mind being called Podge--even before strangers. The name describes her
exactly. You couldn’t tone it down and call her plump; she was simply
one of the fattest girls you ever saw. Her large face was rosy, and
usually beamed, as people say in books, with smiles and good temper.
Her hair was black, and done up in the way that took the least time,
and her eyes were black and bright, and would have been big if her face
had been a little less moonlike. She had little dumpy hands and little
dumpy feet, rather pretty--in fact, the only family landmarks, as Belle
said, that had not been effaced by the rising tide of fat. In a regular
story there is always something about the heroine’s waist: not that I
give in to Podge being--you know! I suppose she had a waist; at least,
it was possible to tell where her frock bodies left off and her skirts
began--then. It isn’t now! The frocks were always old, because whenever
Podge had a new one she gave it to Belle, and you couldn’t deny that
Belle did them more justice. Then, she had a nice kind of voice,
though the Parksop drawl had been left out of it, and I think that’s
all--except that, considering her beam, she moved about lightly, and
that she always sat down like a collapsing feather bed and got up like
an expanding balloon.
Breakfast didn’t make the school commons look very foolish. There
wasn’t much difference, except that the coffee wasn’t so groundy.
Father had his little dish of something special--kidneys, this
time--and Roddy, sitting at his right hand--we were treated as guests
the first day at home--dived in under his elbow when he was deep in
his coffee cup and harpooned half a one. Of course, he had to bolt it
before father came to the surface, and Podge was dreadfully anxious,
seeing him so purple in the face, lest he should choke.
I did as well as I could with my rasher of bacon and hers, and I
remember her whispering to me, just before Nuddles came in with the
Squire’s card, that the housekeeping money had been lately more limited
than ever. And as I looked across the table, out at the window, and
over the green, rolling Surrey landscape--all Parksop property in our
ancestors’ times--and remembered that such a small slice of it was
left to be divided between such a lot of us, it did occur to me that
it would have been better if they--meaning the ancestors--had been a
little less Parksopian in the way of not being able to keep what they
had got. Then Nuddles, the butler, came in with Squire Braddlebury’s
card, and the curtain drew up--we had had a performance of one of the
plays of Terence that very half year, and I had done the part of a dumb
slave to everybody’s admiration--and the curtain drew up on what would
have been “Podge’s Romance,” if Podge had only been thinner.
II
Father broke up the breakfast party with getting up and going out.
As a rule nobody dared push back his or her chair until _he_ had
finished, and when he took it into his head to read one of the leaders
in the _Times_ aloud to us, we had to make up our minds to spend the
afternoon. But as a rule he went to the library as soon as he’d done,
and worked until lunch. He usually worked leaning back in his armchair,
with his feet on a footstool, and a silk handkerchief thrown over his
head. He went to the library now, to meet the Squire, whose gruff
“Good-morning” Roddy and I heard as father opened the door. He didn’t
quite shut it afterward, and as Roddy and I stood by the hall table,
carefully sewing up the sleeves of the Squire’s covert coat--for Podge
had given us each a neat pocket needle-and-thread case, to teach us to
be tidy, she said, and a taste for practical joking isn’t incompatible
with lofty lineage--we couldn’t help hearing some of the conversation.
It was most of it on the Squire’s side, and the words “title deeds,”
“unentailed,” and “mortgage” occurred over and over again. Then
“unpaid,” “due notice,” “neglected,” and, finally, “foreclosure.”
Perhaps it was father’s giving a hollow groan at this, and being
seen by me through the crack of the library door to tear his hair,
beautifully white, without tearing any of it out, that made me listen.
At any rate, I left Roddy busy with the coat, and--any other boy, even
a Parksop by birth, would have done as much under the circumstances.
Well, I made out that Squire Braddlebury had got father on toast. It
became quite plain to me, boy as I was, that he could, whenever he
chose, strip us of the last remaining hundreds of our old acres, and
send us, generally, packing to Old Gooseberry--with a word. Then he
asked father why he thought he didn’t say the word then and there? and
father said something about respect for ancient title and hereditary
something or other; and Squire Braddlebury, who had made his vulgar
money in trade, said ancient title and hereditary something or other
might be dee’d. And then----
“I’ll tell you why, Parksop,” he blustered. “It’s because of your
girl! When you came to me for money to waste on your gobbling, selfish
old self, caring, not you, not one snap whether your family went bare
for the rest o’ their lives, so long as you got what you wanted for
the rest of yours, I lent you the cash on your title deeds, signed by
Edward Plantagenet--and more fool he to waste good land on you! I lent
you the cash, I say, because I knew you’d not come up to the mark when
pay day came, and I wanted your girl. What’s that you say? Belle! Not
if I know it! Sandy hair and aquiline profiles don’t agree with me.
