MARRIED LIFE
So, Caleb Fuller married Letizia Oriano and tamed her body, as without
doubt he would have succeeded in taming the body of any woman of whom
he had lawfully gained possession.
Madame Oriano did not long survive the marriage. The effort she made
in imposing her will upon her daughter was too much for a frame so
greatly weakened. Once she had had her way, the desire to live slowly
evaporated. Yet she was granted a last pleasure from this world before
she forsook it for ever. This was the satisfaction of beholding with
her own eyes that her son-in-law’s discovery of the value of chlorate
of potash as a colour intensifier was all that he claimed for it. That
it was likely to prove excessively dangerous when mixed with sulphur
compounds did not concern this pyrotechnist of the old school. The
prodigious depth and brilliant clarity of those new colours would be
well worth the sacrifice of a few lives through spontaneous ignition in
the course of manufacturing them.
The first public demonstration that Caleb gave was on the evening of
the Fifth of November in a Clerkenwell tea-garden. It is unlikely that
Madame Oriano ever fully comprehended the significance of these annual
celebrations. If she ever did wonder who Guy Fawkes was, she probably
supposed him to be some local English saint whose martyrdom deserved to
be commemorated by an abundance of rockets. As for Caleb, he justified
to himself some of the pleasure that his fireworks gave to so many
people by the fact that the chief festival at which they were employed
was held in detestation of a Papist conspirator.
On this particular Fifth of November the legless old lady was
carried in an invalid’s chair through the press of spectators to a
favourable spot from which she could judge the worth of the improved
fireworks. A few of the rabble jumped to the conclusion that she was a
representation of Guy Fawkes himself, and set up the ancient chorus:
Please to remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot;
We know no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
A stick and a stake for King George’s sake,
A stick and a stump for Guy Fawkes’s rump
Holla, boys! holla, boys! huzza-a-a!
Madame Oriano smiled grimly when Caleb tried to quiet the clamour by
explaining that she was flesh and blood.
“Letta dem sing, Caleb. _Non fa niente a me._ It don’ta matter notting
to me.”
A maroon burst to mark the opening of the performance. This was
followed by half-a-dozen rockets, the stars of which glowed with such
greens and blues and reds as Madame Oriano had never dreamed of. She
tried to raise herself in her chair.
“Bravo, Caleb! _Bravissimo! Ah dio, non posso più!_ It is the besta
_colore_ I havva ever seen, Caleb. _E ottimo! Ottimo, figlio mio._”
She sat entranced for the rest of the display; that night, like a spent
firework, the flame of her ardent life burnt itself out.
The death of his mother-in-law allowed Caleb to carry out a plan he
had been contemplating for some time. This was to open a factory in
Cheshire on the outskirts of his native town. He anticipated trouble
at first with the Peculiar Children of God, who were unlikely to view
with any favour the business of making fireworks. He hoped, however,
that the evidence of his growing prosperity would presently change
their point of view. There was no reason to accuse Caleb of hypocrisy,
or to suppose that he was anything but perfectly sincere in his desire
to occupy a high place in the esteem of his fellow believers. Marriage
with a Papist had in truth begun to worry his conscience more than a
little. So long as Letizia had been a temptation, the fact of her being
a daughter of Babylon instead of a Peculiar Child of God had only made
the temptation more redoubtable, and the satisfaction of overcoming
it more sharp. Now that he was licensed to enjoy her, he began to
wonder what effect marriage with a Papist would have on his celestial
patron. He felt like a promising young clerk who has imperilled his
prospects by marrying against his employer’s advice. It began to seem
essential to his salvation that he should take a prominent part in the
prayer-meetings of the Peculiar Children of God. He was ambitious to
be regarded himself as the most peculiar child of all those Peculiar
Children. Moreover, from a practical standpoint the opening of a
factory in the North should be extremely profitable. He already had the
London clients of Madame Oriano; he must now build up a solid business
in the provinces. Fuller’s Fireworks must become a byword. The King was
rumoured to be ill. He would be succeeded by another king. That king
would in due course have to be solemnly crowned. Liverpool, Manchester,
Sheffield, Leeds, and many other large towns would be wanting to
celebrate that coronation with displays of fireworks. When the moment
arrived, there must be nobody who would be able to compete with Fuller
and his chlorate of potash.
So to Brigham in Cheshire Caleb Fuller brought his wife. In some fields
on the outskirts of the town in which he had spent a poverty-stricken
youth he built his first sheds, and in a dreary little street close
to Bethesda, the meeting-house of the Peculiar Children of God, he
set up his patriarchal tent. Here on a dusty September dawn just over
two years after her last public appearance at “Neptune’s Grotto,”
Letizia’s eldest daughter was born. The young wife of Caleb was not
yet thoroughly tamed, for she produced a daughter exactly like herself
and called her Caterina in spite of the father’s objection to a name
associated with the wheels of which he made so many. Not only did she
insist on calling the child Caterina, but she actually took it to the
nearest Catholic chapel and had it baptised by a priest.
