Daddy's ship never did come home.
"Quack, quack!" said Aggie, and three shrill voices echoed her.
Aggie had to be the duck herself now; for Daddy had long ago given up his
part in the spirited drama.
They had been married six years, and Aggie had had six children. There was
Arty and Catty and Willie and Dick and Emmy (the baby of the year); and a
memory like a sword in her mother's heart, which was all that was left of
little Barbara, who had come after Catty.
It seemed as if there was not much left of Aggie, either. Her delicate
individuality had shown signs of perishing as the babies came, and the
faster it perished the faster they took its place. At each coming there
went some part of pretty Aggie's prettiness; first the rose from her
cheeks, then the gold from her hair, till none of her radiance was left
but the blue light of her eyes, and that was fainter. Then, after
Barbara's death, her strength went, too; and now, at the end of the day
she was too tired to do anything but lie on the sofa and let the children
crawl all over her, moaning sometimes when they trampled deep. Then Arthur
would stir in his arm-chair and look irritably at her. He still loved
Aggie and the children, but not their noises.
The evenings, once prolonged by gas-light and enthusiasm to a glorious
life, had shrank to a two hours' sitting after supper. They never went
anywhere now. Picture-galleries and concert-halls knew them no more. The
Debating Society at Hampstead had long ago missed the faithful,
inseparable pair--the pair who never spoke, who sat in the background
listening with shy, earnest faces, with innocence that yearned, wide-eyed,
after wisdom, while it followed, with passionate subservience, the inane.
Arthur had proved himself powerless to keep it up. If an archangel's trump
had announced a lecture for that evening, it would not have roused him
from his apathy.
And as they never went to see anybody, nobody ever came to see them. The
Hampstead ladies found Aggie dull and her conversation monotonous. It was
all about Arthur and the babies; and those ladies cared little for Arthur,
and for the babies less. Of Aggie's past enthusiasm they said that it was
nothing but a pose. Time had revealed her, the sunken soul of patience and
of pathos, the beast of burden, the sad-eyed, slow, and gray.
The spirit of the place, too, had departed, leaving a decomposing and
discolored shell. The beloved yellow villa had disclosed the worst side of
its nature. The brown wall-paper had peeled and blistered, like an
unwholesome skin. The art serge had faded; the drugget was dropping to
pieces, worn with many feet; the wood-work had shrunk more than ever, and
draughts, keen as knives, cut through the rooms and passages. The "Hope"
and the "Love Leading Life" and the "Love Triumphant," like imperishable
frescos in a decaying sanctuary, were pitiful survivals, testifying to the
death of dreams.
Saddest of all, the bookshelves, that were to have shot up to the ceiling,
had remained three feet from the floor, showing the abrupt arrest of the
intellectual life.
It was evident that they hadn't kept it up.
If anything, Arthur was more effaced, more obliterated, than his wife. He,
whose appearance had once suggested a remarkable personality, a poet or a
thinker, now looked what he had become, a depressed and harassed city
clerk, no more. His face was dragged by deep downward lines that
accentuated its weakness. A thin wisp of colorless mustache sheltered,
without concealing, the irritability of his mouth. Under his high, sallow
forehead, his eyes, once so spiritual, looked out on his surroundings with
more indifference than discontent. His soul fretted him no longer; it had
passed beyond strenuousness to the peace of dulness. Only the sounds made
by his wife and children had power to agitate him.
He was agitated now.
"That will do," he said, looking up from the magazine he was trying to
read, not because it interested him in the least, but because it helped to
keep the noises out.
But the children were clamoring for an encore. "Again, again!" they cried.
"Oh Mummy, _do_ do it again!"
"Hsh-sh-sh. Daddy's reading." And Aggie drew the children closer to her,
and went on with the rhyme in her sad, weak whisper.
"If you must read aloud to them, for goodness' sake speak up and have done
with it. I can't stand that whispering."
Aggie put down the picture-book, and Arty seized one half and Catty the
other, and they tugged, till Catty let go and hit Arty, and Arty hit Catty
back again, and Catty howled.
"Can't you keep those children quiet?"
"Oh, Arty, shame! to hurt your little sister!"
At that Arty howled louder than Catty.
Arthur sat up in his chair.
"Leave the room, sir! Clear out this instant!" His weak face looked weaker
in its inappropriate assumption of command.
"Do you hear what I say, sir?"
Arty stopped crying, and steadied his quivering infant mouth till it
expressed his invincible determination.
"I'll g-g-g-go for Mommy. But I w-w-w-won't go for Daddy. I doesh'n't 'ike
him."