I mean Miss Charlotte. She’s a fine, full figure of a woman; she’s a
good ’un, too! Don’t I know how she keeps your house a-going? Don’t I
know how she makes and mends, plans and contrives, teaches the children
when your foreign governesses take French leave, because they can’t get
their wages out of you, Parksop, and does the Lord knows what besides!
I shouldn’t have spoken so soon, but another fellow’s got his eye on
her--Noel, the parson--you know who I mean. I believe they’re secretly
engaged, or something.”
“Gracious Heavens!” cried father.
“If they are,” growled the Squire, “it don’t matter. We’ll soon put the
curate to the right-about, and on the day I take her to church you’ll
get your title deeds back. You’re reasonable, I see. It’s a bargain.
So go and fetch her, Parksop; go and fetch her.”
There was a scroop and shriek of overstrained springs and tortured
leather. The Squire had thrown himself into father’s armchair. I had
only time to drag Roddy behind the green baize door that shuts off the
servants’ wing from the rest of the house, when father came out of the
library.
III
The whole house was topsy-turvy. The secret of the mortgage was out,
for one thing. Everybody knew that the Squire had proposed to Podge,
that Podge had said “No” to him, in spite of father’s dignified
commands, and that the Squire had rushed out of the house, foaming at
the mouth, with his coat half on and half off, stormed his way round to
the stables, where he saddled his horse himself, and galloped homeward,
scattering objurgations, threats, and imprecations right and left.
“Stuck-up paupers! Make Parksop know better! Sell ’em up, stick and
stone! Prefer d--d curate to me, Thomas Braddlebury! Fool! Must be
crazy!”
Roddy and I and everybody else agreed with him, except Podge. She was
regularly downright obstinate. She had given in to all of us all her
life, and now, just when her giving in meant so much, she wouldn’t.
What was the good of beginning, we asked, if she didn’t intend to go
on? We were very severe with her, because she deserved it. Falling
in love at her size--like a milkmaid--and with an elderly curate--an
old-young man, with shabby clothes and a stoop! Belle had put up with
his staring at our pew when he read the Litany on Sundays, but now
that she was quite sure he hadn’t been doing it because of her, she
regarded it as an unpardonable insult. She stirred up father to write
to the Rector demanding Mr. Noel’s instant dismissal, and the Rector
sent back an old, unsettled claim for tithe money, and referred father
to the Bishop of the diocese.
Meanwhile, Podge was the victim of love. It was really funny. She cried
quarts at night, according to Belle. Her red nose and swollen eyes made
her funnier still. And old Noel stooped more going about his parish
work. He was a gentleman--that was one thing to be said for him--and if
two perfectly healthy lives had not stood between him and the title,
he’d have been a baronet, with a rent roll worth having, the Rector’s
wife said.
They say dropping wears away a stone. We dropped on Podge from morning
till night, and she gave in at last. She put on her hat and trotted
down to the Rectory--waddled would be the best word. She saw Noel, and
had it out _vivâ voce_. She’d tried to do it by letter--Belle found a
torn-up note of dismissal in her room, beginning “My lost Darling.” We
yelled over the notion of old Noel being Podge’s lost darling; almost
before we’d done yelling she was back again, and had smothered the
little ones all round, and gone to the library with a flag of truce--a
wet pocket handkerchief--to announce the capitulation to father. She
spoke to me afterward, looked appealing, as if she wanted to be praised
for doing a simple thing like that for her family! I didn’t praise her,
and Roddy gave her even less encouragement.
The Squire was sent for by special messenger, and came without
hurrying. He said he was glad she’d come to her senses and showed a
proper appreciation of the gifts Providence had placed within her
reach. He brought a diamond engagement ring, which wouldn’t go on the
proper finger. We laughed again at that; we were always laughing in
those days. And he gave father one of the title deeds back, and stayed
to dinner, and had a little music in the drawing-room afterward, and
kissed Podge when he went away, at which Roddy and I and Belle nearly
went into convulsions, and in a little time the wedding day was fixed.