It happened about this time that one of the apostles of the
meeting-house was gravely ill, and Caleb, who had designs on the vacant
apostolic chair, decided that his election to it must not be endangered
by the profane behaviour of his young wife. When he remonstrated with
her, she flashed her eyes and tossed her head as if he were still Caleb
the clerk and she the spoilt daughter of his employer.
“Letizia,” he said lugubriously, “you have destroyed the soul of our
infant.”
“Nonsense!”
“You have produced a child of wrath.”
“My eye!” she scoffed.
Caleb’s moist lips vanished from sight. There was a long silence while
he regarded his wife with what seemed like two pebbles of granite. When
at last he spoke, it was with an intolerable softness.
“Letizia, you must learn to have responsibilities. I am frightened for
you, my wife. You must learn. I do not blame you entirely. You have had
a loose upbringing. But you must learn.”
Then, as gently as he was speaking, he stole to the door and left
Letizia locked behind him in her bedroom. Oh, yes, he tamed her body
gradually, and for a long time it looked as if he would tame her soul.
She had no more daughters like herself, and each year for many years
she flashed her eyes less fiercely and tossed her head less defiantly.
She produced several other children, but they all took after their
father. Dark-eyed Caterina was followed by stodgy Achsah. Stodgy
Achsah was followed by podgy Thyrza. These were followed by two more
who died almost as soon as they were born, as if in dying thus they
expressed the listlessness of their mother for this life. Maybe Letizia
herself would have achieved death, had not the way Caleb treated little
Caterina kept her alive to protect the child against his severity.
“Her rebellious spirit must be broken,” he declared, raising once more
the cane.
“You shall not beat her like this, Caleb.”
“Apostle Jenkins beat his son till the child was senseless, because he
stole a piece of bread and jam.”
“I wish I could be as religious as you, Caleb,” said his wife.
He tried to look modest under the compliment.
“Yes,” she went on fiercely, “for then I’d believe in Hell, and if I
believed in Hell I’d sizzle there with joy just for the pleasure of
seeing you and all your cursed apostles sizzling beside me.”
But Letizia did not often break out like this. Each year she became
more silent, taking refuge from her surroundings in French novels
which she bought out of the meagre allowance for clothes that her
husband allowed her. She read French novels because she despised the
more sentimental novelists of England that were so much in vogue at
this date, making only an exception in favour of Thackeray, whom she
read word for word as his books appeared. She was learning a bitter
wisdom from literature in the shadows and the silence of her wounded
heart. After eight years of married life she bore a son, who was called
Joshua. There were moments when Letizia was minded to smother him
where he lay beside her, so horribly did this homuncule reproduce the
lineaments of her loathed husband.
Meanwhile, the factory flourished, Caleb Fuller became the leading
citizen of Brigham and served three times as Mayor. He built a great
gloomy house on the small hill that skirted the mean little town.
He built, too, a great gloomy tabernacle for the Peculiar Children
of God. He was elected chief apostle and sat high up in view of the
congregation on a marble chair. He grew shaggy whiskers and suffered
from piles. He found favour in the eyes of the Lord, sweating the poor
and starving even the cows that gave him milk. Yes, the renown of
Fuller’s Fireworks was spread far and wide. The factory grew larger
year by year. And with it year by year waxed plumper the belly and the
purse of Caleb himself, even as his soul shrivelled.
In 1851 after twenty years of merciless prosperity Caleb suffered
his first setback by failing to secure the contract for the firework
displays at the Great Exhibition. From the marble chair of the chief
apostle he called upon the Peculiar Children of God to lament that
their Father had temporarily turned away His countenance from them.
Caleb beat his breast and bellowed and groaned, but he did not rend
his garments of the best broadcloth, because that would have involved
his buying new ones. The hulla-balloo in Bethesda was louder than
that in a synagogue on the Day of Atonement, and after a vociferous
prayer-meeting the Peculiar Children of God went back to their stuffy
and secretive little houses, coveting their neighbours’ wives and their
neighbours’ maids, but making the best of their own to express an
unattainable ideal. Horrid stuffy little bedrooms with blue jets of gas
burning dimly through the night-time. Heavy lumps of humanity snoring
beneath heavy counterpanes. Lascivious backbiting of the coveted wives
and maids on greasy conjugal pillows. Who in all that abode of prurient
respectability and savage industrialism should strip Caleb’s soul
bare? Who should not sympathise with the chief apostle of the Peculiar
Children of God?
