her. She gave her husband and me fairly stiff
glasses.
“Steady, steady!” he said. “Give that George, and give me not so much.
Two fingers, two of your fingers, you know.”
But she passed him the glass. When George had had his share, there
remained but a drop in the decanter.
Emily watched the drunkard coldly as he took this remainder.
George and I talked for a time while the men smoked. He, from his glum
stupidity, broke into a harsh, almost imbecile loquacity.
“Have you seen my family lately?” he asked, continuing. “Yes! Not badly
set up, are they, the children? But the little devils are soft,
mard-soft, every one of ’em. It’s their mother’s bringin’ up—she marded
’em till they were soft, an’ would never let me have a say in it. I
should ’a brought ’em up different, you know I should.”
Tom looked at Emily, and, remarking her angry contempt, suggested that
she should go out with him to look at the stacks. I watched the tall,
square-shouldered man leaning with deference and tenderness towards his
wife as she walked calmly at his side. She was the mistress, quiet and
self-assured, he her rejoiced husband and servant.
George was talking about himself. If I had not seen him, I should
hardly have recognised the words as his. He was lamentably decayed. He
talked stupidly, with vulgar contumely of others, and in weak praise of
himself.
The old man rose, with a:
“Well, I suppose we mun ma’e another dag at it,” and the men left the
house.
George continued his foolish, harsh monologue, making gestures of
emphasis with his head and his hands. He continued when we were walking
round the buildings into the fields, the same babble of bragging and
abuse. I was wearied and disgusted. He looked, and he sounded, so
worthless.
Across the empty cornfield the partridges were running. We walked
through the September haze slowly, because he was feeble on his legs.
As he became tired he ceased to talk. We leaned for some time on a
gate, in the brief glow of the transient afternoon, and he was stupid
again. He did not notice the brown haste of the partridges, he did not
care to share with me the handful of ripe blackberries, and when I
pulled the bryony ropes off the hedges, and held the great knots of red
and green berries in my hand, he glanced at them without interest or
appreciation.
“Poison-berries, aren’t they?” he said dully.
Like a tree that is falling, going soft and pale and rotten, clammy
with small fungi, he stood leaning against the gate, while the dim
afternoon drifted with a flow of thick sweet sunshine past him, not
touching him.
In the stackyard, the summer’s splendid monuments of wheat and grass
were reared in gold and grey. The wheat was littered brightly round the
rising stack. The loaded wagon clanked slowly up the incline, drew
near, and rode like a ship at anchor against the scotches, brushing the
stack with a crisp, sharp sound. Tom climbed the ladder and stood a
moment there against the sky, amid the brightness and fragrance of the
gold corn, and waved his arm to his wife who was passing in the shadow
of the building. Then Arthur began to lift the sheaves to the stack,
and the two men worked in an exquisite, subtle rhythm, their white
sleeves and their dark heads gleaming, moving against the mild sky and
the corn. The silence was broken only by the occasional lurch of the
body of the wagon, as the teamer stepped to the front, or again to the
rear of the load. Occasionally I could catch the blue glitter of the
prongs of the forks. Tom, now lifted high above the small wagon load,
called to his brother some question about the stack. The sound of his
voice was strong and mellow.
I turned to George, who also was watching, and said:
“You ought to be like that.”
We heard Tom calling, “All right!” and saw him standing high up on the
tallest corner of the stack, as on the prow of a ship.
George watched, and his face slowly gathered expression. He turned to
me, his dark eyes alive with horror and despair.
“I shall soon—be out of everybody’s way!” he said. His moment of fear
and despair was cruel. I cursed myself for having roused him from his
stupor.
“You will be better,” I said.
He watched again the handsome movement of the men at the stack.
“I couldn’t team ten sheaves,” he said.
“You will in a month or two,” I urged.
He continued to watch, while Tom got on the ladder and came down the
front of the stack.
“Nay, the sooner I clear out, the better,” he repeated to himself.
When we went in to tea, he was, as Tom said, “downcast.” The men talked
uneasily with abated voices. Emily attended to him with a little,
palpitating solicitude. We were all uncomfortably impressed with the
sense of our alienation from him. He sat apart and obscure among us,
like a condemned man.
THE END
Transcribers Notes:
There is one obvious typesetter error which has been retained:
1) “She smiled at her.” could have meant “She smiled at him.” or “He
smiled at her.”