As it came near, Podge didn’t get any thinner. She ate her dinner just
as usual, and smothered the children a good deal. She was to have half
a dozen or so of them to live with her; she stipulated for that, and
the Squire grinned and scowled and said, “All right, for the present!”
He turned out to be quite generous, and tipped us sovereigns and Belle
jewelry and new frocks, and she said every time she tried them on
that she had quite come to regard him as a relative. Everybody had
except Podge, and I dare say if you’d asked her she’d have said she
was the person whose opinion mattered most. You never know how selfish
unselfish people can be till they’re tried! It’s true the Squire was
awfully ugly and as rough as a bear, and a little too fond of drinks
that made his temper uncertain and his legs unsteady. But he had done a
great deal for the family, and women can’t expect us men to be angels.
Podge was a little too quiet as the wedding drew near. You know,
there’s no fun in pinning a cockchafer that doesn’t spin round lively.
The presents came in and the invitations went out, the breakfast was
planned, the cake came from London, with heaps of other things; but she
kept quiet. The night before the wedding it rained. Somebody wanted her
for one of the thousand things people were always wanting her for, and
she couldn’t be found. She stayed out so long that father sent word
to the stablemen and gardeners to take torches and drag the pond. Of
course, he was anxious, for you can’t have a wedding without a bride.
But why the pond? A thin girl might have tried that without seeming
ridiculous, but not a fat one, and Podge couldn’t have sunk if she’d
tried! She came in at last among us, looking very queer, and wet to the
skin, with only a thin cloak on over her evening dress. She said she’d
been to the churchyard, to mother’s grave, praying that we might be
forgiven. She laughed the next moment, catching a glimpse of her own
droll figure in the drawing-room glass.
Next day was the wedding day. Everybody had new clothes, and the
bridesmaids’ lockets had the initials of Podge and the Squire, “C” and
“R,” in diamonds. Roddy and I had pins to match--Hunt and Roskell’s. I
forget how many yards of white satin went into Podge’s wedding gown,
but it measured thirty-eight inches round the waist--no larks. She
cried all the way going to church, so that father was nearly washed out
of the brougham.
How did the wedding go off? It never came off at all! There were the
county people in the smart clothes they’d taken the shine off in
London; there were the school children, with washed faces and clean
pinafores, and baskets of rose leaves all ready to strew on the path of
the happy pair. There were the decorations, palms and lilies, as if the
occasion had been a kind of martyr’s festival; and there was the Bishop
at the altar rails, with the Rector, waiting to tie the knot; and the
Squire, in a blue frock-coat, buff waistcoat, and shepherd’s plaid
trousers, with a whole magnolia in his buttonhole, waiting for Podge.
Father tried to lead her up the aisle, but it was too narrow, so he
walked behind. Just as she put her foot on the chancel step, out comes
old Noel out of the vestry, to everybody’s surprise, looking flushed
and excited. He said something I didn’t hear, and then Podge calls
out, “Oh, I can’t! Have mercy!” or something like that, and surged down
with a flop, like the sound a big wave makes dashing into a cave’s
mouth, on the red and white tiles. Old Noel ran to lift her up, but
couldn’t do it. The Squire called out, “D---- you! Let my wife alone!”
And the Bishop rebuked him for swearing in a sacred edifice. Then
father and the Squire and old Noel hoisted Podge up--for two of ’em
weren’t strong enough--and tottered with her into the vestry.
What happened? I got in, and so I know all about it. We sprinkled
Podge with water, and set fire to a feather duster and held it under
her nose, and she came to, with her hair down, and her wreath and veil
hanging by one hairpin. And old Noel bent over her, and said, “Dearest
Charlotte, there is no need for the sacrifice now!” And he pulled a
newspaper out of his pocket and handed it to father, who said, “What!
what! how dare you, man?” and then dropped his eye on a paragraph
marked in red ink, and said in the best Parksop manner, “I really beg
your pardon, Sir Clement! Your uncle and his son both drowned yachting
in the Mediterranean? Most deplorable! but really affords you no excuse
for--ah--interrupting a solemn ceremony in so extraordinary a manner.”
And then he and old--I mean Sir Clement Noel--had a few confidential
words in a corner, and I heard old--I mean the Baronet--say, “On my
word and honor, a sacred pledge!” And father astounded everybody by
turning on the Squire, and telling him in the most gentlemanly way to
go about his business, which he did, swearing awfully, while Podge was
crying for joy, and Sir Noel comforting her with his arm round her
waist--I mean as far as it would go.