Yet, strange to say, Caleb found that God’s countenance continued to
be averted from his own. He was still licking the soreness of his
disappointment over the Exhibition fireworks when one morning in the
prime of June his eldest daughter left the great gloomy house on the
hill, never to return. While Caleb stormed at his wife for not taking
better precautions to keep Caterina in bounds, he was aware that he
might as well be storming at a marble statue. He lacked the imagination
to understand that the soul of Letizia had fled from its imprisonment
in the guise of Caterina’s lissom body. But he did apprehend, however
dimly, that henceforth nothing he might say or do would ever again
affect his wife either for good or for ill.
Cold dark eyes beneath black arched brows surveyed him contemptuously.
He had never yet actually struck Letizia; but he came near to striking
her at that moment.
“She wanted to go on the stage.”
“A play-actress! My eldest daughter a play-actress!”
“Alas, neither she nor I can cup those drops of blood she owes to you.
But her soul is hers and mine. You had no part in making that. Even if
you did crawl over my body and eat the heart out of me, you slug! Do
what you like with the others. Make what you can of them. But Caterina
is mine. Caterina is free.”
“As if I had not suffered enough this year,” Caleb groaned.
“Suffered? Did you say that you had suffered?” His wife laughed. “And
what about the sufferings of my Caterina all these years of her youth?”
“I pray she’ll starve to death,” he went on.
“She was starving to death in this house.”
“Ay, I suppose that’s what the Church folk will be saying next. The
idle, good-for-nothing slanderers! Not content with accusing me of
starving my cows, they’ll be accusing me of starving my children now.
But the dear Lord knows....”
“You poor dull fool,” Letizia broke in, and with one more glance from
her cold dark eyes she left him.
Caterina had as dissolute a career as her father could have feared and
as miserable an end as he could have hoped, for about twelve years
later, after glittering with conspicuous shamelessness amid the tawdry
gilt of the Second Empire, she died in a Paris asylum prematurely
exhausted by drink and dissipation.
“Better to die from without than from within,” said her mother when the
news was brought to Brigham.
“What do you mean by that?” Caleb asked in exasperated perplexity.
“It’s all these French novels you read that makes you talk that
high-flown trash. You talk for the sake of talking, that’s my opinion.
You used to talk like a fool when I first married you, but I taught you
at last to keep your tongue still. Now you’ve begun to talk again.”
“One changes in thirty-four years, Caleb. Even you have changed. You
were mean and ugly then. But you are much meaner and much uglier now.
However, you have the consolation of seeing your son Joshua keep pace
with you in meanness and in ugliness.”
Joshua Fuller was now twenty-six, an eternal offence to the eyes of his
mother, who perceived in him nothing but a dreadful reminder of her
husband at the same age. That anybody could dare to deplore Caterina’s
life when in Joshua the evidence of her own was before them enraged
Letizia with human crassness. But Joshua was going to be an asset to
Fuller’s Fireworks. Just as his father had perceived the importance
of chlorate of potash in 1829, so now in 1863 did Joshua perceive
the importance of magnesium, and the house of Fuller was in front
of nearly all its rivals in utilising that mineral, with the result
that its brilliant fireworks sold better than ever. The Guilloché and
Salamandre, the Girandole and Spirali of Madame Oriano, so greatly
admired by old moons and bygone multitudes, would have seemed very
dull affairs now. Another gain that Joshua provided for the business
was to urge upon his father to provide for the further legislation
about explosives that sooner or later was inevitable. With an ill
grace Caleb Fuller had complied with the provisions of the Gunpowder
Act of 1860; but, when the great explosion at Erith occurred a few
years later, Joshua insisted that more must be done to prepare for the
inspection of firework establishments that was bound to follow such a
terrific disaster. Joshua was right, and when the Explosives Act of
1875 was passed the factory at Brigham had anticipated nearly all its
requirements.
By this time Joshua was a widower. In 1865, at the age of twenty-eight,
he had married a pleasant young woman called Susan Yardley. After
presenting him with one boy who was christened Abraham, she died two
years later in producing another who was christened Caleb after his
grandfather.
The elder of these two boys reverted both in appearance and in
disposition to the Oriano stock, and old Mrs. Fuller—she is sixty-three
now and may no longer be called Letizia—took a bitter delight in never
allowing old Mr. Fuller to forget it. She found in the boy, now a flash
of Caterina’s eyes, now a flutter of Madame Oriano’s eyelids. She
would note how much his laugh was like her own long ago, and she would
encourage him at every opportunity to thwart the solicitude and defy
the injunctions of Aunt Achsah and Aunt Thyrza. When her son protested
against the way she applauded Abraham’s naughtiness, she only laughed.