"Hsh-sh--poor Daddy--he's so tired. Run away to the nursery, darlings, all
of you."
"I can't think why on earth you have them down here at this time," said
their father, as the door slammed behind the last retreating child.
"My dear, you said yourself it's the only time you have for seeing them.
I'm sure you don't get much of them."
"I get a great deal too much sometimes."
"If we only had a big place for them to run about in--"
"What's the use of talking about things we haven't got, and never shall
have? Is supper ready?"
She raised herself heavily from her sofa, and went to see, trailing an old
shawl after her. Arthur, by way of being useful, put his foot upon the
shawl as it went by.
After supper he felt decidedly better, and was inclined to talk.
"I met Davidson this morning in the city. He said his wife hadn't seen you
for an age. Why don't you go and look her up?"
Aggie was silent.
"You can't expect her to be always running after you."
"I can't run after her, I assure you. I haven't the strength."
"You used," he said, reproachfully, "to be strong enough."
Aggie's mouth twisted into a blanched, unhappy smile--a smile born of
wisdom and of patience and of pain.
"My dear, you don't know what it is to have had six children."
"Oh, don't I? I know enough not to want any more of them."
"Well--then--" said Aggie.
But Arthur's eyes evaded her imploring and pathetic gaze. He turned the
subject back to Mrs. Davidson--a clumsy shift.
"Anyhow, it doesn't take much strength to call on Mrs. Davidson, does it?"
"It's no good. I can't think of anything to say to her."
"Oh, come, she isn't difficult to get on with."
"No, but I am. I don't know why it is I always feel so stupid now."
"That," said Arthur, "is because you haven't kept it up."
"I haven't had the time," she wailed.
"Time? Oh, rubbish, you should make time. It doesn't do to let things go
like that. Think of the children."
"It's because I'm always thinking of them."
They rose from their poor repast. (Coffee and mutton-chops had vanished
from the board, and another period of cocoa had set in.) He picked up her
shawl, that had dropped again, and placed it about her shoulders, and they
dragged themselves mournfully back into their sitting-room. She took up
her place on the sofa. He dropped into the arm-chair, where he sat
motionless, looking dully at the fire. His wife watched him with her
faded, tender eyes.
"Arthur," she said, suddenly, "it's the first meeting of the Society
to-night. Did you forget?" They had never admitted, to themselves or to
each other, that they had given it up.
"Yes," said Arthur, peevishly, "of course I forgot. How on earth did you
expect me to remember?"
"I think you ought to go, dear, sometimes. You never went all last
winter."
"I know."
"Isn't it a pity not to try--a little--just to keep it up? If it's only
for the children's sake."
"My dear Aggie, it's for the children's sake--and yours--that I fag my
brain out, as it is. When you've been as hard at it as I've been, all day,
you don't feel so very like turning out again--not for that sort of
intellectual game. You say you feel stupid in the afternoon. What do you
suppose I feel like in the evening?"
His accents cut Aggie to the heart.
"Oh, my dear, I know. I only thought it might do you good, sometimes, to
get a change--if it's only from me and my stupidity."
"If there's one thing I hate more than another," said Arthur, "it is a
change."
She knew it. That had been her consolation. Arthur was not as the race of
dreamers to which he once seemed to have belonged. There was in him a
dumb, undying fidelity to the tried and chosen. From the first, before his
apathy came on him, he had hardly ever left her to an evening by herself.
He had had neither eyes nor ears nor voice for any other woman. And though
her face had become the face of another woman, and he hated changes, she
knew that it had never changed for him. He loved her more than any of the
six children she had borne him.
"After all," said Aggie, "do you think it really matters?"
"Do I think what matters?"
"What we've lost."
He looked suspiciously at her, his heavy brain stirred by some foreboding
of uncomfortable suggestion; she had been thinking of Barbara, perhaps.
"I don't know what you mean."
He didn't. The flame in the woman's heart was not wholly dead, because he
had kindled it, and it was one with her love of him. The dream they had
dreamed together had lived on for her; first, as an agony, then as a
regret. But the man had passed over into the sensual darkness that is
seldom pierced by pain. Of the pleasures that had once borne him, buoyant
and triumphant, on the crest of the wave, none were left but such sad
earthly wreckage as life flings up at the ebbing of the spiritual tide.
They had come to the dark shores, where, if the captain wavers, the ships
of dream founder with all their freight.
A dull light was already kindling under his tired eyelids.
"I don't know what _you_ feel like," said he, "but I've had enough
sitting-up for one night. Don't you think you'd better go to bed?"
She went, obediently.