That happened three years ago, and Podge and Sir Clement Noel have
been married three years all but a week. We all live with Podge and
her husband--I don’t think they’ve ever been alone together for a day
since their honeymoon. Father is very fond of Charlotte now, and says
the baby is a real Parksop. That always makes Sir Clement Noel wild--I
can’t think why.
I’ve often thought since, after seeing what they call a domestic drama,
that what happened to Podge and Noel might have happened to the hero
and heroine of one. Only, a hero never has gray hair and a stoop, and
there never yet was a heroine who measured as much as thirty-eight
inches round the waist. It’s impossible!
IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
The balloon ascended from the Chiswick Gasworks at twelve-thirty, amid
the thin cheers of an outer fringe of Works _employés_ and an inner
circle composed of members of the Imperial Air Club, who had motored
down expressly for the start. It was by courtesy a summer day, a June
gale having blown itself out over night, a June frost having nipped
vegetation over morn. Now there was not a breath of wind, and the
sky vault arching over London and the suburbs was of purplish-gray,
through which a broad ray of white-hot sunshine pierced slantingly with
weird effect as the order “Hands off!” was given, and the _Beata_,
of forty-five thousand cubic feet, owner Captain the Honorable H.
Maudslay-Berrish, of the I. A. C., soared rapidly upward.
Hitherto Maudslay-Berrish, occupied with the thousand cares devolving
on the aeronaut, had not looked directly at either of his traveling
companions. These were his wife’s friend and his wife. We all remember
the sumptuous Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion and other West End comedy
theaters. Many of the masculine readers of this truthful record
have laid offerings of hot-house flowers, jewelry, sweetmeats, and
settlements, at those high-arched insteps in their pre-nuptial days,
and not all have had cause to mourn the rejection of the same. But
Maudslay-Berrish, son of a philanthropic Nonconformist peer, to whom
the theater is the antechamber to the Pit, married her, and, as too
far south is north, the men of his set thenceforth tacked on “Poor
chap!” or “Poor beggar!” to the mention of his name, when another stage
triumph of his gifted wife, who did not resign her profession, was
recorded in the newspapers.
The friend of Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish, whom we may know as “Teddy,”
gasped one or two private gasps as the _Beata_ shot up to an altitude
of three thousand feet, and Chiswick Gasworks fell away underneath
her into a tinted relief map of West London, and then was buried
under a sea of swirling dun-gray vapors. The hoot of a motor-car--the
needle-sharp screech of a railway locomotive--were the last sounds
to reach the ears of the _Beata’s_ three passengers. Then the sounds
of Earth sank into the silence of Eternity. And the soul of Mrs.
Maudslay-Berrish’s friend felt very thin and small, knowing itself
adrift upon that tideless sea. The wicker car seemed also small--small
to unsafeness--and the ropes as frail as the strands of a spider web.
Cautiously Teddy put forth his immaculately gloved hand and touched
one. Madness, to have trusted limb and life to things like these.
Madness, to have left the good solid ground, where there were clubs
and comfort and other men to keep you from feeling alone--for Teddy
realized with vivid clearness that in this particular moment and at
this particular point Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish counted for nothing. He
even forgot to look to see if she was there. But she was there, and
looking at him across her husband’s back. For Maudslay-Berrish was in
the middle of the oblong basket, and he was leaning over, peering down
into the swirling gray sea below, his folded arms upon the wicker car
edge, his chin upon them.
As matter of fact, he did not wish his wife and her friend to see how
heartily he was laughing. When you have set a trap for two beings whom
you hate with an intensity beyond all the range of human expression,
and waited patiently for years--it had taken him, Maudslay-Berrish,
just three years to qualify as a member of the Air Club--to see them
fall into it, you laugh when it happens. And if they chance to see your
face while you are doing it, it makes them feel uncomfortable.... And
when they know!... The purple veins swelled upon his narrow forehead
under the leather peak of his Club cap. His muscles cracked, his
shoulders heaved with that hidden, terrible, convulsive laughter.
“Harwood,” cried his wife, her strong voice ringing loud in the thin,
untainted air, “what is the matter? Is anything wrong?”
“The balloon is not leaking, the valve is in proper order, there is
plenty of ballast on board, the car is sound, the ropes are new and
have been tested,” said Maudslay-Berrish. “There is scarcely a breath
of wind to move us, and yet something _is_ wrong. What are you trying
to ask me, Beryl ... whether we are in danger? At the risk of spoiling
your evident enjoyment of your first ascent, I answer ‘Yes!’”