“Bram’s all right.”
“I wish, mamma, you wouldn’t call him Bram,” Joshua protested. “It’s
so irreverent. I know that you despise the Bible, but the rest of
us almost worship it. I cannot abide this irreligious clipping of
Scriptural names. And it worries poor papa terribly.”
“It won’t worry your father half as much to hear Bram called Bram as
it’ll worry poor little Bram later on to be called Abraham. That boy’s
all right, Josh. He’s the best firework you’ve turned out of this
factory for many a day. So, don’t let Achsah and Thyrza spoil him.”
“They try their best to be strict, mamma.”
“I’m talking about their physic, idiot. They’re a pair of pasty-faced
old maids, and it’s unnatural and unpleasant to let them be for ever
messing about with a capital boy like Bram. Let them physic young
Caleb. He’ll be no loss to the world. Bram might be.”
Joshua threw his eyes up to Heaven and left his unaccountable mother
to her own unaccountable thoughts. He often wondered why his father
had never had her shut up in an asylum. For some time now she had been
collecting outrageous odds and ends of furniture for her room to which
none of the family was allowed access except by special invitation.
Ever since Caterina had run away old Mrs. Fuller had had a room of
her own. But she had been content with an ordinary bed at first. Now
she had procured a monstrous foreign affair all gilt and Cupids and
convolutions. If Joshua had been his father he would have taken steps
to prevent such a waste of her allowance. He fancied that the old man
must be breaking up to allow such furniture to enter the house.
Not long after the conversation between Joshua and his mother about
Bram, a travelling circus arrived at Brigham on a Sunday morning.
The Peculiar Children of God shivered at such a profanation of the
Sabbath, and Apostle Fuller—in these days a truly patriarchal figure
with his long white food-bespattered beard—preached from the marble
chair on the vileness of these sacrilegious mountebanks and the
pestilent influence any circus must have on a Christian town. In spite
of this denunciation the chief apostle’s own wife dared to take her
elder grandchild on Monday to view from the best seats obtainable the
monstrous performance. They sat so near the ring that the sawdust and
the tan were scattered over them by the horses’ hoofs. Little Bram, his
chin buried in the worn crimson velvet of the circular barrier, gloated
in an ecstasy on the paradisiacal vision.
“_Brava! Bravissima!_” old Mrs. Fuller cried loudly when a demoiselle
of the _haute école_ took an extra high fence. “_Brava! Bravissima!_”
she cried when an equestrienne in pink tights leapt through four
blazing hoops and regained without disarranging one peroxide curl the
shimmering back of her piebald steed.
“Oh, grandmamma,” little Bram gasped when he bade her good night, “can
I be a clown when I’m a man?”
“The difficulty is not to be a clown when one is a man,” she answered
grimly.
“What _do_ you mean, grandmamma?”
“Ah, what?” she sighed.
And in their stuffy and secretive little bedrooms that night the
Peculiar Children of God talked for hours about the disgraceful amount
of leg that those circus women had shown.
“I hear it was extremely suggestive,” said one apostle, smacking his
lips with lecherous disapprobation.
“Was it, indeed, my dear?” the dutiful wife replied, thereby offering
the man of God an opportunity to enlarge upon the prurient topic before
he turned down the gas and got into bed beside her.
“Bram was very naughty to go to the circus, wasn’t he, Aunt Achsah?”
young Caleb asked in a tone of gentle sorrow when his pasty-faced aunt
leaned over that Monday night to lay her wet lips to his plump pink
cheeks.
“Grandpapa was very cross,” Aunt Achsah mournfully replied, evading the
direct answer, but implying much by her expression.
“Gran’papa’s not cross with me, is he, auntie?” young Caleb asked with
an assumption of fervid anxiety.
“No, my dear child, and I hope that you will never, never make your
dear grandfather cross with you.”
“Oh, I won’t, Aunt Achsah,” young Caleb promised, with what Aunt Achsah
told Aunt Thyrza was really and truly the smile of one of God’s most
precious lambs.
“Thyrza, Thyrza, when that blessed little child smiles like that,
nobody could deny him anything. I’m sure his path down this vale of
tears will always be smoothed by that angelic smile.”
She was talking to her sister in the passage just outside young Caleb’s
bedroom—he had already been separated from his elder brother for fear
of corruption—and he heard what she said.
When the footsteps of his aunts died away along the passage, the fat
little boy got out of bed, turned up the gas, and smiled at himself
several times in the looking-glass. Then he retired to bed again,
satisfied of his ability to summon that conquering smile to his aid
whenever he should require it.