Then he straightened his bowed figure and turned so as to face the
wife who had betrayed him so often, and Teddy, her friend. She, Beryl,
looked at him with wild eyes set in a face suddenly grown sharp and
thin. She clenched her gloved left hand upon a rope of the car, and the
splitting of the glove back revealed her wedding ring and its keeper
of sparkling diamonds. At the sight of that consecrated symbol another
gust of mad laughter seized Maudslay-Berrish, and the tears poured down
his purple face, and he roared and roared again, until every fiber of
the car vibrated with his ugly merriment.
“For God’s sake, Berrish, don’t laugh like that!” shrieked Teddy,
blue-white and gibbering. “Are you mad, or what?”
“Were you sane, you infernal fool--you two infernal fools--when you
got into this car with the man whom you have outraged?” shrieked
Maudslay-Berrish. “Haven’t you dragged my good name in the mud, made
me a by-word and a laughing-stock, a mockery even to myself--even to
myself, in the last five years! Why, you d---- ----” (he called Mrs.
Maudslay-Berrish an unlovely name) “my very servants sneer at me, the
people at the theater grin when I come loafin’ round behind the scenes.
They’re quite aware of what I’ve swallowed without gaggin’. They know
I’ve lived on your money when I’d got through my own, quite fly as
to where most of it came from”--he pointed a shaking finger at the
stricken Teddy--“and as downy as you pleased. Teddy, old chap, I’ve
_called_ that blue-gilled funker there, and half a dozen like him.
Well, Teddy, old chap, say your prayers quick, for you’re going to die
suddenly!”
The woman and her lover knew now what their late dupe and butt meant
to do. He had the ripping cord half-hitched about his left wrist--the
ripping cord, a sharp tug at which will, when a balloon is dangerously
dragged during a descent, take an entire panel out of the envelope
in two seconds, immediately deflating the bag. And in his right hand
Maudslay-Berrish manipulated a neat little revolver.
Certainly he played the star part in the drama, and held the audience
breathless. Half of the audience, that is, for Teddy, old chap, was at
his prayers. Down on his knees at the bottom of the car, his gloved
hands rigidly clasped, his handsome, weak face turned up to the
sustaining ball of gas that hovered in its imprisoning net above,
between him and the Illimitable Void, he cowered and slavered. In
pleading for Heaven’s mercy upon a miserable sinner, he set forth
that his Eve had tempted him; he asked for time to make up, another
chance, a year, six months, a week only of sweet life. Hearing him, Eve
herself grew sick with contempt of his infinite littleness, and even
Maudslay-Berrish half turned away his eyes.
“Why don’t _you_ pray?” he said, sneeringly, to his wife. “Why don’t
_you_ grovel like that thing you have kissed?”
Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion, would have held an audience mute and
breathless by the quiet scorn conveyed in Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s look
and tone.
“I dare say when you have done what you are going to do, I shall wake
up in Hell,” she said; “and I believe I shall have earned it!”
Teddy, still spinning out the smeared records of his Past, was now
prostrate and bathed in tears.
“If I doubted the existence of such a place before, I do not now. For I
have loved that man”--she bit her white underlip sharply--“and I have
seen and heard him. Henceforth there can be nothing worse to bear, here
or hereafter. Why do you delay? Pull the cord and have done with it, or
I shall say _you_ are afraid!”
* * * * *
The _Beata_ came sailing gently down upon a delightful green expanse
of turf at Aldershot--the tennis ground, in fact, of a dandy Cavalry
Regiment. The anchor dropped and caught in a pollard oak; a dozen
delightfully pink lieutenants in correct flannels assisted the
handsome Miss Fennis, of the West End theaters, to alight from the
basket. Maudslay-Berrish, calm and imperturbable as usual, followed.
In the midst of congratulations and offers of luncheon, a lieutenant
exclaimed:
“Great Scott! Why didn’t you say you’d another passenger in the car?
Here’s a man lying in a dead faint at the bottom of it!”
And they brought out Teddy, very white and limp, and gave him brandy.
“Heart weak, what?” said the lieutenant who had exclaimed.
“He has certainly had some--cardiac trouble,” returned Maudslay-Berrish
placidly; “but I think he will be less liable to the--ahem!--the
weakness after this little trip of ours together in the Fourth
Dimension.”
And he smiled as he lighted a very large cigar.
THE GEWGAW